Us

Identity is a fun thing to play with.  If you can think of a soul, a brain, a human body, and even a child born of that body as parts of yourself, it isn't an impossible mental leap to think of something like a dog or a rock as parts of yourself as well.  It's the same way you try to understand what it's like to be another person, how they feel and think and see the world, just directed at things you wouldn't normally try to relate to (like a city or a tree or something).

What if empathy weren't just something you either had or didn't, but something you cultivated?  It may start with seeing yourself in others, seeing all the ways they're people like yourself instead of focusing on the few qualities that make them strangers, but if you keep running with this habit of looking for common ground you eventually lose respect for the permanence, the "reality" of the distinctions between us.

If you don't know where to stop, where to draw the line you won't cross, empathy becomes kind of an existential mindfuck.