Maybe We Are Never As Alone As We Think

...we no longer see ourselves as eternally alone because we no longer see ourselves...

Look at the people you don’t love and see them as an exercise for you to open your heart.” ― Ram Dass

When I think about this last year or so, I can’t help feeling as if it was one of the most consequential years of my life. I met Julie, got engaged, went to Paris, Santorini, Puerto Rico, got fired from Tesla, moved to Florida, visited Siesta Key, got married, got a job in Lakeland, visited St. Augustine, and finally, this weekend, visited St.Pete and Treasure Island.

I also finished my final draft of “We Are Stardust” and sent it off to a great editor for polish. It will be back on my desk on the auspicious date of June 22 and I will begin my second journey into query letters, agents and rejections.

More than any of this, I heard something that Ram Dass was saying and it struck me like a ton of California redwoods: when we are looking at most people, they are not nearly as “other” as we’d like to believe. Most of the time, we are, in fact, looking at God.

I consider this one of my most important developments because I have unsuccessfully seen the entire world as “other” since I learned how to breathe.

Thing was, I always knew something felt off. I couldn’t really put a finger on it, but I knew of its existence.

It was like walking through life with a pane of glass between myself and everyone else—I could see them, interact with them, even care about them, but there was always this invisible barrier that kept me from truly seeing them. I had built my entire identity around being separate. Perhaps even unique and misunderstood.

This wasn’t just a casual preference for solitude or introversion. This was something deeper, more pervasive. I had constructed an elaborate fortress of otherness, brick by brick, disappointment by disappointment. Every time someone didn’t understand my sense of humor, every time I felt like an outsider at a party, every time I looked around a room and thought “these people aren’t like me”—I added another layer to the wall.

The strange thing was how comforting this isolation became. It was familiar territory. I knew how to navigate loneliness; I had mapped every corner of it. Being the perpetual outsider gave me a kind of identity, a role to play. It explained away my failures and disappointments. Of course I didn’t fit in—I was different. Of course relationships were difficult—no one really understood me. It was a story that made sense of everything while requiring me to change nothing.

But stories, no matter how well-crafted, eventually reveal their limitations. Mine began to crack the day I heard Ram Dass speak about seeing God in everyone. Not metaphorically, not as some pleasant spiritual platitude, but as a practical reality. Every face, every encounter, every person who annoyed me or confused me or challenged me—all of them were manifestations of the same divine consciousness that I claimed to seek in meditation, in nature, in moments of transcendence.

But when Ram Dass’s words hit me, something fundamental shifted. If I was looking at God in every face—in the manager at work who insists on calling me “Willie,” in the driver who cut me off, or even my ex who is under the impression that I haven’t tried hard enough with my kids—then what did that make me? What did that make any of us?

The question haunted me because it exposed the absurdity of my carefully constructed separateness. How could I claim to be seeking the divine while simultaneously

dismissing its presence in the checkout clerk who moved too slowly, the neighbor who played music too loud, the family member who voted differently than I did? I had been like someone searching for water while standing in the ocean, convinced that the very thing I was immersed in couldn’t possibly be what I was looking for.

This realization didn’t come as a gentle awakening. It arrived like a demolition crew for the ego. All those years of spiritual reading, meditation retreats, and philosophical discussions—and I had missed the most obvious truth of all. The divine wasn’t hiding in some distant realm, waiting for me to become enlightened enough to find it. It was staring back at me from every human face, speaking to me through every interaction, offering itself through every encounter I had spent decades avoiding or dismissing.

The realization was both humbling and liberating. All those years I’d spent cataloging differences, building cases for why I didn’t belong, creating elaborate stories about my uniqueness—it was just another way of missing the point entirely. The very thing I thought made me special was actually what kept me from experiencing the most basic truth: we’re all part of something much larger than our individual selves.

What changed wasn’t the world around me, but the quality of my attention. The same people who had once seemed foreign or irritating began to reveal depths I had never bothered to notice. The colleague who talked too much in meetings wasn’t just an annoyance—she was someone trying to be heard, to matter, to contribute something meaningful. The teenager with the loud music wasn’t just inconsiderate—he was celebrating something, expressing joy in the only way he knew how. My ex wasn’t just critical—she was a mother worried about her children, doing the best she knew how with the tools she had.

This shift in perception didn’t make me instantly love everyone or dissolve all conflict. But it did something more subtle and perhaps more profound: it made me curious about people instead of dismissive. It replaced my default assumption of otherness with a recognition of shared humanity. It transformed encounters from potential threats to my carefully guarded identity into opportunities for connection, understanding, even revelation.

The practice became less about achieving some elevated state of consciousness and more about remembering to look—really look—at the person in front of me. To see past the surface irritations and differences to something deeper, something that connected us both to the same source. It was less mystical than I had expected and more practical. Less about transcending humanity and more about finally joining it.

There are still people in this world who believe that we are born alone and will die alone—but, the way I see things, that appears to be a short sighted perception. When we practice what Ram Dass spoke of as the journey to “Becoming Nobody,” that is, when we embrace ourselves finally as interconnected with all people and all things, we no longer see ourselves as eternally alone because we no longer see ourselves. We see the totality of everything and in the rare moments we think of ourselves, it is only as a molecule of the whole.

That being the case, we can just as easily be alone, as a grain of sand on a vast beach.