Imagine this yellow circle is a young man named Jack.

Jack is friends with a young blue circle man named Jim.

Being friends, Jack and Jim regularly share in each other’s company and engage in behaviors typical of friendship, such as discussing matters of mutual interest, jointly participating in recreational activities, requesting assistance of one another in times of hardship, etc. Over the course of several years, these countless interactions manifest as the influence each young circle man has had, and continues to have, on the current and future identity of the other. This reciprocated influence is illustrated here by the green region of overlap.

One day, while rolling along harmlessly, Jack makes the acquaintance of Jill…

Jill finds unremarkable the yellow aspect of Jack’s personality, but discovers her disinterest in it is more than overcome by her attraction to his complementary green. In other words, she adores most those aspects of Jack that developed as a consequence of his friendship with Jim. One might even go so far as to suggest that it’s exclusively the blue contribution to Jack’s green region that Jill finds irresistible. It’s only natural, then, to wonder at the fireworks that might explode if ever Jill were to meet Jim.

If a recess from carnal considerations is desired, the philosophical reader will find this subject matter accommodating. It’s popular to believe that we are born with some measure of unique voice, that the mind of each offspring has been primed with uniquely composed water drawn from a realm unreachable upon birth. But if Jack’s green region is a result of Jim’s influence on him, might not his yellow region similarly represent the aggregate influence of all other persons he has known? Rather than innate individuality, perhaps we are unique only insofar as the uniqueness of the continuum of our life experiences has made us so. Though it hurts the western ego to think it, perhaps we enter this world more empty than the vacuum of space, and who we become has far more to do with who we’ve known, the books we’ve read, etc. than is commonly thought.