I once thought no experience I had would be unique. Take George Washington. He was the first U.S. President, yet John Adams succeeded him, making his once-unique experience seem no longer unique. I was my high school senior class president, but there have been sixty others at Williamsville North High School. Even something extremely specific, if given enough time, appears bound to happen again.

After pondering this idea further, I determined this thought was incorrect. While there have been many U.S. Presidents after Washington, he is, and will forever be, the first. I will forever be the only Class of 2023 senior class president at Williamsville North High School. Furthermore, while this does not prove my original statement false, it suggests there are more unique experiences than I initially assumed, especially since we cannot assume time is infinite. In this sense, even highly repeatable experiences, like riding the City of Buffalo subway to the KeyBank Center, are unique in intangible ways.

At this point, I realized I had been using the word “experience” imprecisely. It could mean a specific place in time, or the lived, subjective act of moving through a moment. While roles and achievements can be structurally repeated, lived experiences resist exact replication. This distinction made it clear that uniqueness is not an absolute quality, but a spectrum depending on how broadly or narrowly one defines the experience.

My next thought was that some broad experiences are repeatable, though doing so is exceptionally difficult. Out of 360 students in my high school class, I was elected class president. Out of roughly 320,000 eligible individuals in the United States in 1787, George Washington was elected President. Theoretically, it is substantially harder to be elected U.S. President than high school class president. Some experiences are rare not because they are special, but because the conditions required to produce them are difficult to meet. From this perspective, I realized there are an inconceivable number of hard-to-replicate, broad experiences yet to be had. There has yet to be a woman U.S. President. There has yet to be a Buffalo Sabres Stanley Cup Finals win. There has yet to be a great Marvel movie produced after Avengers: Endgame. These experiences represent the convergence of effort and chance. I concluded that, viewing life from this perspective, part of our reason to live should be to have as many of these experiences as possible.

Despite this clear vision, my ideas were consistently ignored by the established group coordinating joint programming for the other ward and at-large council campaigns. The most glaring example was my proposal for a multi-faceted, targeted voter registration effort. The Mayor had explicitly asked me to draft and present an implementation plan at an upcoming joint meeting. Yet, after laying out my strategy, it was summarily discarded. “You just don’t understand how things work around here.” I drove home dejected and seriously considered quitting.

Sitting at a red light, however, my perspective shifted. I realized their rejection wasn’t about the quality of my plan; it reflected an entrenched resistance to genuine change that had resulted in minimal electoral success for the party in recent years. I called a Zoom meeting and demanded concrete reasons why the proposal wouldn’t work. When none were provided, I made it clear if we do not embrace new ideas, the change we seek will never be realized. The plan was eventually agreed upon, and we launched voter registration and education booths at the farmers’ market, the library, and nursing homes. I am proud to say that not only did our campaign win, but every city council campaign won as well. I believe the leadership I showed that day played a part in our sweeping success. I found the entire experience exceptionally rewarding. Recently, the very people who once dismissed me invited me to manage two county legislative campaigns, an opportunity I have accepted.

Thinking about it now, I really do not care if my experiences are unique.

First, it is too difficult to determine the threshold for dismissing specific similarities between broad experiences. Any attempt to draw a firm boundary quickly collapses under scrutiny. If two people rode the Buffalo subway at the same time, did they have the same experience? What if they got off at the same stop? What if they were both men? What if they were both right-handed? What if they both had daughters named Sophia who liked reading Harry Potter, doodling in their school planner, and playing with dolls? At some point, the question stops being meaningful. Attempting to determine the uniqueness of experiences becomes trivial.

Second, our experiences do not need to be unique. If a doctor saves a patient from cancer, they have achieved something great but often repeated. In fact, we should aim to make this experience as repeatable as possible. When I see others having these hard-to-replicate, broad experiences, their unique nature no longer seems to be the appeal. What now seems to matter is not that these experiences happened once, but that they happened at all. I would love to save someone from cancer, donate a kidney, or save a cat from a tree. These goals feel meaningful regardless of how many times they have been achieved before. Perhaps meaning is not discovered in the nature of the experience itself but assigned through our willingness to pursue it. Who knows. It appears, though, that it is up to us to find the “best” broad experiences for ourselves, or put ourselves in positions to be found by them, regardless of their repeatability.

We should never leave our dreams on the pillow when we rise, nor daydream while surrounded by those who are grounded, but act intentionally to bring our dreams to those in our life. I go to a regional public school in rural Western New York. There are not many established opportunities for those studying Political Science or another relevant field, but the absence of a paved path can also be an invitation to build one.

I think about my time serving as Hilary Roe’s campaign manager, and I hope, in some way, this experience is repeatable. Evidently, not all its specifics can be repeated, but the work can. I feel that is what matters. If the effort to help elect good leadership can happen again, then that, to me, is not a loss of meaning but its fulfillment.