Anytime someone writes an essay, that person has to choose a pronoun or other noun to represent and refer to the writer and the reader. That just happened ("someone" as a choice). Above, the writer becomes "that person." The writer (another choice) can become an "I" and the reader a "you" or "they." Readers and writers can appear as "she" or "he." "One" may refer to both writer and reader. The choice comes harder than we might think (another choice, "we") because as with all choice, it takes on a signification and a result, a consequence. Generally, in this writing, I (the writer) choose "we" to represent both the writer and the reader. The reader (you) can also read this as the "authorial we," simply a way of staying away from writing "I" which someone told someone who told us that we have to avoid using "I" in our essay writing. One problem with that choice comes in the distance and abstraction of the "we" and its possible resonance with the royal rather superior sounding "we" (as in the Victorian cliché "we are not amused").
Choosing "we" and "us" in writing also risks sounding as if the writer and the reader are the same sort of person. Actually, it can sound like the writer thinks of the reader as an extension of the writer, as if the writer defined the reader in most if not all particulars. This comes as a kind of modified solipsism. In a full solipsism, the only sure entity in existence is the self. Everything else serves as a projection of that self. Why anyone would bother writing to all those projections of self becomes another question. A modified solipsism allows that others exist, but all those others think and feel exactly as the self, the writer thinks and feels. That sort of writing seems to endlessly suggest that the reader already knows what is being said, but the writer simply brings the thoughts and feelings a clarity the reader doesn't have, but immediately upon reading, the reader will think and feel the same way only better informed about the reader's own thoughts. That certainly can strike the reader as egotistical and intrusive. The reader has the right to think her/his (choice) own thoughts and feel her/his own feelings.
The use of "we" in this writing doesn't seek to deny that independence of thought and feeling, the essential individuation of each of us. The use of "we" and "us" in this writing wants to suggests that in all of our individuation and separation, we share certain experiences and desires, certain needs and wants, drives and realities although we perceive them and respond to them differently. In all our differences as human beings, we share certain similarities because we are, simply stated, human and a being. This commonality supports us and makes for connection even in our inevitable isolation as individuals. These connections keep isolation from becoming alienation from one another. In alienation, we become Others to each other, and we can slip into suspicion and even fear of one another. We can despair of our individuality as an isolation that leaves us each and only suffering alone with no one to hear our cries of loneliness and sorrow—certainly no one to care. The "we" here suggests that your individual self and my individual self exist with unifying and connecting understandings of each other and our shared experiences when we can get to them through our shared isolation. Even when we only share our isolation we can find ourselves less isolated. So here we go.