In which I had an epiphany about interconnectedness while drinking a dark mocha latte breve.

Was just over at the coffee shop with a pile of stuff in front of me.

This pile of stuff:

That’s a fountain pen, traveler’s notebook, my prescription glasses, a mason jar lid and ring, an instant camera and nylon/pseudo-leather strap with plastic connectors, a mason jar filled with a delicious coffee-and-dairy beverage, and a saddle leather jar holder. I don’t need any of them to survive; they’re all leisure-time trinkets, except my glasses, which correct a defect, and without which my quality of life would be much lower.

One, look at my pseudo-retro, analog, reuse/recycle aesthetic! (Apparently I do sorta have a style, even if it only applies to crap I take to coffee shops, and not how I look or dress!)

Two, I can’t produce ANY of these things. Not a single fucking one. Not to these tolerances.

I don’t know how to make glass, let alone glass suitable to use for canning. Nor do I know how to turn hide into fine leather (I could probably produce something rough and crappy), although I could cut leather and I can sew… but I can’t make knives or needles or thread.

I don’t know how to make fine paper, or build machines to print on it, cut it to perfect size, and bind it. I don’t know how to produce metal charms or even elastic cord. I have no idea at all about any of the thousands of steps required to create that camera: the plastic body, the battery, the lens, the instant film itself.

I could make a camera strap from cloth, I suppose, but most assuredly don’t know how to create nylon or faux-leather or little plastic connectors. I don’t know how to grow cotton, spin it, and weave it into cloth, either.

I don’t know how to grind corrective lenses.

I couldn’t even build a fountain pen from scratch. Although I do understand the concept, I have no way to make a nib, and what would I make the feed from? Carve it out of rubber? I don’t know how to produce rubber!

I don’t know how to grow coffee. I don’t know how to grow or process cocoa for chocolate. I have no dairy experience whatsoever, though I could probably milk a cow and Pasteurize the results. Probably.

The mason jar lid and ring: pretty simple, in concept. Punch out of metal. But I don’t know how to make metal, nor build a punch.

All of these items represent the intelligence and cleverness of other human beings. All I did was buy them.

All of these items require a functioning, interdependent society to exist. I doubt there’s any single person on earth, now or ever, who could build all the tools and technologies needed to create these items from scratch.

All of these items, after they came to be, traveled to me on roads, in trucks, in ships, in airplanes. The fountain pen is German, the notebook and camera are Japanese. A couple of the metal charms are from India. The phone I used to take the picture was designed in Florida and South America, and probably manufactured in China of globally sourced components. The image was transmitted to the cloud through a series of pieces of network equipment produced who knows where.

Point being: there are no self-made people. Even if you developed self-discipline early on and studied hard, you still used infrastructure and knowledge and technologies made by others. You may have made the best of what you were given, but you were given it. You do not live alone, no matter how much contempt you may have for others. You cannot live alone; the world is so profoundly intermeshed that isolation is a joke concept. Even if you were to fuck off to an island, you’d travel there in a ship or plane, and arrive with fucktons of technology in the form of clothes and tents or radios or cooking implements to aspirin.

And here’s what selfish people miss entirely: you do owe for what you’ve been given. It’s your duty to contribute to the society that produced you. You have to make sure there are roads and schools, hospitals and firehouses, municipal water and opportunities for not only your kids, but all kids. And adults. Straight and gay, sick and well, theist and atheist, conservative and liberal, smart and dumb, good and bad, lazy and driven.

Some people are smarter than others, some people start several laps ahead. Some people find a path and follow it doggedly, and achieve whatever goals they feel are worthy of achieving — whether that goal is to master photography or law or illegal drug trade or dance or French baguettes. Some don’t. Most of us achieve mediocrity and don’t do much beyond consuming resources, and the best that can be said about us is that while we don’t really contribute to the sum of humanity’s knowledge, we’re not actively evil.

The reality is that all people depend on others for everything, even if they like to pretend their unique existence somehow earned them their indoor plumbing and refrigerators and automobiles and the medical breakthroughs that kept them alive long enough to even have opinions about what other people do or do not deserve.

Preppers and isolationists like to think they could be dropped into the wilderness and not only survive, but thrive. That’s bullshit. It’s a rare human being who could create, even with access to abundant natural resources, clothing, shelter, and safe and healthy food, let alone knives or cast iron pans or medicines or instant cameras. Most people would die of exposure, injury, starvation, poisoning, or illness. And rather quickly. Because it’s fucking difficult to live outside a functioning society. And that’s really the only definition of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that matters; anyone within a society benefits from it, and owes their success to everyone else.

And this is the whole point of society: we share our contributions, and rather than struggling to eke out a subsistence existence, we can just go buy flour, in a store, easily reachable by sidewalk or bus or car, to bake our bread with, or, hell, we can just bypass the entire bread-baking learning curve and buy it already made. I mean, consider something as simple as a loaf of bread: even if you understand all the steps from plowing to planting to growing to harvesting to drying to grinding to mixing with water to baking, can you, personally, yourself, perform all those steps? Can you design and build a plow, a scythe or harvester, a grinder, a peel and an oven?

Sure, probably. Maybe. But God, how much time it would take, merely to make your own bread. Now imagine you also have to make your own cloth and design and cut and sew and mend your own clothes. And locate/harvest/slaughter/process and preserve all your food for winter. And ferment your own booze for drinking and sanitizing. And build your own house. And collect and store your own water and fuel. Now you’re indoors, clothed, warmed, and fed. But that’s it: no life of the mind, no entertainment or distraction or hobbies. That’s what you want if you think you’re an island, that’s what you want if you loathe other humans.