Our Inextricable Interconnectedness or The Myth of Independence

It's something that's been known in Buddhism for thousands of years: we are all connected. And not just we humans, all things. All of existence is interconnected. We—all humans, animals, plants, rocks, dirt—are all made up of the same discrete building blocks of matter that pass in and out of our bodies constantly, billions of times per second. We just can't see it. If we did, it would be quite unsettling as we saw little bits of us floating around the room in which we sit and little bits of everything and everyone in the room being newly incorporated into our bodies. This possibly fortunate lack of visibility creates the illusion of a separate self.

This illusion is reinforced by a narrative of how we perceive the world, one that's built before we're even conscious, putting us as the star of the show. It unfortunately forces us into a very limited perspective of existence, a limited perspective of our own lives. This is a bit abstract, so let me give a concrete example.

My grandmother was told about a decade ago that her chronic back pain was a treatable condition that would likely be solved by a surgical operation. This caused her to be so freaked out that she refused the operation outright, and then magically, all of a sudden, stopped complaining of back pain. She opted to just live with the pain instead of having to undergo surgery. I'm sure she experienced continuous discomfort, but just decided to suppress her feelings because she knew she was making an active choice of refusing surgery and accepting the pain.

However, recently, her memories have been breaking down, and without these memories, her narrative of her self, of her existence, has deteriorated and become fragmented. So now when she wakes up with back pain in the morning, along with the host of other pains and discomfort, she's confused. She's surprised, she's frustrated. "Why do I feel like this?" she asks. "Why does my back hurt so much?" She's forced to confront her existence daily because this narrative is broken. She no longer remembers that for decades she has neglected her body. Now, unfortunately for my grandmother, this results in extreme disappointment and frustration. I'm afraid there's little to be done in her case aside from trying to make her reasonably comfortable every day.

But for the rest of us, it offers a valuable opportunity. We have a chance, not only every day but every moment, to reevaluate our existence. If we did this moment by moment, it would of course be crippling, and we wouldn't be able to exist and move through the world, but we can choose to take time out of our lives to perform this exercise. And when we, like my grandmother does, really do question why things—our lives, our society, our world—are the way they are, we experience personal growth. This is one of the surest ways to expanding our minds.

We can use one of these wonderful opportunities to investigate interconnectedness, or rather question the opposite concept of independence. It doesn't matter what level of our existence we refer to, interconnectedness is the rule. We can look at the functioning of individual cells in our body, organs, our bodies themselves. Each of these units is made up of different discrete components, each of which can't exist on their own. In humans, the heart doesn't make much sense without lungs, and vice versa. And the sum of all of those parts can't exist without its constituent parts. Human bodies require far more than just hearts and lungs. They also can't exist without the right external conditions. Our bodies require habitable environments and regular inputs: air, water, food. And so it is much the same with our societies, whether they're families, small communities, or sovereign states.

Let's take a look at the individual within a modern developed state. We often think of individuals as achieving true independence in our society if they have a certain amount of money, which allows them the privilege of no longer having to accumulate additional wealth to pay for their cost of living. But just like with our independent selves, our discrete independent bodies, this is an illusion.

Money amounts to nothing more than resource points. It's a system that allows you to turn what, for most people, are numbers saved on a website or on an app into practically any good or service that humans are able to create. It's fairly magical. And what makes it even more magical is that we all have to be united in shared understanding and behavior to make it a reality. If enough people were to stop believing in this point system, the extremely fungible digits in your bank account could be worthless overnight. Our modern currency is extremely abstract, so let's take a slightly more concrete example. Let's take the example of a house.

If you buy a house, you receive a piece of paper, the deed, to verify that house is yours. The paper is then usually registered with some sort of government office as well. So without there being a governmental system in place, without other people having trust in that governmental system, your deed, the idea of you "owning" that plot of land, would be meaningless. And without a variety of services being provided to this house, to this plot of land—such as water, sewage, electricity, internet, roads—the house's value, and by value I mean practical real-world benefit, would be severely reduced to the point of being almost zero for most of us. And in that sense, well, even if you pay off your house in cash, even if you have enough money to pay for expenses to maintain your house until long after you die, and even if that currency in which you record your resource points retains its value, you will forever be dependent on the people providing and maintaining all the services that are going to your home, let alone helping you to maintain the physical home itself. Sure, some of us can be pretty handy with fixing things around a home. You can look things up online. But how many of us are capable of manufacturing the tools or the raw materials needed to conduct those repairs?

So what's to be done? It seems that the only way to truly achieve independence is to move somewhere far out to the countryside where you're able to create your own tools, to build your own house, grow your own food, and provide your own fresh water. Problem solved! Or so we think. Made more prevalent by modern technologies, but having existed since what was at the latest the start of agriculture, are the unintentional effects that we have on each other. In this homesteading scenario, are you getting your water from a stream? You better hope no one upstream starts polluting. Getting your water from a well? Better hope not too many other people are doing the same, potentially exhausting the groundwater. Are you living far enough out in the sticks where there's no one upstream and there's no one else tapping into the same groundwater supply as you? Well, you better hope that the rest of humanity keeps climate change under control. Otherwise, depending on where you live, you may face increasingly frequent drought.

Using water alone in this scenario shows us that even when we go out of our way to be as independent of other humans as possible, we still fail. And for those of us who don't want to be homesteaders, the number of ways in which we are linked to other people are nearly innumerable.

Since we are and always will be bound together, I offer a radical idea. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to try to grab some more resources points, more money, for yourself to try to achieve this idea of independence, I say run in the opposite direction as quickly as you can towards dependence. Absolute dependence. If we fully acknowledge that we are entirely dependent on other people, it opens up entire new worlds of possibilities for ourselves and for our society. We no longer have to be obsessed with obtaining resource points and attempting to make sure that we're secure in different kinds of arbitrary, minute ways.

In the past, we didn't fight this. We embraced the fact that we were dependent on one another, that we're interconnected, forming extremely strong local community bonds and mutual support. We got to know our neighbors, were highly involved in our family members' lives, and helping them and asking for help in return was built into the fabric of our society. Our interconnectedness occurred through deep, meaningful human relationships. It wasn't mediated through some arbitrary, impersonal point system.

Seeking independence through accumulation of money disconnects us from almost every product or service that we consume. Even companies that make it their objective to know the origins of the supply chain have a hard time doing so. We as the end consumer hardly have a chance.

It drives us to live more and more in isolation, as we feel we can simply turn our money into the resources we need, rather than building and maintaining relationships to help us obtain those resources and provide resources for others in turn. That not only leads to a breakdown of communication and trust but also significantly decreases our mental health, which for all humans, is hugely dependent on having several deep interpersonal relationships.

The notion of personal independence is an illusion. Even independence as a family, as a neighborhood, as a local community, even a sovereign state—all of these entities are dependent on others. However, to see through these illusions, we first must break the illusion of our own lives. We have to break, for a moment, the narrative in which we live. This is not an easy thing to do, especially the first time you do it. It's scary. It requires questioning some things that you've been taking for granted for possibly decades. And at first, it will truly only be for a moment. It'll be too scary otherwise. It'll be too overwhelming. But over time, as you try it more and more, you'll be able to stave off that illusion, that personal narrative, for longer and longer until you reach the point where you're able to examine entire aspects of your life for what they truly are. You'll be able to see right through your desire for independence and use that understanding to begin to actively write a new, more useful narrative about your life.

I know that this will happen to you if you try because it happened to me. I can still remember when I was in my early 20s arguing with my dad, getting to the point where we were in a shouting match about me wanting to pay for a car my parents were trying to gift me. At the time, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to establish my independence, show how I could stand on my own two feet. My parents paid for the entirety of my college education, and I wanted to show myself that I didn't need their help anymore. At the time, I was even intending on paying them back for the entirety of my college expenses.

But now I look back and I see how foolish this all was. How can you possibly ever repay the "debt" you owe your caregivers who raised you? The amount of time, effort, and love they invested in you goes beyond anything that money could possibly buy. What is a great start in life worth? How much would you pay for a shoulder to cry on? A home to return to? The simple knowledge that there are people in the world who care about your health and happiness? It's absurd to think that we could ever pay this back with money.

We will never be free of the dependence, of the interconnectedness we have with our parents, our caregivers. But nor should we. Again, this represents another opportunity to simply embrace that dependence. Instead of thinking, "How can I exist independently of them?" or "How can I pay them back?", instead, more useful questions might be: "How can I honor what they've done for me? What can I do in return? How can I help others in ways similar to how they've helped me?"

Just as with our caregivers, we will always be dependent on our societies. Another related and much more recent story: I was in line at the post office and briefly chatted with the person behind me as we were sharing a laugh—there were a couple of parents trying to wrangle their kids into having passport photos taken with the youngest being less than enthusiastic at the prospect. I was there to get a money order, but when I got to the counter, I realized I didn't have any cash, a requirement for a money order. So I said "Thanks anyway" and headed towards the door. As I was walking out, the fellow chuckler behind me offered to loan me the cash I needed, saying to take it and their address for me to stop by and pay them back sometime. I, without thinking, said "No thank you," expressed my appreciation, and wished them a good day.

Even before I made it to the door, I asked myself why I did that, and I didn't have a good answer. Several months later, after more reflection, I realize it was my at-that-point trained instinct of independence. I rejected convenience and the opportunity for a new meaningful connection in favor of unquestioning independence. It seems pretty stupid in hindsight and it paints quite clearly how ingrained this tendency towards independence is in our society.

We associate independence, especially financial independence, with success. We unquestioningly think of it as a virtue. "She's done all right by herself." I've never understood the "by herself" in this sentence before. I used to think of it as meaning something along the lines of living up to one's own expectations. But the real meaning is far simpler than that. It simply means "alone". It means the person you're referring to in the phrase has achieved success on their own. And we say this as if it's something that we should all aspire to. We use it as a significant compliment. In such an interconnected world, who are we trying to fool with these kinds of statements? The sad truth is that we're unknowingly fooling ourselves and each other every day. But I suggest another path.

Instead of scrambling to grab a little piece of the pie and carve out an existence for ourselves within our society, why not immerse ourselves in our society? If our goals are to have personal freedom and agency, then we must have buy-in, we must have agreement from the vast majority of people in our society for those to come to fruition. If we're all busy looking after ourselves, stepping on each other's toes in the process, that's exactly when and how our freedom will be curtailed. Out of fear and anxiety, we attempt to grab more and more from each other and for ourselves, creating less and less space for us to truly act according to our own will.

I suggest to live and breathe our interconnected world. The next time someone offers you help, take it. The next time you notice someone who may need help, offer it. If one of your main focuses in life is financial independence, maybe take some time to rethink that. Try working towards, and maybe even structure your life around, something more positive, more tangible than the accumulation of wealth, than steadily filling accounts for retirement, than saving up to buy a house that will be "yours".

I believe the increasing connectedness of the world will ultimately be a wonderful thing. In the most globally connected world that we've ever lived in, it brings people in corners of the globe closer together than they ever have been before. We have some tricky times ahead to navigate as we all get used to living in this new highly interconnected way, but greater connectedness leads to greater understanding, leading to greater cooperation, leading to peace—peace we all deserve.