There are time periods throughout history when humanity collectively loses its mind. Not all epidemics are physical. Some are psychological. These are epidemics of the mind. During these mental epidemics, people lose rationality. They lose coherence. They do not base their perceptions off of evidence. They become profoundly dysfunctional. They lose all alignment with reality. And they do so without realizing it. The standards of sanity are then re-set to align with the new insanity and just like that, collective insanity becomes the new sanity. We are currently in one such time period. And a big element of this specific epidemic is: Independence Sickness. But what does that mean?
Everywhere you look, you will see that in today’s world, people believe wholeheartedly in the virtue and rightness of independence. It has become the new definition of what it is to be a healthy and empowered individual. So many spiritual and self-development teachers that teach that the goal is to be “whole in and of yourself” to the point where you do not need anything or anyone outside of you. So many therapists that tell people that to heal is to learn to be alone, to rely on yourself and to meet your own needs. So many parents that raise children specifically so that they can go off on their own into the world and stand on their own two feet. So many political ideologies that shift the responsibility for wellbeing to the individual.
We have completely lost touch with the truth and reality that human beings are a social species. Humans thrive in groups and are relationally dependent. Yes, even into their adult lives, because no matter how old a human being is, he or she still has relational dependency needs. These are needs that as a human being, you A. Cannot give yourself. Or B. Even if you can give them to yourself too, that does not remove the need get them from others. In order to thrive and be healthy on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level, you need these dependency needs to be met. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs (The thing That No One Will Accept That They Have.
We have failed to question why we are becoming more and more and more separated from each other. Why we have gone from living tribally to living in multigenerational households to living in single family homes to now many people living alone in an apartment. Unless we happen to be a historian, we do not remember that the move from nomadic foraging to permanent agriculture changed human societies from larger mobile kinship groups to blood and marriage related family units anchored to a single plot of land. Unless we happen to be a historian, we do not remember that it was the industrial revolution that moved jobs to factories and to offices in cities, breaking the connection between the home and the workplace. Also breaking the connection between people and the land. We forget that this caused younger generations to move to urban centers in search of wage labor where the new social structure became the setting up of independent households whereas before this, communities lived and worked together and depended on one another. The home was also the center of work and large extended families and communities were that collective workforce.
There is a complicated picture here to be seen because on one side, you have a young man chasing economic opportunity rendering him no longer dependent on inheritance, chasing personal freedom and autonomy. But on the other side, you have companies that are eager to fuel this divide between work and home, so they have more productive employees. You have mortgage companies that are eager to give out more mortgages and this can’t happen unless more individuals split off and set up their own households. You have governments eager for many reasons for urbanization to occur and to set up things like public institutions, making things like school and caretaking which were household roles, a government role. Also, eager to set up pension plans and social security, channeling worker funds into government managed funds. All of this moving the people’s dependency on their community over to dependency on the government and the systems the government creates. You have marketing campaigns and media strategies being designed to influence the way people think so that this shift occurs in favor of individualism. And with all of this, cultural attitudes shifted. Especially in Western societies, they shifted towards independence and self-reliance. Being able to have your own home and making it on your own was now a measure of adulthood and success. It was now tied to your sense of esteem and personal power.
The reason people shifted from foraging tribes to agricultural societies, which is what created the shift to multigenerational household, is forced adaptation. Early farming was far more labor intensive and less healthy than foraging. It was only when the nomadic lifestyle became unsustainable due to a combination of factors that human beings make the shift. Things like climate fluctuations, resource depletion and the necessity of populations moving to certain resource rich areas and becoming more sedentary there, causing the birthrate to increase, which then led to it becoming too overcrowded for foraging. They experienced a “population trap” whereby due to the reality of how much square mileage is necessary to support one person, the size of land could not support the growing population through hunting and gathering alone. Farming provides more food per acre, and they could have more “control” over the guarantee of food. They were not limited by what nature organically provided. And even though individuals within a farming group were less healthy due to poor diet and disease than their foraging counterparts, they could support so many more people than foraging bands. Their sheer numbers allowed them to organize into groups capable of out-competing and displacing remaining foraging tribes. Suddenly, farming was a necessity for any group to be able to survive amongst other farming groups. Foragers saw resources as communal. Agriculture necessitated the concept of private property.
Let’s fast forward. The big shadow lurking behind people going in this direction of separation and independence in the post agricultural world is relational pain. The distress we experience in our relationships. And this is still the shadow lurking behind the world’s current obsession with independence. Everyone falls somewhere on this scale of experiencing relational pain. All you have to do in order to relate to the pain that made people vote for independence and separation with it, is to imagine what it would be like to move back in with your parents or grandparents. To be totally financially dependent on them and dependent on what they own. In these multigenerational households, there tends to be experiences all the way from social friction to severe relational trauma. People find the constant presence of this relational friction and these uncomfortable and painful interpersonal dynamics stressful. And if you are in a dysfunctional family system, traumatizing. And we don’t feel like this relational distress is limited to our families. We experience it with ‘other people’ in general. De-communalizing our lives makes it so we do not have to live in that social friction. We are not powerless to the whims of authorities, such as elders. We do not have to be observed and disturbed by others. We can create psychological, emotional and physical room where there is no pressure to be any specific way for others, which causes us to relax and feel relief.
Throughout time, in response to these pains, so many philosophies and social movements have arisen, such as The Enlightenment, including Kantian Autonomy and Classical Liberalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. Transcendentalism and Existentialism of the 19th century. Modern individualism of the 20th century. And here we are today. An era ruled by Neo Liberalism, Liquid Citizenship, Self-Help, Radical Self-Optimization and New Age Spirituality. Independence is now a value that sits atop a pedestal for people in the modern world, especially the modern Western world. And it is such a sacred cow so to speak, that people are missing the following awareness:
There is no such thing as independence. At the most basic level, we are dependent on so many things. You are dependent on oxygen, water, sunlight, foods. You are dependent on the microbiome, such as the bacteria and fungi that are essential for you to be alive. You are dependent on the ecosystem. You are dependent on your dependency needs such as social connection and physical touch.
And let’s go further, in today’s world, we live in the illusion of independence despite being more dependent than we ever were before. How could this be true and yet, people don’t see this? Because the modern belief in independence rests on our ability to live alone, make money, work remotely and not depend on our community and our parents and partners. But this is only possible because of an underlying dependency on the system. A highly complex web of infrastructure that people do not recognize.
It used to be that we were dependent on what nature provided. Now, almost all people have lost the knowledge and skills to be able to live off the land. Instead, we are dependent on financial institutions. We are dependent on farmers growing food, transport services getting the food to the stores near us that sell us the food. The same is true of all goods we need to thrive. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive. We are dependent on internet connectivity. We are dependent on resources like oil and electricity. And all the people and processes that make them available to us. We are dependent on the government for all kinds of things such as the infrastructure that enables us to live daily life, emergency services, and public utilities. A person feels independent when they go to the bank and deposit money in their own account and use that money to buy their own apartment. But they miss that in doing this, they are dependent on the entire financial system, on the bank, on the mortgage company. A person feels independent when they are able to follow GPS to wherever they want to go. But they miss that in doing so, they are dependent on the GPS system to work. That they have outsources the basic survival skill of navigation. Unlike our ancestors who, even if they had a specialty, were generalists, in that they had many skills and knew how to find food, build shelters, navigate etc. Most of us are specialists. We develop and trade one skill for everything we need. If the need for our one skill becomes obsolete, our entire means of survival is obsolete. We are living in a profound state of dependency that no one sees, until it fails. This makes us uniquely vulnerable and uniquely ignorant. We can go around convinced we are independent and encouraging everyone else to be independent too, and totally miss that we are in fact totally dependent. We’ve simply shifted what we are dependent on. We have shifted from a kind of partial social dependence to total systemic dependence.
We miss the fact that the price we are paying for this independence obsession is not only being in reality, it is also human connection and safety. We are becoming more and more and more separate from one another. When this happens, we become more and more unwell because we have relational dependency needs. And we are far more powerless. The less connected we are, the more vulnerable we are to being controlled by those that control the system upon which we depend. The more dependent we are on those who create and run and control the system. And the more powerless we are to stop them if they go out of alignment and against our best interests.
The reality is that dependency scares the crap out of people. Dependency has become a dirty word. Why does dependency scare us so badly? Because it makes us feel powerless to things external to us. And what people are the most terrified of is being powerless to other people. We wouldn’t fear this unless we had bad experiences with depending on others.
If we did not receive our dependency needs adequately from our significant relationships in our early life; and even worse, if we were harmed by those who we depended on to meet our dependency needs, we become desperate to not be dependent on others. We create and adopt and latch on to social and spiritual ideologies that promote the idea that we do not need things from other people. That everything we need, we can get from within. We find ways to feel the least dependent on others as we possibly can, even if that means buying into an illusion. It makes a great many people (who experienced dependency as opening them up to stress if not harm) feel empowered to think that they can meet all of their needs themselves. To believe they can be unaffected by others.
The issue at the heart of this is not dependency, even though dependence has become the scapegoat. The issue is how truly bad people are at relationships. At practicing the basic concept of I see your wellbeing as indivisible from my own and so, I can’t go against your best interests just to suit my own. People are so bad at creating truly loving, supportive, feel-good relationships that humanity as a whole has decided that it is safer to depend on the system than on your family, community and partner. That it is better to depend on an impersonal, massive network of people you will never meet (because the system is not a living entity. The system is created, maintained and governed by people). As if they for some reason, are more likely to act in your best interests. And we have branded this shift “personal empowerment”. The reality check is that you are far, far more dependent on other people than people were ever dependent on people before. But because you don’t see them or interact directly with them every day, you can feel independent. And at the same time as we have become more dependent than ever before, we have lost our “we”.
The modern-day obsession with Independence has led to social calamity. A loss of connection and belonging. Our community bonds are corroding. There are less and less people volunteering and putting their energy into their communities. People feel so much pressure to do it all themselves that they are under constant pressure to do more than one person is capable of doing, leading to burnout. People don’t seek support out of shame, nor are they supported when they do seek out help. People are not exposing system failures because individuals are blamed for problems instead. People are going away from the mutual vulnerability required for deep emotional connection because relying on anyone emotionally and co-regulating, which is our very nature, is now treated as a form of personal failure. People are behaving more and more narcissistically, like an island unto themselves, further reinforcing the experience that people cannot be trusted, which further reinforces the obsession with independence. And low and behold, we are living in a true loneliness epidemic.
Our social ties are being snipped. They are being snipped and we are not really doing anything to prevent it. Instead, we are joining in and are snipping our social ties for ourselves. And we are using all kinds of philosophies and ideologies to support the doing of this. And with it, we are losing more and more of the much-needed things that we get from tribe and community. The positive payoffs of living together and depending on those people we live with. We can’t build a WE when everything is about ME. So, we are lonely. And we are vulnerable. This independence sickness has led to a state of hyper individualism. But we are fighting for that loneliness, for that vulnerability and also, for the illusion.
Interdependence is the reality of the existence we lead. And within this reality, Individual autonomy and social cohesion do not need to be mutually exclusive. The way forward is not independence. It is the mastery of relationship. Interdependence is the truth of relationship. We need each other and we depend on each other. And, at the same time there is a you and there is a me in a relationship. This means autonomy and self-empowerment is also a part of the picture of a positive relationship. Conscious interdependence is the is the way of the future.
