I don’t believe in self-sufficiency. No one pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, and no one is truly independent. You were born of someone else’s flesh, after all. You were cared for as a child (at least to some extent). Drake is wrong:
“It may not mean nothing to y’all,
but understand nothing was done for me.
So I don’t plan on stopping at all.
I want this shit forever, man.”
— “Forever” by Drake
Artwork by ALyubimov.
We all need things from other people. These needs are both material and emotional — I have yet to meet a person who thrives on total solitude. Maybe there are one or two hermits living in the woods, intentionally isolated and surviving entirely by their own labor. But most of us are bound to communities, and we couldn’t release ourselves if we wanted to.
Visions of the future always acknowledge this, at least tacitly. No one imagines that we’ll sever our tethers to other humans. Are there any popular books, movies, or TV shows that depict a world inhabited solely by machines? The Matrix is the closest example I can think of, and that saga is focused on human relationships. Human dilemmas.
We love ourselves more than we’d like to acknowledge. We’re understandably obsessed with both our present and our inevitable legacy — but we can’t imagine a world without us.
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