Go, click a selfie!
There are many words and phrases that aren’t rooted in reality. Quite a lot of the words we throw around are due to pop cultural…
There are many words and phrases that aren’t rooted in reality. Quite a lot of the words we throw around are due to pop cultural compulsion. A case in point being ‘awesome’; a term that lost its soul last decade during the rise of the Internet. It’s not alone though as the modern conversations are teeming with vacuous expressions. That said, nothing can come close to the vanity of “self-made person” because of a very simple fact: It’s impossible to be one. There has never been a self-made person in the history of our species. Not one.
Think about it.
Let’s assume you’re a self-made person, chances are you’ve arrived at this spectacular conclusion based on your tireless struggles and your triumphs over obstacles. Good for you. Fair enough too. But not great enough. You still owe a lot, a terrible lot, to others for where you stand today. It’s your arrogance and ignorance — a dangerous combination for anyone at any age — that’s not letting you acknowledge things that are right in front of your eyes.
Let’s take a closer look. You are wearing clothes prepared by machines manned by mill workers, followed by tailors, both of whom you’ll never meet. You can’t grow food, now, can you? Agricultural Revolution might have changed the collective fate of our kind but we’ve reached that stage in our journey where a majority of us assume food miraculously drops into our supermarkets. Farmers? Who? Left to our design, we’ll end up eating mud after the last packet of Maggi noodles runs out. Similarly, we live in a house built by labourers. We don’t even know how to make a brick, let alone come up with the mortar required to stack them up. Why? We throw in cash and wait for the magic to happen. We are essentially helpless because capitalism has programmed us to conclude that money solves all the problems. We know by now that it doesn’t. At its best, it helps make our problems others’.
Moving on, even if we zoom out of the basics, the dependence we have on the society as well as the nature is almost crippling. We breathe thanks to trees planted by people we won’t say thank you to. If you look at yourself right now, there’s not a single thing on you — smartphone, sunglasses, belt, wallet, shoes, etc. — that you can possibly create on your own. It took several lifetimes from the past to reach this milestone where these products could be bought; a word we take for granted because of the demand-supply abracadabra. Every little and huge entity around you took ages to exist. The irony being your existence is pretty much hinged on theirs, not the other way round.
When the power supply goes off and you start feeling the heat, the first thing that you realize is the extent of your dependence on electricity. And you can’t even explain in 100 words what electricity really is! If the power doesn’t return, how long can you go on before anxiety swallows you up? Most probably, you’ll get bored of the darkness and jerk off repeatedly. Try making a candle from your semen.
Unfortunately, the nature can easily carry on without us as it did even before we entered the picture. But we can’t carry on without each other. We need each other desperately all the freaking time. Yes, this applies to the most reclusive of beings. Just because we can afford to be strangers with fellow humans doesn’t mean we can do without them. The person who sat next to you on the train today might have been the one who helped you on the phone 5 months ago but then, he was just doing his job and you perfectly deserve each other’s strangerness. However, the acknowledgement of reliance is not undue, particularly when the world is getting warmer and we are turning colder.
Lastly, the so-called self-made persons can go take a walk in the forest.