Interdependence?

Warehouses are hard work. Carrying heavy packages is hard work. Even taking inventory is exhausting. But the people in the warehouse didn’t make the thing. The thing in the warehouse wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for someone else somewhere else working really hard, probably a bunch of people that the warehouse workers will never meet.

Maybe meetings are hard work. I don’t know. My peak performance is blue collar and most of the time I’m scraping by at the bottom of the barrel with the other minnows picking up scraps off the ground (which, by the way, is hard work too). So I’ve never discussed marketing strategies or stock portfolios or the motion of the dow jones with a bunch of rich people. But I’ll entertain the possibility that maybe it’s hard work. It still doesn’t generate the product that they’re selling, advertising, and analyzing profits on trying to decide how to increase said profits and decrease costs.

There’s a cultural tendency to assume “I worked really hard” equates to “I did it all by myself”. It’s probably the only way to maintain the “power of the individual” propaganda we’ve all heard for so many years. It doesn’t.

I used to get really pissed off about samples and loops. Someone comes along and sings or raps over a song that already exists, and suddenly it’s “their” song, completely dismissing the hard work that the original artist put into making the song. Some of the people singing and rapping are very talented. But they still didn’t make the song all by themselves. A lot of the time they didn’t even write their own part. Yes, singing is still work, but so is writing, so is music tech, so are all the hundreds of other positions that go into making a hit single.

I grew up with a lot of “I can’t make a difference on my own” narratives. This was presented as being a flawed perspective, a product of low self esteem. At the very least, it was framed as a problem to be fixed. Usually by “becoming more powerful”. In truth, it is an axiom. No one accomplishes anything meaningful on their own. Even for the most powerful people in the world, “power” equates to “I have a bunch of people who will do what I tell them”. And the army of trolls waiting for someone to yell sic ’em are already inclined to attack marginalized people, and it could just as easily be someone else yelling sic ’em.