The Self-Made Man and Other Bedtime Stories for Adults Who Should Know Better

The guy next to me at the mechanic was doing something I recognized immediately, because I do it too. He was on his phone, scrolling through a YouTube video with the sound off, and every few seconds he'd glance up at the service bay where his car was raised on the lift, then back at his phone, then back at the car, as if he were mentally comparing whatever the mechanic was doing to whatever the video was showing him he could have done himself.¹ His face had the expression of a man calculating whether he could have changed his own brakes in the driveway and saved $300, and whether the fact he hadn't was evidence of some personal failing. I know this face. I have made this face. I once spent forty-five minutes watching a plumbing tutorial before calling an actual plumber, and the plumber, when he arrived, fixed the problem in about nine minutes and charged me $150, which felt both completely reasonable and somehow a personal indictment.

What I want to talk about is the strange, quiet shame we attach to needing other people, and why it is, I think, one of the more destructive fictions running underneath modern life.

Here is a thing I notice in myself, and I suspect in you, though I could be wrong about the you part:² there is a voice, not always loud but always present, whispering that the goal is to need no one. To be the person who handles everything. Who doesn't ask. Who figures it out. This voice has, if you listen carefully, a particular accent; it sounds a lot more confident than it deserves to, given the evidence. Because the evidence, when you actually look at it, is overwhelming: no one who has ever accomplished anything worth talking about did it without someone else in the room.

This is not a feel-good sentiment. It's a structural observation, the way noting that a bridge needs two abutments is not sentimental about abutments.

The cultural machinery around this is, once you start noticing, hard to un-notice. Consider the way relationship advice gets dispensed on the internet, which is to say: with absolute confidence and almost no contact with how actual relationships work.³ The dominant narrative goes something like this: you must become a "fully complete person" before you can be in a relationship. You must, the thinking goes, fill every gap in yourself before you're ready to be with someone else, because needing another person is a red flag, a sign of weakness, evidence of what gets clinically (and often incorrectly) labeled codependency. The implication is that healthy love is a transaction between two sealed units, each self-contained, choosing to be together out of pure preference and not out of need.

This sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than thirty seconds.

Because a fully complete person has never been born. Not once, in the entire history of our species, has someone arrived on this planet fully equipped to handle everything on their own. Aristotle, writing roughly 2,400 years ago, put it with characteristic bluntness in his Politics: man is by nature a social animal, and anyone who exists without community is either above humanity or below it. He compared such a person to a bird flying alone.⁴ This was not Aristotle being poetic. He meant it as a description of how things actually work, the way you'd describe the load-bearing requirements of a column. Humans are structurally designed for interdependence, the way teeth are designed for chewing. You can refuse to chew, but you're going to have a hard time with dinner.

The interdependence theory developed by John Thibaut and Harold Kelley in the late 1950s formalized something people have always known intuitively: the outcomes of your life depend not just on what you do, but on what happens between you and other people. Your actions shape other people's experiences, and theirs shape yours, and the quality of what emerges is a function of that mutual influence. This is not weakness. This is physics (or the social equivalent).

And yet. Culture keeps insisting otherwise, across a remarkable range of domains.

Take the financial advice corner of the internet, where a certain kind of young man (it is almost always a young man) films himself in a rented Lamborghini explaining that wealth is built through relentless solo effort, that asking for help is for people who lack discipline, that the grind recognizes no partnerships.⁵ Take the self-help shelf at any bookstore, where roughly 95% of the available material focuses on internal mindset work, solo journaling exercises, morning routines performed in solitude, affirmations whispered to bathroom mirrors.⁶ Take the hip-hop narratives (which I grew up on and love, so this is not dismissal) framing success as a solo act against a hostile world. The message, broadcast from a hundred different frequencies, is consistent: you against everything, and if you can't make it alone, the problem is you.

This is, and I want to be clear and precise about this, an objective falsehood.

I have spent a lot of time (my wife might say definitely too much time) thinking about the biographies of people who accomplished remarkable things. And in every single case, the story has the same structural feature: there is a moment, usually somewhere in the middle third of the narrative, where the protagonist meets someone. A partner, a collaborator, a mentor, an editor, a co-founder, an unlikely ally. And that meeting, not any solo breakthrough, is the hinge point. John Lennon without Paul McCartney is a talented guy with an acoustic guitar and an attitude problem. Steve Jobs without Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula is a charismatic dropout with strong ideas about calligraphy. Marie Curie without Pierre Curie is a brilliant scientist without a laboratory or the institutional support to do the work that would earn two Nobel Prizes.⁷

What I find most telling is that this isn't a pattern you have to squint to see. It is, in fact, the pattern. The overwhelming, boringly consistent pattern. And for some reason, the culture still sells the solo narrative, the way a store might keep stocking a product nobody actually buys but everybody seems to want on the shelf.

There is, I think, a psychological reason the solo myth persists, and it has something to do with control. Brené Brown, whose research on vulnerability and shame I've found quietly devastating in the way it dismantles things I wanted to believe about myself, points out that vulnerability is not weakness but rather the most accurate measure of courage.⁸ The reason we cling to the myth of total self-sufficiency is that dependence requires vulnerability, and vulnerability means admitting there are things you can't do, gaps in your own design that only another person can fill.⁹ This admission feels, on a very primal level, dangerous. It feels as though telling someone "I need you" is handing them a weapon. And some of the time, with some people, it is. But refusing to ever hand anyone anything is not safety. It's just a more dignified (and socially acceptable) form of starvation.

I think about this in the context of my own marriage, which I won't pretend is some kind of aspirational model, but which has taught me (which is a polite way of saying "beaten into me through repeated evidence") something about how actual partnerships function. My wife is better than I am at about fifteen things I would prefer to be good at, including but not limited to: reading the emotional temperature of a room, knowing when a conversation is actually about something other than what it appears to be about, and maintaining friendships with a consistency I find genuinely mysterious.¹⁰ I am, in turn, apparently better at some things she finds tedious, things involving spreadsheets and the particular kind of patience required to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi router at 10 p.m. These are not parallel skill sets. They are complementary ones, in the way a lock and a key are complementary: neither is deficient for being incomplete. The deficiency would be in insisting the lock should also be its own key.

In every successful relationship I've personally witnessed (and I want to be careful here, because "every" is a big word, but I've thought about this and I'm sticking with it), the couple needed each other. Not just wanted. Needed. They each filled in gaps in the other's personality, temperament, skill set, and worldview. And the relationship worked precisely because of that mutual need, not despite it. The dependency was the feature, not the bug.

This runs so counter to what the culture currently preaches that it feels almost naughty to say out loud. But think about it in professional terms, where the evidence is even harder to argue with. Every organization of any complexity runs on division of labor, which is just a formal way of acknowledging that no single person can do everything. Your company has an accountant because you are not good enough at accounting, and the accountant has someone who handles IT because the accountant is not good enough at turning his computer off and on again. This is not a failure of any individual. It is the entire architecture of human cooperation, the architecture on which civilization runs.¹¹

And of all the truly powerful people in the world and in history, the ones who actually shaped events and built things and changed the way people think: zero of them got there on their own. This number is not approximate. It is exact. Zero.

The self-help industry, and I say this as someone who has consumed an embarrassing quantity of it, has a structural blind spot here. The vast majority of personal development content focuses inward: fix your thoughts, optimize your routine, build your discipline, master your emotions. And these things matter; I'm not saying they don't. But they account for maybe half the picture, and the industry treats them as the whole canvas. What gets neglected, consistently and almost systematically, is the outward-facing work: learning how to collaborate effectively, how to delegate without anxiety, how to ask for help without interpreting it as failure, how to be safely dependent on another human being without either collapsing into them or keeping them at arm's length.

Harry Stack Sullivan, the American psychiatrist who developed interpersonal theory, argued in the 1950s that personality is almost entirely the product of recurring interpersonal situations.¹² You don't have a self in isolation. You have a self that emerges between you and other people, shaped by those interactions, defined by them. Your personality is not a solo performance; it's a duet, or a trio, or an ensemble piece, and the people around you are not the audience. They're the other musicians. This is a hard thing to sit with if you've built your identity around the idea of being a solo act.

The danger of the hyper-individual myth is not just that it's wrong (though it is wrong), but that it creates a specific kind of damage. When you believe you should be able to handle everything yourself, every moment of needing help becomes evidence of inadequacy. Every time you ask your spouse for emotional support, or your colleague for professional help, or your friend for honest feedback, there's a small internal flinch, a sense of having failed at the project of being a complete person.¹³ This flinch, accumulated over years, breeds something corrosive: resentment. You start to resent the people you depend on, not because they've done anything wrong, but because their existence in your life is a reminder of your incompleteness, and you've been told incompleteness is a deficiency rather than a design feature.

I see this pattern in myself more often than I'd prefer to admit. There are moments when my wife offers to help me with something and my first, involuntary reaction is not gratitude but a kind of defensive bristle, a micro-flinch of "I can handle it." And when I catch that reaction and actually examine it, what I find underneath is not confidence. It's fear. The fear that needing help means I'm less than. That dependence is a loss of power rather than an accumulation of it.

Because here's what I've started to believe, and it has taken me a genuinely long time to get here: dependence on the right people, in the right ways, is not a diminishment of your power. It is the mechanism by which your power actually becomes real. Think of it structurally. A single wire can carry a certain load. Braid several wires together and the cable can support a bridge. The individual wires didn't get weaker by being combined. They got useful. They became capable of something none of them could do alone.¹⁴

This reframing (and I know it's a reframing, I know I'm doing the thing where you present a different way of thinking about something and hope it sticks, which is pretty much what all my essays do) changes what self-improvement looks like. Instead of the endless inward gaze, the morning routines and the journal prompts and the solo meditation retreats,¹⁵ what if the real work of personal growth was learning to be good at needing people? Learning to identify who fills your gaps and letting them fill those gaps without flinching? Learning to say "I can't do this part, but you can, and I'm glad you're here" without it feeling confessional?

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that ethics begins with the face of the other person, that our responsibility to one another is the foundational fact of human existence, preceding even our responsibility to ourselves.¹⁶ I first encountered this idea in a graduate seminar I was probably too young and too sure of myself to appreciate, and I remember thinking it sounded backwards. Responsibility to others before responsibility to yourself? That seemed a recipe for self-neglect. But Levinas wasn't arguing for self-sacrifice. He was arguing that the self only becomes real in relation to others, that you literally do not exist in the way you think you do without the people around you calling you into being.¹⁷

Which, okay, sounds a bit abstract.

The guy next to me eventually put his phone away. His car came down off the lift, and the mechanic (a woman, as it happened, which seemed to add an additional layer of discomfort to whatever internal narrative he was running) walked over and explained what she'd found. He listened. He asked a question. She answered it. He paid, and he left, and the whole interaction took maybe four minutes, and as far as I could tell, at no point during those four minutes did he enjoy himself.

I wanted to lean over and tell him something, though of course I didn't, because you don't tell strangers in in waiting rooms the thing you've been thinking about for three weeks. But what I would have said, if I were the kind of person who talks to strangers in waiting rooms (I'm not, which is probably itself evidence of the thing I'm describing), is this: the mechanic knowing how to do the thing you don't know how to do is not a commentary on your worth. It's a commentary on the nature of being human, which is to say: incomplete, by design, on purpose, and only capable of wholeness in collaboration.

Believing otherwise, refusing to acknowledge the incompleteness, is a kind of delusion. And delusions, as a general rule, don't hold you up. They hold you back. They weight you down. Sometimes for your whole life. Sometimes so quietly you don't even notice the weight.

Then someone else reaches over and helps you remove it.

¹ The video, from what I could see at an angle, appeared to be from one of those channels where a calm man in a clean garage explains car maintenance with the serenity of a Buddhist monk, which makes you feel both empowered and vaguely patronized. ↩︎

² I'm aware of the irony of an essay about needing other people beginning with a series of confident assertions about what "we" all do. I acknowledge it may not have the structural integrity I'm hoping for. ↩︎

³ There is something deeply funny about getting relationship advice from platforms algorithmically optimized to keep you alone and scrolling. ↩︎

⁴ The Greek is zoon politikon, which is often translated as "political animal," but the word politikon is closer to "of the community" than to "of politics" in the modern sense. Aristotle wasn't saying we're all natural politicians. He was saying we're all natural collaborators. I find this somehow both more optimistic and more terrifying. ↩︎

⁵ The Lamborghini, in these videos, functions as a kind of visual thesis statement: "I did this alone." The fact that a Lamborghini requires hundreds of specialized workers to manufacture is an irony that appears lost on the speaker. ↩︎

⁶ I have done the mirror affirmations. I have done them with full sincerity and with the bathroom door locked. The results are still locked in that bathroom. ↩︎

⁷ Pierre Curie himself insisted that Marie's name appear on the Nobel Prize nomination after it was initially submitted with only his name and Henri Becquerel's. This is, depending on how you look at it, either a beautiful act of partnership or a depressing commentary on whose contributions get erased. Both, probably. ↩︎

⁸ Her TED talk on vulnerability has been viewed over 60 million times, which is either evidence that people are hungry for this message or evidence that the algorithm knows we need to hear it. Or both? ↩︎

⁹ Honestly, I'm being slightly unfair to the "be complete before dating" crowd. There is a real and important distinction between healthy interdependence and genuine codependency, and the people making this argument are usually trying to protect against the latter. The problem is that the cultural message has overcorrected so far toward self-sufficiency that it's created a new dysfunction: people who are terrified of needing anyone. ↩︎

¹⁰ She has maintained a text chain with a friend for eleven consecutive years without a gap longer than three days. I lose contact with people I genuinely like for months at a time and then send a message that says "Hey! Long time!" with the enthusiasm of someone who has not been absent. ↩︎

¹¹ There is an argument to be made that the entire history of civilization is the history of humans getting better at being dependent on each other. Agriculture required it. Cities required it. The internet, which is now used to tell each other to be more independent, required perhaps the largest coordination of human dependency in history. ↩︎

¹² Sullivan's work has aged unevenly, and some of his clinical theories about the origins of mental illness have been superseded. But his core insight about the interpersonal nature of selfhood remains remarkably durable. ↩︎

¹³ This flinch is so automatic for some of us that we don't even register it as a flinch. It just feels like how we are. If you think about it, it's the most insidious kind of conditioning: the kind that feels like nature. ↩︎

¹⁴ I'm aware this is a metaphor, and metaphors are not arguments. But it's a metaphor that tracks with the engineering reality, which gives me slightly more confidence in it than I'd have in, say, a metaphor about rivers or trees. ↩︎

¹⁵ I've done a solo meditation retreat. Three days in silence. By day two, I was talking to a spider in the corner of the room. The spider, to its credit, was a very good listener. ↩︎

¹⁶ Levinas's major work, Totality and Infinity, is one of those books I've started three times and finished once, and even on the finished attempt I'm not confident I understood all of it. ↩︎

¹⁷ This idea has echoes in attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby, which demonstrates that humans develop their sense of self and their capacity for emotional regulation through early relationships with caregivers. The self, in other words, is always already relational. ↩︎