You Are Not Alone

Imagine that you live alone. I don't mean living by yourself in an apartment or house, I mean imagine you are the only person in the world. Furthermore, imagine that no other people have ever touched the world, so that you are living in a wilderness without any of the artifacts of humanity. Kind of like Brian in Hatchet, but without the hatchet. And without any clothes or any other manufactured items

Think about what you have to do to survive:

• Gather or hunt your own food and prepare it
• Protect yourself from predators and parasites
• Create protection from the environment, such as clothes and a shelter
• Care for your own injuries and illnesses

In that situation, how much could you accomplish? What could you create? What wealth could you accumulate?

The Only Human

But let's go one step further. Think about all of the knowledge you have that you learned from someone else rather than from direct experience. Now imagine that you did not know any of that. You only know the things that you have learned through you own interactions with the world. We'll be generous and say you also know things that you might reasonably have discovered on your own.

Now how much could you accomplish?

Remember, you can only work with available natural materials such as wood and stone. You can't use metal, ceramic, plastic, rubber, or cloth unless and until you can make it yourself. Remember also, we are assuming you don't have any knowledge except that which you have learned through direct experience. You are unlikely to even know that any of those materials exist or are possible, let alone know how to create them.

Would you be able to survive? Would you have any time left over to start the long process of discovering, learning about, and making any of the unavailable materials just mentioned? Compared to what you own today, and the accomplishments of your real life so far, how much could you have collected or accomplished in our imaginary situation?

Knowledge is Power

Let's ease up on the restrictions a bit and allow you to retain all of the knowledge you have. In fact, let's take it one step further and make available to you all of the collected knowledge and experience of humankind. Basically let's say you have internet access. Now you can look up anything you want, even if you have never thought about it before. You can read about and watch videos on how to make a bow and arrow, or how to knap flint to make an arrowhead, or how to make steel, or how a computer works.

Of course, reading about how to do something and actually being able to do it are not the same thing. If you want to make an arrowhead, first you'll have to find and identify some flint, then you'll have to practice, practice, practice knapping before you get a decent arrowhead. You should eventually be able to make your flint arrowhead and an arrow to attach it to, and with a lot more work you'll be able to make a functional bow. Your internet connection will provide you with many details that would take much longer to get right if you had to figure them out yourself, such as what kind of wood to use, how to fletch and nock the arrow, how to make string, how to make glue, and how to string your bow.

The knowledge you can get from your internet connection will help you much more quickly learn how to identify edible and poisonous plants, skin and cure animal hides, make fire (it's harder than you might think; rubbing two sticks together is not an effective approach), make and fire ceramic (clay), and maybe, if you are lucky enough to find some copper ore (which your internet knowledge can help you identify), create some metal tools.

There are many things you will not be able to create by yourself, even with a long and healthy life and with access to all that information. As examples, producing integrated circuits and stainless steel require far more prerequisite infrastructure than you could create in one lifetime. But having access to the distilled knowledge of millions of lifetimes of exploration and experimentation will allow you to create much more than you could if, as in our initial supposition, you had to learn everything yourself.

With all that knowledge available to you, how much could you create and accomplish in a world without other people and their creations as compared to your current life?

We've seen how much more you would likely be able to create if you had access to the knowledge of humankind via the internet. In the real world as well, we use that knowledge to help us accomplish much more than we could without it. We don't have to rely solely on what we have directly learned from our own experience. We benefit from the experiences and knowledge collected by many other people.

The Wealth of the World

What if, in addition to the knowledge humankind has collected, you also had access to the physical things humankind has created? Let's now assume that the world exists just as it does today, with all of its roads, factories, and other infrastructure, but with no other people. What could you accomplish?

The first question is, how long will all that infrastructure continue to operate without any people? How long will you continue to have electricity, water, communications, or the internet? If you were to apply your time and energy towards keeping those systems up, how much difference would it make? Probably not a lot. Those systems are too big, there are too many, and they require too much experience for your efforts as one person to make much difference. Without the continuing work of a very large number of people, all of these systems, that we rely on in the ordinary course of our lives, would likely fail relatively quickly.

If all those systems fail, what could you accomplish? You could perhaps figure out how to generate some electricity, but keeping that system running would certainly take some of your time. And you would still have to spend some time collecting and preparing food. For a while you could live off canned and preserved food that you could raid from a grocery store, but eventually you'd have to start gathering or hunting again, and that would cut into the time you have available for doing other work.

But for our imaginary scenario, let's say all of those systems continued to work. Let's even take it a step further, and stipulate that all of the factories and supply chains continue to operate. We'll even say you can order stuff online. So basically, everything works as it does in the real world, except that you don't have the ability to communicate or collaborate with any people. Now we are essentially asking, how much can you create or accomplish in the real world if you do not collaborate with anyone else or specifically ask anyone else to do some custom work for you?

People Power

This is not that much different that the way many people operate, and some people can create amazing things. One person can create a wonderful piece of art, or a fun computer program, or an elegant piece of furniture. But most of the things in the world, and all of the most complex and sophisticated things, are made by groups of people, sometimes very large groups of people, collaborating towards a common goal.

I hope that this exercise has helped you see how much all of us rely on the work of other people to accomplish what we do. In all of our lives, there are innumerable people who have helped us get to where we are and whose labors continue to contribute to our success. There is no person walking this earth who has not been helped by someone else at some point. As babies, we would have died if there were no one feeding us and caring for us. We have all learned things from teachers, friends, strangers, and, through media, from people we have never met. We have all inherited wealth from our ancestors, whether it is a personal mansion or the use of our public streets, bridges, and other infrastructure. We use knowledge from around the world and across time. We benefit from the factories and other capital created by our ancestors that provide us with better and less expensive goods. We rely on the labor of others to provide us with food, clean water, electricity, and many other things, so that we can focus on our own specialty. For large projects, we collaborate with others to get more done, and even for small projects we may solicit some piece of custom work from someone else. In all of these ways, the work of other people, both past and present, makes it possible for us to own more, do more, and produce more than we could without them.

The next time you think "I did it all myself", please remember to be grateful for all the people who helped you do it: all the people who kept you alive and cared for you as a baby or beyond, all the people who gained the knowledge of the world, all the people who helped you learn some of it, all the people who built the world around you, all the people who made things that you now have, and all the people who are still providing goods and services to you. You are not alone.