We’re constantly told that being completely independent is the ultimate goal. You see it everywhere—the obsession with being “self-made,” the modern hustle-culture mantra that you should never have to rely on anyone else. We are sold this idea that the peak of human existence is total, unbothered autonomy. But honestly, at what cost?
I think about this illusion of independence a lot, especially when reality forces my hand. Back in January, right around the 46,000-mile mark, my car needed a complete cylinder head replacement. In an instant, my pristine bubble of self-reliance popped. I couldn’t fix it myself. I had to rely on a tow truck driver, a mechanic who actually understood the engine, and a global supply chain I usually ignore. We walk around feeling totally autonomous right up until the machinery underneath us breaks down.
When we build our own spaces on the internet—our digital gardens, our portfolios, our personal brands—we have to stop and ask: are we just building bigger, prettier walls to hide behind, or are we planting things for other people to actually find and connect with?
The “self-made man” is probably the biggest lie on the modern web. We perfectly curate our feeds, build these isolated aesthetic bubbles, and convince ourselves we did it all on our own. We act like we are the sole architects of our reality. But it’s an illusion. Even the code we write and the frameworks we use are built on the invisible labor of thousands of open-source contributors. We are always standing on someone else’s shoulders.
The Architectural Shift
I’ve been thinking heavily about how the physical spaces we build change how we act, and how that bleeds directly into the digital world. In the physical world, we traded in communal town squares for walled-off suburban neighborhoods. We prioritized private convenience over public friction.
You can see it in how we live day-to-day. When Jillian and I take Tucker out for a walk, the difference between a sprawling, open public park and a neighborhood lined with six-foot privacy fences is palpable. The fences are designed to keep the world out, to ensure we don’t have to deal with the unpredictability of our neighbors. But in doing so, we accidentally architected our own loneliness.
And then we took that exact same blueprint and applied it to the internet. The isolation isn’t an accident; it’s literally how the architecture is designed now.
- Instead of messy, public forums where anyone could jump into a conversation and you might learn something by accident, we just endlessly scroll through hyper-personalized, algorithmic feeds that only show us what we already agree with.
- Instead of public blogs and open webrings, people retreat into private group chats, locked accounts, and invite-only Discord servers.
- We traded the weird, random magic of stumbling onto a stranger’s cool website for perfectly curated, sanitized content platforms that feel like digital strip malls.
The Theological Problem of the Self
As I’ve spent more time digging into theology lately, this tension keeps coming up. Almost every major philosophical and religious tradition warns against total isolation. The idea that we are meant to be radical individuals, entirely self-sufficient, runs contrary to human nature. We are built for communion, for shared burdens, and for the friction that comes with dealing with other people.
When you remove the friction, you also remove the warmth. When you optimize your life to never need a favor, you also ensure no one will ever ask you for one. It creates a sterile, transactional existence. The push for extreme individualism doesn’t liberate us; it just traps us inside our own heads. It convinces us that we don’t need a community, right up until the moment we realize we are entirely alone.
Breaking the Glass
Being capable and self-reliant is a good thing, but true cultivation requires a shared ecosystem. If you build a digital garden, put a giant glass wall around it, and keep out all the wind, the dirt, and the bugs, you haven’t really made a garden. You’ve made a museum exhibit. It might look pristine, but nothing new will ever grow there.
A real garden needs cross-pollination. It needs to be open to the elements.
I don’t want my corner of the internet to be a museum. I want it to be a place where ideas can bump into each other, where a random 2 AM rabbit hole might spark something for someone else. We have to start leaving the gates open again. We have to be willing to be a little less curated, a little less independent, and a lot more connected.