Chapter 2

“You’re trash and worthless just like everyone else. And you only made it out of the dumpster because you got lucky.” —Gong Yoo, Squid Game

Humans rely on each other more than any other species. Seriously, human babies are so helpless they can’t even lift their own heads for months. Compare that to a baby giraffe, which drops six feet to the ground at birth, dusts itself off, and is running from lions within an hour.

Human newborns can’t even hold on to their moms. Even after a year, they’re not strong enough to hold on and support their own weight. So, if you’ve made it to the age where you can read this, that means you relied on another human to carry you around for at least a year, possibly longer if you were an especially weak toddler.

And it wasn’t just your parents or caregivers who kept you alive, but also, the greater ongoing human inheritance that provides the wealth, literacy, resources, technology, infrastructure, and technical know-how that supports you every day. You’re here because of an entire network of people—teachers, farmers, construction workers, sanitation crews, scientists, engineers—who built the world you live in. We are the heirs of thousands of years of ongoing social information and cultural gift accumulation. You are the walking-talking accumulation of other people which includes both material and nonmaterial culture.

In his book Manhood of Humanity, Alfred Korzybski called this unique human ability to pass knowledge through generations “time-binding.” Unlike, say, squirrels, who aren’t exactly making generational progress in acorn management, we humans live in a world shaped by thousands of years of accumulated information. From the infrastructure we use daily to the symbolic systems of language, numbers, and calendars that let us coordinate everything, we exist in a reality that’s fundamentally shared and socially constructed.

That old saying that “humans are social animals” is actually an understatement. Everything about you is also about other people. Even your name was given to you by other people before you were able to exist for yourself. There’s no way to get away from it. We can try, but to even talk about it we are using language.

Ironically, in America, we’re obsessed with individualism. It started as a bourgeois thing in the late 19th century with the professional and managerial class, but now even working-class folks are posting memes about being a “self-made boss” and “trusting no one”—while using smartphones invented by other people, sitting on IKEA furniture, drinking coffee in houses with air conditioning and fridges. We don’t even make our own clothes. The idea of being “self-made” is ridiculous when you think about it. Your sense of self isn’t some pure, isolated thing—it’s shaped by how others see and reflect you.

Linguistics professor Corey Anton points out in Selfhood and Authenticity that you wouldn’t even know what your own face looks like if other people hadn’t invented mirrors, windows, and photography. This echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea in Being and Nothingness that part of who you are is your “being-for-others.”

Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secrets of Our Success, tells some brutal stories about European explorers who didn’t grasp how much their survival depended on inherited cultural knowledge. Sir John Franklin’s men on King William Island, the Burke and Wills Expedition in Australia, and the Narváez Expedition along the Gulf Coast—all these educated professionals set off into the wild with months of supplies and scientific equipment. And once they ran out? They had no clue how to find food, control fire, or stay alive. They starved, some resorted to cannibalism, and the worst part? They died in places where indigenous people were thriving because those cultures had passed down survival skills. Without the gift of accumulated knowledge, those guys were toast.

Gift-giving is one of the oldest human traditions. Ancient societies performed blood rituals, sacrifices, and offerings—not because they were superstitious fools, but because they understood something we’ve lost: survival is a shared effort. They knew they owed their lives to nature, luck, other people, or the gods, and they honored that connection. Today, we suffer from attribution bias. We look at successful people and assume they got there because of their personal grit and genius, ignoring the web of circumstances, resources, timing, and sheer luck that played a role. It’s not that individual effort doesn’t matter—it’s just that no one gets anywhere without other people.

Take my own story. The Las Vegas Recovery Center didn’t just help me recover from addiction—it gave me a second chance at life. I was treated like an athlete, with a team of doctors, therapists, social workers, and coordinators supporting me. I had a safe place to stay, food, and clothes, so I could focus entirely on getting better. After 90 days of inpatient care, my coordinator helped me transition into an 18-month housing program. Two years later, with the help of the LVRC director of operations and others, I landed a job at the very shelter where I was once a patient. Step by step, other people opened doors for me. If they hadn’t? I wouldn’t be here writing this.

When I was a teenager in Boys Town in Omaha, Arnold Schwarzenegger visited and gave a speech. He talked about growing up in Austria without plumbing and moving to America alone. People always praised him for being “self-made,” but Arnold thought that was weird—he said he had stood on the shoulders of many people. At the time, I figured he was just saying that because he was at Boys Town, where the motto is “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” But since then, I’ve heard him say it again and again. He even wrote it in the foreword to Tools of Titans, where he thanks all the people who helped him and insists, “I am not a self-made man.”

In Australian rugby, there’s a tradition where, after a game, players refuse to take personal credit. If you ask a guy how it feels to score the winning goal, he just says, “Full credit to the boys.” It might seem ridiculous—he literally won the game—but he knows he couldn’t have done it without his teammates. And that applies to all of us. No matter how great you think you are, take a look around and ask yourself: What is your life, really, without the lives of other people?

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