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No person on Earth is ever self-made
There’s a chance you’ll recognise yourself differently by the time you finish reading this.
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Your mitochondria used to be separate organisms. About two billion years ago, one cell swallowed another cell, and instead of digesting it, they made a deal. You exist because of that merger. Every thought you’ve ever had, including the ones about being independent and not needing anyone, was powered by an ancient act of cooperation happening inside your own body.
So. Self-made.
The term showed up in a speech by Frederick Douglass in 1859, and the whole lecture was called “Self-Made Men” and Douglass spent most of it pointing out how the concept was incomplete. Even him — a man who escaped slavery, taught himself to read, became one of the greatest orators in American history — even he wouldn’t fully claim it. The internet took the phrase, stripped the nuance, slapped it on a gym poster, and here we are.
You don’t even think alone. Every word inside your head right now was handed to you by someone else. Your parents. Teachers. A kid on a playground in 2003. The language you use to process your own private, innermost experiences is a borrowed technology. Wittgenstein circled this exact…
