Dependent human

We evolved to be communal creatures living in extended families. And yet, I see so much contemporary advice on the importance, and healthiness of being independent. Need someone too much and you’ll get labelled as co-dependent.

We start early with this process. It is normal to hand over your baby to someone else when that baby is only a few months old, and go back to work. No doubt human history is full of things you didn’t do while holding a baby, but in a hunter-gatherer arrangement it is fair to assume the gatherer has the baby tied to them. Generally, mammals keep their offspring close beside them until the offspring is ready to fend for itself. Parents take it in turns to hunt, and to watch the little ones, or they hunt and come back and the little ones are not left for long. We don’t do that.

Family life is ever more fragmented, with few households sitting down regularly to eat together, or just spend time together. We are to sit alone in our own rooms, staring at our own screens and eating our own ready meal… what a miserable way to exist.

I’ve seen estimates that the modern human sees more people in a year than a mediaeval person would have done in their whole life. We can have a lot of human activity going on, but no intimacy, no depth of relationship, no reliance or trust. If you are surrounded by a vast sea of people who mean very little to you, perhaps independence makes sense as an idea.

I am a social creature. I need to know where I belong and who my people are. If I don’t have a tribe, I feel ungrounded, and a bit lost. For preference I want a tribe that knows it is a tribe, where conscious involvement in each other’s lives, care and mutual support is a given. I function best in groups of less than a dozen and I can comfortably belong to more than one such group, although I find I have one group where that feeling of connection is most profound and important to me.

Unashamed of being a social creature I can admit that I need the people around me. Most of the time I don’t need them to do anything specific, just be themselves and be part of my life. Their stories and adventures, their cares and ambitions become part of my story too. We make a life, and a future out of that.

There are people who recoil in horror when anyone says ‘need’. People who have learned to fear the idea of being thought co-dependent. People who fear being diminished if they hand over anything of their precious independence. But, there’s something very beautiful indeed about being in the company of people who are not afraid to need each other.