I am the sum of all others

Buddhism speaks of how all of us are interdependent. While we like to think of ourselves as independent entities who have been their own creators, if we analyze this a little deeply we understand that nothing we are is self made or independent.

We were not created out of our violation, our parents did that, we did not grow on our own, our parents and the larger society ensured that we had the food, the shelter and the care to do so, we did not develop our own concepts and models of reality, they were fed by the world we grew up in. So we in fact are not self made. The thing that we generally call as "self made" refers to someone who did not have any extraordinary support to support them in their ventures e.g. starting a business by taking capital out on loan, paying for college by working a part time job etc. While worthy of appreciation in its own right, this does not mean that a person is truly self made, yet we accord this tiny sliver of evidence to a person's entire life - and to our life too. We think of ourselves as self made as if we have carved ourselves out of stone but that is not the case, and we think of everyone else as "others" who interact with this self made independent entity. But we fail to see the all the support that all of us get since the moment we are born, simply the fact that your parents decided to have you makes you not self made, because if you were indeed self made then it should have been you that decided to "have" you.

One can say that yeah perhaps when they were a child they might have been dependent on others and hence not entirely self made, but now in their adult form they are self made. Though if you think about it, even in our adult lives we are not self made or independent. We are children because we have parents, we are parents because we have children, we are managers because we have subordinates, we are citizens because we belong to a nation and so on. What we consider as our "self" exists because others make it so. Some might regard this as overly theoretical and impractical and it might as well be for the busy individualistic world we live in - but that does not take away from its truth.