LinkedIn presents.

I'm Rufus Briskum and this is the next big idea.

Today, a Stanford professor who thinks the self is an illusion.

For some time, I've had an emerging view shaped in part by conversations we've had on this podcast.

But community broadly defined to include family, friends, colleagues, strangers we meet is everything.

Not 50% of happiness or 75% or 95%, but 100%.

There's an analogy in physics.

We see the world at first as comprised of discrete objects, an atom, a molecule, a teacup, a chair.

But if you look more closely, physicists would say matter starts to look more fluid,

a web of subatomic particles suspended by the four forces, gravity, electromagnetism, and so on, moving in a kind of flow.

In the same sense, we could choose to see ourselves as autonomous individuals,

heroically fighting our way through life like explorers with machetes, hacking our way through the jungle,

or we can choose to see ourselves as always suspended in a constellation of relationships.

Our relationships with other people in this view are not just another variable.

They are everything. They determine our happiness, our health, our resilience, our success.

We talk about individual accomplishments.

But in reality, every single accomplishment any of us makes is deeply contingent upon the support and influence of other people.

There's no such thing as an autonomous human being, and that's a good thing.

If we give up disbelief, there were cowboys on the frontier, heroines fighting for glory,

and instead see ourselves as teams, tribes, posses, bands, orchestras.

If we see ourselves this way, the question is not, can I accomplish this thing?

The question becomes, can we accomplish it? Who else shares this same objective?

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