If you buy food from the supermarket deli, the people behind the kitchen doors, whom you never meet, are dispensable. If they quit, even if they die, someone else can be hired to fill their role. The same goes for the laborers in Indonesia who make the clothes you buy at the superstore. The same goes for the engineers who design your computer. We rely on their roles, their functions, but as individual humans they are expendable. Maybe you are a nice, friendly person who actually exchanges friendly greetings with the cashier who’s worked for five years at the local supermarket, but while you may be dependent on her role, the specific person filling this role is unimportant. It does not really matter if you get along with this person, or even know her name. She could be fired or die and it would make little difference in your life. It would not be much of a loss. Unless you live in a very small town, you probably will never know what happened to her or ever think to ask.

Because the economy depends on our roles, but does not care which individuals fill these roles, we suffer an omnipresent anxiety and insecurity borne of the fact that the world can get along just fine without us. We are easily replaced.

Of course, for our friends and loved ones—people who know us personally—we are irreplaceable. But with the increasingly fine division of labor and mass scale of modern society, these are fewer and fewer, as more and more social functions enter the monetized realm. Thus we live in fear, anxiety, and insecurity, and justifiably so, because we are easily replaceable in the roles we perform to earn money.

We can get along fine without you. We’ll just pay someone else to do it.

~ AfterCharles Eisenstein, from Alone in a Crowd in The Ascent of Humanity

Contexts

• #ascent-of-humanity (See: The Ascent of Humanity)

• #charles-eisenstein (See: Charles Eisenstein)