44. The Myth of the Competent Individual

Instagram as a representation of reality. Hmm.

We all know it’s a load of nonsense, but despite this, it’s still so easy to get caught in the trap of coming to some variation of the following conclusion: “Everyone else is smashing life, and I’m a useless shitebag.”

Everyone else has it all together. They’re flourishing and making valuable contributions to the world, and we’re not. Our life is a comparative shambles.

In Blog 39 (a classic!), we discussed the disparity between our external facades (what we selectively choose to show the world) and how we actually feel on the inside (scared and insecure).

And that often, people who are apparently ‘smashing life’ can be overcompensating for, or running away from, something or other. So we won’t go into detail on that point today.

No, today we’re going to look at it from a slightly different angle; that regardless of how impressive other people seem to be, we’re all actually pretty useless in the grand scheme of things.

The aim of this? To try and give us (slash me) some sort of reassurance about our seemingly comparatively lame existence.

So, let’s start with someone who we’d probably have to agree fits into that above mentioned ‘making incredibly valuable contributions to the world’ category. Steve Jobs.

I mean, I’m typing this on a MacBook, and there’s probably like a 70% chance you’re reading this on an iPhone.

He made an observation that I hadn’t really considered before.

"I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being."

Such a fair point.

Basically, no matter how impressive someone may appear, they’re basically useless without the help, support and contributions of other people.

I read this Steve Jobs quote (on James Clear’s 3-2-1 weekly newsletter) when rather aptly, I was also reading ‘The Ape that Understood the Universe’ by Steve Stewart-Williams, who comes to a very similar conclusion.

“We have knowledge and technology that would take a single individual millions of years to create (if a single individual could even create it at all).

We’re surrounded by machines and technology whose inner workings we don't understand and could never hope to understand. Humans are chimpanzees reciting Shakespeare - dunces with technology of geniuses”.

Dunces with technology of geniuses may be on the harsher side of things, but I think he makes a valuable point. As much as we can give off the perception we know what’s going on in life, we’re basically clueless for the most part. He continues:

Often though these humbling facts are obscured from our vision. We routinely ascribe our species' cultural achievements to lone-wolf geniuses - super-bright freaks of nature who invented science and technology for the rest of us.

This tendency is so pervasive it even has a name: The Myth of the Heroic Inventor.

It’s a myth because most ideas and most technologies come about not through the Eureka moments of solitary geniuses but through the hard slog of large armies of individuals, each making - at best - a tiny step or two forward.

As the Historian of science Joseph Needham put it, “No single man was the father of the steam engine; no single civilization either.”

As chance would have it, at a similar time to reading the above book and newsletter, I was also watching a WWII docu-series on Netflix (‘Greatest Events of WWII in Colour’. It’s so good btw, highly recommend) which, although didn’t explicitly say the same thing, did exemplify this exact point.

There’s an episode all around Hiroshima, where they go into the research, development and invention of the atomic bomb.

Of course, when we hear ‘inventor of the atomic bomb’, we think J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Though at the risk of showing my embarrassing ignorance, I was completely unaware of the scale of the team involved. To Stewart-Williams point above, there were ‘armies of individuals’ working day and night on the thing. In total, 130,000 people were involved - so not quite the individual achievement we (well, I) may have naively attributed to Oppenheimer. The Myth of the Heroic Inventor.

As we start to wrap up, let’s lean again on the insight of our Ape Understanding Evolutionary Psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams to reiterate our individual uselessness.

“Naturally, we’re smarter than chimps.

However, if we compare our cultural achievements (putting a man on the moon, etc.) with theirs (using rocks to crack open nuts or fish for termites), as individuals we’re probably closer to the nutcracker, termite-fishing end of the spectrum.

If we doubt this, imagine being marooned in the jungle with no relevant knowledge. At a push we might be able to figure out how to obtain a little food - but we’d never figure out how to get a rocket to the moon.

The rocket ship is a much more extreme example of a more general truth. Clever though we are, no individual could design even something as simple as a kayak from scratch… let alone a jetpack or a democratic nation-state.”

Once again, humans, bloody clueless.

There’s something that we tend to find deeply appealing about a heroic individual. I mean, there’s got to be a reason Marvel seem to release a new superhero movie every few weeks.

Most films, stories, and books have a protagonist. A lead character.

Even in successful teams, there’s usually one person who we value above everyone else. Think Chicago Bulls and we think Michael Jordan. Think Barcelona and we think Lionel Messi.

However, this bias towards individual heroism can warp our perception of other people’s capabilities.

On this, I really like Chris Williamson’s idea that

“Most of the people that you admire aren't superheroes; they're normal humans that have sacrificed pretty much everything in their life to be good at one thing.”

Basically, if someone excels at one or two things, they probably under-index at most other things.

Although the thought that ‘everyone else has their shit together, and we’re just a shambles’ is probably quite a normal one at times, it can naturally be pretty destructive and also completely unfounded.

As Jobs, Stewart-Williams, Oppenheimer and Williamson all allude to, we're all fairly useless at the end of the day.

And if you also happen to be on the overly self-critical side, I’ve found this quite a useful thing to try and remember.

Yours incompetently,

Howie x