Why Dependence Begins in the Place You Entered Seeking Connection — the State You Enter In Decides It

Introduction

Feeling the limit of pushing on alone, you entered a place where people gather. You can talk with people in the same situation. You can hear from those ahead of you. At first there is, indeed, a sense that the world has widened.

But six months later, you notice something. Before thinking for yourself, you first ask someone. The answer you got here feels like your own answer.

On how to choose a good place, information is plentiful. What this article treats is the part that is its ground: why, in a place entered seeking connection, dependence begins — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. Because the “economic state” you are in when you enter fundamentally governs the quality of the relationship thereafter.

Do You Enter as “One Who Seeks a Solution” or “One Who Brings Observations”?

Watching people of various backgrounds enter a place, I have seen one clear pattern.

Those who are economically stable tend to “enter in order to give.” Because they already hold some base that generates value, they treat the information there as “material for updating their own thinking.” They welcome rebuttals and differing viewpoints as ingredients for tempering their own ideas.

Those who are economically unstable tend to “enter seeking a solution.” They come holding the concrete question “how do I change my situation?”

This stance itself cannot be criticised. Seeking a solution is a natural motive. But when, keeping this stance, they form a relationship with “someone who looks as if they hold the answer,” a hard-to-reverse asymmetry is born between the two.

This asymmetry itself is the origin of dependence.

An Unused Circuit Weakens

When you meet “someone who holds the answer,” what happens?

If the first answer is useful, you seek the next. If the next is useful too, the judgement “ask this person and it can be solved” gets fixed. This is a cognitively natural process. Repeating an action that was effective in the past is an efficient choice of low cognitive cost.

But this efficiency produces a long-term problem. Once the judgement “ask and it can be solved” is fixed, the frequency of use of the circuit “think for myself and solve” falls. An unused circuit gradually weakens.

Dependence chips away, little by little, at the very “ability to stop relying.”

The human-capital theory systematised by the economist Gary Becker showed the frame that an individual, by investing in their own ability and knowledge, raises their future productivity [Becker, 1964]. From here an important implication is drawn. Investment in human capital functions effectively only on a stable economic base.

In a state of economic anxiety, the solution of a short-term problem is prioritised over investment in long-term ability. This is a rational judgement. You cannot ask a person whose income next month is unknown to make a learning investment aimed five years ahead.

But this rational short-termism brings, in the long run, disadvantage in the form of the deepening of dependence. Because merely receiving the answer does not teach the process that derived it.

Scarcity Itself Narrows the Bandwidth of Cognition

The effect that an economically unstable state has on cognition is larger than imagined.

The economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the psychologist Eldar Shafir showed that scarcity of every kind holds the effect of narrowing a human being’s cognitive bandwidth [Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013]. Economic scarcity lowers the quality of long-term planning, abstract thinking, and decision-making.

This is not weakness of will. When the urgent question “can I secure next month’s income?” occupies cognitive resources, the bandwidth available for other questions narrows — a structural consequence of the brain.

This cognitive contraction makes dependence still graver. When the bandwidth is narrowed, “an environment that provides answers” looks like an attractive option that lowers cognitive cost. No need to think, no need to judge, just obey — this environment functions as the shortest path for economising cognitive resources.

But lowering cognitive cost and growing cognitive ability point in exactly opposite directions.

As long as giving answers continues, the power to pose questions does not grow. As long as the power to pose questions does not grow, the economic fragility is not resolved either. The structure to escape this loop is not inherent there.

Position Is Updated Later Than Ability

There is one more easily overlooked consequence. “The fixing of position.”

One who entered as “a seeker of solutions” is first given, in that place, the role of “the side being helped.” This role, once settled, is hard to change. Not only the perception from those around, but the person too comes to hold the self-recognition “here, I am the receiving side.”

A self-image within the place is updated later than the real change in ability. Even if ability has been gained, one may keep staying on the receiving side, unable to hold the conviction “I have something to give.”

So the path “one who entered economically unstable turns into a self-reliant, equal participant” is structurally narrow.

▸ This fixing of “the giving side and the receiving side” is also treated in why relationships wear you out — not because there are too many.

What Separates “Solidarity” from “Dependence”

Then where is the boundary between the two? “The precondition of the relationship.”

In the structure of dependence, “the side that receives a solution” and “the side that gives a solution” are fixed. Even as the content changes, this role does not.

In the structure of solidarity, this role is fluid. On one question someone holds the insight; on another, someone else does. Each brings their own observation, and each other’s viewpoint updates each other’s thinking.

For this fluidity to hold, everyone needs to hold “something they can give.” It is not information but a distinctive observation, experience, viewpoint. And this is something only a human being who has chosen their own life by themselves can hold.

An economically unstable state shrinks the chance to “choose for yourself.” In a situation where you must obey another’s judgement in order to survive, accumulating a distinctive observation becomes hard. Where there is no distinctive observation, equal solidarity does not hold.

Further, what makes an equal relationship function is not “agreeing” but “bringing in a differing viewpoint.” But when the position “the side receiving a solution” is fixed, saying “your way of seeing is different” carries considerable psychological difficulty. The asymmetry structurally obstructs the exchange of critical thinking — the essential function of solidarity.

Conclusion: Swap the Order

That dependence begins in a place entered seeking connection was neither a problem of character nor of will. It is because the state you enter in decides the nature of the relationship’s entrance.

Here let me make it clear. This does not mean “the economically unstable should not enter.” It is a problem of order.

The order “aim at self-reliance by entering the place” is hard to make function. Because at the point of entering you become “one who seeks a solution,” it structurally reproduces the relationship of dependence.

By the order “first hold your own base, and on top of it join the solidarity,” participation becomes not “a move seeking what you lack” but “participation in a place where each exchanges what they hold.”

And the first half of this order can begin today. Record your observations and hold one base for delivering them continuously. Increase readers one by one in a place you manage, dependent on no one’s algorithm. No large capital is needed.

Rather than searching first for a partner in solidarity, first make what you can offer. This reversal of priority produces, in the long run, a great difference. The whole of this structure is gathered in why the more you connect, the lonelier you grow.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Becker, G. S. Human Capital (1964) University of Chicago Press
• Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) Times Books
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press