How much of who I feel I am comes from other people? If I was abandonded in a forest as a newborn and by a stroke of luck got adopted by wild animals such as wolves, I wouldn’t have been able to write this article. Feral children don’t behave like humans around us. They walk on four legs, bark, eat raw meat and hate clothes. Most of them never learn to speak.

Besides all the languages I speak and read, knowing what a “table”, “umbrella” or a “cup” is, ability to walk upright and wear clothes… Pretty much everything I think I am, from the very basics, is based on something I absorbed from other people. I learned how to be a human either from them directly, or through something they produced. Such as books, Internet, music, movies, festivals, houses, streets and so on.

As much as we might be taught to believe, humans are not inherently independent beings. We are separated from nature by hundreds of generations of people passing down their culture and raising new people who keep the flame of humanity alive. This fire is burning only as long as new humans keep learning from others. If we all were to be suddenly struck with amnesia, the humanity would be gone even though physically we’d still be here.

Is there anything mine, however? Just like a small branch growing on a bigger branch, which in turn grows on a bigger branch, I’m standing on the shoulders of the human culture at the level I’m able to perceive it, and continuing to add to it. And so does every other human.