The Army that Delivered this Pen
We Can’t Do It Alone - And We Don’t
Credit: Mykyta Dolmatov
Using thousands of deflections, humans will do just about anything not to face the fact that relying on others is, in short, terrifying and inescapable.
We tell ourselves, “I don’t need anyone” or “I can do it myself” to avoid asking for help and risking feeling weak or being disappointed.
We have to relinquish control and the accompanying feeling of safety when we delegate responsibilities in our lives. We build self-reliance to protect ourselves from the vulnerability of dependence, then tell ourselves it’s the right thing to do anyway - we don’t want to be a burden to others.
But we never do anything alone. The requirement of other people in every aspect of our life is inescapable, no matter how we hide it away.
The Source
One day, I pulled out my notebook and clicked the top of the pen I keep in my pocket to scribble down a question for research later - how is ink made?
Then I clicked the pen again to retract the ink-tip and realized I had no idea where any piece of my pen came from.
At a glance, the pen’s body seems to be metal: polished and thinned into a lightweight but sturdy frame with a pleasing, dulled shine. A person (or robot) extracted the ore from the ground. To start that process, a crew of people had to plan where this mine should be and figure out the logistics of assembling everything needed to retrieve the raw material from the ground.
And that’s just the casing of the pen.
Most ink comes from petroleum byproducts or plant materials. The petrol had to be pulled from the Earth’s surface or extracted from a tree or plant. The same is true for the rubber grip near the base of the pen. Teams of people had to prospect for petroleum, gather, assemble, and use the equipment necessary to get to it, then store it in a form that allows for shipping to processors.
Processing
Once extracted, the ink had to be refined, strained, cleaned, and combined with other chemicals to make it shelf-stable. Years of research went into refining this process, working with constraints on time and materials to produce an ink able to be inserted into thousands of pens at a competitive price. These processes improve on thousands of years of research on gathering and refining ink dating back to ancient times in China and Egypt.
Similar decades of research and refinement - still improving today - went into the chemical engineering used to extract, process, and refine oil and steel. Scores of people contributed modest and enormous improvements to this process, perfecting the transition from raw source materials to more flexible/refined products used to assemble items like pens.
Assembly
After refining, purchasers gather these materials for assembly. Often in large factories run by people and machines, materials are bent, connected, filled, and assembled to create pens on a massive scale.
Then more people inspect the pens as part of quality control, others who supervise the people at all steps in the process, and yet more people on-call to fix machines that do the assembly and create the boxes to hold the approved pens.
Distribution
Next, even more people plan how many pens to put into how many crates, and how many palettes to send to different regions in the country for maximum efficiency. These designations dictate where and how the boxes of pens will be shipped, using truck drivers and airline pilots to shuttle them from location to location, loaded and unloaded by other teams of people.
Eventually, the box of pens will reach a shelf in a store, like the Office Depot where I purchased this pen. That credit card transaction will require another army of people to run the financial processing of a personal Visa card people tote around without thought.
Use
Finally, this pen lands in my hand, where I use it to write down ideas for articles to publish on the internet or sketch out notes for different business solutions in various consulting projects. Some ideas disappear to my abysmal handwriting, others refuted, and a few will develop into complex solutions that can change the direction of a business, a community, or the world.
Maybe I will use this pen until it is drained. Maybe I will lose it on a bus where it will be picked up and thrown away or used to record someone else’s ideas. Whatever its fate, the army of planners, builders, distributors, and manufacturers have ensured that when used, it will dutifully spill just enough ink under pressure to allow skilled fingers to persist ideas from the head attached to that hand. This skill results from years of schooling to learn the mechanics of writing and the complex skill of relaying our thoughts via text in languages we had to learn after thousands of years of use and evolution.
Or maybe this pen will meet its end as it explodes in the washing machine, and no further direct use will come of it until the materials get recycled in another lengthy, complex process requiring scores of people and thousands of years of honing.
Even jotting down ideas alone in a quiet room, seemingly an act of isolation, is only possible through the help of thousands of people.
What could we do if we admitted we never do anything alone? What if we could face the fact that we have always needed other people? What if we learned to work with the fear rather than against it?