On my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, my co-host Emily John Garcés and I sometimes “put words on trial.” We assign a judge, gather the evidence, and ask whether a word has outlived its usefulness. Recently we prosecuted a very American term, one that many Psychology Today readers may quietly feel inspired by: self-made.

It was an unexpectedly spirited trial. But for me, the verdict felt inevitable. It is time to retire the idea of the self-made person altogether.

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh often used the example of a simple sheet of paper. Look closely, and you can see the sun because without sunlight, no trees. Look again, and you can see the rain. You can see the lumberjack, the mill worker. Every condition that made the paper possible is somehow present in it. The paper exists because everything else exists. This is the Buddhist understanding of interdependence, sometimes called interbeing.

If this is true of........

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