In the contemporary era, there has been a spark debate that whether modern society became more independent from each other or increasingly interdependent on each other. In this essay, I will give justifications for both viewpoints, but I personally lean towards the latter as the majority of facets of life nowadays are specialized, making people rely on each other to compensate for what they cannot fulfill by themselves.
On the one hand, it is undoubtedly true that the modern world enables people to be autonomous in some aspects of life, particularly finance and self-study skills. Firstly, young generations nowadays are likely to attain financial independence from an early age. In light of the fact that after-school and part-time jobs have become increasingly ubiquitous, making it easier for high schoolers to earn their own income. Therefore, many people could cover their tuition and living expenses without their parents’ financial support. Secondly, a myriad of tools provided by the widespread availability of the Internet empower individuals to study and solve problems on their own. For example, when they have to fix a household appliance, they could just search on Google or YouTube for a tutorial, instead of hiring someone to fix that for them. This inclination results in the proficiency of practical skills among people surging substantially.
On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the fact that people have an inevitable interdependence on each other due the globalization and job specialization. One of the significant reasons is that globalization ties individuals’ lives to events happening across the world, creating an immediate ripple effect from a country to citizens’ lives half a globe away. To exemplify this statement, wars in the Middle East or in Ukraine exert an influential impact on gas prices on all over the world, despite the fact that many countries have no involvement. Another appealing reason is that the modern economic fundamentals establish on job specialization, which makes self-efficiency virtually impossible. Each sector becomes increasingly complicated and specialized that hardly anyone today could have the abilities to grow crops, sew clothes and cure diseases simultaneously.
In conclusion, those aforementioned points consolidate my opinion about people becoming more and more dependent on each other as although people could be more self-reliant in their own lives, segments and industries are intertwined on a global scale.