Compulsive Self-Reliance

Compulsive self-reliance is not resilience. John Bowlby distinguished it carefully from the confident autonomy of a securely attached person, who does not request help constantly precisely because she knows it is available. The compulsively self-reliant person has reached a different conclusion: that help is not coming, and has organized her entire personality around that conclusion. She does not ask for support. She does not express confusion. She performs capability so consistently that the organizations that prize her are the last to know she is in distress. In the AI transition, this pattern is activated and amplified to a pathological degree, because the tools that are transforming every knowledge profession have a structural property that rewards compulsive self-reliance perfectly: the AI never requires vulnerability, never demands that the user ask for help from another human being, and provides the illusion of a fully responsive relationship without any of the actual