"Only one thing can stop us all becoming ignorant hermits" (asking for help)

I recently had to ask for help. I was trying to understand Substack, with a view to starting my own (this is a statutory requirement now for anyone who does not have the verbal skills to start a podcast or any friends to appear as guests) and, well, it just wasn't happening. Posting to Instagram has me working at the very limits of my technological ability and, as easy and helpful as the founders have made the Substack site, I was fully dumbfounded.

It made me realise two things.

One, this will be the last modern endeavour I ever undertake. I will get to grips with this, and then that's it. All other innovations, advances, aids to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/bill-paying/food delivery/ communication/ processes and ambitions as yet undreamt of will have to go on without me. I shall retire to my library to read paper books and tend my garden to grow the hemlock I will need when the AI overlords come for us all, and that will be that. No problem.

The second thing it made me realise, however, was that I don't know how to ask for help. And that, at least for the few remaining years left to me in society, might be a handy skill to have.

But I've never done it. I was brought up not to. It was a sign of weakness; moral, intellectual or emotional, depending what kind of aid or succour you were thinking of seeking. Asking for help, I was given to understand, could only go one of two ways and it wasn't clear which was worse.

Either you laid yourself open to exploitation by malevolent others, or you selfishly drained resources from kind, generous people simply to bring yourself up to the level at which you should already be functioning - though by what exact means you should have achieved this in isolation was never quite clear.

If you need help with something then you shouldn't be doing it was, in essence, the message. Which, it belatedly dawns on me, is fine if you're an American pioneer heading off to settle the West, but of much less use if you're anything else at any time or place at all and certainly including the present day UK.

Because where does it get us, not asking for help when we need it?

Nowhere, that's where. And then less than nowhere, as we fall behind in skills and knowledge that sensible - one might almost say emotionally literate - people are happily and intuitively sharing amongst themselves, building friendships and other delicate social bonds as they go, becoming part of a whole greater than themselves in all sorts of tangible and intangible ways.

The isolation is aggravated by the fact that if you are not someone who asks for help, you tend not to be someone people come to for help either. It's not a conscious thing (unless you're a horrible person on top of the lone-wolfhood you've been trained into, which you may well be, in which case you will have damned me as a fretting neurotic and stopped reading long ago, and may I say that's absolutely fair enough). It just...happens. No (wo)man is an island, you say? Maybe not, but the waters around me are vast and undisturbed.

It is most immediately clear at the individual level that without help, without cooperation, without the sharing of knowledge and skills, we handicap ourselves. But the same principle works at scale too. We saw it most bitterly and potently in recent years during the Covid pandemic. After the public sharing of the virus's genome that a Chinese and Australian virologist had sequenced, which enabled a vaccine to be produced with unprecedented speed and effectiveness, countries then retreated into themselves and - to shorthand it somewhat - ploughed their own preventative furrows with barely a look over the hedges at what others were doing or whether they might have anything to learn from (or share with) them.

Such is the mentality of governments and politicians, which not only does obvious harm during times of crisis but corrodes our collective health and wealth less obtrusively - yet still relentlessly - in the stretches in between as well. To ask for help or advice, to copy a policy or a measure that is working well in another nation, is seen as weakness again.

The same attitude stops sectors from doing the much-vaunted but rarely practiced "joined-up thinking". It prevents police rolling out initiatives across their forces or even, sometimes, involving others in the pursuit of a criminal who is likely operating across borders. It stops all kinds of progress in its tracks, much of which we will never even know about though its absence may impede us all.

At the same time, the internet - which once promised connection, cross-pollination of thought and a new Renaissance - fuels only entrenchment and siloing as we enter an age in which merely listening to, let alone asking for or offering aid, seems not just absurd but increasingly the act of a fool, a madman, a weakling, a loser.

This is unsustainable. Independence is one thing - isolation and ignorance are quite another. We need help.