Your Life Was Never Truly Yours (by Fabio Squeo)

In modern Western thought, we are accustomed to thinking of the human being as an autonomous individual: a separate consciousness that possesses itself and only later enters into relationships with others.

The “self” is often imagined as an inner fortress — first there is the subject, then come the bonds. Yet this idea can be radically questioned.

Life never belongs exclusively to the individual; it emerges and unfolds through relationship.

The human being is not a closed entity, but rather a living web of connections, dependencies, and mutual exposure.

The “non-life” of the other never remains external to me. If another person suffers, is excluded, humiliated, or deprived of the possibility of fully living, something within my own existence is also fractured.

This happens because the other is not simply an additional element of my experience, but participates in the very constitution of my being. In other words, I am never only “myself”: I am always also the result of the relationships that shape and traverse me.

This intuition carries profound philosophical consequences.

It means that life cannot truly be understood as individual property. We often say “my life” as though it were a private possession, something belonging exclusively to me. Yet this idea is, at least in part, illusory.

Life is instead a shared event — something that takes place within the space of reciprocity.

I live through the language I received from others, through affection, education, social recognition, and collective memory. No one is born from themselves alone. From the very beginning, we are immersed in a network of dependencies.

One only has to think of the condition of the newborn: without the care of another, survival would be impossible. But this original dependence never entirely disappears.

Even the most autonomous adult continues to live through invisible relationships: the labor of others, mutual trust, institutions, friendship, and love.

Individualism tends to conceal this fundamental truth, presenting the subject as self-sufficient. In reality, every identity is relational.

From here, a dramatic insight emerges: if the other cannot truly live, then my own life also becomes diminished.

The suffering or negation of another person is not merely an external event that I can observe from a distance. It wounds the very structure of my existence.

This becomes evident in the great historical tragedies — wars, genocides, slavery, social exclusion. Whenever a society tolerates the reduction of some human beings to “non-life,” even the lives of the privileged lose part of their moral and spiritual integrity.

One could say that every exclusion impoverishes the shared world.

If another person is treated as disposable, then my own security becomes fragile as well, because the very principle of shared dignity has been undermined.

Human life is never isolated; it is a field of relationships in which every negation produces far-reaching consequences. Collective suffering does not concern only those who directly endure it — it transforms the entire experience of living.

Here we encounter an “ontological paradox”: if there are two of us, how can the “two” think itself as one?

This challenges the classical idea of a unified and self-contained subject.

The self is not born complete; it is formed through encounter with the other.

It is through the gaze of another that we learn to recognize ourselves. Even the language with which we say “I” was taught to us by someone else. Our identity therefore emerges through a continuous tension between alterity and unity.

And yet this unity always remains fragile.

The other can never be completely absorbed into me. Every person retains an irreducible dimension — a distance that cannot be erased. It is precisely this irreducibility that makes relationship authentic.

If the other were simply a copy of myself, there would be no true encounter, only a narcissistic reflection. Relationship instead implies the presence of something that escapes my control.

Here emerges the idea of “asymmetrical co-existence.”

Human relationships are never perfectly balanced. I may love someone more than they love me; I may depend emotionally on another person who does not depend on me in the same way.

This asymmetry is not an accidental defect of relationships, but a fundamental feature of existence itself. To live means exposing oneself to the other without any guarantee of absolute reciprocity.

Within this exposure, human vulnerability reveals itself.

To be alive means being capable of being wounded by the presence — or absence — of another.

Our fragility does not arise solely from biological mortality, but from the fact that our identity is open, incomplete, and constitutively tied to something we can never fully control. The other may sustain us, but may also abandon us; may recognize us, or deny us.

And yet it is precisely this vulnerability that makes a more authentic humanity possible.

If we were completely self-sufficient, we would have no need for care, solidarity, or mutual responsibility.

Existence must therefore be rethought — not as absolute independence, but as interdependence.

My life is always intertwined with the lives of others, and the negation of the other reveals a hidden truth: what I once called “my life” was never entirely mine.

This perspective also carries strong ethical and political implications.

If life is relational, then justice cannot be limited to the protection of the isolated individual. A truly humane society should concern itself with the conditions that allow everyone to fully live.

Every form of social, economic, or cultural exclusion harms not only its victims, but impoverishes the shared fabric of existence itself.

Ultimately, the self is not a closed monad, but a fragile knot of relationships.

To live means to co-exist — to be shaped by the presence of others and by the possibility of their loss.

Life, then, is never pure private property: it is a shared, vulnerable, and incomplete experience that finds meaning only in encounter with what does not coincide with ourselves.