The perils of outsourcing ourselves.

We find ourselves in a world where we prize efficiency and performance, subject ourselves to the judgement of others and generally distance ourselves from much lived experience. It has some interesting side effects.

• We pay to watch professionals play sport than develop our own skills.

• We distance ourselves from the reality of the food we eat, from growing it to killing it.

• We work hard in pressured conditions for fifty weeks a year in order to pay large amounts of money to holiday somewhere else for two weeks where we don't have any real community connection.

• We put ourselves in debt to appear wealthy to others.

• We take the risks determined by others, rather than take responsibility for the risks ourselves.

The whole of the industrial economy, from the time of Adam Smith's first observations in the pin factory, has been increasingly dependent on specialisation, from our individual skills to the design of machinery. It has worked really well - perhaps even too well.

Specialisation has it's li…