Look at the morning before it is fully yours. The coffee was grown by hands you will never shake, picked in a country you may never visit, and carried across an ocean by a crew months away from home. The water came from an aquifer filled by rain on distant hills. The light you switched on arrived down a wire that runs back to turbines and power stations and the quarterly returns of people who will never learn your name. A few hundred strangers made this morning, and most of them are not here to be thanked.
The hands that grew the coffee may be a child's. The aquifer is draining faster than the rain can fill it, and the light is sold to you at a profit, much of it still made by burning fuel. The harm comes down the same threads as the morning.
You are less of an individual than you were taught. The microbes in your gut digest what your own body cannot, and number roughly as many as the cells you think of as yourself. You are nearer to an ecosystem than to a unit, a standing meeting of other lives, none of them permanent members.
It runs well past the human. Under a pine forest, most of the fine root tips are sleeved in fungus, and the tree pays out sugar for water and minerals its roots cannot reach alone. The terms of the bargain can shift until the fungus takes more than it brings. Robin Wall Kimmerer, learning Potawatomi, found in it what she calls a grammar of animacy, a way of speaking that treats the living world as a someone rather than a something. The catch is that the same world, spoken of as a someone, is being counted and priced and traded as a something, often by the people most fluent in the language of care.
We are trained not to see any of this, because not seeing it pays. A system that runs on unpaid care has every reason to keep the care invisible: the cooking, the minding, the checking-in, the holding-up of everyone who then walks out the door to compete as though they had made themselves. When the official systems fail, as they did when the wards filled, it is this unpaid web that catches people, and is thanked, and is sent back to being invisible. The self-made individual is what the accounts look like when the care is left off them.
The same arrangement can carry care to one end and a cost to the other. A woman who looks after another family's parents may have left her own children with their grandmother an ocean away; the sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this a global care chain. Clean air over one town can begin as waste in another: in 2008 a plant in Henan making polysilicon for solar panels sold around the world was reported dumping its waste beside a village, and the cornfields there died. You are held up by the labour of people you will never meet, and some of your own may land as a cost on others, mostly without your knowing whom, or how.
Living in the web we are already in means owing thanks and owing answers to the same crowd of strangers, and letting your comfort and its costs be one fact rather than two.