I'm not. In fact, I posit the opposite, that one enabler of individuality is through community support, as it means that "the individual is stronger against the state, market forces, etc."

That said, some self-sufficiency is required too. Someone that has to yield to all kinds of powers to survive because they're not self-sufficient, can't ascertain their individuality either.

That's an interesting idea.

Perhaps we should hope for the emergence of "be self-sufficient" as a separately motivating idea from "be an individual"?

Then maybe the instincts driving unhappy individualism would subside a bit.

Because the instinct towards sufficiency is presumably a strong one, underlying much of life, whether conscious or not. So I imagine that when the two concepts are blurred together, the instinct towards sufficiency causes people to be driven to differentiate themselves as individuals. For example, by leaving the places where they were raised, in the hope of becoming "different" from the people they grew up with.

it s not a specific idea, the concepts of individualism and self-sufficiency are orthogonal . in developed societies, markets have replaced the social dependency on each other because people want to be more individualistic. i don't think people are unhappy being individualists

>in developed societies, markets have replaced the social dependency on each other because people want to be more individualistic

In developed societies markets have replaced the social dependency on each other through legislation, gunpower, and policies that closed down communal ways of living and forced people to seek (much worse) work in towns and factories -- often against much protest from the people subjected to that. Further laws made small scale production impossible or near, and mass production mandatory. And much later (around the '30s or so) followed advertising and other means to expand this even more through constant low-intensity brainwashing.

In the process people became less individualistic -- often confined for hours on end to the same cubicle, to come back home exhausted from some meaningless commute, in a meaningless job.

This confuses individualistic with isolated.

Maybe we mean different things by self-sufficiency.

By self-sufficiency, I mean capable of doing well within the context of modern developed societies and their systems. Not ruggedly off-grid sufficient.

The markets don't work too well, even for individualism, when people cannot get what they need from those markets. People are often forced to conform to get what they need.