HIPS: Outsourcing Portions Of Our Lives Is Creating Extreme Dependency

By Bryan Hyde

COMMENTARY -- Consider all the things that people once did for themselves that are now being outsourced to others.

Food production has been handed off to corporate farms, making a vast majority of Americans dependent upon grocery stores. 

Dining out is convenient, but it’s also a form of outsourcing.

However, there is also a corresponding degree of dependency that comes with this convenience. Very few people today have any connection whatsoever to producing their own food.

Outsourcing has allowed us to delegate the responsibilities of caring for our children or aging loved ones to others in return for more time to earn wages. 

This can only be seen as an improvement over previous generations if our standard of living is based purely on material measurements. 

Another example is how few people believe that they can educate themselves or their children.

In some ways, we are poorer than those who came before us.

Some things take on far greater personal and moral importance only when we provide them for ourselves.

This is why we should exercise extreme care when we abdicate responsibility for our lives, our children, our well-being and our sense of moral direction.

The individuals who built this country and, against all odds, secured the blessings of liberty for the generations who would follow them, understood this.

The question isn’t “Who can we get to fix this?”

We must be brave enough to approach our problems with the question “What am I going to do about it?”

* Hyde In Plain Sight is written by KDXU personality Bryan Hyde. Catch his daily HIPS vignette at 7:50-ish every weekday morning on KDXU and listen to The Bryan Hyde Show weekends at 7 p.m. Saturday and 6 p.m. Sunday nights.