--- title: "You Are Not Independent When You Do Everything Yourself. You Are Alone." date: 2026-04-08 description: "A personal essay on the trap of Romanian self-sufficiency, a mechanic father\'s hands, and what the person who does everything loses — including in the age of digital technology and artificial intelligence." author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Personal development" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/personal-development.md" --- # You Are Not Independent When You Do Everything Yourself. You Are Alone. The idea that takes shape beyond the story and beyond personal intuitions is a cold and economic one: it is not the quantity of work that makes the difference, but **the way in which it is distributed**. [![](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/Faci_singur_si_tocmai_asta_te_costa_cel_mai_mult.jpg)](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=323:you-are-alone&catid=39:personal-development&lang=en-GB&Itemid=503) I think about my father's hands. I don't know why I start there, but that is where I go every time I want to understand something about real work — about what it actually means to know how to do something. His hands had a texture I have never been able to forget, though I have tried. Not because they were ugly — on the contrary — but because they held something I do not have, something that still intimidates me now, at my age, when I ought to have moved past this kind of comparison. They were a mechanic's hands. Cracked at the knuckles, with nails that no amount of soap could restore to the white of an office worker's hands. The black of engine oil had settled there as a second skin, older and more truthful than the first. My father knew how to do everything. He repaired cars, of course — that was his trade, the workshop in Botoșani where the air smelt of burnt oil and the warm metal of an engine cooling after a long journey. But he also repaired the roof when the rain came in, and the electrics when there was a short circuit, and the neighbour's rubber boots, and the black-and-white television, and my three-speed bicycle, which I broke every summer with the same systematic enthusiasm. He never refused. That was his pride — that there was nothing in the world he could not do, fix, or restore to the state it ought to be in. And I admired him for it. Sincerely, without reservation, with that uncracked admiration of a child who has not yet seen enough of the world. --- I am forty now and I understand something different. I understand that my father was exhausted. No one asked me that at the time and I didn't ask myself — children don't see their parents' tiredness, or they see it and choose not to name it, because naming it would make it real. But the tiredness was there, in the way he rose from the table and went straight to the workshop after supper, in the way his day of rest was never truly rest, because someone always turned up with something to repair, and he could not refuse, because to refuse would have meant saying he didn't know how — and that was unthinkable. He knew how to do everything. That was precisely why he could never stop. I don't mean only the physical tiredness, though that was there too. I mean something deeper, harder to articulate: the person who does everything becomes, over time, a prisoner of their own universal competence. Everyone knows you can. Everyone comes. You cannot refuse, because refusal would need to come from incapacity rather than choice — and choosing not to do something you are capable of doing feels, somewhere at your core, like a form of cowardice. That is the trap. And our culture built it with its own hands, carefully, over the course of hundreds of years, and called it virtue. --- ## What You Think You Are When You Know How to Do Everything You think you are free. That you depend on no one. That you possess a kind of practical sovereignty that money cannot buy and schooling cannot teach. And, in a very narrow sense, you are right. But here is what no one ever told you: the freedom of depending on no one has a precise, calculable cost, which you pay every day — and which never appears on any invoice, so you never count it. You live it, consume it, waste it, but you never count it. The cost is called time. And time means life. When my father repaired the roof instead of calling a tradesman, he invested — let us say — two days of the weekend. The roofing was done well, because my father was a serious man and did not do things by halves. But those two days existed in no other version of events. They could not be recovered. They could not be exchanged for anything else. And had you asked him, during those two days, whether this was what he wanted to do with his life — whether this was his highest contribution to the world — I believe he would have been silent for a moment too long before answering. Romanian folklore knows this and at the same time does not. On one hand it says that *a trade is a golden bracelet* [*meseria e brățară de aur*] — that is, deep specialisation in a single craft is a man's most precious asset. And on the other hand it says *help yourself and the Lord will help you* — that is, self-sufficiency is the supreme virtue. No one has noticed that the two proverbs are in direct conflict with each other. Or, if they have noticed, they chose to say nothing, because in our culture contradiction is not resolved — it is lived, discreetly, as an underground tension inherited without knowing where it came from. --- ## The Moment I Saw the Trap I did not see it all at once. Important things are never seen all at once — they accumulate, layer upon layer, until their weight becomes impossible to ignore. The first layer came a few years after I had begun working in web development. I had a client — a man who ran a small construction firm in Botoșani, a serious man, a man who had put in eight hours of physical labour before arriving at my door one evening with a laptop open on a website he had built himself, during a single night, following a YouTube tutorial. I looked at that website and did not know how to explain what was wrong with it, because everything was wrong — not in the way a single thing is wrong, but in the way a book written by someone who does not know how to write is wrong: every sentence is in order, but the whole communicates nothing. He told me, with a pride I understood perfectly: *I made it myself. I sat up all night and made it.* And I felt something complicated in that moment — a mixture of recognition and sadness, like when you recognise in another person a reflex you yourself only shed with difficulty. I recognised my father. I recognised myself from ten years earlier. I recognised the entire genealogy of the man who does everything and cannot understand why it still does not work. *I sat up all night and made it.* Every word in that sentence is a silent cry. A night's sleep lost. A website that appeared in no search engine whatsoever. A pride invested in something that produced nothing — not a single client, not a phone call, not a request for a quotation. --- ## But What Did I Choose? For years I refused to specialise, and this is the story I must tell honestly, because otherwise it makes no sense. I knew how to write — and so I took up programming as well. I knew how to build websites — and so I took up marketing as well. I knew marketing — and so I took up basic bookkeeping, because *I'm not going to pay an accountant for something so simple*. And every new thing I added to my repertoire gave me a feeling of security which, I now understand, was not security at all. It was the illusion of control. It was the conviction that if I knew how to do everything, I could not be vulnerable to anyone. Vulnerability frightened me. Depending on someone, trusting a specialist, paying someone for something you believe you could do yourself — all of this requires an act of surrender of one's own self-sufficiency which, for someone brought up as I was, seems almost immoral. Father never called anyone. Why should I? And yet. And yet, in the years when I tried to be writer, programmer, marketer, bookkeeper, strategist, and client liaison all at once — in all those years, I excelled at none of them. I was good at many things. Very good, perhaps, at a few. But excellence — that level of work where what you do becomes genuinely valuable to someone else, where reputation is built from competence rather than availability — excellence requires one thing the man who does everything cannot give: deep, uninterrupted time, dedicated to a single craft. Adam Smith knew this in 1776, when he wrote that *ten workers specialised in different operations produce two hundred and forty times more than ten workers each doing everything*. Émile Durkheim added, a few decades later, that specialisation does not fragment society — it holds it together, creating solidarity and interdependence. Ludwig von Mises put it most sharply: *refusing specialisation is not independence. It is voluntary poverty.* Voluntary poverty. I read that phrase a few years ago and it stuck in my throat for several days, because it was brutal in its precision. Not because of money — or not only. But because it described perfectly a deeper form of poverty: poverty of time, of attention, of depth, of genuine presence in what you do. --- ## What the Man Who Does Everything Loses He does not merely lose money. This is important to say, because if it were only about money, it would be simple — you would do the calculation and see. No, he loses something harder to measure and harder to recover. He loses the pride of craftsmanship. There is a type of satisfaction known only to the man who has worked at something for so long, so deeply, that there are no longer any unpleasant surprises — only good ones, only the moments when you know you can go further, that there is a next level, that your competence has not yet reached its ceiling. Adam Smith's workers who specialised in a single operation in the making of pins did not enrich knowledge in the way a deep craftsman does — Smith himself acknowledged this, and proposed education as the antidote. But in services, in creative and technical fields, specialisation brings precisely that depth which forced generalism forbids. When you do everything, you are always at the surface. You are useful, available, valuable in the way a penknife is valuable — because you have a blade for every situation. But none of the blades is a chef's knife. He also loses self-respect. Not immediately — but slowly, in the way iron oxidises, barely visible each day, yet inevitable. The man who does everything eventually no longer knows what he actually is. What would he write under 'profession'? What would he answer if someone asked him: *what are you better at than anyone else in the whole county?* The question seems grandiose, but it is simple — and for the man who does everything, it is paralysing. --- ## The World We Live in Now Does Not Forgive Forced Generalism And now comes the moment when I must say something uncomfortable, something that goes beyond my own story and my father's and the client with the website built in a single night. We are living in 2026. The technical complexity of the world has grown in the last ten years more than in the previous fifty. Digital domains — websites, social media, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence — are no longer fields in which an intelligent and industrious person can improvise successfully. The statistics are clear and troubling: only 5% of Romanian companies use automation and artificial intelligence solutions, compared with over 33% in the Nordic countries of Europe. The structural gap is between five and ten years. Romanian SMEs that fail to automate basic processes risk entering *survival mode* within the next three to five years, according to specialists at EnterTech 2026. But beyond the figures, there is a problem of mentality that figures cannot fully capture. The man raised with *I'll manage myself* and *it'll do as it is* does not see the danger in imprecision. He believes the digital world works like a roof: if it isn't leaking, it's fine. He does not understand that a website without security does not *leak* — it is breached from within, invisibly, and you only find out when your clients' data is already somewhere else. He does not understand that an AI system implemented without an audit does not *collapse* — it makes wrong decisions in silence, systematically, until the effects become impossible to attribute to any particular source. And since August 2024, the European Artificial Intelligence Regulation — the AI Act (EU 2024/1689) — applies directly in Romania, without transposition into national law. Ignorance of its existence is not a legal defence. But ignorance, in the tradition of the man who does everything, is almost an identity. --- ## What I Chose, in the End I chose to write. And to know how to build websites. And nothing else. It was not a heroic decision. It was more of a surrender — an acceptance that I cannot be, and no longer wish to be, all things at once. That doing two things well is more valuable than doing ten things badly. And, more difficultly, I had to accept that delegating is not a sign of weakness. That paying an accountant means respecting my own time, not that I cannot count. That hiring a cybersecurity specialist does not mean I do not know what a server is, but that I know I do not know enough — and that enough is never enough in fields where a mistake has consequences you cannot undo. Father did not choose this. Or perhaps he did choose, but his context did not always permit him to choose otherwise — in Romania of the 1980s and 1990s, specialists did not exist in the forms they exist today, or did not exist for men like him, and self-sufficiency was sometimes genuinely the only instrument available. But I live in a different world. And if I carry his memory with me — and I do carry it, every day, in the way some things are never forgotten — my debt to him is not to imitate him. It is to understand why he did what he did, in the context in which he lived, and to take from that what is still valid now and set aside what no longer is. What remains valid: seriousness. The fact that a thing is worth doing well or not doing at all. The fact that work is not a burden, but a form of presence in the world. What is no longer valid: the conviction that doing everything is the supreme virtue. That asking for help is weakness. That paying someone to do what lies beyond your competence is waste. --- ## Conclusion — or Rather, a Question Left Open My father's hands. I return to them. I no longer have the simple certainty I had as a child — the certainty that those hands knew everything that needed to be known about the world. What I have instead is something more complex: an understanding that his competence was real and enormous, and that, at the same time, it cost him more than it should have. I do not know whether he knew this. I never managed to ask him — or I asked too late, when his answers had grown shorter and harder to decipher. But I believe there was an awareness in him, somewhere. People who live long and attentively come to know things about themselves that they never put into words — not because they cannot, but because putting them into words would give them a weight they do not wish to carry. I put them into words. That is my trade. Just the one. Well chosen, I hope. --- ## 10 Practical Suggestions — or How to Escape the Trap of Self-Sufficiency Without Losing Yourself Carl Jung did not write about entrepreneurs. Nor about Joomla websites, nor about SMEs that refuse to hire accountants. And yet, when you read what he wrote about the *persona* — the mask we construct in order to face the world — and about the *shadow* — everything we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves — you immediately recognise the man who does everything. The man who does everything does not have a time problem. He has an identity problem. And false identities are not resolved with better diaries or productivity applications. They are resolved with honesty towards oneself — which is, by far, the hardest kind of work a person can do. The ten suggestions below are not tricks. They are orientations — starting points for anyone willing to look at the real problem, not at the symptoms. --- ### Why Jung? It is a question I asked myself before writing what follows. There are more modern psychologists, more measurable, more accepted in the current academic space. There are cognitive-behavioural approaches with clear protocols and controlled studies. Why turn to a Swiss psychiatrist who died in 1961, whose system is often considered closer to philosophy than to science? The answer has several layers, and I want to show them all — including the uncomfortable ones. The first layer is honestly personal: I find myself in Jung's language more than in any other when it comes to *why we do what we do*, rather than *how to do things differently*. Behavioural psychology is excellent for changing habits. Jung is useful for understanding the deep structure of habits that resist any change — and Romanian self-sufficiency, inherited from father to son without words, is precisely that kind of structure. The second layer is more important and I shall state it directly: there are real, verifiable points of contact between Jung's analytical psychology and Orthodox spirituality. Not identity — Jung was no theologian, nor did he claim to be. But significant convergences, signalled by serious authors, not in a New Age register, but in a patristic and academic one. Jung himself was fascinated by the Eastern Christian tradition. He wrote that Western theology had rationalised mystery to the point of evacuating it, whilst Orthodoxy had preserved something essential: the awareness that there are layers of inner reality that reason cannot reach alone. The Jungian concept of the *collective unconscious* — that stratum of the psyche which transcends the individual and contains universal archetypes — is not far, as an intuition, from what the Eastern Fathers called *the depths of the heart*, or from what Saint Macarius described as the inner space in which man meets the presence of God. Jungian *individuation* — the process of becoming a whole self — has clear echoes in the Orthodox concept of *theosis* or deification: not the erasure of the self, but its deepening and integration until it becomes transparent to something greater. Both traditions reject the illusion that the mature person is the one who has no need of anyone. Both hold that the very capacity to receive — grace, in theological language; contents from the unconscious, in Jungian language — is the mark of authentic maturity, not of weakness. There are, of course, real tensions. Jung treated religious symbols as psychic phenomena, not as ontological realities. An Orthodox believer cannot accept the reduction of the Holy Trinity to an archetypal structure of the collective psyche. And Jung, for his part, would have refused to affirm that the unconscious is anything other than psychic, in the broadest sense of the word. This tension cannot be resolved — it is lived, like any fertile tension. But for the purpose of these practical suggestions, what matters is that Jung offers a vocabulary of self-knowledge that is neither reductive nor superficial. A vocabulary that takes seriously the idea that man has depth, that this depth is not always accessible to consciousness, and that ignoring it carries a cost — in exhaustion, in missed relationships, in false identities worn for too long. This is the reason I chose him. Not because he is the only possible language. But because he is the language in which the problem of excessive self-sufficiency — *I'll manage, I need no one* — becomes visible at the depth at which it must be seen in order to be changed. --- ### Distinguish Between What You Know How to Do and What You Are Jung called *ego inflation* that moment when a person identifies so completely with a competence or a role that he can no longer see where the role ends and the real person begins. The mechanic who cannot refuse any repair is not a man with wide abilities — he is a man who has built his entire identity on availability. And identities built on availability are, by definition, permanently besieged. **Practical exercise:** Write down, on paper, three things you do because you enjoy them and three things you do because you cannot refuse without feeling diminished. The difference between the two lists is the measure of the problem. --- ### Recognise the Shadow of Self-Sufficiency — the Fear of Dependence The Jungian *shadow* is everything we have removed from our image of ourselves because it did not fit who we believe we are. For the man raised with *I'll manage*, the shadow is precisely the need for help. Not the absence of competence — but the legitimate need to depend on someone. To be vulnerable. To not know. This need does not disappear because we deny it. It remains there, in the background, and manifests in other ways — through chronic exhaustion, through relationships in which you always become the one who resolves things, through the inability to ask for help even when the situation demands it urgently. **Practical exercise:** The next time you feel the reflex to *sort it out yourself*, stop and ask: *why can I not leave this to someone else?* If the honest answer is *because I do not trust anyone* — you are in the shadow, not in competence. --- ### Identify the Professional *Persona* You Have Built — and Its Cost The *persona* is the social mask — the image we project to the world in order to be accepted and respected. It is necessary. The problem arises when the mask becomes more real than the face beneath it. The man who does everything has built a solid *persona*: the dependable man, the man who solves things, the man you can rely on. It is a respectable mask. But every hour you maintain the mask is an hour when you are not yourself — you are the role. And the role, unlike the man, does not tire. It has no need of sleep. It has no limits. That is why it is so exhausting to wear over the long term. **Practical exercise:** Ask yourself: *what would happen if I said no?* Not as a rhetorical exercise — but seriously. What image of yourself would crack? That is the mask. And that crack is, in fact, a door. --- ### Practise Delegation as an Act of Individuation, Not a Lack of Time Jung called *individuation* the process by which a person gradually becomes more whole — more truly himself, less defined by inherited roles and more by conscious choices. Individuation requires relinquishing what you no longer are, not only adding what you wish to become. Delegating is not an administrative gesture. It is an act of clarity about who you are and who you are not. When you say *it is not my trade* and call in a specialist, you are not surrendering a competence — you are surrendering an illusion. And the relinquishing of illusion is, in Jungian psychology, one of the fundamental gestures of psychological maturation. **Practical exercise:** Choose a task you currently perform, about which you know someone else would do it better than you. Delegate it just once. Observe what you feel in the moment you let go of control. That emotion — the discomfort, the unease, perhaps the relief — is the material to work with. --- ### Listen to What Your Exhaustion Is Saying — It Is a Message from the Unconscious Jung believed that symptoms — including physical ones — are often messages that the psyche is trying to convey to consciousness. The chronic exhaustion of the man who does everything is not a sign that he must work more efficiently. It is a sign that something in the structure of his choices is in contradiction with what he, at depth, wants to be. My father's exhaustion was not a scheduling problem. It was a message he did not hear — or that the circumstances of his life would not permit him to hear. I chose to hear it. And that changed more than any productivity tool. **Practical exercise:** At the end of a fragmented working day — in which you have jumped from one task to another, resolved things that are not yours to resolve, improvised in fields where you are not a specialist — sit for five minutes and do nothing. The tiredness you feel in that moment is more precise than any analysis. It knows what it is counting. --- ### Build Boundaries from Understanding, Not from Rules Many people attempt to resolve the problem of excessive self-sufficiency through rigid rules: *I will never do this again, I will not answer after six o'clock, I will no longer accept clients who...* Rules fail because they fight the symptom, not the cause. Jung spoke of *psychological functions* — thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition — and of the fact that people tend to overdevelop some and neglect others. The man who does everything is often dominated by the *thinking function* — he calculates, resolves, optimises — and underdevelops the *feeling function* — what do I genuinely want, what do I need, what causes me harm. **Practical exercise:** Before any new commitment, ask yourself two questions in order: *can I do this?* and only then *do I want to do this?* You will discover that the second question is very often avoided altogether — and that it contains the most important information. --- ### Rediscover the *Selbst* — the Deep Self Beyond Competences The concept of *Selbst* — the Self, in Jungian terminology — is the psychological centre of the personality, deeper than the ego, more complete than any role. It is what you are beyond what you can do. The man who does everything has built his entire self-worth on what he can do. When he can no longer do — through illness, through old age, through a change of context — he collapses identitarily. Not because he has lost his competences, but because he did not know what lay beyond them. **Practical exercise:** Write a paragraph about yourself that contains no verb of action: no *I do*, *I know*, *I can*, *I solve*. Who are you without what you do? If the paragraph is empty or uncomfortable to write — you are more dependent on your professional persona than you think. --- ### Invest in Relationships of Real Interdependence One of the unseen consequences of excessive self-sufficiency is relational isolation. The man who needs no one arrives, in time, at no longer being in any genuine relationship with anyone — because real relationships require reciprocity, vulnerability, mutual dependence. Jung spoke of *animus* and *anima* — complementary principles within the psyche — not to describe gender, but to describe the fundamental need of the human psyche to integrate polarities: strength and vulnerability, autonomy and connection, giving and receiving. Pathological self-sufficiency blocks precisely this integration. **Practical exercise:** Identify a specialist you would hire if you set your pride aside. Do not hire them immediately — first ring them and ask for a piece of advice. Free of charge. Observe that asking for advice costs you nothing you think it costs. --- ### Practise *Deep Attention* in Your Chosen Craft Jung spoke of the *transcendent function* — the capacity of the psyche to integrate opposites and produce new meaning from the tension between them. This function does not activate at the surface. It appears only in depth, in sustained work, in concentration that surpasses efficiency and enters something more akin to meditation. The true craftsman — the tailor, the mechanic, the writer, the programmer — knows this state. It is the state in which you are no longer conscious of time, in which the work is done through you rather than by you. The man who does everything never knows it, because he moves too quickly from one thing to another to enter any depth. **Practical exercise:** Reserve at least two uninterrupted hours each week for a single thing — not for productivity, but for depth. Close everything that can interrupt. Observe that the first twenty minutes are hard and that after that something changes. --- ### Let the Father's Legacy Evolve, Not Merely Repeat Itself Jung spoke of psychic *complexes* — emotional structures formed in childhood, around significant figures, which continue to act in adult life without our awareness. The father complex — or the mother complex, or that of any formative figure of authority — is not a problem to be solved. It is a legacy to be integrated. To integrate means to take what is valuable and leave behind what no longer serves. My father's seriousness, his refusal to do things by halves, his respect for craftsmanship — these are legacies I carry with pride. The conviction that self-sufficiency is the supreme virtue — that I set aside, with respect, but firmly. I do not betray him by changing this. I continue him — in a different context, with different means, towards the same kind of excellence he was seeking with his hands. **Practical exercise:** Write a letter to your father — or to the formative figure in your life — in which you explain what you have kept and what you have chosen to do differently. You do not need to send it. You need to write it for yourself. The clarity produced by that text is a form of individuation in action. --- *Jungian psychology does not offer quick solutions. It offers something more valuable: a language for understanding why we do what we do — and why we continue doing things that cost us, even after we have clearly seen the cost. The suggestions above are not a programme. They are orientations. Each person traverses them in their own order, at their own pace, with their own material. But to traverse them — even partially, even hesitatingly — is more than remaining in the trap into which you were born.* --- ## Bibliography **Theoretical Foundation** - Adam Smith — *The Wealth of Nations* (1776) — the theory of specialisation and opportunity cost - Émile Durkheim — *The Division of Labour in Society* (1893) — specialisation as the source of social solidarity - Ludwig von Mises — *Human Action* (1949) — refusal of specialisation as voluntary poverty - Murray Rothbard — *Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor* — [mises.ro](https://mises.ro/articole/libertate-inegalitate-primitivism-si-diviziunea-muncii/) **Sources on the Romanian Labour Market and Services** - PwC Romania — *Study: Shortage of Skilled Employees* (2019) — [pwc.ro](https://www.pwc.ro) — 68% of entrepreneurs find it difficult to recruit technical staff - IFC / World Bank — *Private Sector Diagnostic: Romania* (2023) — [ifc.org](https://www.ifc.org) - ABSL / PwC — *Business Services Industry Report 2025* — [piatafinanciara.ro](https://www.piatafinanciara.ro) - Oficiul de Știri — *Economy without strategy: we have a shortage of specialists* (Feb. 2026) — [officiuldestiri.ro](https://officiuldestiri.ro) **Sources on Digitalisation and AI in Romania** - StartupCafe.ro — *Romanian SMEs up to three times less productive* (Feb. 2026) — [startupcafe.ro](https://startupcafe.ro) - Capital.ro — *Digitalisation of Romanian companies advancing too slowly* (2026) — [capital.ro](https://www.capital.ro) - Revista Biz — *EnterTech 2026: AI becomes the new digital engine for SMEs* (Mar. 2026) — [revistabiz.ro](https://www.revistabiz.ro) **Legal Framework** - EU Regulation 2024/1689 (AI Act) — directly applicable in Romania from August 2024 - ValidSoftware.ro — *AI Act: what Romanian companies need to know* (2025) — [validsoftware.ro](https://validsoftware.ro) **Romanian Folklore and Popular Culture** - Wikipedia RO — *List of Romanian proverbs* — [ro.wikipedia.org](https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%C4%83_de_proverbe_rom%C3%A2ne%C8%99ti) - Wikiquote RO — *Romanian proverbs* — [ro.wikiquote.org](https://ro.wikiquote.org/wiki/Proverbe_rom%C3%A2ne%C8%99ti) - George Muntean — *Apa trece, pietrele rămân. Proverbe românești* [The Water Flows, the Stones Remain. Romanian Proverbs] — Editura pentru Literatură, 1966 **Romanian-Language Resources on Carl Jung** - *Psychology and Religion in Jung and Freud* — course, Calea Victoriei Foundation, Bucharest. The essential distinction: Freud reduces the religious phenomenon to personal psychology; Jung held that human life has an inescapable connection to the divine — [fundatiacaleavictoriei.ro](https://www.fundatiacaleavictoriei.ro/psihologie-si-religie-la-jung-si-freud/) - *Jung and the Connection Between Man and the Past, through Religion* — Espresso Filosofic, 2023. Introduction to the Jungian œuvre in a Romanian context, with references to editions available in Romanian — [espressofilosofic.ro](https://www.espressofilosofic.ro/filosofie-a-religiei/jung-si-legatura-dintre-om-si-trecut-prin-intermediul-religiei/) - *Orthodoxy and Psychology* — CrestinOrtodox.ro. Presents the real tensions between psychotherapy and Orthodox theology (useful for the intellectual honesty declared in the section 'Why Jung?') — [crestinortodox.ro](https://www.crestinortodox.ro/religie/ortodoxie-psihologie-149074.html) --- ## 10 Author's Questions About the Arguments and Tensions in This Article --- **1. Why do you start with your father's hands? Is this not a sentimental manoeuvre that avoids the argument?** It is a legitimate question and I put it to myself. The answer is that you cannot write honestly about a cultural problem without showing where, in yourself, your understanding of that problem originates. Had I begun directly with Adam Smith and statistics about SMEs, I would have written an economics article, not an essay. And I would have lost precisely what makes the problem genuinely important: it is not an abstract market problem. It is a problem of identity, transmitted from generation to generation, through the hands, without words. My father's hands are the entry point into the problem, not its decoration. --- **2. Are you not idealising specialisation? Generalists have real value too, in certain contexts.** Yes, they do. A good entrepreneur must understand enough from several fields to make decisions and lead specialists. A good writer must have lived broadly. I am not arguing for the monomaniacal specialisation that produces experts incapable of speaking with anyone outside their field. I am arguing against a specific type of generalism: the kind forced by distrust of others, by fear of vulnerability, by the cult of self-sufficiency at any price. The difference is that the conscious generalist knows what he delegates and to whom. The man who does everything delegates nothing, because delegation strikes him as weakness. --- **3. Your father — have you not treated him unjustly? That man lived within real constraints, not free choices.** You are right to raise this question. I tried to be explicit in the article: his context did not always permit him to choose otherwise. Romania in the 1980s and 1990s was a space in which self-sufficiency was often the only instrument available, not one option among others. I am not criticising him. I am trying to understand what worked in his logic, in his context — and to separate from that what is valid and what is no longer valid in mine. Anything else would be an injustice to him and a cowardice towards myself. --- **4. There is a contradiction in the article: you criticise your own tendency to do everything, yet you write a long article combining literature, economics, folklore, and autobiography. Is this not itself a form of generalism?** It is a real contradiction and I acknowledge it. But there is a difference between combining perspectives in writing — which is a writer's competence — and executing all the technical tasks of a business single-handedly out of distrust of others. Conceptual synthesis is a different thing from operational fragmentation. The first type of generalism is, at its best, a virtue of thought. The second type is a hidden cost you pay with your life. --- **5. The argument about the AI Act and legal risk seems to belong to a different article. Why do you include it here?** Because the tension I am describing is not nostalgic. It is not a problem belonging to my father, resolved by time. It is a live problem, manifesting today in increasingly costly ways. The man with the *I'll manage* mentality of 1990 risked a poorly repaired roof. The man with the same mentality in 2026 risks a fine under the AI Act, a security breach with personal data exposed, an investment in technology with no value because no one audited the processes beforehand. The fact that the dangers have become more sophisticated does not mean the mentality has changed. That, precisely, is the problem. --- **6. Is there not a form of elitism in saying one must pay specialists? Not everyone can afford to.** There is a degree of privilege in my position, and I do not deny it. But elitism would be to claim that those who cannot afford specialists are making the wrong choice. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that those who *can afford* them — and yet choose not to engage specialists for reasons of cultural principle, of pride, or of distrust — are paying a cost they need not pay. The distinction matters. I am not talking about genuine poverty. I am talking about voluntary poverty — Mises's formulation, which I find exact. --- **7. There is a tension between the personal tone of the article and the economic and legal arguments. Does one not weaken the other?** It is a tension I assumed deliberately. Economic and legal arguments without personal story remain abstract and do not change behaviour. Personal story without arguments remains therapeutic confession with no public relevance. The combination is uncomfortable — but precisely its discomfort is its strength. If my father's story moved you and the 5% AI adoption figure in Romania troubled you, then the tension worked. --- **8. Why do you not offer more concrete solutions? The article diagnoses, but does not prescribe.** I did offer a few directions — conscious specialisation, delegation as a form of respect for one's own time, auditing processes before any technological investment. But I did not want to write a guide. Guides exist, they are useful, I have written them myself on other sites. Here I wanted to write something that comes before the guide: the question of *why we resist*. Without an answer to it, guides reach no one. People do not change behaviour because they have been told what to do. They change it when they have understood why they do what they do — and why they might do otherwise. --- **9. The final message — that you chose to do two things well — does it not sound somewhat triumphalist in relation to your father?** That was not my intention and I hope it does not come across that way. I chose differently from him. Not better. Differently, within different constraints, with different resources, in another world. He excelled in his own way — in seriousness, in presence, in refusing to do things by halves. These values I have inherited and I prize them above any specialisation. What I have set aside is only the conviction that self-sufficiency is an end in itself. Not the virtue. Not the way of being in the world. Only the conviction that you never need anyone. --- **10. What is the hardest thing to say in this article?** That I recognised myself in the client with the website built in a single night. That for years I carried the same misplaced pride, the same reflex of not asking for help, the same conviction that if I could do something it would be weakness not to do it. That this change — from *I'll manage* to *I know what I can delegate and to whom* — cost something real, not money, but a piece of the image I had constructed of myself. And that it is worth it. That it is, in fact, the only direction in which a person can grow: not in breadth, adding new competences without end, but in depth, in the craft they have chosen. --- **11. Why Jung?** Why turn to a Swiss psychiatrist who died in 1961, whose system is often considered closer to philosophy than to science? The answer has several layers and I want to show them all — including the uncomfortable ones. See the section '[10 Practical Suggestions...](#Sugestii)'. There are, of course, real tensions. Jung treated religious symbols as psychic phenomena, not as ontological realities. An Orthodox believer cannot accept the reduction of the Holy Trinity to an archetypal structure of the collective psyche. And Jung, for his part, would have refused to affirm that the unconscious is anything other than psychic, in the broadest sense of the word. This tension cannot be resolved — it is lived, like any fertile tension. --- ## Final: It Is Not the Quantity of Work That Makes the Difference, But the Way in Which It Is Distributed The conclusion that emerges, beyond the story and beyond personal intuitions, is a cold and economic one: it is not the quantity of work that makes the difference, but **the way in which it is distributed**. In the logic formulated as far back as *The Wealth of Nations*, value does not arise from total effort, but from specialisation and co-ordination — from the fact that each person concentrates their time where they produce the most. Doing everything does not mean autonomy; it means taking on invisible costs: fragmented time, uneven quality, missed opportunities. At an individual level, this means that the choice is not between independence and dependence, but between efficiency and waste. Refusing to delegate does not eliminate dependence — it moves it inward, where you become dependent on your own limitations. The principle of comparative advantage shows that real value appears when you accept this limitation and turn it into a strategy: you do fewer things, but you do them at a level at which they become relevant to others. Seen thus, the lesson does not contradict my father's work, but continues it in a different context. The seriousness remains, but the direction changes: it no longer means doing everything yourself, but knowing precisely what is worth doing yourself and what is worth leaving to others. Because, in the end, the real cost is not the money you pay, but the life you fragment when you refuse to choose. ---