Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. We discuss what it really means to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps in America, “the land of the self-made.”

Humans are biologically wired to be interdependent. In fact, achievement is often accompanied with isolation and loneliness. Alissa reminds us that “People who are fighting for democracy shouldn't be leaning into their own self made myth, but instead they should be trying to dispel the myth entirely.” The counter narrative to the self-made myth is that being in community and mutual solidarity feels better than being an individualist.