Independence - what's that about?

I attended a review today where the word "independence" must have been uttered at least a dozen times and it made me think about what the word and reality actually is.
My thesaurus says : liberty, scope, range, latitude, elbow room. So, in the light of that definition just how independent are any of us?
Let me say, straight away, that I believe that the whole concept of independence is a misnomer, a mirage, so the ultimate irony is that it is the focus of whole sections of industry and philosophy - and is in reality completely unattainable.
Real independence would only be within the reach of a superhuman, robotic entity ( for even God needed company) who could supply all its own needs and had infinite elbow room.
How many of us actually do meet ALL our own needs? Do we grow and process all our own food, produce the materials to clothe and shelter ourselves, supply all our own utilities? I am talking about real independence, life without reference to others.
Of course we don't. However self-reliant we might think we are the truth is that we need others to fill the gaps in our own knowledge and abilities.
When I talk to clients about maintaining independence and how we can support them in that, I am beginning to feel I maybe selling them a lie.
I think I should be talking in terms of interdependence - the need we have for the skills and input of other people and their need for ours.
The frail elderly are particularly vulnerable in this area. Because we live in a society which covertly believes that you are only valuable when you are producing, whatever that society might say overtly, then when people reach the time of life when their obvious productivity seems to have ended, the sense of guilt and dependence is overwhelming. To ease that sense of guilt we promote the idea of independence as the holy grail of social care - we are so focused on it that we lose connection with reality, we are expending valuable energy striving for the unattainable.
Now, if we talked in terms of interdependence then not only would it be a realistic goal but we would actually value not only the client but all those making up the network that allows us and our society to function.
The frail elderly are often perceived as takers, a drain on increasingly scarce resources and as unproductive, with a parallel rise in the often unsubtle questions regarding their continued right to life.
Of course, the reality is that without these people I, and thousands of others, would be unemployed and even larger swathes of British industry would be defunct. Which begs another question as to whether there is a correlation between the low status of both the social care force and their clients and the fact that the makeup of both sections is still largely female, and aren't we cheaper by the dozen?
The truth is that we all need each other, in every situation. If no man is an island then no woman, or man, is independent, and we would need to be the one in order to really be the other. We could all start to function more realistically and attain more successfully. More importantly, we would recognise the value of those who really count in society - I am not talking about class or professional status - but anyone who enables any of us to function and meets our needs, however eclectic.