The Dangers Of ‘I’
Human connection is the key to happiness and success, yet we are increasingly isolated. Why?
Alongside physics, evolution, and gluten, one of the biggest advances in our understanding of the workings of our world is the discovery of the intricate interconnectedness of things. Just as we can’t separate our mind and our body, we’ve realized that we can’t view or deal with discrete elements of our health, our environment, our society, or our economy, in isolation.
We’ve also come to understand the importance of connection to our own evolution. Homo sapiens’ rise from just another hustler in the forests and fields to the decider of the fate of all other beings is down to, essentially, networking. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it, humans rule the earth because “we can create mass cooperation networks, in which thousands and millions of complete strangers work together towards common goals.”
We are hardwired to crave friendship and community because such things were a matter of survival for earlier versions of us. We’ve perhaps lost sight of the fact that community is still deeply connected to the quality and, likely, the duration of our lives.
Technology has allowed us to share information and stories and connect with most anyone — to build networks — more efficiently than ever. By some measures, the result has been incalculable progress for humanity. By other measures, we are suffering from a breakdown in the kind of connection we need most.
A range of (connected) factors have warped our views of what a network is, and what it does, and how to build and sustain one. Under the surface of our vast digital network, our smaller networks, and our deeper human connections, disintegrate without the right kind of attention. The connections of community are weakened as our lives increasingly revolve around ourselves.
We see this playing out in a few important ways.
We Are Dangerously Lonely
In a widely quoted Harvard Business Review story, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy summed up the findings of countless researchers over the last decade when he declared loneliness a health epidemic. “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness,” Murthy said. “We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.”
And while we think of loneliness as the scourge of the old, a recent study from YouGov found that younger people feel especially alone. 30 percent of millennials (people aged roughly 24 to 38) said they feel lonely, compared to 20 percent of Gen Xers and 15 percent of boomers, and 22 percent of the younger cohort said they had zero friends. On one hand, loneliness is a timeless fact of this stage of life, when school circles fall away, new families replace friend groups, and careers and identities are forged. But there are factors that make this generation’s loneliness uniquely intense, and they are factors that contribute to everyone’s isolation.
Overuse of (in other words, use of) social media (more on this later) and an interconnected assortment of economic and societal changes may be exacerbating feelings of loneliness. Among those changes: the rise of “sharing” economy jobs, and remote work. More than 75 percent of people around the world work remotely at least once a week, and more than one third of U.S. workers, or 57 million people, work in the gig economy. Along with the stress of financial uncertainty, gig and freelance work can be isolating. A Canadian study found that workers in precarious employment are almost twice as likely to report poorer mental health and are almost 55 per cent more likely to report they are often depressed as a result of work. A Deloitte poll of 4,000 workers found that half of millennial freelancers were discouraged by “a lack of connection to a company’s internal culture,” and that isolation was a big reason fewer than half (48%) of past and present freelancers reported being “very satisfied” with the experience.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the “new loneliness” is that we are, it seems, being set up to be lonely from the time we’re children. Multiple studies indicate that screen time interferes with young children’s ability to read social cues. One study found that kids get better at reading the emotions of other people after just five days away from their devices.
Social Media Doesn’t Always “Bring The World Closer Together”
We’ve been understandably preoccupied by the destructive impact of weaponized social media on our public institutions. We’ve watched in horror as bad actors, human and machine, hijacked our social networks’ algorithms to spread false, hateful, and precisely targeted information. Five years after the MIT Media Review declared on its cover that “Big Data Will Save Politics,” its editors reassessed the impact of data and social networks. Their slightly less breezy conclusion: “Today, with Cambridge Analytica, fake news, election hacking, and the shrill cacophony that dominates social media, technology feels as likely to destroy politics as to save it.”
But our social media dependence has perhaps even steeper costs to our personal lives and relationships (which are, of course, connected to the political sphere). 86% of people use social media at least once a day, and they spend an average of two hours and 22 minutes at it. Leaving aside the unsettling thought of all those precious hours on earth slipping away with nothing conclusive to show for it (just 23 percent of Facebook users said using the platform was “time well spent”), our social media time appears to be making us less social, and less connected in ways we probably don’t fully understand yet. Multiple studies have linked prolonged social platform use with symptoms of depression, anxiety and loneliness. And while researchers are typically careful about drawing direct causative lines, one study specifically designed to show causation revealed what we might have intuited: that spending too many hours obsessively observing others’ performative displays of life doesn’t make us feel better. As the study’s author summed up: “Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness.”
Platforms that were built on ideas of “sharing” and “bringing the world closer together” have in fact turned our turned our attention, and our camera lens, inward as we focus either on narrowcasting our idealized life moments or comparing them against the idealized moments of others. Sure, selfies aren’t responsible for an apparent rise in narcissism in our society, but they’re not NOT involved. In one of several studies showing a connection between social media and narcissism, researchers found that “those who used social media excessively, through visual postings, displayed an average 25 percent increase in..narcissistic traits over the four months of the study. Recent studies comparing the goals, concern for others, and civic orientation of young people in high school and college today with those of Gen Xers and boomers at the same age, show an increased emphasis on “extrinsic values” — money, image and fame — versus intrinsic values — community, affiliation and self-acceptance. Pat MacDonald, author of the paper “Narcissism in the Modern World,” framed the larger issue to The Guardian: “Much of our distress comes from a sense of disconnection. We have a narcissistic society where self-promotion and individuality seem to be essential, yet in our hearts that’s not what we want. We want to be part of a community, we want to be supported when we’re struggling, we want a sense of belonging. Being extraordinary is not a necessary component to being loved.”
Our Bubbles Have Become Suffocating Carapaces
As the problems facing our society, our planet and our personal lives become more complex, our capacity for nuance seems diminished alongside our ability to communicate and operate outside of our own philosophical/ identity/socio-economic silos. Where we used to blend, we are now sorted and segmented. The paralyzing polarization of our political discourse is one manifestation of this segmentation but our lack of social cohesion shows up in all areas of our lives—even the places we get our lunch. In “The Sweetgreenification of Society,” Ranjan Roy writes about long-past trips to a New York deli where 1-percenters ordered the same arm-sized sandwiches as laborers. Now, he says, comparing a nearby deli to the latest venture-funded Food Concept: “it’s impossible to ignore just how stark the socioeconomic contrast is to the Sweetgreen line. While the latter appears filled with people who stepped away from their WeWork desks, the former feels packed with the contractors underpaid to maintain that same WeWork.”
The pattern repeats across most areas of our lives. Social scientist Jutta Allmendinger noted in a WaPo article, “Given how crucial overlapping social circles are to cultivating solidarity within a nation, it is worrisome that there are fewer and fewer interactions between different social groups occurring in modern society.”
The lack of communal interaction and empathy engenders distrust, of institutions, and each other. In a recent Pew poll, 75% of Americans said that their fellow citizens’ trust in the federal government has shrunk, and 64% believe the same about our trust in each other.
Even at a time when our ideas and expressions of gender are becoming fluid, we’ve seen the grave repercussions of regressive notions of gender segmentation and the lack of cross-gender empathy and socialization. In an article called “The friendship crisis: Why are boys so lonely and violent?” author and psychologist Niobe Way talked about the importance of friendship and connection in relation to the violence being perpetrated by angry, isolated young men. “Our culture prizes independence over human connection,” she says. “It devalues and even discourages close friendships, particularly among boys and men. And our definitions of manhood emphasize aggression, toughness and rugged individualism at the expense of girls, women and relationships.”
The science has always been clear, says Way: “Humans need and want close relationships, including friendships, and when they don’t have them, there are serious physical and mental health consequences.”
The Connection Is Connection
The thread that connects all these issues is connection. Everything is connected, connection is critical for our wellbeing, and yet we are disconnecting.
No one factor, including selfies or screens, is responsible for loneliness, or violence, or alienation (a new study has in fact absolved our screens of responsibility for any ill effects on the young! So calm down!). And let’s be clear here: public policy and concerted action by government and civic organizations are essential in solving many of these problems.
But across our political, social, and personal predicaments, we see the sad triumph of the me at the expense of the we. As we remove “friction” from our business models and our daily routines, we’re eliminating something beyond jobs. And it’s a process that started long before the launch of Facebook. “One of the major goals of technology in America is to ‘free’ us from the necessity of relating to, submitting to, depending upon, or controlling other people,” the sociologist Philip Slater wrote. “Unfortunately, the more we have succeeded in doing this, the more we have felt disconnected, bored, lonely, unprotected, unnecessary, and unsafe.” Slater wrote those words in The Pursuit of Loneliness, published in 1970.
Robert Putnam, author of the seminal social study, Bowling Alone, recently told The New Yorker: “We are now, and have been in the last 50 years, plunging deeper and deeper into individualism of a very malignant sort. We are much more isolated in ways — culturally, politically, economically, and socially — than we have been in 120 years. The whole idea that ‘We’re all in this together’ is now out of fashion. We’d like to be connected, but we’re not.”
Certainly, self esteem and self care are critical for an individual’s well being. But we don’t have to see those things in opposition to community and other-care. As individuals, we are happiest and healthiest when we are connected to others who are invested in our happiness and health.
The good news in all of this is not only that growing awareness of these issues is spurring collective action (the UK, for example, now has a Minister of Loneliness). It’s how much power we each have to take steps to build better connections, and how much even small steps can pay off for individuals and for communities.
Social media, if used with intention, and as a means, not an end, can provide useful tools for maintaining our friendships. With what we know, and feel, about the impact of social media, we should be actively interrogating the nature and duration of time spent on any platform, asking ourselves at frequent intervals if this behavior grows and sustains communal feelings, or reinforces our bubbles of self.
Strong relationships are the best predictor of success and happiness. And strong relationships are built, they don’t just magically happen. We tend to think of our network as career infrastructure, to be deployed when we’re looking for a job or a contact. And it is — the vast majority of people get their jobs through “networking.” But if we start thinking of thoughtfully building our networks as a way of life, and as something connected to each aspect of our life — to our jobs, our friendships, our families, our recreation — those networks become the fabric of happier, healthier people and communities.
That’s the reason for starting this publication on Medium: To share ideas and insights on how to build better human connections.
