connected have so many people feeling as if they are all alone?
I started my research where I usually do, with a call to my grandmother. Ninety-six years old and still sharp as a tack, she’s a treasure-trove of common sense and wisdom. “I’ll tell you why y’all are all so lonely these days,” she drawled. “It’s on account of three things — air conditioning, television, and women drivers.”
I waited for her to explain what she meant, and with a sigh she said: “Back before air conditioning, it used to be just too darn hot to sit inside on a summer afternoon and evening, so we didn’t. We sat outside on our front porches with a big pitcher of sweet tea and visited with our neighbors. We knew the names of everyone living up and down our street, and there was always someone there if you needed them. It’s not that way anymore. It’s cool and comfortable in your homes, so you go inside and sit in the cold air. You’re bored or lonely because the people in your television talk to you and keep you company, so you never actually have to spend time with any real people at all.”
She thought for a moment and then said: “But what really did you in was women drivers. Once women started driving and folks got a second car, people started driving their kids all over the place. Used to be that kids played in the neighborhood or did sports at the school. Now y’all are driving them an hour each way for ballet or soccer or goodness knows what else, and patting yourselves on the back for being good mothers. It seems to me that you’ve traded having a life of your own for your kids’ being busy. That doesn’t seem like a very good trade to me.”
She was right, of course. She’s always right. It goes so much further than air conditioning, television, or women drivers (none of which are bad things, of course, and, actually, they’re all pretty good). Almost everything in modern life seems designed to keep us alone and lonely. How did it get this way?
After talking to Grandma, I started Googling. I kept running across the terms “Dunbar Number” and “Dunbar Theory” as explanations for what’s going on in our modern relationships. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has spent years studying human social interactions and has come to the conclusion that we all have a finite number of people we can fit into our social circles. For most people, that magic number is around 150. That’s everyone from your spouse and children, to your relatives, to that guy from high school that you keep up with on Facebook. It doesn’t matter how long your list of “Friends” is, you can’t maintain relationships with more than a total of 150-ish.
A hundred fifty people is a lot of people to keep up with, but it used to be much simpler. Most people lived in the same place for the whole of their lives. If they did happen to set off for somewhere new, they left their social network completely behind and constructed a new one for themselves wherever they happened to be. They became completely enmeshed in the fabric of their new community. The people they knew mostly knew one another, and friendships overlapped and wove around one another, creating a densely woven society. We don’t do that any longer.
These days, we are a much more mobile society, but we don’t really leave anyone behind. Instead, we maintain our social and emotional ties to people through social media and technology. Relationships that would have died natural deaths in the past now don’t ever have to end. We grow up and leave for college, taking with us all of the people we knew and loved throughout our childhoods. We gather a few more in college and elsewhere along the way. We keep adding people to our circle, but the number of relationships we can actually maintain never changes. Eventually, we end up somewhere and settle down with room for just a few spots left in our circle.
Even worse, our people don’t know one another. They may not even know of the others. Our relationships no longer interweave; they’re more like the random pattern of a shotgun blast. The kind of community that people were designed to live in no longer exists for most of us. There are all kinds of gaps between our relationships — and those are the cracks that we end up falling through.
That’s when we begin to notice how quiet our social lives have become, and how much we really want and need to have friends and people near us. We spend more time on the phone or on social media trying to connect or reconnect with the people we miss, and we bemoan the fact that we can’t find people “here.” All the while, we avoid getting to know our neighbors, calling back that guy from work, or joining any clubs or church groups. The thought of meeting all those new people is a lot to deal with, and we start saying things like, “I don’t have the time or energy for meeting people right now.” And we’re right. Our social abilities are strung out and filled by the people we have clung to for no reason other than that we knew them back in the day. Hanging on to those people we’ve known forever is a big part of the reason we all feel so alienated and alone today. Let them go, and set yourself free.
Then, once you’ve purged your friend list and cleared your social calendar, the search for your tribe can begin. But where? It has to start with knowing ourselves and who we are when all the layers are stripped away; not the person we pretend to be when we’re with other people, but the authentic self. A friend of mine once told me, “A good friend will let you into their life; a great friend will let you into your own.” Isn’t it time you found people like that?
Chapter 1
A Case for Friendship — Why Do We Even Need Friends?
“Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself …’”
— C. S. Lewis
I curled up with my nine-year-old son on the couch as he cried out the hurt he had suffered from his best friend’s decision to “unfriend” him. He sniffled and sobbed and wiped his runny nose on my sleeve. “Why do we even need friends?” he asked me. “What are they even for?” I struggled to explain the purpose of friendship to someone whose heart was so freshly broken and came up with a “mom speech” that was not quite right. The fact is, it was a good question, and one for which there was no easy answer.
After a lot of reading and research, and asking even more questions, I’ve learned that once upon a time friends and community were necessary for survival — there was no way for a guy to kill a mammoth with a stick unless he brought his buddies with him. We’ve evolved past hunting our food with sharp sticks, thank goodness, so what roles do our modern friendships fill? And, are they somehow necessary for our survival?
I asked my eldest daughter — conveniently, she’s a neuroscience student — for the scientific purpose of friendship, if there was one. She began by explaining that human beings are herd animals and therefore have an instinct to congregate in groups for safety. She explained the evolution of the brain with a lot of very big words that I wrote down to look up later. Now that I have, I’m still not sure I understand. What I did get out of that conversation, though, was that there seems to be a biological drive to create friendships. So, there must be a purpose behind them.
The need for people and community is hard-wired into our psyches. Studies of human brain activity show over and over that the presence of a close friend releases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin into our brains. Those are the “pleasure” hormones, the same ones that make us fall in love and keep us from killing our children (always a benefit!). We don’t merely get silly or goofy when our friends are around; we get high. Suddenly, my high school and college shenanigans make a lot more sense.
What I keep coming back to is the idea that we still need our friends and family for safety and survival, just maybe not the physical kind. Because of the internet and technology, it’s absolutely possible to work from home, shop from home, bank from home, and have everything we need to keep our bodies functioning delivered right to our front door. There are now services that will even bring your purchases inside your house, making it unnecessary to even step outside onto your front porch. We practically never have to interact in person with another human being ever again. As a result, many of us have become quasi-hermits. We huddle inside the home theaters in our McMansions, eat the dinner that was delivered, build ten-foot-high fences so we don’t even have to acknowledge that our neighbors exist, and text with our virtual friends all night long. (Heaven forbid we should actually call someone.)