Remember those first weeks, and then months, of Covid? Those were the days when I’d return home from the grocery store and wipe down my fruit like I was scrubbing stains out of the carpet, sit with friends in the backyard with elephant-sized spaces between us, and try to keep up with public health guidance as the science evolved. From a science communication standpoint, we missed such an opportunity to build literacy about science in society: as scientific understanding evolves, the guidance evolves. That is applied science at its best. But as we all know, many people clung to debates over masking or not masking, or changes in mask rules, or lost their minds in grocery stores and airplanes. Our mixed and contentious public response to Covid ended up serving as a proxy for the difficulty we have in the U.S. of balancing our self-interests with collective well-being.
But I digress.
Even as an introvert – my introvert result on the age-old Myers Briggs test is literally almost 100%– I felt the pangs of quiet and aloneness during that first Covid year. I killed the time and painted every wall in my house; the local ACE Hardware delivered during Covid, and it was often the same person who delivered the goods. Since I interacted with him more than anyone for at least a few months, we were best friends during that time, though I'm not sure HE knew that.
I also repainted many of the walls because the only things misty about the Misty paint color was its name and my mood after a few days of feeling like I lived on the inside of an aquarium. Paint chemists are like cruel magicians or masters of optical illusions; I do not understand how a one square foot trial of painted wall can look so dramatically different when the same color is on the entire wall. Years ago I owned a townhome and painted the kitchen. I went to bed with painted light brown walls. I woke up to light purple walls. Something about undertones, they tell me.
There has been too much time and money in my life lost to the pranks of paint color. And with Misty, not only did I waste time and money, but I was emotionally manipulated. Misty had silently talked me into self-betrayal. I KNEW I was a neutral color type of guy but I followed Misty anyway with their tantalizing undertones. And my best friend at ACE failed to tell me the warning signs when he mixed, packed up and delivered Misty. That is a violation of Best Friend 101: you TELL your best friend when they are in a bad relationship. This is why we don't talk anymore.
Those early Covid months and years led many of us to reflect about the role of social interaction and connection in our lives. The silence in my house was so acute, I could practically hear it. And it led many of us to experience a few feelings – ugh, feelings – that were both unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and rooted in the absence of social interaction.
And that gets to the focus for this post: social bonding and connection.
Consider some other examples where people used to be social:
To recap: more of us are sitting by ourselves, looking at our phones while broccoli rots in the refrigerator, maybe griping or thinking about wages, schools or maybe (wishfully) the needs of others while simultaneously not participating in organizations that address wages, schools and the needs of others.
Whatever you might think about unions, religion, parent-teacher groups, civic groups with a long history of older dudes at the helm, the point is this: many of the places where people traditionally interacted with other people, including people that might have different perspectives, world views and/or values, is down in just about every which way to measure it. And research says this (here comes a run-on sentence): when we socialize less and have less exposure to our communities, we feel isolated, we get lonely, and we are denied the experiences that help us understand others’ lives, their triumphs and their hardships, and this lack of social bonding leads to a lack of empathy and a tendency to get judgy. And, it accelerates cognitive decline in older adults. It is the classic image of the grumpy old man sitting on the porch yelling at kids to get off his lawn; he lacks a sense of connection to his community. And according to the research about cognition, we can continue than scene by him angrily standing up to go inside, and then forgetting why he got up to go inside, but it wasn't to go meet his Mahjong group.
In one of the rare examples of an oft-repeated social science research result that remains stable over time, the most consistent predictor of a happy life are good social relationships. Research has shown this again and again and again and yet again. In the world of social science, we expect the results of studies to change and evolve alongside society’s changes and evolutions, but this finding about social relationships and happiness is an outlier. What it took to be happy in the 1950s is the same stuff it takes today. Imagine that. The internet hasn't replaced people as the key to happiness. In fact, one Harvard study followed 700+ men for 75 years (!) and good relationships were the most important factor to their long-term happiness. Although, personally I find the most striking conclusion of this study is that men were willing to ADMIT that good relationships were important.
I can’t begin to describe how unusual it is for a social science question to be studied as much a this one about happiness and find the same results, decade after decade. We need good, close social relationships. The bland ones don't count, and of course neither do the toxic crappy ones. This is quality, not quantity. Good relationships. We know what they feel like.
I can feel my own brain scattered in this post so I’ll try to bring some things together. We need good friendships. That point has been driven home, I think. And we need to get out and join clubs and organizations, we need to volunteer, we need to put ourselves in community settings so we can not only build and maintain healthy social relationships, but to give ourselves exposure to the diversity of people in our community doing their best to live a good life (that’s right, I said it: DIVERSITY). Unions, civic clubs, places of worship, parent-teacher organizations and other entities all helped facilitate these interactions in the past. Not so much, today. We work more. More of us live alone. We fiddle around with screens in our faces for nearly a third of the day.
It almost feels cliché to say that the U.S. has become so divided. We all know it, see it, experience it and feel it. But “divided” is maybe too watered down to me. “Divided” can mean half the group wants plain cheese and the other half wants pepperoni, but we don’t despise each other over that difference like we see in our social and political divisions. Whatever we call it today, it lacks empathy. We draw lines between who thinks similar and who thinks different, and treat the former as friends and the latter as enemies. It is worrisome. It is existential. I don’t think it’s dramatic to say it’s slowly eroding an important part of the foundation of this country. It's become en vogue to act righteous and cruel to those who think or different, rather than humble and empathetic. It's hard for me to envision a country that prospers with such an undertone.
Maybe our “divided” problems have some roots in the slow and steady erosion of social bonding, increased loneliness, and fewer quality relationships. We have a lot to lose by our lack of closeness in relationships (continued civic decline and hostility), and a lot to gain (personal happiness, empathy) if we fix it.
I can feel a little bit of adrenaline surge while I write this post. I get fired up about how intolerant, and even mean, society feels sometimes. I feel the challenge of straddling the chasm between personal well-being and giving a sh** about something bigger than ourselves, like our communities and country feeling like we’re all in this together.
We have control over a lot of what influences happiness. Good relationships and social interaction are imperative, and it’s on all of us to build and maintain those relationships for ourselves: our happiness benefit from it and we become better people. What a deal! And maybe, as a hypothesis, is if we focus on rebuilding social interactions -- not just with our immediate friends, but our community more broadly -- we can persevere through this cruddy feeling period of time.