"Loneliness is a warning"
Humans evolved to live in groups, meaning loneliness is a kind of "evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong"
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I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently reading a new book called Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, from British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. It’s a great read, but one of the first arguments he makes in the book struck me so much that I keep thinking about it multiple times a day: “Loneliness is a warning signal”1.
The idea is that humans are essentially group animals. At another point Dunbar makes the point that in early human communities, having other people around would help you more easily find food to gather or animals to hunt. That need for a community is still a part of us. Here’s Dunbar:
Loneliness is actually an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong — a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated can be enough to disrupt your physiology, with adverse consequences for your immune system as well as your psychological well-being that, if unchecked, lead to a downward spiral and early death2.
Dunbar then goes on to review the research connecting loneliness to an array of health problems. And of course, countries such as the U.S. are experiencing a “loneliness epidemic.”
My suspicion is that loneliness is even more widespread than is immediately apparent. It’s hard to have frank conversations about loneliness, but whenever I manage to break through and discuss it I’m surprised to find people who share my own feeling that their social network is inadequate.
I’ve already written about one of the causes of this: Social changes during the Victorian period significantly narrowed the circle of people to whom you could show affection. A modern wage labor economy that pushes people to move constantly also doesn’t help, and a host of other factors — more people living alone, etc. — may also be parts of the equation.
In any case, Dunbar goes on to make some interesting points about the social networks everyone needs to thrive. For example, in his research on British and Belgian women, he found that network sizes “increased up to the age of about thirty, stabilized, and then began to decline again from the age of about sixty”3. This finding appears to confirm what most of us over 30 already know, which is that it’s really hard to make friends in your 30s4.
Women also apparently have deeper relationships with their closest friends than men:
Some people (mainly men) have only one special friendship at the center of their social universe, and some (mainly women) have two. So who is this extra person? In most cases they turned out to be what I had thought they might be — a Best Friend Forever. This is almost always someone of the same sex as you. It is, however, a phenomenon almost entirely confined to women, and rather alien to men. In a sample of intimate friends obtained by Anna Machin, 98 percent of women said they had a BFF, 85 percent of whom were female. Although 85 percent of men in the sample also named someone as a best friend (76 percent of whom were male) simply because we forced them to, these did not seem to be in the same league as women’s BFFs. A woman’s best friend is an intimate, someone to confide in and seek advice from; a man’s best friend is just someone to spend an evening in the pub with. It is a very different kind of friendship5.
That passage in particular struck a chord, and as I read that I couldn’t help remembering a time not long ago when our family was potentially at a kind of personal crossroads6. My wife mentioned that I might want to tell a friend about the situation, especially so I’d have someone to talk to if things went south. And while I’m probably now in the least lonely period of my adult life since college, I initially drew a blank when trying to think of someone I could divulge deep personal information to. I love my friends, I just wasn’t sure I felt comfortable burdening them7.
Dunbar goes on in the book to explain why humans tend to have networks of 150 relationships 8, but not all of these relationships function the same way. And I wanted to highlight one final point that Dunbar makes: Friendships are harder to maintain than family relationships.
Another respect in which family and friend relationships differ is that friendships are more costly to maintain than family relationships. Our women’s network data illustrate the general principle: people typically devoted more time to their close family than to their close friends, but they devoted much more time to their less close friends than to their less close family. Distant family relationships need only the occasional reminder to be kept ticking over, but friendships die fast if they are not maintained at the appropriate level of contact for any length of time9.
This is what Dunbar calls the “kinship premium.”
I don’t highlight this passage to suggest that everyone needs to center their social networks around families. As always, to each their own.
But it does appear that family is deeply coded into us humans as part of our literal or figurative villages. We evolved in a way that makes family part of the antidote to loneliness.
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Headlines to read this week:
You are not your job
“It was one of the first times I realised that what I'd been chasing—get the dream job, climb the ladder, and then ... something else—maybe wasn't what I wanted. That I'd started following the same well worn path that ambitious young men had followed before me, without actually asking "why?" It was what lead me to start working with a career coach, an investment in myself I've never regretted.”
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 18
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 19
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 39
It’s worth shouting out one of my favorite New York Times pieces ever here, which is aptly titled “Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?” I like this piece not just because it identifies a problem that seems widespread, but also because it pinpoints specific things that go into friendship: “As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other”
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 78
Sorry for the vagueness here, but the outcome of that crossroads is still TBD.
This reminds me of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Thong,” in which Larry David runs into Rob Reiner at his psychiatrist’s office. They briefly talk about why they’re there, to which David says, “what are you going to do, you can’t bother your friends with this stuff.” I agree with the comment, but ever since seeing this episode years ago have wondered if maybe what’s going on has to do with how we define friendship.
There’s an entire chapter in the book that reviews how Dunbar got to the 150-person number. The process involved looking at social media data, wedding invite lists, medieval villages, ancient stone circles, German camping sites and many other data points. Again and again, across time periods and cultures, that’s about how many people a person could have in their “village,” either literally or figuratively.
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition. Robin Dunbar. 2021. Page 45-46