Alone, the So-Called New Normal
Humans Are Evolutionarily Designed to Be With Others
Before the pandemic, I often went to a co-operative workspace for a few hours every week just to get out of my house. Yes, it cost money, which was calculated by the number of days per week someone wants to occupy a temporary desk, but that seemed a small price to pay for colleagues when your occupation is basically a solitary one, such as a writer. The very idea behind a co-operative space is to not spend so much time alone. But I quickly noticed that I was shelling out hard-earned money to sit at a desk surrounded by people wearing headphones, and that the only real interpersonal interaction occurred around the twenty-five-cent peanut M&M dispenser.
Try as we may, many of us in Western culture are pretty much alone most of the time, and this was true even before the virus; quarantine just made it more so. According to the U.S. Census, about 13% all household were composed of one person in 1960. By 2014, that number had more than doubled. This trend can be explained, in part, by social changes. For example, men and women now delay marriage and they have fewer children; the American birth rate has dropped 10% since 2007 and is currently at its lowest level in history. Besides the low birth rate, older people are living longer, some as singles after a spouse has died, and there is an accepted cultural trend for young and middle-aged Americans to also live alone. The same is true in other Western countries. In Denmark, for example, 47% of the adults live solo and in and in large cities such as Paris, 50% of the household have only one person.
All this living alone seems to be embedded in a cultural acceptance for doing what one wants, free of the entanglements of spouses and children, or even roommates. This trend is at first glance positive and freeing. And yet, when many of us read these figures we feel sad. Some ancient voice deep within us says, “This isn’t right,” and indeed it isn’t. The scary part is that according to recent research, loneliness is actually making us sick and putting us at risk for death before our time. And that’s because we were never, ever designed to be creatures living or working all on our own.
Anthropologists assert that we lived in small kin-based bands for about 95% of human history, and or ancestors made a living by hunting and gathering. By definition, if you feed yourself by searching for animals and gathering plant matter you are probably living in a group simply out of nutritional necessity. Hunting can be done alone, of course, but much hunting is done co-operatively, especially when prey is large such as with giraffes and whales. When large animals are slain, it also takes a village to butcher, cure and eat the meat.
Gathering, too, involves working with a group to spot or remember sources of food, and a caring collective is needed to watch children during long foraging expeditions. For example, Hadza women of Tanzania gather in groups, occasionally accompanied by a man. Hadza men hunt alone or in pairs and bring back game and other coveted resources such as honey. Everything is shared, which cements social bonds.
Other types of human substance styles require a collective as well. Those who eat by working small garden plots or by tending rice terraces need others to plant, weed and harvest. These households also coordinate during times of flood or famine. Nomadic herders might travel from spot to spot in family groups so their animals can graze, but they often meet up for the necessary task of finding mates.
In all these subsistence activities, group affiliation is paramount. Human social organization, as they teach you in introductory anthropology courses, usually includes implicit or explicit categories such as bands, tribes, clans, kinship groups, and families. Notably, everyone knows with whom they belong. These organizational affiliations, or identities, are important for the running of the group as well as individual survival through sharing, companionship, and favors done and received. This kind of inter-dependent social system is reinforced in daily life during various rituals and even in games. Anthropologist Alma Gottlieb of the University of Illinois describes the falling dance/game, or what we might call The Trust Game, of Beng children of the Ivory Coast. “This game happens every day,” Gottlieb says. “About a dozen children gather, some as young as three years old, others teenagers. They all sing a song and then someone goes into the middle and when the song stops and the one in the middle falls. All the children in the circle extend their arms and move to catch that child before he or she lands on the ground.” Gottlieb points out that the Beng game always occurs in public and it is observed by everyone. The game is play, and loads of fun, but it also reinforces the idea that the group is in it together, and that they can count on each other now and in the future. More telling, Gottlieb tried the Trust Game with American college students with very different results. She instructed her students to form a tight circle and get ready to catch a classmate in the center. The exercise made the whole classroom nervous and the young woman in the center had to be coaxed to fall. Even when she was successfully caught, the student remained nervous. Such reliance on others is anathema to Westerners.
Some other cultures today favor the extended family as a place of connection and togetherness. These families often house unmarried relatives, newly single adults, and orphaned children. Sponsored by Child Trends, a nonprofit organization devoted to children, The World Family Map shows that extended families living together are common in Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, and sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, most people in the world do not live alone but in systems that foster groups rather than individuals. Humans, it seems, are most often group living creatures by necessity, inclination and choice. And such togetherness might just be part of our genetic heritage.
We belong to the mammalian order Primates which includes about 200 species, and unlike most mammals which are solitary, primates tend to be intensely social. Primates don’t just live in herds. Instead, they weave a web of inter-personal connections among kin and friends, make lasting alliances, and sometimes forming rank hierarchies where everyone knows their place within the group. Most important, every animal knows everyone else. Primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania and others have argued that primates, including monkeys and apes, initially evolved big brains because we needed to constantly keep track of who is doing what to whom. Robin Dunbar of Oxford University has even shown that among primates, group size and neocortex size are associated, meaning the more individuals to keep track of, the more brain cells.
But it’s about more than primates simply having a good mental address book. As primatologist Fran deWaal of Emory University, author of the best-selling Chimpanzee Politics, has observed, captive chimps are like political operatives, sussing out a social situation and altering their behavior accordingly. In one case, deWaal watched as a female chimp tried to make bigger and stronger males stop their fighting by taking the hand of one and making him touch the hand of his opponent.
DeWaal has also written about the roots of human empathy — the ability to feel what someone else is feeling. Such empathy, a trait that is essential for group living, is found in many animal species but it is especially highly tuned in primates. For example, DeWaal and colleague Andrew Whiten of St. Andrews University in Scotland have shown that chimpanzees need each other to puzzle solve. The researchers let chimps look at a box all day that automatically and repeatedly unlocked itself and popped out a treat. But no matter how many times they saw the box auto-unlock, the chimps were much better at working the box themselves when it was unlocked first by another chimp. They learned by their buddy’s example.
The need to be with others shows up all over the primate order. Chimpanzees hug another chimp in distress, macaque females run to the aid of another female being attacked by those higher up, male and female baboons form friendships that go beyond mating access, older mangabeys lead younger ones to food sources, and vervet monkeys’ alarm calls ring out across the savannah to warn others when a cheetah is near. Our common genetic heritage with these animals suggests that group living and inter-dependence is part of our evolutionary make-up.
Human evolutionary history, as recorded in the fossil record, is also full of people living together and depending on each other. In 1975 Don Johanson and his crew discovered a cache of fossil bones at Hadar in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. Called “The First Family,” paleoanthropologists have declared that the 3.2-million-year-old bones represent at least thirteen individuals of all ages and sexes of the same genus and species as Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis. No one can prove whether this group lived and died together or if they, by chance, ended up buried up in the same place at about the same time. Still, this is the first evidence that early humans were not solitary. Another pile of fossilized bones found in 2013 in a deep cave in South Africa represents at least fifteen individuals of a newly named species Homo naledi. These individuals are close enough to humans to share our genus and they sseem to have been placed in the cave on purpose, as if in a burial ground. Although the geological conditions of the cave make dating the fossils difficult, they appear to be one to two million years old.
Further along the fossil record early humans left a path of stone tools that suggest they were scavenging, hunting, and making tools as a group. Although these remains are not really evidence of a home base as we know it today, it does suggest that the makers of these tools gathered together for a task and that they may have been eating and sleeping together as well. Further along in our evolutionary history, humans were clearly making households for themselves and their relatives in caves, on cliffs, and on the savannah from at least 30,000 years ago. And by 10,000 years ago, our kind chose to grow crops and settle down permanently in villages and cities, opting for permanent households and neighbors rather than wondering about. They were, it seems, drawn to each other.
But now, we often make the opposite choice, especially in Western culture. Grow up, leave the family, get a job, and support yourself with the ultimate goal of not relying on anyone. Years down the line one might marry and have kids, but then end up an old person living alone again. In other words, we have culturally rolled out a path that reinforces a philosophy of independence and self-reliance but also often leaves us lonely. That culturally determined path, science now believes, is dangerous.
Last year, Nicole Valtorta and colleagues of the of the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, Heslington UK published a meta-analysis of twenty-three studies that focused on the connection between loneliness and coronary heart disease. Those studies amounted to over 35,000 cases, and collectively showed that being lonely increases the risk of heart disease by 29% and the risk of stroke by 32%. A similar type of study looked at the connection between loneliness and mortality. There, too, living alone resulted in about a 30% increase in mortality. Even scarier, that risk was highest among those under the age of 65.
Work by psychologists John Capitanio of the University of California, Davis, John Cacioppo, and Stephanie Cacioppo, both of the University of Chicago, and have focused on the neurology of loneliness from an evolutionary point of view. They point out that loneliness is subjective, and that what really matters is the mismatch between the social interaction one has and what a person might like to have. “Research in the past looked at structural measures of social networks, that is, the number of people a subject interacted with in a day,” Capitanio says, “But what really matters is how satisfied you are with that social network.”
In his work with male rhesus monkeys housed in large field cages, Capitanio was able to watch the males and label individuals as highly social, satisfied loners, and those who appeared to want more social interaction than they were getting by observing their behavior with others. Then, he introduced rhesus infants, by definition highly social and non-threatening creatures, to a super lonely male who had been temporarily put in a single cage. After some hesitation, the males were happy to have those baby companions and appropriately hugged and cared for them.
Stephanie Cacioppo has also shown that loneliness is more nuanced than we think, and how feelings of loneliness can be a reinforced by society. It turns out that truly lonely people who are unhappy about their lack of interaction are also more fearful of reaching out into society. They are deeply worried about being evaluated and rejected by others and so they stay home, alone and unhappy. These people are caught between wanting close connections, which the culture and their evolutionary voices tell them is the right thing, and the inability to actually make those connections.
But that doesn’t mean that everyone is a social butterfly. “There is pressure to go out and make friends in our culture,” comments Capitanio. “And being alone is seen as negative. But for some people it’s just fine. It’s really about the mismatch.” In his work with monkeys, in fact, Capitanio found that the highly social animals and the true loners look and behave in similar ways. Those who were solitary but making clear signals that they wanted more social interaction were the ones who needed help. People who sincerely want a social network might have trouble breaking the cycle of loneliness because they don’t have the means or opportunity to make new friends, or are just too scared to try. It’s also possible that many of us simply doesn’t know where we stand on the loneliness scale.
I write these words at my kitchen table, stuck here alone in my “home office” because of the virus. I am silently typing away, solitary in my work yet surrounded by a social network outside that for the moment I cannot join, even if I wanted to. This pandemic, with the growing frustration, anguish even, about not being able to gather in groups or eat with friends dramatically underscores the driving force of our innate social selves.
For now, all the comfort I have are the words of Bruce Springsteen blasting through my headphones:
I ain’t lookin’ for praise or pity.
I ain’t comin’ ‘round searchin’ for a crutch.
I just want someone to talk to.
And a little of that Human Touch.
Just a little of that Human Touch
