Time, Connection, and Mattering
ARISTOTLE FAMOUSLY REFERRED TO HUMANS AS “SOCIAL animals,” yet this portrayal mischaracterizes humans as naturally social rather than social because they recognize the need to expend effort engaging with others. As noted throughout this book, extensive research confirms that our capacity to humanize—to consider other minds—is finite because we each have finite cognitive resources. As humans, we need time to draw on and deploy these resources in effective ways.
Humanization requires time, and this poses a problem because many of us increasingly experience what organizational behavior scholar Leslie Perlow calls a “time famine.”1 In fact, every rehumanization solution I have offered, including the basic process of humanization itself (i.e., considering others’ minds), requires time. To rehumanize the workplace, individuals must develop new, cognitively demanding skills like sociability and variability. (Remember the suggestion to balance skill development with dedicated time for disengagement from work). To rehumanize our interactions with technology, we must learn how to collaborate with machines and divide labor effectively. To rehumanize relationships with enemies and competitors, we must not only find common ground through shared goals, shared enemies, or shared identity but also establish common ground around power asymmetries. And rehumanizing relationships with close friends and romantic partners requires the most work of all: disentangling our own humanity from theirs, despite our feelings of self-other overlap.
Given that these strategies tend to require effort suggests the need for a dramatic societal-level mind-set shift, one that values time above all else. You would think that the automation age would make finding time and choosing time easier than ever before. Beyond the prospect of technology taking over our work, technology’s ability to fast-track tasks from purchasing theater tickets to conducting bank transactions should give us a time surplus rather than a dearth of it. Yet, as I suggest in chapter 6, given our penchant for busy-ness, the experience of free time makes us uncomfortable and we return to the activities that society has deemed fundamentally purposeful, namely work.
In considering the importance of pursuing time, what is most critical is that we not fear that time will deprive us of purpose or meaning. If used in the service of humanizing others, time can create perhaps the greatest source of psychological well-being and good health: social connection.
Throughout this book, I have described the power of humans to generate meaning and morality and to inspire and motivate, yet I have saved the greatest power for last. It is humans’ capacity, through forming social relationships, to literally reduce mortality. Evidence for the life-extending power of social relationships comes from several sources, but the clearest data come from a meta-analysis conducted by psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues in 2010.2 This meta-analysis of 148 studies including over 148,000 participants assessed the links between social relationships and physical health and found that people reporting stronger social relationships have a 50 percent greater chance of survival than people who report weak relationships. The effect of social relationships on mortality in this analysis was stronger than the effects of quitting smoking, abstaining from alcohol, getting a flu vaccine, or engaging in physical exercise. Holt-Lunstad and colleagues confirmed these findings with a follow-up meta-analysis in 2015 of studies on social isolation and mortality.3
Holt-Lunstad’s findings echo a similar paradigm-changing 1988 study demonstrating that social isolation poses a health risk on par with smoking, obesity, or high blood pressure.4 Work conducted by my mentor John Cacioppo and summarized with William Patrick in their book Loneliness similarly documents countless negative health effects of simply feeling alone.5 Social connection, on the other hand, counteracts these negative effects.
What is the mechanism by which human relationships affect physical health? Research suggests several, but the most well-established explanation is that they do so through affecting our mental health. Social relationships are a major determinant of happiness,6 and according to Cacioppo and Patrick, they also reduce stress, the primary source of cortisol release that impairs our immune functioning. We can probe this issue even further, however, to ask, well, why do social relationships increase happiness and reduce stress?
Based on my years of thinking about this topic, the best answer I have come up with is that social relationships make us feel like we matter, and mattering is the essence of feeling human. When people devote time to understanding and acknowledging our feelings, our fears, our desires, and our points of view, we feel a sense of purpose, and we feel seen—no longer invisible. Indeed, the reason why social isolation seems to drive extreme behaviors ranging from terrorism to drug addiction, as research suggests, is because people are seeking alternate sources of happiness, purpose, and connection to something larger than themselves.7 Research also shows that when people experience ostracism and exclusion, they feel less than fully human.8
The formula, then, for shifting toward the more person-oriented society described by Martin Luther King Jr. is that we need to find time, which enables social connection and feeds the sense that we matter. My concern is that time, connection, and mattering are in short supply, but this book seeks to suggest ways we can replenish these resources to rehumanize the world around us.
If nothing more, I hope to have made three things clear. Our tendency to see other people in their full humanity is declining. Seeing human is psychologically important. And rehumanizing the world around us is possible. As I want to make clear here, rehumanization is hard, and I only hope we expend the effort to reverse dehumanization’s course.
This concluding and somewhat dissatisfying note recalls the earliest memory of my life when I was four years old in preschool. During some unstructured playtime, the lot of us twenty kids had gotten unruly, and my dear teacher Ms. Cecil, seeking to bring us to order, shouted, “Children, stop what you’re doing, you’re all behaving like a bunch of animals.” Some unexplored confidence inside me drove me to respond, “Well, humans are animals.”
My classmates all went silent, shocked I had talked back to the teacher. Cutting through the hushed room, Ms. Cecil asked me defiantly, “Are you an animal?” Although wishing to continue the argument on scientific grounds, the terror of Ms. Cecil singling me out led me to respond meekly, “No.” Class activity resumed as we formed a semicircle around the front of the room for story time. However, my response still troubles me to this day because the “correct” answer to Ms. Cecil’s question seems to reside between yes and no.
I wish I could say that this experience led me to my current scholarly pursuit of studying what it means to be human, but the truth is that it led me to a more mundane insight: seeing human is a flexible process. This means the choice is up to us. We can create time to expend the mental energy necessary to see others in their full humanity, or let the current fragmented moment pull us apart as isolated bodies, united only as members of a common animal species.