On the surface, Mike has quite a full and happy life. In his late twenties, he’s working his way up at a mission-driven company, on a career path that will land him, eventually, in upper management. He’s also healthy, fit, and energetic, hitting the gym regularly and joining his buddies for a game of pickup basketball every few days. He’s no health nut, but he’s stopped partying regularly and has focused on nutrition—Paleo, to be precise. It made intuitive sense to discard those prepackaged power bars and processed staples he’d been snacking on, and to echo the eating patterns of his earliest ancestors.
And yet, all is not right in Mike’s world. Somehow, he feels unmoored, and he doesn’t quite know why. When he visits his parents, usually during Christmas vacation and maybe once during the summer, they ask how’s he doing, and he responds with a generic, “I’m good. Everything’s pretty good.” If his mom presses, he steers the conversation to his career, or a new piece of furniture he’s recently purchased for his apartment, or an upcoming trip. Now that he’s graduated college, he no longer sees his fraternity buddies as much, and instead routinely attends after-work mixers with his colleagues. They drink beer together and decompress, keeping the talk light and easy. Deep down, however, Mike longs for more intimacy in his life—a feeling he attributes to being single. Once he finds that “special someone,” maybe he’ll finally feel whole.
Many people today feel lonely or disconnected. Twice as many Americans are lonelier today than they were in 1980, and that trend shows every sign of increasing. In many cases, these feelings can lead to full-blown anxiety or depression, but others of us experience them as a subtler feeling of unease. Like Mike, we shrug it off, assuming that we’ll “work it out” over time. And yet, discontent about the quality and quantity of our relationships causes more harm than we realize by stressing our bodily systems. Having stronger social bonds can decrease your mortality risk by up to 50 percent, which makes strong social support and community integration just as important as smoking, drinking, obesity, and sedentary lifestyles in determining your overall health. According to former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “Loneliness is a growing health epidemic.”1
For cultural critics, the causes of our scourge of loneliness aren’t all that hard to identify. With the dominance of social media and impersonal communication like texting, our social connections have increasingly lost their capacity to nourish and ground us. We might boast a multitude of “friends” or “followers,” but we sustain fewer and fewer meaningful relationships. We spend time in others’ company, but all too often the quality of that time is corroded as we check our phones, trying to maintain many superficial social connections all at once. Factor in other elements of modern life, such as our tendency to move from place to place seeking opportunity, or the demanding pressures many of us experience at work, and it’s easy to find yourself in Mike’s predicament.
In line with my seasonal model, I’d like to suggest that critiques of the impact that social media and digital technology are having on our relationships are incomplete. Social media and digital connectedness have a role in our lives, just like natural sugar has a role in our diets. Problems arise when we limit ourselves to the kinds of relationships that social media and digital technology facilitate, failing to dedicate ourselves to other kinds of relationships as well. As with food, sleep, and movement, our relationship needs are not one-dimensional. We need different kinds of relationships in their proper balance. As I’ll argue in this chapter, we wind up lonely and disconnected when we fixate on what I’ll call “summer” socializing, neglecting the patterns of connecting associated with other seasons. The solution, as in the other three basic areas of human health, is to dislodge ourselves from endless summer and rediscover more symbolic seasonality in how we interact with others. Only then can we achieve optimal health.
It’s a cliché to observe that humans are social animals, but it’s absolutely true. In his famous teachings about the hierarchy of human needs, psychologist Abraham Maslow conceived of human needs as a pyramid, with our most basic, physiological requirements for food, water, shelter, sleep, and so on residing at the bottom. As we satisfy those requirements, we can address new sets of needs higher up on the pyramid, culminating in the satisfaction of our inborn yearning for creativity and personal growth. Critically, Maslow conceived of physical and psychological safety—the products of social rootedness—as vital needs that ranked just above our baseline requirements for food, water, shelter, and sleep. After fulfilling our underlying physiological needs to keep our bodies alive, we need to see to our connection with others. Otherwise, we don’t have a prayer of living happy, healthy, contented lives.
In the context of evolutionary history, our need for connection and rootedness is an old one. Absent our ability to socialize and cooperate for the greater good, large kangaroos or apes might be running the world right now, not us. During our hunter-gatherer days, individual humans were too fragile to survive on their own. We gave birth to completely helpless babies, who needed our round-the-clock care and attention. We were also terrible solitary predators, with dull teeth, poor eyesight, and insufficient physical strength and speed. Imagine a lone human duking it out on the plains with a lion—it wouldn’t have been pretty. We also couldn’t match the sensory prowess of most other predatory mammals, nor were we equipped to subsist on vegetation alone. As such, we found ourselves in a unique predicament: we needed to hunt and protect ourselves but lacked the raw physical capacity to do so. Poor humans. Luckily, what we lacked in physical ability we more than made up for in intelligence and the ability to cooperate.
Modern science doesn’t know all the particulars of how we became social and cooperative, but I’m compelled by Yuval Noah Harari, who in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind explores the theory that around seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution occurred in the human species.2 Unlike competing species like Neanderthals, we developed a unique and wonderful ability to collect knowledge and reapply it to practical problems. While it might have taken reptiles millions of years to learn to fly, humans would come to do it over a much shorter time period through the focused, transferrable application of knowledge. And well before the Wright brothers’ inaugural flights, the cognitive revolution gave us language, the ability to construct kinship and other social networks with one another, and the ability to create potential realities with our imaginations. Our cognitive abilities allowed us, for the first time, to create, share, and teach such things as technology, language, and hunting strategies within our small societies.3
After the cognitive revolution, we still lived in relative harmony with the land, nourishing ourselves with the plants we foraged and the animals we hunted, and enjoying meaningful connections with one another. This likely happened in a seasonally variable manner. In those ancient winters, our social worlds contracted. We invested in a few close, intimate connections, and not much else. Daylight was brief, rendering the world physically and psychologically spare. We wouldn’t have risked long voyages in this cold and dark seasonal extreme, remaining instead in close, confined spaces where we enjoyed rootedness and intimacy with our core connections, our most important people. Winter also provided a space for cultivating observation, self-awareness, and introspection, a chance to know ourselves better. In the company of others, but also in our personal solitude, we became better acquainted with our hopes, dreams, visions, and future plans.
When winter finally yielded to spring, the world broadened again, becoming more expansive, exciting, and inviting. We met more people, explored more ideas, and explored different types of relationships. As we moved from spring into summer, the number of connections we made with others continued to grow, while the quality of these connections tended to become more superficial. I don’t mean superficial in a negative way—I simply mean that many of our summertime connections were more like fleeting friendships or flings than lifelong connections or partnerships. Ancestral summer provided our hunter-gathering ancestors the opportunity to explore, migrate, and gather new ideas, as they also hunted extensively and gathered nature’s rich bounty. We ate copious amounts of nutritious and energy-dense foods, wondered what was over that next ridge, and then actually went to find out, bringing our new friends and acquaintances along to help. Both literally and symbolically, summer was about expansion, consumption, novelty seeking, and risk-taking. It was about working hard, gathering ideas and resources, and thinking ahead with others, as we stockpiled preserved foods for the coming winter and added some extra body fat to our frames (a portable form of long-term energy storage).
As the summer sun waned and fall returned, we gradually pared down our warm-weather acquaintances. We began sifting, distilling, and picking and choosing which relationships to keep of the dozens or hundreds we might have developed during the warm-weather months. Abandoning the energetic “friend frenzy” of summer might have been difficult, but it was also part of a restorative and self-balancing pattern of expansion and contraction. As pleasant and exciting as summer socializing was, winter’s quiet rootedness provided a healing time to reconnect with closer relationships, and to turn inward to ourselves. The winter home provided our ancestors with safety, belonging, rootedness, and inclusion, and an opportunity to reprioritize and reinvest in their dearest people and priorities.
Our movement toward agriculture, permanent settlement, and eventually industrialization and urbanization disrupted this natural, rhythmic quality, and it also led to more social disconnection generally. We broke ourselves off from the ebbs and flows of hunting and foraging; from seasonal and migratory food sources; from the seasonal swings in temperature and exposure to precipitation (through building permanent dwellings); from the natural consequences of our extractive attitudes toward natural resources; and from an awareness of our fates as inextricably linked to the environment we inhabit. Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse outlines what happens when shortsighted humans compete for and rapidly deplete limited resources in locations such as Easter Island.4 (Hint: it ends badly.) Our newfound imaginations led to a collective hubris, as we gradually came to believe that we were owed a biblical “dominion over the earth.” Having become the most destructive and dominating species on earth, no other animal could challenge this self-indulgent claim.
So began the Great Separation. Humans began seeing themselves as separate from the earth and other living things, rather than as part of a larger, integrated whole. We no longer felt reliant on the fertility, seasons, and natural fluxes of our environment, but instead exerted control and mastery over them. We stopped syncing our movements and patterns with the earth and began directing the natural order instead. For roughly fourteen thousand years, our transition to modern civilization cemented these trends, as we devised centralized and hierarchical administrations, political structures, property ownership, systems of knowledge, densely populated communities, and divisions of labor.
New forms of community arose in cities—we had neighborhoods, occupational guilds, local religious groups. But as a whole, urbanization led to a decline in the close bonds we had formerly enjoyed with members of our tribes, and hence a sense of social unmooring and anonymity. In our burgeoning cities, we tended to spend less time with close acquaintances, and more time among strangers. Families moved from rural, multigenerational homes into atomized urban housing where they enjoyed far less community support and solidarity. When your neighbors are strangers, you lose your sense of belonging there. Absent traditional community stability, parents strained themselves, working long, hard hours to feed and care for their families. Industrialized labor further disconnected us from one another as we became increasingly specialized and isolated, losing the sense of purpose that came from providing goods and services to people we actually knew or could see regularly in a marketplace. We became obsessed with growth, efficiency, and expansion, and the “progress” we achieved only served to perpetuate our loyalty to a system premised on fracturing our ancestral interconnectedness in order to achieve more progress. But at what price? We did more work to produce less-nourishing food, and had less free time to talk, make music, dance, be playful, or simply relax.5
Fast-forward to modern times, when we have become stuck on what I’ve identified as the “summer” forms of connecting. We seek out novelty and sensation via numerous shallow and unnourishing relationships, foreclosing on the opportunity for deeper attachments. Texts and social media posts might seem social, but they really aren’t. When we filter our psycho-emotional state through alphanumeric characters, we strip out the most nourishing components of human interaction. We remove human vulnerability and the subtleties of communication—nuanced social cues, gestures, touch—that can only occur in real time, with the unpredictable unfolding of complex human emotion and language. Human beings feel safe when others see us, with all our flaws, idiosyncrasies, and quirks, and love us with them all. Only the experience of being seen, known, and accepted can reduce the baseline stress that we feel and enable us to thrive. Maintaining a facade makes us feel fundamentally unsafe, since our relationships are predicated on a projected image, not an authentic expression of who we truly are. Conversely, authenticity and vulnerability, paradoxically, create opportunities for deep belonging and that critical psychological sense of safety.
Before complex language, our hominid ancestors communicated and connected largely through biological cues. They relied on facial expressions, eye contact, physical touch, hand gestures, and vocal intonation to understand one another, regulate their nervous systems, and establish safe, trusting relationships. Researchers call this experience coregulation, which occurs when one person’s nervous system interacts with and influences another’s, often outside the purview of conscious observation.6 In secure, loving, safe relationships, coregulation takes the form of gentle gestures, positive expressions, loving touch, and a relaxed or happy emotional state. In unsafe or insecure interactions or situations, the opposite is present: mistrust, fear, defensive postures, and a nervous system that’s always on guard. Coregulation is one of the most fundamental ways we as humans connect, beginning at birth with the mother-child relationship and continuing onward through our adult life and subsequent relationships and interactions.
When we become perpetually busy, distracted, and emotionally absent, as we are in the modern world, we lack the feeling of safety and belonging that comes with coregulation. We also miss out on those connective experiences when we immerse ourselves in a world of two-dimensional symbols on our digital devices. Without the opportunity to coregulate, the rich, meaningful connection we’re yearning for becomes little more than a hollow, transactional exchange of data, one you might just as easily sustain with a highly capable computer. The farther away we move from coregulation, the more likely we are to forget how to do it. In her book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle poignantly observes that we are being “silenced by our technologies,” and as a result are experiencing a “crisis of empathy.”7 Without attentive conversation, personal touch, and face-to-face interaction, we’re losing the ability to conjointly regulate our minds, bodies, and emotions, leaving us frayed at the edges and lonelier than ever.
The cultivation of closeness and intimacy requires an investment of time. Lacking that investment, we fall into relationships by default and convenience, like those we make with the barista at the corner coffee shop, or the people we see at work. These interactions are typically impersonal or fragile, as traditional corporate environments, for example, frame relationships as inherently competitive and hierarchical. Don’t get me wrong: some of these relationships can be gratifying. A barista might remember your favorite drink in the morning and provide you with a fleeting sense of community belonging. Digitally mediated forms of communication, like text messages, also have their place. They are a great way of transmitting data (“Did you get the eggs on the way home from work?” “What time should we get together?”). But they are ultimately an impoverished and sanitized form of communication. They enable us, like Mike, to don an “everything is wonderful” facade, and to avoid the complex loneliness and even emptiness at the center of our lives.
I speak here from painful experience. Right around the time that Facebook and Twitter took off, my own career took an unexpected turn. I’d spent almost a decade in clinical practice as a physical therapist and strength and conditioning specialist, and my nerdy interest in nutrition had spilled over into many of my personal and professional conversations. I started speaking and writing about nutrition and exercise, and, along with my former partner, began traveling the country teaching nutrition seminars to enthusiastic audiences interested in improving physical performance, nutrition, and overall health.
We worked hard to grow our online audience, publishing thousands of Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram posts, blog posts, and email newsletters. I answered hundreds of online questions and responded to innumerable skeptical inquiries and overt attacks from hostile or confused strangers. During those years, I flew hundreds of thousands of miles, attended dozens of professional conferences, met incredible, inspiring people, appeared on national television many times, and … was really, really lonely.
I had many friends, but with my busy travel schedule and the pressure to be “just so” in the public eye, I found it hard to be truly vulnerable about my fears, flaws, and failings. If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you that my social life was incredible. I talked to dozens of friends often, met lots of interesting, successful people, and, though my marriage was crumbling, I had convinced myself that my social needs were being met. After all, how could they not be? In retrospect, I spent much of those hectic years desperately filling any spare time I had with “connections” (often online), trying to distract myself from a creeping sadness and the unsettling feeling of not truly belonging anywhere. Success, money, and recognition didn’t make it better; if anything, that only increased the pressure I felt to project an image of health and happiness on my social media platforms and in my private conversations. I made the same mistakes that millions of modern, tech-savvy smartphone and internet users make every day: I confused the exchange of little snippets about my life with meaningful emotional connection.
After splitting up with my partner in 2014, I suffered depression, anxiety, and crushing loneliness, and was unclear about how to escape all of that. Once again, I distracted myself with business, traveling extensively, and learning compulsively. It took some deep soul-searching to recognize that I was, like so many others, emotionally isolated and deeply distressed. Despite writing and speaking about the perils of filtering our personal vulnerability, championing face-to-face interactions, and launching a program called More Social Less Media, I wasn’t really following my own advice. Although I wasn’t purposely deceiving my readers and followers, I was struggling with the same basic qualities of modern life as everyone else: chronic overstimulation, perpetual distraction, and social isolation. In other words, I lived a perpetual summer.
The problem isn’t with summer itself. On a metaphorical and also literal level, summer as I’ve described it is about exploration, novelty, stimulation, challenge, a focus on work, acquisition, success, and “doing.” The general sensation of “summer” includes the perception of scarcity (after all, winter is coming) despite the reality that, all around us, we see abundance, excess, and wastefulness. During the actual summer months, it’s healthy and normal to go exploring (road trips!), to meet new people (neighborhood parties and barbecues), and to stay up later than usual because the sun is still out. Our problems arise when we try to maintain summer patterns of social connection all the time.
In effect, we become addicted to the excitement and intoxication that comes with doing and moving as opposed to sitting still and reflecting; with making quick, superficial, and usually fleeting connections with others as opposed to deeply relating and investing over time. This addiction even has a neurochemical basis to it. Social media “likes” and comments as well as advertising and other elements of modern consumer culture can give us a quick and pleasurable hit of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Famous for its role in motivation, pleasure, focus, and emotional flexibility, dopamine leaves us feeling clearheaded, euphoric, energetic, powerful, and motivated. Who wouldn’t want to feel that way?
And yet, our drive to maximize these feelings leaves us unable to slow down and forge deeper connections with a few special people in our lives. With TV shows, advertisements, and pings from our smartphones endlessly seizing our attention, with traffic and media hypersexualization and noise and light pollution constantly stimulating us and delivering those dopamine hits, modern summertime drains our creativity, self-awareness, and ability to understand and empathize with others. We wind up overstimulated, overextended, isolated, and ultimately, quite lonely. It’s a painful comedown.
We also wind up consuming too much. I’m speaking broadly about our unbalanced, unconscious desire to buy, own, eat, and accumulate … everything. The stress of the summer bustle makes us want more sugar, salt, fat, calories, sex, emotional validation, attention, pleasure, and consumer goods of all sorts. Summer is about wanting and taking action to realize our desires, but with that comes fear—the fear of not attaining, or of losing what we have. Fear is a wonderfully effective motivator for consumer culture, and if you’ve watched the news or scrolled through your social media feed recently, you might have felt an unsettling sense of fear. The fear of being left out or socially rejected, the fear of not being “enough,” the fear of terrorists or economic collapse or disease epidemics, and the fear of somehow being inferior to people around us drives us to buy, lease, or borrow things we don’t need, want, or sometimes even like.
Perpetual summer nudges us into excess in other ways. We stay up too late scrolling through Instagram or watching TV, stealing much-needed sleep from our future selves. We spend money we don’t really have, opting in to an economic system that would leave us perpetually indebted. We spend time commuting to work, chauffeuring kids to and from extracurricular activities, doing yard work and housekeeping, going to happy hour and holiday parties, and still trying to get to the gym or go for a run so we don’t gain another ten pounds like we did last year. We’re burnt out and beat down, but we can’t stop. We dare not stop. Most of us are crazy-busy (crazy + busy?), with fewer leisure hours per day than many hunter-gatherers. Contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes such as the Bushmen of Namibia only spend four to five hours per day working, although it’s worth noting that for many of these tribal peoples, their “work” includes hunting, fishing, walking, gathering nuts and wild fruit, and setting up camp, activities that, ironically, many of us more “civilized” folks might do on vacation.8
All of this frenzied, summer-type behavior leaves us sick. Depression, anxiety, and other dysfunctions like insomnia, mood disorders, and dementia have steadily increased since the agricultural revolution, with industrialization, urbanization, and the ever-accelerating pace of life that followed all increasing the mismatch between the natural world in which our brains evolved and the post-agricultural world that we have created.9 Although such illnesses have no single, straightforward cause, we’ve spent over ten thousand years moving farther away from nature, inadvertently disconnecting ourselves from the earth, ourselves, other people, and a larger sense of purpose and meaning. It would be surprising if that didn’t negatively impact human experience.
Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker takes a brighter view of human history, arguing that the trajectory of humankind is, in fact, an upward one. As he’s demonstrated, we inhabit the most peaceful era we’ve ever had on this planet, with far fewer deaths, illnesses, and acts of senseless violence claiming innocent lives.10 But I wonder: What good is a long life if those lives are anxious, depressed, and lonely, and ultimately devoid of the deep meaning and purpose that comes from deep human connection? Aggregated data about large-and-ever-growing populations is little solace for those trying to understand or cope with the suffering that we individually experience.
As I’m suggesting, our crisis today isn’t just a lack of deeper connections with individuals thanks to our penchant for stimulation and frenzy, but rather a lack of rootedness and connectedness in all of its forms. The farther we move away from living in smaller family clans or tribal groups, the farther we move away from a daily connection to the rhythms of the natural world, and the farther we move away from being deeply and meaningfully connected to each other, the less healthy, peaceful, and happy we humans are. Most of us sense this—we know that we are unmoored in a very big, very fast-moving world. We feel very small and, sometimes, utterly invisible and insignificant. We wonder what it’s all for. We don’t feel like we’re contributing to anything that matters, and we lack a sense that someone “has our back” if things should go sideways.
In contrast to all the talk about social isolation’s health consequences, we don’t talk very much about how empty life can feel without a sense of contributing to a larger whole, whether that be extended family, a local community, or the better world we hope to leave for future generations. Working for a faceless corporation moving numbers around on a computer screen to make invisible shareholders richer doesn’t do much for our sense of contribution to something that truly matters. If that last sentence makes you bristle, that’s okay. I’ve bristled a lot at statements like this one over the years, but once I settled down, I saw the truth they contained. Simply making money for yourself or others won’t leave you feeling like you’ve contributed much that is meaningful, just as focusing much of your attention on superficial “friend” relationships on social media won’t leave you feeling seen and deeply loved.
Without a sense of contribution to something larger than yourself, you’ll doom yourself to an intangible hollow feeling, and a less enriching, less healthy life.
I’ve painted a grim picture of modern life and (dis)connection, ranging quite far in my discussion. Let me focus my commentary a bit by identifying four forms of disconnection that I’ve been touching on in one form or another. As I see it, no single form of disconnection outweighs any other, but taken together they prevent us from feeling rooted, happy, and at peace. It’s only when we understand how far off track we are that we can become unstuck from summer, and begin the process of reconnection.
Following adolescence, most people move away from the comforts of home to explore, create, and establish roots elsewhere. They might move physically from their hometowns, or they might make a psychological break, or both. Whatever happens, they leave their own established sense of self behind to learn, grow, explore, and build.
Such behavior is both physically and psychologically healthy during the spring and summer phases of our lives, which for most people occurs during our twenties and thirties (something I explore in chapter 8). After a childhood phase in which we practice, prepare, and dream, we need to get out in the world and busy ourselves with actually doing and accomplishing our summertime projects and goals. And yet, all this action and adventure can become dangerous if we take it too far. We can lose contact with our core self, to the point where we become terrified of spending time alone and feel as if we’re inherently “not enough.” The longer we stay away from our home, our selves, the deeper we dig ourselves into a hole of disorientation and oblivion.
Disconnected from ourselves, many of us turn to mainstream culture for opportunities to reconnect. In recent years, as social media has influenced the way we share with and signal to one another, we’ve seen catchy content telling us to set boundaries around work, take our “me time,” and make room for self-care and self-love. But when we finally end up scheduling that much-needed massage or taking a weekend away, the peace of mind we’re hoping to attain escapes us. We walk away, wondering, yet again, what’s missing.
While I certainly agree it’s essential to nurture, love, and accept oneself, emphasizing bubble baths and massages, the setting of boundaries or “self-acceptance” alone isn’t enough. Without complementing such activities with close observation of our very real, often unpleasant qualities, we miss the opportunity to connect with our whole selves. If we encounter an experience that challenges our positive but incomplete understanding of ourselves (divorce, major injury or illness, job loss, infidelity, eating disorders, mental health conditions), we struggle to integrate it within our larger sense of self.11 We then fragment into two people: the person we reveal “out there” in the world, and the person we are in the shadows of our own home and minds. Such compartmentalization leaves us feeling unseen, unheard, and unaccepted by both ourselves and others. After all, if we don’t show anyone who we really are, others can’t know, accept, and embrace our real selves, either.
In learning to connect to our true self, we find both pride in our strengths and humility in our weaknesses. We learn to meet our own emotional needs and lovingly accept our flaws while also gently encouraging ourselves to stretch and grow. Without this type of compassionate awareness, focusing more attention on ourselves is little more than self-absorption or narcissism. Knowing, accepting, and valuing ourselves is often misunderstood or overlooked, but it’s a critical component of who we bring into the world wherever we go, and a better world starts with each of us bringing forth the best versions of ourselves.
As technology and urbanization press forward into seemingly endless expansion, our sense of belonging in the world we inhabit continues to diminish. For most of human history, until the last 200 years or so, we lived closer to Mother Nature’s fury and bounty.12 We understood weather patterns and seasonal oscillations. We relied on the soil’s fertility and feared the raging seasonal storms. We let our feet dance naked over sun-warmed rocks and our ears bathe in the tranquil sounds of the forest. This kind of spiritual connection with our home—the dust from which we came and to which we’ll return after death—is what gives us a sense of belonging to somewhere much larger and more profound than our apartments, offices, or daily grinds. Without it, we are unmoored—isolated islands within a turbulent sea of uncertainty.
Most of us recognize this need for rootedness—to have a place where we’re “from” and the significance that comes with it—which is why we visit the same coffee shops, take the same route to work every day, and see the same friends every Friday night. Familiarity is calming and belonging signifies safety. Without either, the thrill of novelty quickly turns to alarm. But in a world of concrete jungles, electronic screens, and glittering drive-throughs, we’ve neglected and disconnected from the physical soil underneath our feet. This soil is the foundation for the homes we inhabit, the food that nourishes our bodies, and a soft, welcoming beacon for our concrete- and asphalt-weary bodies. Instead of physically grounding ourselves in natural environments, we look longingly at photoshopped pictures on the internet and fantasize about white sandy beaches and quiet mountain retreats. All of us, even those living in siren-laden cities—who proudly declare that we thrive on the noise and hustle and bustle of the city—feel deep within our bones that something is missing: the feeling of attachment, belonging, and kinship to more than just our iPhones and Facebook friends.
Despite the influence of our neglected geography, the most neglected form of connection in the modern world is likely that which we should be sharing with other human beings around us. Though we evolved in small tribal bands, ranging from a few dozen to a couple hundred people, we now routinely interact with hundreds or even thousands of people through digital technologies and online platforms. In ancient and modern tribal groups, both privacy and loneliness were in short supply, given the physical proximity required to successfully hunt, forage, migrate, and rear children—not to mention play, dance, sing, or otherwise socialize. We knew our fellow tribesmen intimately and they saw us in our entirety as well. Whether we liked it or not, we couldn’t hide our quirks or flaws. We were seen and truly known, even if we would rather have it be different. Wearing a mask of sorts is now the online norm, and we might not even notice that we are doing it. Have you ever noticed a contrast between how dear friends or family members present themselves online versus how you know them to be? Yeah, me too. So much for the psychological safety in being deeply known and accepted.
Such tribal intimacy is no longer possible, as an inverse relationship exists between the emotional energy you can invest in any specific person and the number of people with whom you can actively maintain meaningful social relationships. In 1992 British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that humans can only maintain between 100 and 200 stable social relationships. He anchored this proposal in evolutionary biology and anthropology, correlating the size of the brain with the size of social groups among various primate species.13 According to his math, humans topped out at around 150 connections that their brains could actively manage and maintain. As he then discovered, ancient villages and tribes naturally gravitated to around 150 people—after reaching that threshold, most societal groups tended to splinter off. This means that many of your 500 or 1,000 Facebook friends lie somewhere outside the neurologically limited circle of people that you can functionally maintain relationships with.14 And if you happen to have several thousand LinkedIn contacts or Facebook friends, you probably enjoy a meaningful connection with only a small minority of them.
But let’s not fixate on the actual number. I raise Dunbar’s research to highlight an underlying principle of human social connection: we have a finite ability to connect with other people, and as I’ve suggested, most of us choose summer’s quantity over the quality of relationships. We choose the titillation of summer’s beach parties over the quiet comfort of winter’s hygge (pronounced hoo-gah), a Danish word that loosely expresses the intimate, comfortable, cozy feeling of being present and connected, an ineffable sense of security, familiarity, reassurance, and contentedness. Ironically, as we push farther ahead into our lives of chronic summer, we crave hygge even more, but we’re not quite sure what to do about it, since it appears nowhere to be found.
As I’ve noted, stripping down our deep and complex experiences to alphanumeric characters (plus emojis) on an LCD screen dramatically reduces important aspects of human communication. In terms of understanding another person, you don’t get the (whole) story through text. The consequences can prove tragic. One fall evening in 2011 Sharon Seline texted back and forth with her daughter, inquiring about how she was doing at college. The daughter responded with upbeat emojis and glowing statements, just as she had broadcast on social media. And yet, that night, the daughter attempted suicide. Talk about hiding behind technology. As communications consultant Susan Tardanico wrote, commenting on this sad story in Forbes magazine, “Awash in technology, anyone can hide behind the text, the email, the Facebook post or the tweet, projecting any image they want and creating an illusion of their choosing. They can be whoever they want to be. And without the ability to receive nonverbal cues, their audiences are none the wiser.”15 Hiding behind our screens, we can tell whatever story we want, to ourselves and others, leaving us lonely, misunderstood, and lacking a sense of deep belonging within the interdependent, supportive web of human life.
Although the spheres of connection I’ve addressed so far are not strictly hierarchical, they do build upon one another, culminating in a sense of wholeness and satisfaction in one’s life. For most of his career, Maslow labeled this culmination “self-actualization,” though adopted a more inclusive and expansive take during his final years, labeling the pinnacle of human expression “self-transcendence.”16 Such a reorientation underscored how our greatest sense of meaning is less focused on the self, and more on our feeling of having contributed to something outside of ourselves. The final and perhaps most transcendent form of connection—so vital and integral to our well-being—is to our sense of purpose. Most people living in the developed West tend to take a hedonistic view of happiness, regarding happiness as the maximization of pleasure. However, research increasingly shows that those who instead define happiness to include purpose and contribution enjoy better health and well-being outcomes.17 Unfortunately, the hyperstimulating and hyper-stressing environments we inhabit cater to a never-ending pleasure quest as we seek unsuccessfully to outrun our fears, pains, and boredom by looking for quick hits of happiness everywhere we can. We, in the West, are a people of inflated expectations and, as a result, chronic disappointments. With those disappointments come a host of physical and mental symptoms that leave us feeling flat, flaccid, and in search of an elusive but still desirable panacea.18 Nothing is ever enough. As long as we malign or ignore our deep personal purpose in favor of a list of lusts and a house in the Hamptons, indeed, nothing will ever be enough.
The Okinawans—well known for their exceptional longevity—use the Japanese word ikigai to refer to their purpose and meaning. Ikigai means “life worth living,” and points to a belief in, and the value of contributing to, a larger purpose in life.19 Once we frame life as something more than the perpetual pursuit of pleasure, we can notice that the endless chasing is unsustainable and that pleasure alone is unable to fill the void as we imagine it will. That was never pleasure’s job in the first place. Think of the happiness/purpose contrast in the same way you think about the sugar/nutrient-dense foods dichotomy. Sugar and nutrient-poor processed foods are neither immoral nor by definition problematic, but it’s easy to let our pleasurable responses to them displace a diet rich in real, vibrant, nourishing foods. Just as we should prioritize nourishing food, so, too, should we avoid letting our response to pleasure outweigh the sometimes difficult but clearly beneficial and even profound experiences of a meaningful existence such as generosity, contribution, and legacy.
After considering all the ways that we’ve become disconnected, hopefully this chapter hasn’t left you feeling depressed about your personal future or the world in general. There are a lifetime of opportunities available for recalibrating our ways of moving through the world—places to slow down, pause, and reconnect with ourselves, important locations, other humans, and a greater sense of purpose. Even if you’ve operated in a summer mode of endless expansion for years or even decades, it isn’t too late to start redirecting, decelerating, and embarking on a more fall-style set of behaviors (see chapters 7 and 8). In reworking our way of living, we can rediscover belonging, safety, comfort, and meaning. We can change course, not only with the ways that we connect, but also with the ways that we eat, sleep, and move. We can integrate these dynamic and enriching parts into a larger whole, a coherent system for living that is both solid and flexible, both impactful and intuitive.
Have you ever stopped and wondered about the expression “let’s keep in touch”? We say it all the time, but it rarely involves any actual touch. Usually, it’s an expression that initiates a period of zero physical contact. “Let’s keep in touch,” you say to a close friend who’s about to move, or to a new acquaintance you’ve just met. This used to mean, “Let’s contact one another via telephone or handwritten letter.” Nowadays, it entails following or friending someone on social media.
During my decade of perpetual summer living, which roughly corresponded to my midtwenties through my midthirties, I kept in touch with a lot of people. I relished all my spring- and summer-style friendships, using text message and social media to receive data about my “friends’ ” lives. Then I started reading Brené Brown, a leading authority on courage, authenticity, and vulnerability. “Owning our story can be hard,” says Brown, “but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.… Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”20 For all my friends and acquaintances, I came to realize that no one really knew me, as I’d been running and avoiding my own messy darkness for so long. I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with my parents. I had friends, and some wonderful, amazing people in my life. But like Mike in the story that began this chapter, I had carefully constructed the narrative about myself that I wanted everyone to see—leaving out the uglier and messier parts.
Following this gradual realization, I took some small risks and gradually began to peel away some of the emotional armor protecting me. This happened via a return to personal, social rhythmicity, as I began a fall-like process of contraction and distillation, selecting which friendships I wanted to maintain, and which ones I could gently let go of. I then visited those most important people face-to-face or brought them to visit me. And, in the presence of people I trusted, I began revealing more intimate parts of myself.
During my midthirties, I contemplated a career change and talked openly with a few select friends about my fears of failure. It was terrifying at first, because like everyone who decides to bare their tender, deeper selves I feared abandonment and rejection. These conversations also felt awkward and contrived initially—like the feeling you get when you’ve not been to the gym for a long time. “This is supposed to be good for me,” you think, gazing around, feeling intimidated by all the equipment, with the regular gym-goers’ ease further highlighting your own sense of insecurity.
Nonetheless, I pushed through the discomfort and decided to invest more deeply in a handful of meaningful connections. And I made some people uncomfortable. “Why are you telling me this?” some people asked when I divulged personal information about myself. They weren’t trying to be mean. They were simply as unpracticed at vulnerability as I was, and my efforts struck them as confronting and unsettling.
Now, at forty, I’m still learning how to prioritize and honor those closest connections amid the more spring and summer types of connections in my life. It’s an ongoing process. Sometimes it manifests in my decision to decline to attend yet another big social event and say, “No, thank you,” opting instead to reinvite a close circle of friends I’d recently had over to sit around the fireplace and pick up the conversation that we didn’t get to finish last time. Other times, it’s a decision to decline a conference in the middle of winter and stay home with my loved ones. The more I move toward self-reflection and lean into my own symbolic fall, the more inspired I am to move even farther in the direction of home, intimacy, and rootedness, and the better I feel. It feels like being exactly where I’m supposed to be for the first time in my life.
Perhaps my experience, or that of Mike, resonates with you. Whether it does or not, the best way to get in sync socially is to start noticing your behaviors. Take a moment and reflect: Do you feel like you have a tribe? Do you feel profound, deep belonging with a close circle of people who know your deepest secrets, fears, and dreams? If not, is this because you haven’t revealed these personal details to others, or because you don’t know them yourself?
To know ourselves, we must know our history. In other words, prior to introspection, I recommend retrospection. Examine your childhood experiences and past romantic relationships. What tendencies do you notice? What are your strengths when interacting with others? Where do you tend to go off-track? If you suffer from anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), or any number of similar experiences that impinge on your mental health, and you haven’t sought help, do it now. Find a therapist. Start moving toward a healthier, happier you. And go easy on yourself. It’s a common experience not to know yourself, given how distracting the outside world is. It’s also common to have lived in a chronic summer social mode for a long time, neglecting self-knowledge and intimacy with others. Almost all of us are off-track here, and we would all benefit from reclaiming this part of our lives.
Whether you start meditating, begin journaling, seek counseling, or do something vulnerable and begin to share deeper parts of yourself with a group of intimate people (or anchors; see chapter 6), you’ll inevitably slow down. You’ll do fewer things. Or to put it in the terms of my seasonal model, you’ll move away from summer kinds of behaviors and approach a fall or winter mode. Getting out of summer—no matter what the actual season is—and slowing down is the only way you’ll ever acquire self-knowledge and then develop and prioritize meaningful connections with others. So, if you are ready, reinvest in your closest relationships, say yes to fewer big social engagements, and make a much deeper, personal investment in yourself.
But you need not stay in winter mode forever, either. Tuning yourself to seasonal change and rhythmicity is vital. You need balance, variety, and differing perspectives, and seasonality provides these elements. In chapters 7 and 8, I go into extended detail about how to strike that balance. But first, as we’ll explore in the next chapter, there’s a bit of a catch.
One of the great paradoxes of human life and of the physical world is that oscillation itself must be rooted in a fixed point, in a place of permanence. Though oscillations ought to govern our eating, exercise, and sociability patterns, there remain core pillars of our existence—also related to nutrition, movement, sleep, and connection—that must remain unchanged throughout our lives. These core foods, sleep habits, everyday movement patterns, and relationships nourish and anchor us, serving as beacons and safe harbors, grounding and protecting us amid life’s turbulence and tumult, and putting us in a position to accommodate the seasonal changes we so desperately need to live life to the fullest.