We are a social species. Unlike bears or cougars, we are built to spend our time in groups. Alone on the savannah, we would never have lasted long. For most of human history, we appear to have lived in tribes of seventy-five to 150 people. Those who could not handle the complexity of the relationships would go off on their own. Lions need to eat, after all.
Today we have created a world in which more than half of the population lives in urban areas (over 75 percent in the more developed countries7). One would think this would eradicate the unhappiness associated with isolation, but no. It turns out that we were not built to function best in groups of at least seventy-five to 150, but in groups between seventy-five and 150. There is a cost associated with being in bigger crowds.
For one thing, the complexity of the relationships becomes astronomical as numbers rise. In a group of three people, there are three relationships: A with B, A with C, and B with C. A group of four has six relationships: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD. By the time we get to one hundred there are 4,950 relationships—probably too many to keep track of completely, but still within the firing range of humanity’s remarkable social abilities. When we get to a city of just fifty thousand people, however, the total number of relationships is 1,249,975,000—over a billion—incomprehensible to any of us, no matter what our social skills might be. We have to start walling them off.
Not surprisingly, the urban environment is constructed precisely for this purpose. Modern housing developments often present a row of garages to the street, the houses hiding behind them as though sheltering from gunfire. Neighbors cannot see one another, let alone chat from their nonexistent front porches. Residential developments such as these are described with the modern marketing term for isolation: privacy. And indeed, they are private. The first hint that there may be problems next door is likely to be a fence-jumping odor of decaying flesh and some well-fed housecats.
So once again, we have a path to misery that has been cleared, paved, and widened by our culture. You need only choose the on-ramp and accelerate down the road. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam has documented the decline of social groups such as the Rotary Club, churches, and, yes, bowling leagues in Western societies—this at a time of coincident rises in the rates of depression. The temptation to draw a link is overwhelming.
In the years before satellite imagery, the government of British Columbia frequently employed college students to staff mountaintop forest-fire watchtowers through the summers. Much of their time would be spent alone. Now abandoned and crumbling, these towers still sit at the summit of many hiking trails. To many job-hunting students, this seemed like an ideal and somewhat undemanding task. Every year, however, many of them would have to be removed from their posts, desperately unhappy, having discovered that they simply were not cut out to be isolated from the tribe for such an extended period.
It may seem impractical to pursue a strategy of isolation, given that it might appear to require a lonely cabin in the woods or on a mountaintop. Nothing could be further from the truth. As we have discussed, the modern urban environment is built specifically to facilitate isolation. You don’t have to do anything at all in order to achieve your goal.
We have managed to create privacy to such an extent that it takes considerable effort for city-dwellers not to be isolated. Further, if they remain fixated directly on the goal of meeting people, they can accidentally join us on the path to misery. After all, how do you meet people? They can waltz down the street shaking hands with strangers, but this will only get them startled looks, not admiring friends. The direct approach fails more often than not.
Those wanting to build a larger social network must put the goal of meeting people on a shelf and ask themselves, “What else do I want in my life?” Then they must pursue those other interests in such a way that they have human contact as a side effect. They have to join clubs, take night-school classes, schedule outings, do volunteer work, play sports, and generally occupy a significant portion of their time plotting how to find, cultivate, and spend time with small subtribes within the urban crush. If they do not, many find that they can wander the streets of their neighborhoods for days and never run into anyone they know.
The world of the Internet, at first blush, seems designed to overcome isolation. The various social media platforms allow us to connect instantly with innumerable people all over the world. We can build an online tribe based on arcane interests shared by no one in our hometowns. And indeed, some of our yens for contact can be met in this way.
But if you think of the social diet as being composed of various vitamins, some of the most essential ones are missed in online connection—genuineness, nonverbal communication, face-to-face contact, and more. Sit alone in your basement discussing Russian prehistory or, perhaps more likely, killing other people’s war-game avatars or watching cat videos, and you will develop a misery-inducing deficiency quite quickly.
So build an island. Put up the fence, close the garage door, switch on the computer, and kid yourself that you have substituted in-the-flesh social contact with the pixelated kind. It is one of the most effective routes to unhappiness that exists.