We Weren’t Meant to Be Alone All the Time
Some days I go to a co-operative workspace for a few hours just to get out of my house. Yes, it costs money, which is calculated by the number of days a week one wants to occupy a temporary desk, but that seems a small price to pay for colleagues when your occupation is a solitary one, such as a writer.
The idea behind cooperative open works spaces is not to spend so much time alone. But lately, I’ve noticed that I am spending good money to sit at a desk surrounded by people wearing headphones and that the only real interpersonal interaction occurs around the 25-cent peanut M&M dispenser.
Try as we may, many of us in Western culture are pretty much alone most of the time. 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 designed to be creatures living or working all on our own.
How we live day to day is the first indicator of the depth of our aloneness, particularly in Western culture. According to the U.S. Census, about 13% all households were composed of one person in 1960 but 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 live alone. The same is true in other Western countries. In Denmark, for example, 47% of the adults live alone and in and in large cities such as Paris, 50% of households 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. For many, this trend is, at first glance, positive and freeing. And, yet, when we read these figures, many of us are sad, and some ancient voice deep inside says, “This isn’t right,” and indeed it isn’t.
Anthropologists claim that for about 95% of human history we lived in small kin-based bands and 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. Ethnographic descriptions of hunter-and-gatherers today explain the belief system that fuels that kind of lifestyle. Hunting can be done alone, of course, but much hunting is done co-operatively, especially when prey is large such as giraffes and whales. When large animals are slain, it also takes a village to cure the meat. Gathering, too, involves working with a group to spot or remember sources and a collective to watch children on a long foraging expedition. For example, Hadza women of Tanzania gather in groups although sometimes a man is with them. Hadza men hunt alone or in pairs and they not only bring in game but also honey. Food sharing is common and required which cements their social bonds. In the same way, those who eat by working small garden plots or rice terraces also rely on a collective to plant or harvest and these groups coordinate households 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 and 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. In some cultures, extended family is a place of connection and togetherness. These families often house unmarried relatives, newly single adults, and orphaned children. The World Family Map, sponsored by Child Trends, a nonprofit organization devoted to children, 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 interpersonal connections among kin and friends. They make lasting alliances, form rank hierarchies, and of course, this means everybody has to know everyone else. More interesting, primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania and others have argued that primates, including monkeys and apes, evolved big brains because we need 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.
This need for being 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 leade younger ones to food sources, vervet alarm calls ring out across the savannah when a cheetah is near. Our common genetic heritage with these animals suggests that group living, and inter-dependence, are 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. For example, in 1975 Don Johanson and 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 13 individuals of all ages and sexes of the same genus and species as Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis. No one can prove that this group lived and died together or if they, by chance, ended up buried in the same place at about the same time, but 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 15 individuals of a newly named species Homo naledi. These individuals are close enough to humans to share our genus and they seem to have been placed in the cave on purpose, as if it was 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 evidence of a home base as we know it today, it does suggest that the makers of these tools gathered together at a task and that they may have been eating and sleeping together as well. We also know from various sites that at least 30,000 years ago, humans were making households for themselves and their relatives in caves, on cliffs, and on the savannah. And by 10,000 years ago our kind chose to grow crops and settle down permanently in in villages and cities, choosing to have permanent households and neighbors. They were, it seems drawn to each other.
But now, we seem to be making the opposite choice in some places. Grow up, leave the family, get a job, and support yourself with the goal of not relying on anyone. And then years down the line you might marry and have kids, but you’ll probably end up an old person living alone again. 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 believe, is also 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 had focused on the connection between loneliness and coronary heart disease. Those studies amounted to over 35,000 cases, and collectively they show 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 and there, too, living alone resulted in about a 30% increase in mortality. And 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 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 super lonely males who had been temporarily put in single cages. After some hesitation, the males were happy to have those baby companions and appropriately hugged and cared for them.
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, Capitanio found that the highly social animals and the true loners looked and behaved in similar ways. But those who were solitary but also making clear signals that they wanted more social interaction were the ones who needed the help. For people who sincerely want a social network, they might have trouble breaking the cycle of loneliness because they don’t have the means or opportunity to make new friends, or they 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 cooperative workspace, silently typing away like everyone else, solitary in my work yet surrounded by a social network that can go to lunch with me if I ask, knowing that I probably won’t. And through my headphones that block out any overhead conversation I hear Bruce Springsteen sing:
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
Also on Medium: https://ms32-23594.medium.com/the-loneliest-primate-c60c305bb750