The Power of Social Connection

In 2004, when researchers asked "How many confidants do you have?"

The most common response—made by twenty-five percent of the respondents—was none. One-quarter of these twenty-first-century Americans said they had no one at all with whom to talk openly and intimately.¹

con·fi·dant = a person with whom one shares a secret or private matter, trusting them not to repeat it to others

Also published in 2004, a joint study by the World Health Organization and researchers from

Harvard University found that almost ten percent of Americans suffer from depression or bipolar

disorder. They also found that binge eating and drinking are up, and that our children are medicated for depression and attention deficit disorder to an alarming degree.²

When UNICEF surveyed twenty-one wealthy nations, the United States came in second to last in

terms of the welfare of its children, with only the United Kingdom faring worse. The United States had the very worst record in terms of infant mortality rates, and second to worst in terms of exposure to violence and bullying, chaotic family structure, and troubled relationships with family and friends. Respondents to the survey from across the United States say that their families no longer have meals together. Children say that they don’t spend time talking to their parents, and that they generally don’t find their peers kind and helpful.³

For citizens of the twenty-first century, “the way things used to be”—being bound to your village,

marrying someone chosen by your family, and otherwise doing whatever your priest or your parents or your tribal elders tell you to—is not a life plan with much appeal. However, the dismal statistics above suggest that our society may have gone overboard in its emphasis on standing alone. We pay the price, not just in terms of our mental and physical health, but in terms of the strain on social cohesion and sustainable economic progress. The corollary to being “obligatorily gregarious” is being interdependent.

“Independence,” the biologist Lynn Margulis reminds us, “is a political, not a scientific term.”⁴

And yet independence is the rallying point for our culture. We have always prized vertical mobility

and accepted “horizontal mobility” as the cost of doing business—you go where the opportunities are. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, that swashbuckling independence could be better described as rootless-ness. Executive transfers had become a staple of even the most routine and regimented corporate lives, turning managers into a new species of migrant worker. The triumph of the interstate highway system, tract housing, strip development, and the automobile encouraged the creation of interchangeable landscapes, with entire “communities” mass-produced as marketable commodities. Sales people, consultants, and even academics like me became road warriors, racking up the frequent-flyer miles.

Reference:

1. M. McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and M. T. Brashears, "Social isolation in America: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades," American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 353–375.
   
2. WHO World Mental Health Survey Consortium, "Prevalence, severity, and unmet need for treatment ofmental disorders in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys," Journal of the American Medical Association 291 (2004): 2581–90.
   
3. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, An overview of child well being in rich countries, United Nations Children’s Fund, February 13, 2007.
   
4. L. Margulis and D. Sagan, What is life? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).