Commusings: Loneliness and Social Fitness by Jeff Krasno

Or, listen on Spotify

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Dear Commune Community,

I often say that disease is an expected result of our adaptive mechanisms trying to cope with our lifestyle. In short, our culture has hijacked our evolution. 

I like to underscore this notion by leveraging my great-great-great-great-great grandfather (times 600) who lived as a hunter-gatherer in 10,321 BC in the area of East Africa that we now call Kenya. 

His name was Ffej Onsark – which is, somewhat unimaginatively, my name spelled backward. 

Ffej’s lifestyle and ecosystem mirrored those of hundreds of generations. And across vast swaths of time, human biology evolved in relation to its environment.  

Ffej and I share virtually the same exact biology. Give Ffej a shave and a button-down and he could walk down 5th Avenue without turning a head. However, the cultural conditions in which we live could not be more different. And this tension is leading to the evolutionary mismatches that are dogging us and making us sick.  

There are many examples of how culture has rendered the adaptive maladaptive. Today, I explore the modern cultural artifact of loneliness, its knock-on impacts and introduce the concept of social fitness as a means to combat social isolation.

Here at [email protected] and swinging from the branches of IG @jeffkrasno. 

In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

Loneliness & Social Fitness

Watch a version of this musings on YouTube or listen on the podcast.

 

Let’s begin by traveling back 12,000 years or so and visit the conditions in which our ancestors evolved. 

It was a nightly ritual for Ffej and his tribe to gather around a crackling fire as the sun dipped and the air cooled. On most days, resources could be gathered across 4-6 hours which left time to gather, eat and share stories of the day. Communal life provided camaraderie but it was also essential for survival. 

Some members of the group kept watch at night to protect fellow tribesmen from predators. Other members hunted and foraged for game, plants, fruits, roots, tubers and seeds for the clan. Tribes moved around together as resources in one area became picked over. This led to collective “family planning” as tribe size needed to be kept small and stable. Mothers breastfed their babies for extended periods of time for myriad reasons. Breast milk served as “free” food and under ancestral conditions of hunting, gathering, and high infant mortality, infant survival depended on the immunological, hormonal and nutritional factors found in maternal breast milk. Prolonged breastfeeding also served as a means of natural contraception as the practice decreased female fertility. This contributed to a stable population over tens of thousands of years.  

Communal child rearing was commonplace. The babies of homo sapiens are unique in their sustained and unqualified reliance on their caretakers. Compare this dependence with other animals. Most normal foals, for example, will stand within 40 minutes to 1 hour of being born. Baby robins jump from their nest when they are about 13 days old. It takes them another 10 or so days to become strong fliers and independent birds. At 6 weeks of age, a human baby can only see about 12 inches away. And it will be another year before it gets up on its legs and walks. And not that skillfully. This phenomenon may be due to an evolutionary tension. 

While the timeline is not particularly clear, it appears that Australopithecus, an early hominin, took their first steps as committed bipeds between 2 and 4 million years ago. Bipedalism resulted in skeletal changes to the legs, knee and ankle joints, spine, toes and arms. Most significantly, the hips tapered and the pelvis became shorter and rounded.  In female hominins, this led to a narrower birth canal.

The history of the human mastery of fire is equally mangy. The oldest unequivocal evidence, found at Israel's Qesem Cave, dates back 300,000 to 400,000 years. The ability to control fire altered the course of human history in various ways, the most significant of which was cooking. Prior to cooking, it was not uncommon for hominins to spend a good part of the day chewing. Our primate ancestors give us a window into the time allocated for mastication. Chimps chew for 4.5 hours per day and orangutans clock 6.6 hours. Modern humans spend a mere 35 minutes every day chewing. Uncooked food needs a tremendous amount of breaking down and pre-digestion. Further, the metabolism of raw food requires a tremendous amount of energy. 

Cooking changed the equation. The chemical transformations induced through cooking made it easier for our bodies to digest carbohydrates, proteins and fats. It reduced the need for incessant chewing and expanded nature’s pantry to include foods that were previously inedible or very difficult to digest including grains, tubers, maize and meats. 

With the advent of cooking, hominins unearthed a surfeit of excess calories. This discovery went to our heads, quite literally. The average brain size of Australopithecus was 400 cubic centimeters. Between one and 2 million years ago, the brain size of Homo erectus doubled. Currently, Homo Sapiens boast brains of approximately 1,300 cubic centimeters. When it comes to energy, our brains are greedy devils, pilfering 20% of our available ATP even though they comprise only 2 percent of our body mass.

You might presage where these two convergent evolutionary trends were headed. Bigger brains and narrower birth canals led to increasingly difficult and perilous childbirth. It is theorized that this resulted in shorter gestation periods as babies needed to be born before their heads became too large. In comparison to other animals, one could argue that human babies are born premature. Certainly, they are helpless. Given their utter reliance on others and the conditions of hunter-gatherer life, babies required multiple caregivers.

The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” originates from an African proverb and conveys the message that it requires a community to provide a safe, healthy environment for children to develop and flourish. 

Evolutionary pressure led to collective child-rearing. By dint of our biology, we are obliged to support each other. Ffej and his fellow tribespeople couldn’t survive in single-family households. Of course, communal living is the manner in which we existed for the overwhelming majority of human history. We lived in large camps, depending on one another for food, childcare, and virtually everything else—all without walls, doors or picket fences.

One day recently in Topanga, Gabor Mate said to me, “If the entirety of human history was reduced to one day, we lived communally for 23 hours and 54 minutes of it.”

Community is an adaptive advantage. Humans are not the fastest or most muscular creatures on earth. What makes humans unique, and shot us to the top of the food chain, is our ability to cooperate flexibly at scale. 

Modernity has mischaracterized the notion of “survival of the fittest.” The phrase has come to connote a world of cut-throat competition in which only strong individuals will succeed and the weak will perish. But survival doesn’t favor individualism. Our ability to survive and thrive is bound to our capacity to function collectively. The fittest – and happiest - of us are those who can foster deep social connection. 

When we say things like, “It’s just human nature to be selfish and ego-centric and look out for one’s needs first,” we confuse nature with culture. Yes, it’s our culture to be individualistic, but our nature is communal. And when we defy nature, it rarely works to our advantage. 

The last two hundred years in the West have been dominated by the sanctification of the individual. Yuval Harari chronicles this trend masterfully in his book Sapiens. Romanticism implores the individual to follow one’s heart and satisfy their wanderlust. Art bequeaths beauty to the eye of the beholder. Commerce yields to the customer who is always right. Liberal democracy gives every citizen a vote – most of the time. Even physics points to the individual subjectivity of experience. 

Our modern heroes are the rugged individuals, the Marlboro men, the captains of industry, the star athletes, the winners of social Darwinism. But individualism comes with a cost. 

We live increasingly alone. We are atomized, living in boxes within boxes within boxes. Our children barricade themselves in their rooms within fenced houses within gated communities. 

According to the Roots of Loneliness Project, 52% of Americans report feeling lonely while 47% report their relationships with others are not meaningful. 58% of Americans reported that they sometimes or always feel like no one knows them well. And, astoundingly, single or not, 57% of Americans report eating all meals alone. Fewer than three people live in the average American household.

What are the physiological and psychological impacts of loneliness? 

People are generally aware of the most common health indicators and risk factors. We don’t always heed our own advice, but we understand that poor diet, smoking, alcohol use, sedentariness and obesity pose risks. What we might not know is that social isolation is just as predictive of death. 

BYU professors Tim Smith and Julianne Holt-Lunstad have conducted research that demonstrates that loneliness poses the same risk of death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. Their more recent study also reveals that the risk of social isolation surpasses that posed by obesity. 

Unfortunately, more people live alone today than at any time in human history. These data inspired Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the country’s top doctor, to declare loneliness an epidemic and author a book on the topic.

Loneliness directly interacts with the wiring of our nervous system. Being lonely induces a stress state through increasing the human perception of threat. Our brain innately knows that there is greater security in groups. We grok this reality as a product of direct experience. Imagine the feeling of getting lost in the wilderness by yourself versus losing your way with a group. Your limbic system innately understands that your chances of survival is greater in a group. Modern society can feel like a wilderness for many people. 

The downstream impacts of chronic stress include chronic fatigue, brain fog, high glucose levels, gut dysbiosis, systemic inflammation, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The persistent activation of the sympathetic nervous system creates hormonal imbalances in the body that can lead to these conditions and others. The overactivation of steroid hormones produced in the adrenal glands such as cortisol and adrenaline can spike glucose levels, lower immune function and disrupt the balance of gut flora. 

Sociogenomics is an emerging field that studies epigenetics in relation to social environment. In other words, our gene expression is in some measure dependent on social interaction. Individuals who suffer from chronic social isolation have different transcriptome profiles for genes related to immune system factors including elevated expression of pro-inflammatory cytokine genes and depressed expression of anti-viral genes. Chronically isolated individuals are also more likely to develop inflammation-related diseases thus providing a plausible biological connection between social variables and disease risk and mortality. 

When threat perception increases, we begin to question people’s motives. Trust erodes and our focus shifts inwards. Under perceived threat, humans develop an excessive focus on self.  

Loneliness is a downward spiral. The lonelier we are, the more we believe that we are unworthy and unlikeable. As our self-esteem plummets, we are more likely to seek out self-destructive external agents to assuage our perceived deficiencies, find relief and create a sense of connection. Turning to the comfort of alcohol or drugs becomes a way of coping with feeling alone, unloved and rejected. Substance use is an anesthetic for pain. But, of course, they provide only short-term reprieve. 

Substance abuse helps to avoid confronting problems, delivering a false, brief sense of security. It is a vicious cycle because when the drugs and alcohol are not present, all our emotions come flooding back in.  

Loneliness and addiction are bi-directional, fueling each other in equal and horrifying measure. As addiction worsens, many people damage relationships and lose friends, further aggravating loneliness and isolation. Without support, it is incredibly difficult to cope with those feelings without drugs or alcohol – so the cycle continues. Loneliness is both an effect and a cause of addiction.

Of course, we are aware of the psychological impacts of social isolation. Isolation is leveraged by our justice system. The most severe punishment doled out short of a death sentence is solitary confinement. 

We are still getting our collective heads around the long-term effects of the forced monasticism imposed by the COVID pandemic. We’ve seen a dreadful increase in suicide rates and drug overdoses. That said, rates of loneliness were skyrocketing prior to COVID putting its wicked foot on the accelerator. 

In the absence of in-real-life interaction, we have resorted to creating “connection” from behind screens. However, study after study suggests that social media actually exacerbates feelings of isolation instead of fostering social bonds. 

Online interactions lack the nonverbal cues, physical presence and the emotional intimacy that are essential for building and maintaining meaningful relationships. Social media can also lead to feelings of comparison and inadequacy as well as feelings of isolation due to constant FOMO (fear of missing out).

Loneliness can be both objective and subjective. Objective loneliness is a reflection of social isolation and having very few, if any, social connections. Subjective loneliness stems from a feeling that the social bonds you do have fall short of your social needs. We can be around people and still feel lonely. We’ve likely all had the feeling at one time or another of being lonely in a crowd or at a party. 

The Reverend Michael Beckwith once told me in an interview, “Loneliness is often a loneliness with yourself.” 

We’ve probably all been in conversations where the person with whom we’re speaking is looking over our shoulder, scanning the room for someone more “important” to ensnare. Lack of self-worth and the incessant seeking out of the approval of others inhibits the ability for people to be present and connect. This is a form of loneliness with oneself. 

It’s important to delineate between loneliness and solitude. The latter is a form of chosen aloneness that can be the source of replenishment and feel extremely connective. In fact, meditation can elicit a sensation of oneness and interpenetration with the world. In a deep meditative state, the separation between the external world and your internal reality dissipates. The sense that you are sitting somewhere on the edge of experience looking in at it dissolves. This transcendent feeling is also the product of immersion into nature or creative expression. 

It is ironic that the pathway to developing greater connection to the external world is often forged in periods of solitude. Ultimately, we seek a reality in which we complete ourselves and don’t feel lonely when we’re alone. And, at the same time, we bring our confident selves into the world around us.  

Robert Waldinger is a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the world’s longest and most comprehensive study of human happiness (listen to his Commune podcast here). Launched in 1938, the longitudinal study followed 238 college sophomores (and their progeny) across 85 years. When I asked Robert for the number one determinant of self-reported happiness and well-being, he responded without hesitation, “hands-down, the strength of one’s social connections.”

While Ffej enjoyed his moments of solitude and introspection, he had very little occasion to be lonely. He felt a profound sense of accountability to the tribe and, in return, possessed a deep sense of belonging, of being accepted as his authentic self. 

Just like Ffej didn’t need to work out to remain strong and flexible, Ffej’s social fitness was a product of his lifestyle. 

Our modern culture is peppered with the trapdoors of loneliness. We need to treat social fitness like cardiovascular fitness and actively engage in the activities that foster greater connection and mimic the circumstances in which we evolved. 

• • •

 

The Protocols of Social Fitness

One hundred pull-ups. One hundred push-ups. One hundred sit-ups. These are my daily fitness non-negotiables. Of course, I’ll work in some tennis when scheduling allows. Chasing yellow fuzzy balls like a golden retriever might be considered play but fortunately it is also fantastic for cardiovascular health.

Many of us have fitness regimes. We commit to the gym, the track or the court to keep our bodies strong and flexible. 

But what about the atrophy of our social muscles? I’ve described modernity’s scourge of loneliness. Given that social isolation is as detrimental to health as alcohol or smoking 15 cigarettes per day, we best have a social fitness regimen to accompany our biceps curls. 

Loneliness is like thirstiness. It’s a signal. It’s a reflection that your social connections are not meeting your social needs. Too many of us have no one to confide in, to call in an emergency or with whom to vulnerably talk through problems. Isolation breeds mistrust and keeps us in a state of constant fight or flight. 

Improving social fitness requires the same kind of training and maintenance as physical fitness. Here are twelve elements of a social fitness regimen:

• 5 minutes every day: In 1987, AT&T released a commercial set to the jingle, “Reach out and touch someone.” Billy has gone off to college and is feeling lonely and nostalgic. He pecks out his home number on the analog keypad and his mother picks up. Billy is light-hearted, but his mother senses his wistfulness. Billy feels heard and seen. 
  
  Stevie Wonder sang, “I just called to say I love you.” This notion seems quaint as if it could only happen on a rotary phone. Life is too busy now.
  
  Take five minutes every day to connect with a relative or friend. Like the vegetables in your garden, your relationships cannot thrive unless they are nurtured. If needed, you can set an automatic reminder on your incredibly smart phone. 
  
  

• Answer the phone: Pick up when a loved one rings even if you “can’t talk.” Instead of exchanging an endless stream of texts, tell them that you’ll return their call as soon as possible. 
  
  
• In-person connection: Don’t mistake virtual connection for the real thing. Despite the ever-increasing opportunities to connect online, Americans report having fewer friends than they did decades ago. Connection relies on more than the content of what someone is saying. We evolved to “dance” in conversation. We read body language and vocal intonation. We connect through eye contact, mimicking body movements, nodding along and, of course, through offering each other touch and physical affection. 
  
  
• Random Acts of Kindness are spontaneous and unpremeditated gestures of friendliness and generosity. They are often simple. A smile to a stranger, public recognition of a co-worker, picking up litter on the street or leaving a good tip. These deeds may seem small and token but what is the human condition except an aggregate of billions of small actions.
  
  
• Cultivate compassion: Identify someone else’s suffering as your own and actively work to alleviate that pain. Compassion is an experience of interbeing. When you viscerally feel someone else’s pain, you transcend self and feel connected to something bigger.
  
  
• Empathetic joy: Experience joy solely for someone else’s joy without envy or jealousy. When we witness the achievements of others, we often project our feelings of our own unfulfilled potential on to that person. This results in envy or resentment. Don’t compare. Celebrate the accomplishments of others. 
  
  
• Serve: Service to others through volunteering or providing assistance plays a crucial role in social fitness. Serving others can increase empathy and understanding as it often involves interacting with individuals who may be different from us or in situations unlike our own. We can find deep satisfaction in knowing that we are making a positive difference in the lives of others. Service activities often involve collaborating with others which can create opportunities for social connection. This can help individuals feel more connected to their communities and can foster a sense of social belonging. 
  
  

• Build Communication Skills: In my 20’s, I ran a record label and our music was “big in Japan.” I traveled to Tokyo many times for business. My trips were packed with meetings with record executives.  I would ramble on and on passionately extolling the virtues of a new record or signing. When I finished, there was nothing. Silence. Of course, at first, the lack of response was discombobulating and I felt the need to awkwardly fill the emptiness. Eventually, I learned that the pregnant pause was actually an indication of respect. My counterpart had listened thoroughly and was now processing an appropriate response. 
  
  The Japanese listen to understand, not to respond. When someone else is talking, we tend to be formulating our rejoinder and only partially listening. Try to pay full attention to others without any compulsion to reply. Show others that you are invested in their feelings through active listening.
  
  At the same time, when you do speak, practice clear, assertive and respectful communication. This includes both verbal and nonverbal cues, such as body language and tone of voice. 
  
  

• Foster Conflict Resolution Skills: You can practice the middle way by bringing opposing positions together. Reframe the concept of “winning” away from trying to elicit an admission of defeat and toward fostering compromise and cooperation. Admit when you’re wrong and say you’re sorry. Learn to forgive and move on.
  
  
• Give the gift of presence. In the age of the attention economy in which everyone and everything is vying for your conscious attention, the most precious gift you can give anyone is the present of presence. Be all there.  
  
  

• Be there: While our children and loved ones may never listen to us, they rarely fail to imitate us. Oftentimes, we want our influence to be explicit and direct but never underestimate the immeasurable value of just being there every day, of leading a life of example, of walking an honorable, if occasionally jagged, path such that there are footsteps in which to follow. 
  
  
• Solitude: Ironically, deliberate solitude is a means to social fitness. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." So many of us are simply not comfortable alone. We immediately fidget or grab our phone. However, connection to self is a bridge to social connection.  
  
  

The Golden Rule is a spiritual axiom shared among myriad traditions. It instructs us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Yes, this maxim asks us to be charitable and altruistic. However, in order to fulfill this timeless equation, we must also love ourselves. We must belong to ourselves, accepting ourselves for who we are. This is no easy feat but it begins with being comfortable in our aloneness. Eventually, in fulfilling our own needs, in becoming complete, love can become something given, not taken. 

Social fitness is a delicate balance between extraversion and introversion. Most of us feel a tendency toward one or the other. Some of us are more outgoing, socially confident and gain energy from being around people while others are generally quiet, introspective and generate energy from spending time alone. 

Extraverts are often comfortable in group settings and enjoy engaging in social activities. They're typically more assertive, expressive and tend to enjoy seeking out new experiences. Introverts often prefer one-on-one conversations or solitary activities to large social gatherings. They typically spend more time thinking and reflecting and are more reserved in expressing their feelings or thoughts. 

The most socially fit are ambiverts. They balance a desire and ability to bond with others while fostering the powers of introspection and finding connection in solitude. 

Social connection is inextricably linked to psychological and physiological well-being. Make social fitness a priority.