Connection Is Our Lost Superpower

The global loneliness crisis is far-reaching, from its impact on our bodies to the erosion of our democracies. To address this crisis, I argue in Relationality: How Moving from Transactional to Transformational Relationships Can Reshape Our Lonely World, we must learn to invest in the work of building relationship. Most institutions, from philanthropic foundations to political campaigns, struggle to invest in this work, because it’s messy and unpredictable. But it is also desperately needed, and can be extremely effective at fostering resilience, unlocking creativity, and building power.

However, to invest institutional resources in the work of building relationship we need better language to describe that work and better methodologies for measuring its success. Drawing on movement organizing, complex systems theory and ecology, Relationality lays a groundwork for understanding, measuring, and resourcing this work. The following passage explores the wide-reaching implications of the loneliness crisis and the powerful ways that working to build relationship can reverse them.—David Jay

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If humans have one defining advantage as a species, it is our ability to make relationships happen. In 1992, anthropologist Robin Dunbar performed a study to try to figure out why mammals like humans have large brains. He ruled out many popular theories: It’s not that we needed big brains to use tools (crows can do that) or to distinguish between many kinds of foods to know what’s edible (rats can do that), or even that we needed bigger brains to exist in large groups (bison can do that). Humans’ large brains seem like they should be an evolutionary dead end. They barely fit through a birth canal, making human childbirth extremely dangerous by mammalian standards. They take up 2 percent of our body weight but burn 20 percent of our calories. What evolutionary advantage could be worth all of that cost?

Dunbar found that brain size correlated with the number of complex relationships that an organism had to think about to maintain group cohesion. When humans get together, we need to reason about not only our relationships with everyone else in the group but everyone else in the group’s relationships with one another. Among mammals that formed these sorts of complex groups, like wolf packs and monkey troops, brain size scaled with the number of complex relationships that any one animal had to think about.

It is this superpower, more than our opposable thumbs or our ability to walk upright, that has allowed our species to spread to, and for most of our history live in relative harmony with, almost every ecosystem on Earth. We have survived for so long because the environmental devastation we are experiencing today is an exception, not a human norm. We are deeply wired to connect. We build and flock to cities, construct monumental temples to gather in, and endlessly write, dance, and sing about the experience of relationship because for us to be in relationship is simultaneously to meet our need for survival, create possibility in our lives, and access the divine. Give us food and we will host a feast. Give us a drum and we will dance together. Give us a tool and we will put our enormously powerful brains together in community to figure out how to use it to create the conditions for connection.

Carry these abilities forward into modern times and we should be living in a golden age of connection. We are not.

In May 2023, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a dire warning about a rapidly growing global crisis of social isolation. Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of US adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness. In 1990, fully 33 percent of US adults had ten or more close friends, and only 3 percent reported having none. By 2021 only 13 percent of US adults had ten or more close friends and a whopping 12 percent had no one. That’s about four million people—more than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and Maine combined. If we think of lonely people as a political constituency, then there are more than enough of them to swing a presidential election. If we think of them like Dr. Murthy does, as a public health crisis, then their disease is now twice as prevalent as cancer and growing rapidly.

In 2003 the average US adult spent thirty hours per month with friends. By 2008 it had dropped to twenty-five hours, in 2019 to seventeen hours, and in the 2020 pandemic it dropped to ten. Before the pandemic, those of us in the United States went from roughly seeing people we care about four times per week to seeing them only once. Outside the United States, things are not much better. A Brazilian study found that 20 percent of participants reported moderate to severe loneliness. London is the world’s loneliest city, with more than half of Londoners feeling lonely a significant amount of the time, creating an estimated public health cost of about $7,300 per Londoner, according to the mayor’s office.

To understand why all of those lonely people in London and around the world are so inconvenient to our public health budgets, we must comprehend how profoundly a lack of relational agency impacts not only our mental but also our physical health. Like sleep, exercise, and a healthy diet, relational agency is one of the panaceas of human health. Exercise makes us happier and more energetic, mentally focused, and resistant to everything from viral infection to heart disease while adding years to our lives. If it could be taken in pill form, it would become the world’s most successful drug overnight. Sleep is similar, with benefits including weight loss, improved athletic performance, and a decreased risk of diabetes.

Loneliness is like a lack of sleep or lack of exercise, but the harms stretch from a breakdown in our individual cells to a breakdown of our democracies. Our brains are so intensely wired for relationships—not just relationships with other humans, but with ourselves and the more-than-human world—that loneliness impacts our bodies on a profound level. When we feel a lack of relational agency, it activates the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal gland (HPA) axis in our bodies, releasing a chemical stress response that is felt on a cellular level. Proteins are more likely to misfold and DNA is more likely to have copying errors. The immune system is suppressed. We get less energy from our food, less oxygen from the air, and less range and power from our muscles.

These examples represent just a fraction of the many complex ways that our bodies react to loneliness, with clear and drastic impacts on our health. The lack of meaningful connection can increase our risk of premature death as much as smoking daily. If we are lonely, we are 29 percent more likely to experience heart disease and 32 percent more likely to have a stroke. We are more likely to suffer from diabetes, 50 percent more likely to develop dementia, and twice as likely to become depressed. Stress from sources other than loneliness will hit us harder, as will infections from viruses. When our relationships fall apart, our bodies fall apart with them.

This crisis of loneliness is impacting more than our bodies. A study by the health insurer Cigna estimated that loneliness cost US employers $154 billion between job withdrawal and increased employee turnover. To put that in perspective, the US loses in loneliness every year about what it spends on consumer electronics. Loneliness is slowly killing our economy, but building relationships can have the opposite effect. Engaging in social activities like volunteering makes unemployed people 25 percent more likely to find a job. A landmark research collaboration between academic researchers and employees at Facebook found that relationships that cross lines of economic privilege are “among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date.” Relational agency determines our economic prospects as individuals and plays an especially important role in addressing economic inequality. A lonelier economy is both one that grows more slowly and one that concentrates more wealth in the hands of a few.

Reading this research, I begin to imagine the future that the loneliness crisis is leading us toward. We are sicker, sadder, and poorer. It is a future where institutions struggle and fail to take on the work that our communities used to do. Rather than receiving care from those around us, we enter acute crisis and wind up in emergency rooms. As our mental health, our sleep, and our bodies fail, our schools and employers (if we have them) struggle to institutionally simulate the human intimacy we crave. We collectively become withdrawn and less trusting.

Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century, saw a deep link between this sort of loneliness and the rise of totalitarianism. After witnessing Hitler’s rise to power before fleeing to the United States in 1941, Arendt sought to understand how such a terrifying and destructive form of government could emerge. To Arendt, “totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated, individuals.” Totalitarianism happened when “the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class.” A nation of lonely people, desperate to belong to something, will more readily embrace totalitarian rule. To isolated people, the perceived strength of a totalitarian ruler will seem appealing, the attacks on others in one’s community that always come with totalitarianism will feel distant, and people with little relational agency will feel powerless to come together and push back when they themselves are attacked.

As global loneliness has spiked, democracies around the world have begun to decline. The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Administration, an international agency that tracks the health of democracies around the world, has noticed a disturbing trend that, like the loneliness epidemic, seemed to get significantly worse in the early 2010s. The IDEA’s 2022 report states that “the number of democracies has stagnated,” with half of the world’s democracies categorized as “contracting” toward authoritarianism. According to the report, “over the past six years, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy.” Meanwhile, 50 percent of nondemocracies, about one in five of the world’s countries, are becoming significantly more repressive.

The descent of democracy is clearly correlated with the global rise in loneliness, and it is not hard to imagine why the two might be causally linked. In addition to the powerful arguments of Hannah Arendt, there is mounting evidence that loneliness is a driving factor in violent extremism, though use of this term requires a critical analysis of who is applying it and to whom it is being applied. Democracy is and always has been a messy relational project. If we feel more relational agency, then we feel like we can find a way to navigate the conflicts necessary to govern together, and democracy feels like a worthwhile project. It is when navigating those relationships feels impossible that we seek to dominate rather than collaborate with those around us. It is then that we seek the authoritarian strength to settle our disagreements through suppression.

Return now to our imagined lonely future. Not only are our cells breaking down, our bodies breaking down, our minds breaking down, our schools and our workplaces breaking down. Not only are we sleepless, anxious, addicted, and depressed. The vast wealth of our economies flows to fewer and fewer billionaires who, themselves isolated, cannot turn their unimaginable wealth into happiness. Our democracies falter and collapse, replaced by authoritarian regimes that see collective action and the human connections that lead to it as a threat. We are isolated not only from one another but from ourselves and from the more-than-human world.

Could the opposite also be true?

Instead of a lonely future, try to imagine a relational one. Not a future where everyone is connected, as we have already established that too many connections can be a bad thing. Instead, imagine a future where most of us feel that they are capable of building the relationship that they need to survive and thrive. Like relational magicians, we know how to find or cocreate relational containers capable of manifesting whatever relationships we’re looking for, including professional connections, romantic partnerships, creative collaborations, and friends we can just relax with. Because we have relational agency, these relationships evolve when and how we need them to. If we need time to ourselves, we communicate about it and our friends oblige, knowing that we’ll invest in time with them when we have the capacity.

Imagine that year after year for decades at a time our capacity for relationship keeps getting better. The world around us becomes more and more structured to facilitate relationship, and we become more skilled at leveraging it. What changes if the leading driver of human happiness is a thing that all of us start having more and more access to? How do our bodies feel in this world? How do our careers unfold in this world? What happens to any would-be authoritarian rulers who try to seek power in this world?

The difference between these two futures rests on whether we choose to invest in and build places where relationships happen. Creating the conditions for relationships takes deep understanding, compassion, and skill. It takes training ourselves to be present, knowing when and how to invite people in, cooking food, and creating art. It takes tapping into lineages of wisdom about how to create community that our grandparents knew but that we have begun to forget. It takes knowledge about how to facilitate generative conflict. It takes respect for the fact that people in relationship will become powerful in ways we do not anticipate. And all of this food, furniture, and skilled labor takes money. In this book I will argue that the global loneliness crisis is due in large part to the fact that most large institutions are unable to effectively fund relational work. We are starved of relationships because most of the people who build relationships are starved of resources. This book will explore how we can get out of this crisis by better understanding what relationships are, how to create the spaces where they happen, and how to move resources toward the work of building them.