William von Hippel taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University before becoming a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has published over 150 articles, chapters, and edited books. His research has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, The Australian, and the BBC.
What’s the big idea?
The very dynamic that characterizes modern society has pitted our two most important needs against each other. Evolution wired us to seek connection and autonomy. But we live in a world that tempts us with autonomy at every turn while making interdependence less necessary, and thus, connection has become the route less chosen. Success individually will continue to feel mysteriously hollow unless connection is restored in our lives.
Below, William shares five key insights from his new book, The Social Paradox: When Finding What You Want Means Losing What You Need. Listen to the audio version—read by William himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Hunter-gatherers are happier than we are.
Hunter-gatherers own almost nothing, have no savings for a rainy day, bury almost half their children, and yet are happier than we are. How could that be?
An important part of this story lies deep in history. When our ancestors left the rainforest for the savannah approximately six million years ago, they embarked on a new evolutionary pathway that created a pair of competing needs within all of us, which must be balanced for us to experience lasting happiness. These needs were etched into our psychology because they supported two key goals our distant ancestors needed to achieve: bonding with others for mutual protection and developing their own skills to become valuable to their group and potential mates. Millions of years later, we’re still driven by these needs; from childhood to old age, we have a need for connection and a need for autonomy.
By connection, I mean our desire to cooperate, form social bonds, make friendships, establish long-term romantic relationships, and attach ourselves to our groups. Our need for connection played a central role in our evolution, enabling us to cooperate in protecting ourselves from predators and hunting large animals, which slowly transformed us into apex predators. Connection was a matter of life or death then, and we still feel its importance today. When you bask in the comfort and camaraderie of old friends, you’re experiencing the product of six million years of evolution.
At the same time, the need for connection was supplemented by a need for autonomy, which remains our second most fundamental psychological need. By autonomy, I mean self-governance, choosing a path based on one’s own needs, preferences, or skills, and making independent decisions. Connection makes humans effective in their struggles against predators and harsh environments, but autonomy allows us to increase our usefulness to others by motivating us to pursue domains in which we have the best prospects.
“Our capacity to transform our actual self into our aspirational self is a large part of why we evolved a need for autonomy.”
Humans are unique among all the animals in our capacity to envision the future. One of the most important tasks our large brain evolved to solve is imagining what might happen later today, tomorrow, or next year and then preparing for it. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our preparations is when we change ourselves—when we decide what sort of person we need to be in our imagined future and then set about becoming that person.
Our capacity to transform our actual self into our aspirational self is a large part of why we evolved a need for autonomy. From early childhood, our sense of who we are becomes focused on our personal attributes that have the best chance of leading us to success. Domains in which we stand out in a positive way become central aspects of our self-definition. Once these abilities become central to our self-concept, they start to occupy our minds, they become more fun and interesting, and we exercise them whenever possible. It is our sense of autonomy that leads us to choose our own path and then pursue it.
Unfortunately, forming social bonds with others satisfies our connection needs but directly threatens our autonomy. Interdependence constrains our choices by requiring us to consider the consequences of our actions for others. In contrast, prioritizing our own goals and preferences over the needs and desires of others maximizes our autonomy but makes us unpalatable as relationship partners or coalition members.
2. Evolution played a dirty trick on humans.
Throughout our evolutionary history, connection was of paramount importance. We needed to form tight connections to survive, and that fact was so obvious that we connected unquestioningly. Hunter-gatherers who couldn’t see the need for connection soon became lion chow. As a result, their tendency to go it alone was removed from the gene pool, and their remains served as a vivid reminder to the folks back home that survival requires connection. For that reason, our genes pushed us to connect, our cultural rules demanded connection, and our daily lives reminded us that we couldn’t live without it. Connection was an obvious necessity.
But autonomy was a luxury. In principle, we had opportunities for autonomy every time our group faced a decision we didn’t like, but in reality, we couldn’t just do our own thing. When it was time to break camp, if everyone else wanted to go north and you wanted to head south, you almost always went north. We either had to persuade others to our point of view or go along with theirs. Life for our hunter-gatherer ancestors revolved around connection and compromise, with chances for true autonomy arising only occasionally. Given this, we evolved a tendency to seize autonomy whenever it was genuinely available.
“Now, we are out of shape and autonomous because we live in comfort and safety.”
In our ancestral past, such situations were rare enough that our default tendency to grab autonomy whenever possible resulted in a proper balance between autonomy and connection. In our modern world, opportunities for autonomy are like fat, salt, and sugar—we evolved to crave them when they were rare, but now, they’re everywhere. Increasing wealth, urbanization, and education, along with dramatic increases in the occupations and entertainment options available, mean that we not only have choices our ancestors didn’t dream of, but we also no longer depend on each other for survival. As a result, our evolved tendency to pick autonomy whenever we can has become a form of miswanting that has seriously disrupted the balance between these two needs. This imbalance can be seen in the growing tendency of Americans to live alone. In 1850, one in every hundred American adults lived alone. By 1950, that number was one in twenty-five, and today it is one in seven.
We were once super fit and highly connected because we spent our lives hungry and threatened, and now we are out of shape and autonomous because we live in comfort and safety. But just because our modern world allows us to live a certain way doesn’t mean it makes us happy. Autonomy without connection creates what I call sad success stories: people whose achievements feel hollow and unsatisfying because they don’t have the connections to share them with.
3. Our modern world has pushed our two most important needs out of balance.
Cities are over five thousand years old, but they didn’t catch on until about two hundred years ago. Before 1840, fewer than one in ten people lived in a city. By 1960, this number was one in three. After thousands of years of very slow growth, in 120 years the percentage of people living in cities tripled. And the pace of urbanization has only accelerated again. In the last sixty years, the ratio of people living in the country versus the city has flipped, with people in cities outnumbering those in the country for the first time in human history in 2007. Planet Earth used to be a rural place, but not anymore.
People know their own minds, and when they vote with their feet so consistently, we are tempted to conclude that city life makes them happier. But what if moving to the cities is just another reflection of our modern obsession with autonomy and the opportunities available in cities compared to the countryside? Indeed, there are losses in connection when people relocate to the city. When pollsters ask if they know someone they can trust with their house keys, rural residents are more likely to answer yes. People in rural areas feel a stronger connection to their community, are more satisfied with their friendships, and as a result, are more likely to be very happy than those in urban areas.
4. We lose what we need when we prioritize autonomy.
How do we rediscover the balance of our ancestors in a world that emphasizes autonomy? One of my favorite answers can be found in surveys on the religious practices of rich and poor people. When we dive into these data, we see that prayer leads to greater happiness among poor people than rich ones, which makes perfect sense given that rich people already have a lot of things that poor people pray for. Far more interestingly, however, we also see that attending religious services leads to greater happiness among the rich than among the poor. Why is that? The answer brings us back to where we started.
“What if moving to the cities is just another reflection of our modern obsession with autonomy?”
Poor people need each other; rich people don’t. When poor people require a tool they don’t own, buying it is out of the question, but borrowing it is not. When poor people need someone to watch their dog, hiring a dog-sitter is out of the question, but asking a neighbor is not. For these and a thousand other reasons, poor people depend on each other. People in poor neighborhoods live in a complex web of interdependence, with everyone counting on each other to help keep the boat afloat. As a result, poor people are about twice as likely as rich people to get together with their neighbors at least a few times a week. In contrast, rich people are about twice as likely to see their neighbors only a few times a year.
That is why rich people who attend services several times a week are about twice as likely to be happy than rich people who never attend. Attendance at religious services leads rich people to form and maintain social connections they are otherwise inclined to avoid. These findings show the importance of increasing our connections, even when we’re only doing so because circumstances force it upon us.
5. We need to re-emphasize connection.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this book began a decade ago, over dinner with my childhood friend Steve. He’d made a fortune in the oil business, and when he invited me to his new apartment, I was excited to see how the super-rich live. As I wandered through his extraordinary home, I told him that his life was over the top. Steve admitted that it seemed that way but then explained—with a straight face—that it really wasn’t. While I nibbled on his caviar and brie, I learned that the cook didn’t get along with the maid, he and his wife couldn’t agree on where to go on their next vacation, his daughter was waitlisted at the fancy kindergarten, and the list went on. By the time he finished, I felt so sorry for him that I offered to trade places, if only to sort out this vexing cook/maid problem.
At the time, I marveled at Steve’s inability to see his good fortune, but later, as I read Frank Marlowe’s wonderful book on Hadza hunter-gatherers, I realized that I’m just like Steve. And so are you. Data collected by anthropologists suggest that we are no happier (and possibly a lot less happy) than the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers, who eke out a living much like our distant ancestors did. The comforts, safety, and ease of our existence make us the equivalent of multimillionaires by comparison to them, but somehow that reality hasn’t made a dent in our happiness.
Human beings did not evolve to live alone. We’re a gregarious species who need others psychologically even when we no longer need them physically.
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