Of course, humans don’t completely lack the capacity to desire companionship the way we lack the capacity to desire vitamin C. We do get lonely; we just don’t get lonely enough. Compared to, say, our food-stats, our social-stats are rather anemic. When people starve, they’ll become obsessed with food; they’ll fantasize about opening restaurants and going hog wild at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and these desires will only increase until the person either eats or dies. When someone starves socially, however, they don’t develop an overwhelming desire to go to a rave. They do not daydream about all the lovely chit-chat they’ll have when they’re allowed to see their friends again, nor do they concoct elaborate plans for their next birthday party. They may feel lonely, they may report a sense of longing, but mostly, they’ll just wither.
I know this feeling—or really, this lack of feeling—because I have suffered from it myself. When I started to feel very bad during the pandemic, the signal I got from my brain was not “hey maybe we should spend more time with other people”. It was more like, “hey everything feels bad and it will never feel better”. (…)
The idea is that our body have some weird ways to measure with we are in need of somethings that are really important for our well being. Turns out that for things like vitamin C or Water (ok lets drink more water) our body dont really trigger any mechanism that will drive us to take in these missing components so it’s easy for humans to get dehydrated if they aren’t careful. This idea can be extended to our social need as humans, but “It’s tough to target these interventions because we know a lot less about our social-stats than we do about our food-stats and hydro-stats“.
We need periodic PSAs that modern life can leave you chronically people-deficient. We need to be pushed toward one another slightly more than we want to be. Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another. They are wrong. Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want. If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.