KPAO by Dave Cortright

“The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

There is a lot of great content in this blog post about the importance of relationships, but this is the one that really sticks with me:

“What have you learned from the Grant Study men? That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

and here’s my second favorite:

Contrary to the belief that happiness is hard to explain, or that it depends on having great wealth, researchers have identified the core factors in a happy life. The primary components are number of friends, closeness of friends, closeness of family, and relationships with co-workers and neighbors. Together these features explain about 70 percent of personal happiness.

—Murray and Peacock 1996

Money can only buy you the bottom two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Several studies have shown that money only buys happiness to a certain point. (Somewhere between ~$60–120k in the USA) A more recent one is from Purdue University in Feb 2018. But these studies don’t get at the “why”. I’m convinced it’s because money can satisfy the bottom two levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—physiological and safety; after that, the higher-level needs can’t be bought, they can only be earned by having strong, healthy relationships with others.

 

It shouldn't be that hard—The Principle of Parsimony reinforces Darwin’s Razor

I’ve previously blogged about overcomplexification. But life really isn’t that complex at the broadest levels. (To be clear, there is subtlety and nuance of course; I’m talking about the biggest factors here.)

From a survival and reproduction standpoint, humans are social creatures. So it makes sense that our genes would have evolved to reward positive social behavior and perhaps even punish anti-social behavior. Multiple studies show that people with healthy relationships and social lives live longer, healthier and happier lives than those without—the Harvard Grant study, Blue Zones, The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People…

The unique gift we have as humans is our big brains capable of abstract thought and hypothetical situations. And we can (and do!) use that to our detriment. We make up all sorts of theories about what will make us happier or healthier, but the answer is really quite simple. Healthy relationships with others in our life so that we feel connected is really all it takes. Our genes reward us for being good social creatures.

Smartphones on the table during dinner reduces enjoyment and increases distraction

Not surprising, but having your smartphone out during a face-to-face interaction negatively impacts the quality of that in-person interaction.

Using a field experiment and experience sampling, we found the first evidence that phone use may undermine the enjoyment people derive from real world social interactions. In Study 1, we recruited over 300 community members and students to share a meal at a restaurant with friends or family. Participants were randomly assigned to keep their phones on the table or to put their phones away during the meal. When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family. We found consistent results using experience sampling in Study 2; during in-person interactions, participants felt more distracted and reported lower enjoyment if they used their phones than if they did not. This research suggests that despite their ability to connect us to others across the globe, phones may undermine the benefits we derive from interacting with those across the table.

 

The outrageous time scale of evolution shows us what is really driving our behaviors

I’m using the Cambrian explosion as the anchor point for these comparisons because that is when more complex animals appeared. Animals—living beings with locomotion—necessarily had at least primitive emotional systems that guided them towards good things (safety, food, mates) and away from bad things (harm).

Primates (social mammals) appeared at roughly 70 Ma, 470 million years after the Cambrian explosion. That is a long time. Long enough for the primary survival emotions—happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust—to be firmly established. Another 68 million years or so pass before the appearance of our closest human (homo) ancestors. The margins of error at this point (±15 million years) are bigger than the values we are talking about here. So one could say that our primate ancestors were establishing and honing social and emotional connections for 70 million years before we came along.

Modern homo sapiens with language and culture have been established by 50,000 years ago. The ratio of the time between that milestone and now is 0.01% of the time since the Cambrian explosion. Civilization (where we started the transition from bands of hunter/gatherers to agriculture and established settlements) started 12,000 years ago, or 0.002% (2 thousandths of a percent) of the time since the Cambrian explosion. The industrial revolution is only 260 years old and that caused huge changes to the way we live our lives. That is 0.00005%—5 hundred thousandths of a percent of the time since the Cambrian explosion. It is a blip; a rounding error. 

My point in all this is to highlight the different layers that have been built up over time, one on top of the other (much like the 7 layers in the OSI networking model), that make up we humans and the outrageous time scales involved in some of them. It’s pretty clear that the primary emotions and the social emotions are pretty well optimized at this point having been refined over tens of millions of years. These systems are in all of us now working behind the scenes without our conscious effort.

Our thinking brain began its major development roughly 2 million years ago (coincident with and likely caused by our ancestors figuring out how to break down food outside the body by pounding, chopping and cooking). The thinking brain is amazing tool, but one of its limitations is that it can believe practically anything by selective attention and/or biased weighting of information. That is to say it can be trained to deceive others as well as itself.

We can think that our underlying emotions aren’t important and that we are more evolved, but the data shows us otherwise. We are at our core social and emotional beings, and living a life aligned with what those systems are doing and telling us is the key to living a healthy and fulfilling life. After all, our brains are the only thing that ultimately determine whether or not we feel like we are succeeding in life or not.

Managing emotions—the forest fire management analogy

For the better half of the 20th century, the forest fire management policy in the United States was complete suppression. If a fire starts, put it out. However there was no one around to put out the fires in the preceding 300+ million years and somehow the planet managed just fine despite lightning-induced fires. In fact some species of plant/tree require fire to reproduce, like the giant sequoia. It turns out that recurring ground fires actually are a vital part of the ecosystems in which they occur. That’s how nature works. It takes whatever environmental conditions exist and it adapts to them.

So what this policy ended up actually doing is allowing a lot more kindling to build up, reducing a supply of essential nutrients, and preventing some species from reproducing. When a fire does break out in these conditions with so much fuel available, the fire burns far hotter and intensely than it would otherwise literally leaving nothing but scorched earth. It takes so much longer for such a landscape to recover, whereas a typical low intensity ground fire might burn dead kindling and some quick-growing plants and grasses, leaving the larger, mature specimens.

One might say we are in our “suppression” phase when it comes to emotions. Our society tells us that some emotions are ok to express and others are not. And in more public forums, this holds true. However all emotions are designed to be expressed and shared with another, if only the innermost circle of your Dunbar relationships. However this subtle nuance can be lost on people, and they end up in a state where emotions have been bottled up for so long that  when they do come out, they do so in an explosion of anger and rage. Look to the mass shootings we've had as a horrifyingly large set of examples.

It is possible to get back to the natural state of things, just as we did with our forests. It takes a fair amount of effort and courage to process the backlog of emotions. But once that is done, emotions can be managed as they come in real-time the way that nature intended. It gets easier.

The historical trend of progress in knowledge and understanding should make us more cautious about our certainty

There certainly has been enormous progress in our understanding of how things work in the world. Yet at any given point in the past, there are numerous examples of things we (or at least some reasonable population of us) collectively thought we knew but turned out to be wrong. The fact that some primitive societies still hold erroneous beliefs (like the “cargo cults”) only further reinforces this idea: we should always approach a subject with the humility recognizing that what we currently believe to be true is likely based on only partial data.

One of these areas is how dinosaurs actually looked and moved in the world. There are some very clever artistic renderings of modern animals that were extrapolated only from their skeletons, and it’s dramatic how different they look based on faulty assumptions of the artist. One of my favorites is the whale, which if you didn't know that it had a lot of soft tissue filling out certain parts of the body, you could easily presume the body was “shrink wrapped” around the skeleton leading to a sleeker creature:

Here are some more shrink wrapped projections based only on skeletons: baboon, zebra, and elephant. With no bones in the ears or trunk, we have no way of knowing iif they even exiisted or how bigi they were. The original source is here, and there is more here.

What we were designed to do—an owner’s manual for human beings

As anyone who happens to be reading these recent blog entries can see, I’m trying to synthesize my thoughts on human nature and living life fully. The catalyst for all of this was a realization that humans—and really all forms of life—were designed. I don’t mean that an intelligent creator designed us. Rather, the environment that our ancestors lived in—all the way back to the proto-lifeforms that emerged from the primordial soup—placed constraints upon them that made some succeed where others failed. That process repeated a trillion times (by some estimates) to bring us to where we are now. It is that process of evolution through natural selection shaped by the environmental factors that “designed” us.

So what are the implications of that? What were we designed to do? Like all life forms, the most basic requirements are to survive and reproduce. Actually I think Maslow did a pretty good job of a high level summary. But this only covers the what, not the how. (For the record, the why are the basics already mentioned: survival and reproduction.)

Anthropology shows us the essence of the how. Edward O. Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of Earth gives a really good overview of it. His descriptions of the behaviors of how our ancestors lived their lives leading up to 50k years ago when modern humans with complex language and culture were established clearly shows us what we were designed to do. The lifestyle foundations of hunter/gathers living in band societies (which I previously outlined here) are the baseline for which we operate most effectively on life.

Dunbar’s donut—our all-too-common lack of skill in intimate relationships creates a unfulfilled hole in our emotional lives

I previously blogged about Dunbar’s Number. I was speaking to a guy friend about this and he joked about having a “Dunbar’s donut”; he didn’t have anyone that really qualified as a member of his support clique, so the closest he really got with friends was in the sympathy group. I think this is far too common in our society—especially for males. I feel like I was there for a lot of my life. Or maybe better said that I had friends I considered in my support clique, but I didn’t really have the skills or understanding to feel entirely comfortable express myself with them.

We need to fill the hole in Dunbar’s donut so that everyone out there has a complete Dunbar Disk.

A couple of quotes on the relationships between humans and animals, and honoring your ancestors

The biggest difference between humans and other animals is that humans arrogantly believe the difference to be much bigger than it really is.

The best way to honor your ancestors is to learn from their experiences—both successes and failures.

Indeed it is also the best way to honor yourself.