The Social Animal (30 page)

Harold and his friends were not rebels. By and large, they still wanted a stable marriage, two kids, a house in the suburbs, and a secure income. People in the current generation are more likely than those of previous generations to say that parents should sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of their children. But the former had been raised amid peace and (for the most part) prosperity, so they had an amazing confidence in their ability to realize their dreams. Around 96 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old Americans agree with the statement “I am certain that someday I will get to where I want to be in life.” They were very, even insanely, impressed with their own specialness. In 1950 a personality test asked teenagers if they considered themselves an important person. Twelve percent said yes. By the late 1980s, 80 percent said yes.

Despite his assumption that everything would turn out well in the end, Harold found himself living in an under-institutionalized world. Because the Odyssey stage of life was so new, groups and customs had not yet arisen to give it structure. He didn’t belong to any religious congregation (young people today are much less likely to attend church than young people were in the 1970s). He didn’t have any clear ethnic identity. His view of the world wasn’t shaped by any local newspaper or single opinion leader (he surfed the Web). His worldview wasn’t molded by any world historical event such as the Depression or World War II. He wasn’t even bound down by acute financial pressures. Between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, the average American receives $38,000 in subsidies from Mom and Dad, and Harold, too, relied on some help to pay the rent.

He lived in a social landscape with astonishingly few guardrails. Some days he felt as though he was waiting for a set of opinions, habits, and goals to harden in his mind. The social critic Michael Barone argues that the United States produces moderately impressive twenty-year-olds but very impressive thirty-year-olds. He says that the hard pressures and choices that hit people during their wide-open, unsupervised twenties forge a new and much better kind of person.

Harold wasn’t sure about that, since he seemed to spend a disturbing amount of time on a friend’s ragged couch playing Call of Duty: Black Ops. But at least he did have moments of intense pleasure, and he did have a great group of friends.

In the years between living with his parents and living with his wife, Harold lived with the Group. The Group was a gang of friends who lived in the same limbo state as he. They were between twenty-two and thirty. The core had attended college together, but they’d accumulated a gang of selected friends along the way, so now there were roughly twenty people hanging about in their circle.

Most of them had dinner together once a week at a local diner, including Mark when he was around. They formed a softball team and some of them played volleyball together, too. They had orphan dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas for Group members who couldn’t make it home to be with their folks. They lent each other money, drove each other to the airport, helped each other load U-Hauls and generally provided all the services that people from an extended family might provide for one another in a more traditional society.

Harold was sure that his group was filled with the most talented proto-geniuses that had ever been assembled. One of them was a singer-songwriter, another was doing her medical residency, a third did art and graphic design. Even the ones who had boring jobs had interesting sidelights—hot-air ballooning, extreme sports, or great potential as a future contestant on
Jeopardy!
. There was an unofficial ban against Groupcest, dating within the group. But an exception was made if the couple involved got really serious about each other.

The Group conversations were the most exhilarating part of Harold’s life at this time. They spent hours talking at cafés, bars, and parties—repeating dialogue from
30 Rock
episodes, complaining about bosses, coaching each other for job interviews, and debating serious issues such as whether or not people over forty should still be allowed to wear sneakers in public when not working out. They had uproarious nostalgic conversations about who had puked on whom in college. They sent each other philosograms—little pseudo-profound texts such as “Don’t you think my narcissism is my most interesting feature?” They handed out Whuffies, a reputational currency from a Cory Doctorow novel, that were awarded to people who did things that made them no money but which were creative or just nice. They spent a lot of their time discussing core questions such as which of them was smart enough or ruthless enough to make it in the real world.

Researchers have done a lot of work over the past few years analyzing social networks. It turns out almost everything is contagious. If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you’re more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely. In fact, Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that a person’s friends have more influence on whether he or she will be obese than a person’s spouse.

But to be honest, Harold loved spending time with the Group because he didn’t have to worry if it served any utility or not. Being part of the Group was an end in itself. More time with his friends meant more of a feeling of being alive, and there was no higher purpose involved. They’d get together for hours on end in great swirling bouts of talk. Very frequently they’d dance. Most societies have some form of ritualized group dancing. Modern American society has done away with a lot of that (except for square dancing and a few other specialties). Now most dancing is done by couples, as a preparation for sex. But when the Group got together they would all dance. They’d gather at a bar or an apartment, and they would form this big mob of dancers—a cloud of people with no set pairings or formations. They’d each move about the mob, engaging one or another, man or woman, and then they’d move on to another part of the shape-shifting cloud. The dancing wasn’t about anything. It wasn’t about wooing. It wasn’t about seduction. It was just the physical exuberance of being together.

And then one day, or really over the course of forty-eight hours, fate intervened. Harold was out with Mark and some Group friends at a sports bar, watching the World Cup. The match was coming to its climax, with a few minutes to go, when Mark elbowed him on the shoulder with a thought that had just popped into his head: “Hey, do you want to move to L.A. and become a TV producer with me?”

Harold looked at him for a second and then back at the game. “Have you really thought this through?”

“I don’t need to. It’s my Destiny. It’s what I was meant to do.” The match went back and forth. Everybody in the bar was screaming, and Mark sketched out the life they would lead. Produce a few trashy shows at first—maybe infomercials and cop shows. Then take a few years off with their money and have fun. Then do something more legit. Then buy some houses in various parts of the world and have more fun. Then do big dramas on
HBO
and change the world. The great thing, as Mark described it, is that you’d make boatloads of money, have total freedom, and never be tied down to one thing or one project or one idea. It was perfect liberty.

The funny thing is, Harold had no doubt that Mark would achieve everything he set out to do. He had what Harold had once called “Universally Synchronous Superficiality.” That is to say, Mark was exactly as shallow as the market would bear. He was never tempted to be too complicated or too experimental. What he liked, the world liked. What he hated, the world hated—or at least that portion of the world who lived and died for early-evening TV and Saturday night at the movies.

Still, Harold resisted. “That’s no way to live,” he replied. And so began the debate, the debate they had been heading toward since that day years earlier when Harold had first walked in on Mark in the dorm room. It was the debate between freedom and commitment, about whether life is happier footloose or firmly rooted.

Mark made his case, then Harold made his, and neither made any points that would strike you as particularly original. Mark painted a picture of endlessly exciting diversions—traveling the world and trying new things. He contrasted it with the world of middle-aged drudgery, going to work at the same job and home to the same wife, drinking yourself to sleep to cover up your life of quiet desperation.

Harold took the other side. He painted a picture of loving relationships and stable bonds—old friends over for dinner, watching the kids grow up, making a difference in a town and community. He contrasted that to a life of shallow fripperies—zipless sex, vacuous possessions, showy luxuries, and a sad and lonely old age.

This is an old debate—the debate between
On the Road
and
It’s a Wonderful Life
. To the extent that social science can solve debates like this, the data is on Harold’s side.

In recent years, researchers have spent a lot of time investigating what makes people happy. They do it mostly by asking people if they are happy and then correlating their answers with other features of their lives. The method seems flimsy, but it produces surprisingly stable and reliable results.

The first thing they have found is that the relationship between money and happiness is complex. Richer countries tend to be happier countries, and richer people tend to be happier than poorer people, but the relationship is not that strong; it depends on how you define happiness, and it is the subject of fierce debate among the experts. As Carol Graham writes in her book
Happiness Around the World
, Nigerians rate themselves just as happy as the Japanese, even though Japan’s
GDP
per capita is almost twenty-five times higher than theirs. The percentage of Bangladeshis who report themselves satisfied with their lives is twice as high as the percentage of Russians. Living standards in the United States have risen dramatically over the past fifty years. But this has produced no measurable uptick in happiness. On the other hand, the United States has become a much more unequal society. This inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness either, even among the poor.

Winning the lottery produces a short-term jolt of happiness, but the long-term effects are invisible. The happiness gain you get from moving from poor to middle class is greater than the gain you get moving from middle to upper class; the happiness curve flattens out. People aren’t happiest during the middle-aged years, when they are winning the most promotions. They are happiest in their twenties and their sixties, when their careers are just starting or winding down. People who place tremendous emphasis on material well-being tend to be less happy than people who don’t.

The next clear finding from research is that people are pretty bad at judging what will make them happy. People vastly overvalue work, money, and real estate. They vastly undervalue intimate bonds and the importance of arduous challenges. The average Americans say that if they could make only $90,000 more a year, they could “fulfill all their dreams.” But the evidence suggests they are wrong.

If the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, the relationship between social bonds and happiness is not. The deeper the relationships a person has, the happier he or she will be. People in long-term marriages are much happier than people who aren’t. According to one study, being married produces the same psychic gain as earning $100,000 a year. According to another, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.

People who have one recurrent sexual partner in a year are happier than people who have multiple partners in a year. People who have more friends have lower stress levels and longer lives. Extroverts are happier than introverts. According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, and others, the daily activities most associated with happiness are all social--having sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends--while the daily activity most injurious to happiness--commuting--tends to be solitary. The professions that correlate most closely with happiness are also social (being a corporate manager, a hairdresser, or a health- or care provider), while the professions most injurious to happiness are either perversely social (being a prostitute) or less social (being a machinery operator).

As Roy Baumeister summarizes the evidence, “Whether someone has a network of good relationships or is alone in the world is a much stronger predictor of happiness than any other objective predictor.”

In what became their lifelong How-to-Live debate, Mark cited movies and rock songs that celebrated freedom and the open road. Harold said all those movies and lyrics were just marketing strategies for adolescents. Adults should want two things, he said, and these were the two things he wanted from his own life: First, he wanted to have a successful marriage. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

Then, Harold continued, he wanted to find some activity, either a job or a hobby, which would absorb all his abilities. He imagined himself working really hard at something, suffering setbacks and frustrations, and then seeing that sweat and toil lead to success and recognition.

He knew that his two goals were in conflict. Marriage might drain time away from his vocation, and his vocation might steal time he could be spending with his friends. He had no idea how he’d navigate those problems. But these were the things he wanted, and neither of them were compatible with the sort of peripatetic, freewheeling life Mark was interested in. Harold had grown up in a culture that, for forty years, had celebrated expressive individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal liberation. But he sensed that what he needed was more community, connection, and interpenetration. He couldn’t bring out his best self alone. He could only do it in conjunction with other people.