What predicts a happy life? As I explained long ago in The Pursuit of Happiness, there are some things that I might have guessed would matter. But one’s age, gender, or race, for example, matter little. Money helps to a point—better to be able to afford life’s necessities and to feel control over one’s life than not. Yet ever-increasing wealth provides diminishing well-being returns. Moreover, the last half-century’s remarkable growth in average real income and purchases (albeit with rising inequality) us has left people a bit less happy.
What does matter—what best predicts whether people report being “very happy”—is close, supportive relationships. We are, as Aristotle recognized, social animals. Our ancestral history has destined us to flourish with others. For our hunter-gatherer forebears, six hands were better than two.
We therefore have what today’s social psychologists call a “need to belong.” When supported by intimate friendships or a committed marriage, we are much likelier to declare ourselves “very happy.” When socially deprived—when exiled, ostracized, bereaved, or imprisoned in solitary confinement—we feel lonely and adrift. Social support matters. Friend number predicts happiness.
“Happiness seems made to be shared,” noted the French dramatist Pierre Corneille. So it seems from answers to a question asked of Americans by the National Opinion Research Center: “Looking over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?” Compared with those who could name no such intimate, those who named five or more such friends were 60 percent more likely to feel “very happy.”
And then a curious thing happened on the way into the twenty-first century. Our close face-to-face relationships have waned. We’re marrying later, and less often. We’re not just more often Bowling Alone, to use political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous metaphor, but also spending less time socializing with others. The American Time Use Survey reveals that we are (in minutes per day) hanging out together less. (To replace the diminished engagement, some have created interactive online AI friends.)
Decreased face-to-face social connections are most striking among teens and young adults. As my Social Psychology text co-author Jean Twenge has amply documented, today’s teens are dating less, partying less, and being with friends less. Much less. They also have fewer friends. Their decreasing time with friends is not, as some have speculated, because they are working more or doing more homework. If anything, they’re employed less and doing less homework.
But, you say, being alone needn’t mean being lonely. Sometimes we savor solitude. Moreover, texting and social media posting enable social connections.
Nevertheless, especially among teens and young adults in Western countries, depression, anxiety, suicide ideation, and loneliness have increased concurrently with the increasing homebound solitude, and mainly for those spending long daily hours staring at social media screens rather than engaging with people in-person, face-to-face.
In one of her informative Substack essays, Jean Twenge recently displayed Monitoring the Future survey responses of U.S. 13- to 18-year-olds, showing the percentage reporting depressive symptoms (with data from the depressing Covid years excluded).
Our screens are not only a time suck from sleeping, reading, and schooling, but also from relationships. And consider other societal sources of our social malnutrition:
- At-home remote work. Many people love the convenience and lessened travel time and expense, but they come at the price of connecting with colleagues in the mailroom, over the coffee pot, and in office meetings.
- Take-out food, sometimes with contactless delivery. We love the convenience of take-out foods, albeit with less time leisurely dining out with friends. In the UK, the result has been a long-term decline in the number of people in pubs and nightclubs.
- Online shopping. We love the efficiency of one-click purchases and home delivery, even if putting out of business some shops where we once mingled with others and had chance conversations.
- Decreased attendance at churches, museums, and school sports. Fewer folks are joining others at worship places, museum galleries, and high school and small college sporting events. During the 1996–1997 college season, the NCAA Division III men’s basketball attendance at the three schools with the most attendance averaged 2467 fans per game; last year it was just 1397. I confess that I love being able to watch my school’s livestreamed out-of-town basketball games. But that convenience means that I’m less likely to enjoy being with fellow fans traveling together to cheer them on.
The drains on our in-person, empathy-enabling relationships seem baked into modern life. Yet we are not helpless. We can reinvigorate the priority we give to close relationships. We can put down our phones and give conversational partners our focused attention. We can resolve to take the initiative to dine more often with friends, meet more often with colleagues, exchange confidences more often with family members. We can stick our head into coworkers’ work spaces. We can video-call relatives. We can establish sit-down family mealtimes. We can initiate micro-friendships—pleasing brief relationships with our baristas, seatmates, and ride-share drivers.
Today’s digital world enriches our lives—but especially so when we retain a central place for face-to-face active listening and engagement. Sharing our lives in person with those who love and support us has two effects, observed the seventeenth-century sage Francis Bacon: “It redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.”
David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.
