The Social Animal

CHAPTER 12 FREEDOM AND COMMITMENT

FOR THE FIRST EIGHTEEN YEARS OF HIS LIFE, HAROLD HAD engaged in a sort of highly structured striving. During childhood, he had been extravagantly supervised, coached, and mentored. His missions had been clearly marked: get good grades, make the starting team, make adults happy.

Ms. Taylor had introduced a new wrinkle into his life—a love of big ideas. Harold discovered he loved world historical theories, the grander the better. Sometimes he would get so swept up in ideas, you had to chase him around with a butterfly net.

In college, Harold made another discovery. He could be interesting. In college, there were two different status economies. There was the daytime economy, when students interacted with adults and were at their resume-padding, mentor-pleasing best. Harold didn’t really stand out in this world, where he was surrounded by students whose conversation consisted mostly of how much work they had to do.

But then there was the nighttime economy, an all-student mosh pit of sarcasm and semen-related gross-out humor. In this economy, worldly accomplishments were irrelevant, and the social rewards went to those with the wittiest sensibilities.

Harold and his friends were sensibility gymnasts. They could pull off hilarious routines of irony, camp, ridicule, and self-referential, postmodern pseudo-mockery. Nothing they said was ever meant literally, and the trick to entering their social set consisted in knowing exactly how many layers of irony surrounded each conversational display.

He and his friends knew what the cruelest and funniest YouTube videos were before anyone else. They debated Coen brothers movies and the cultural significance of the American Pie series. They were briefly enthralled by the open-source software movement as a new mode of social organization. They wondered what is the optimal level of fame—Brad Pitt or Sebastian Junger? They favored the kind of music that is more fun to talk about than to listen to—intellectual neo-House music and self-consciously retro electro-funk. They cultivated the sort of weird obsessions that can come only through months of nonschoolwork-related Internet surfing. They shared an interest in the radical Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

In other generations, the campus avant-garde debated Pauline Kael and the meaning of Ingmar Bergman films, but Harold and his friends assumed that technology would produce bigger social changes than art or cultural products. They moved first from iPod to iPhone to iPad, and if Steve Jobs had come out with an iWife they would have been married on launch day. They were not only early adopters; they were early discarders, ditching each fad just as it hit the mainstream. They had finished their titanium-necklace phases by eighth grade, and by college they were sick of whimsical furniture. They scoffed at kids who had gumball machines in their rooms, though Harold found it witty when a friend used an airplane-service cart as an at-home liquor cabinet.

Harold was pretty good at these sensibility contests, but overall he was overshadowed by his roommate. In the initial housing application, he’d asked to be paired with a student who had low grades but high SAT scores. When he walked into his dorm room for the first time, there was Mark, dripping in sweat and wearing one of those sleeveless undershirts like Marlon Brando wore in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Mark was from L.A. He was about six two with hard, muscled shoulders and a dark handsome face. He wore a scruffy three-day growth of beard on his face, and his hair was perpetually shaggy, like one of those sensitive stud novelists at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’d already put a sliding board in the room, for impromptu late-night exercise, and had brought his own bed frame to college—believing that bachelors should always invest in a good bed frame.

Mark was willing to risk humiliation in order to have fun and organized his life as a series of picaresque adventures, designed to produce adrenaline bursts. For example, during his freshman year, he decided, on a lark, to enter the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, billing himself the Kosher Killer. He decided he wouldn’t train for his bouts, just blog about boxing. He was escorted by a posse of ring girls dressed as morticians, carrying a coffin as he walked in for the fight. He was knocked out by a real boxer in eighty-nine seconds, but not before his story was covered by every TV news show in the city.

One month, Mark tried to get on American Idol. The next, he took up kitesurfing and ended up hanging out with the owner of an NBA basketball team. He had four thousand Facebook friends and on nights out Mark would spend half the night texting, juggling different social and hook-up options. He lived in what he called “Intense World,” a constant search for adrenaline and fond memories.

Harold was never quite sure how seriously to take his roommate. Mark would leave little sarcastic Post-it notes around the room—“Go Ahead! Be a Manwhore!”—designed for his own amusement. He made lists of everything: women he’d slept with, women he’d seen naked, people who’d hit him, people who would do community service even if they didn’t have to. One day Harold picked up an issue of Men’s Health, which Mark had left around the apartment, and he found some seemingly earnest marginalia next to an article on exfoliation: “So True! … Exactly!”

Once a leader, Harold was now a follower. Mark was Gatsby and Harold, who had once been so assertive, was Nick Carraway, the narrator. He spent the stray hours of his youth marveling at Mark’s manic energy and trailing along to share in the fun.

The writer Andrea Donderi argues that the world is divided between Askers and Guessers. Askers feel no shame when making requests and are willing to be told no without being hurt. They’ll invite themselves over as a guest for a week. They’ll ask for money, to borrow the car, a boat, or a girlfriend. They have no compunction about asking and do not take offense when they are refused.

Guessers hate asking for favors and feel guilty when saying no to other people’s requests. In Guess culture, Donderi writes, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re sure the answer will be yes. In Guess culture you never say no to someone else directly. You make excuses. Every request, made or received, is fraught with emotional and social peril.

Mark lived in Ask culture, and Harold lived in Guess culture. This occasionally caused problems between them. Sometimes Harold even thought of buying some self-help books—an entire genre designed to teach Guessers how to be Askers. But it never actually came to that. Besides, to a nineteen-year-old kid, Mark was irresistible. He was always happy, always moving, and always fun. He was like the poster boy of youthful vitality. After graduating from college he set off on a grand world tour, blithely unconcerned with how he would organize the rest of his life. He had assumed since early adolescence that he was destined to be the Omnivore Guardian of Taste. He would take charge of some field—movies, TV, music, design, fashion, or something else, and impose his delightful sensibility on a grateful world.

“Hey, High Thinking!” He called out one day just before graduation. High Thinking was his nickname for Harold. “Do you want to share an apartment while I travel the globe?” So Harold spent the next few years sharing an apartment with a man who wasn’t there. Mark’s bedroom would sit idle for months, and then occasionally he would breeze into town, bringing a wake of European heiresses and adventure stories.

Harold went on to earn a degree in global economics and foreign relations. He also figured out how to ace job interviews. Instead of being polite, deferential, and demure at these interviews, he was his late-night irreverent self. The bored interviewers inevitably loved it, or at least those at any place he actually wanted to work did.

After college he went through a pseudo–Peace Corps phase of do-good think tankery. He worked at the Social Change Initiative, the Foundation for Global Awareness, and Common Concerns before serving as a senior fellow at Share, a clean-water distribution NGO founded by an aging rock star. Tiring of private-jet philanthropy, he then went through his editorial-associate phase. He applied for jobs at The Public Interest, The National Interest, The American Interest, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, and National Affairs. While working as an associate editor, he edited essays advocating the full range of oxymoronic grand strategies: practical idealism, moral realism, cooperative unilateralism, focused multilateralism, unipolar defensive hegemony, and so on and so on. These essays were commissioned by executive editors who had been driven insane by attending too many Davos conferences.

The jobs sounded exciting on the outside, but they often involved doing a lot of unnecessary research. Harold had spent the years before college graduation in upper-level seminars discussing Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and the problem of evil. He spent the years after graduation operating a Canon copying machine.

It became obvious to him, as he stood there trying not to be hypnotized by the cruising green light of the machine, that he had become information-age Canon fodder. The organizations and journals he worked for were run by paunchy middle-aged adults who had job security and a place in society. People in his cohort, on the other hand, were transient young things who seemed to be there mostly to provide fact-checking and sexual tension.

His parents were growing increasingly anxious, because their son, a few years out of college now, seemed adrift. Harold’s own mental state was more complicated. On the one hand, he didn’t feel any particular pressure to settle into a groove and become an adult yet. None of his friends were doing it. They were living in an even more slapdash manner than he was—spending their twenties doing a little teaching, a little temping, a little bartending. They seemed to move from city to city with amazing promiscuity. Cities have become the career dressing rooms for young adults. They have become the place where people go in their twenties to try on different identities. Then, once they know who they are, they leave. Thirty-eight percent of young Americans say they would like to live in Los Angeles, but only 8 percent of older Americans would. Harold’s friends would show up in San Francisco one year and then Washington, D.C., the next. Everything changed except their e-mail addresses.

On the other hand, Harold desperately wanted to know what he was supposed to do with his life. He dreamed of finding some calling that would end all uncertainty and would give his life meaning. He longed for some theme that would connect one event in his life to another and replace the jarring sensation he had that each of his moments was unconnected to what came before and after. He dreamed that someday some all-knowing mentor would sit him down and not only tell him how to live but why he was here. But his Moses never came. Of course he could never come, because you can only discover your vocation by doing it, and seeing if it feels right. There’s no substitute for the process of trying on different lives, and waiting to find one that fits.

In the meantime, Harold found himself evolving in ways he didn’t particularly like. He had developed a personality based on sensibility snobbery. He hadn’t accomplished much of anything yet, but at least he could feel good about his superior sensibility. He watched those comedy shows that exploit young people’s status anxiety by ridiculing famous people who are professionally accomplished but personally inferior.

At the same time, he could be a shameless suck-up. He found himself dashing across cocktail receptions to make a nice impression before a superior. He discovered that the higher people rise in the world, the larger the dose of daily flattery they need in order to maintain their psychic equilibrium. He became very good at delivering it.

Harold also discovered that it’s socially acceptable to flatter your bosses by day so long as you are blasphemously derisive about them while drinking with your buddies at night. He marveled at the college losers who’d spent the four years at school in friendless isolation watching sitcoms, and who were now promising young producers and Hollywood’s flavors of the month. The adult world seemed mysterious and perverse.

The Odyssey Years

Harold was part of a generation that inaugurated a new life phase, the odyssey years. There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age. Odyssey is the decade of wandering that occurs between adolescence and adulthood.

Adulthood can be defined by four accomplishments: moving away from home, getting married, starting a family, and becoming financially independent. In 1960, 70 percent of American thirty-year olds had accomplished these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent had done the same. In Western Europe, which has been leading this trend, the numbers are even lower.

The existence of this new stage can be seen in a range of numbers, which have been gathered by scholars such as Jeffrey Jensen Arnett in his book Emerging Adulthood, Robert Wuthnow in his book After the Baby Boomers, Joseph and Claudia Allen in their book Escaping Endless Adolescence, and by William Galston of the Brookings Institution.

People around the world are shacking up more and postponing marriage. In the early 1970s, 28 percent of Americans had lived with a partner before marriage. By the 1990s, 65 percent of Americans had. Between 1980 and 2000 the median age of first marriage had increased by between five and six years in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, an astonishing shift in lifestyles in such a short time. In 1970 a fifth of Americans at age twenty-five had never been married. By 2005, 60 percent had never been married.

As Wuthnow demonstrates, people around the developed world are spending more years in school and taking more time to finish their education. The average college graduate in 2000 took 20 percent longer to earn a degree than the average student in 1970.

The changes have been caused by several interrelated phenomena. People are living longer, and so have more time to settle on a life course. The economy has become more complicated, with a broader array of career possibilities, so it takes awhile for people to find the right one. Society has become more segmented, so it takes longer for people to find the right psychological niche. Women are better educated than before and more likely to be working full-time. In 1970 only 26 percent of women were working out of the home fifty weeks a year in the United States. By 2000, 45 percent were. Many of these women want to, or feel compelled to, postpone marriage and family until they are professionally established.

Finally, young people are ambivalent about adulthood. As Arnett argues, they want the security and stability adulthood brings, but they don’t want to settle into a daily grind. They don’t want to limit their spontaneity or put limits on their dreams.

These changes had profound effects on the way Harold and his cohort imagined their life courses. For example, earlier generations assumed that a young person should get married and then together as a couple go out and get established in the world. But people in Harold’s social class generally took a different view. First you got established. Then when you were secure and could afford a wedding, you got married.

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.

The Group

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.

Fate

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.

Erica

Life is filled with strange correspondences. You spend months looking for a good job and then two land at your feet in a day. You spend years looking for a soul mate and then find yourself drawn to two people simultaneously. The day after Harold had his debate with Mark, and effectively closed off one life course for himself, he found himself with another offer. A different life course opened before him.

It came in the form of an e-mail. There was a lunch invitation. It was from a woman named Erica, a friend of a friend. She said she was looking for someone who would help her build her business, and she’d heard that he might be just the person to do that. He checked her out on Facebook and saw a small-boned, attractive Latina-Asian woman. Harold didn’t know about working with her. But he wouldn’t mind getting to know her. Harold wrote Erica back and said he’d be delighted to meet for lunch. He pretended to be interested in the job, but all sorts of romantic fantasies were already burbling in his mind.