The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (41 page)

It turns out that the business world runs on the same biological tracks as other face-to-face social networks, the ones that bind people together in Italian hilltop towns, in real neighborhoods, and in “intentional” communities—in churches, synagogues, college dorms, golf foursomes, and swim teams. Given that the same wiring cements together mother and child, not to mention loving spouses, it shouldn’t be surprising that face-to-face social bonds trump the electronic kind when it really matters: when lives, loyalty, or lots of money is at stake.

Earl Jones knew that. The question is, why doesn’t everybody else, and what does that mean for the rest of us?

I
n August 2010 I spent a day nosing about a cohousing community in Pleasant Hill, California. I drove there from Berkeley, crossing over some stinky sulfurous salt ponds, then spiraling through the arid Orinda Hills while the air outside my car got hotter and hotter. Many of the ranch-style houses I passed had signs on their garage doors—
PROTECTED BY SMITH
&
WESSON—
which made me a little nervous about dropping in on a group of people I’d never met. But as soon as I stepped out of my car in the community’s parking lot, I was greeted by a middle-aged woman unloading groceries from her trunk into a wheeled cart. She smiled at me and asked who I was looking for. When I said Bob Fynn, she pointed me toward a wooden shed about fifty yards away. And that’s where I found Bob, a connection I’d made through a friend, tidying the tool bench in the community’s workshop.

Pleasant Hill is a cluster of about thirty-two tangerine stucco houses that reminded me of a cross between Mayberry R.F.D. and the kibbutz where I spent a year when I was eighteen.
¹
This particular community’s goals, though, are less about sharing material resources than about sharing social capital.
²
In an era when more people are living, raising children, and aging alone than at any time in history, these formerly unacquainted folks—numbering about fifty adults and their kids—wanted more from life than they were getting from going it alone. So in 1999 they bought two acres
of land and created a village where none had existed before. The aim was to design housing that fostered social contact, or as the American Cohousing Association website describes it, “Old fashioned neighborhoods created with a little ingenuity.”

According to a 2011 survey sponsored by the association, cohousing residents say they want the sense of belonging that comes with village life and are willing to give up their own backyards to get it.
³
“I grew up in an apartment building where maybe you knew one person on each floor,” Bob Fynn told me. This was a distinct shift from his parents’ childhoods, when everyone sat out on the front stoop. “People now put such a premium on privacy that it’s hard to get to know your neighbors,” he added. So he and his wife decided to help create a neighborhood.

It’s not easy to fast-track a real sense of village, and often the reality is far from the perfect community the founding members imagined. I wouldn’t want my weekend hours to be whittled down by a community chore roster (it suddenly dawned on me why Fynn was spending his Sunday afternoon cleaning up the communal work bench). But, like co-working sites—former industrial spaces where telecommuters and freelancers are increasingly converging to share office space and an espresso machine—cohousing is a twenty-first-century response to an increasingly solo world. “If our future depends on being clever not individually, but collectively,” as British science writer Matt Ridley aptly put it, then how are we going to get together?
⁴
Because, despite the clear-cut advantages of the Internet, if we want to be happy, healthy, long-lived, and learn more effectively, then we need to find ways to spend more time with each other face-to-face.

This book has shown that intimate contact is a basic human need. Indeed, most of us not born in Sardinian mountain villages still hanker for the feeling of belonging—not to mention the extra twenty years of life—that those villages bestow. Though few of us are willing to give up the educational and occupational
opportunities of the present for the inequalities of the past and the very real privations of old-style rural life, at some level we still want a piece of it. The most common reaction to a 2013 radio documentary I wrote about the phenomenon of Sardinian super-longevity was
I want to live there—even
from people in their twenties and thirties. American historian Christopher Lasch captured the digital generation’s yearning for real connection when he wrote this little ode to social contact in the early 1990s, not long after the word
cyberspace
was coined:

Lasch wasn’t engaging in some loopy utopian fantasy as much as he was voicing some cognitive dissonance about the future. Despite our being increasingly tethered to the devices that connect us virtually, there has not been a corresponding uptick in well-being. In fact, it’s the reverse. By and large we’re lonelier and unhappier than we were in the decades before the Internet age.
⁶
Psychologists don’t know why that is exactly, though we do know that close relationships are the strongest drivers of happiness, and that being alone and unaffiliated makes us the most unhappy. The evidence is pretty clear that we are wired for frequent and genuine social interaction. As humans, we need to know that we belong.
⁷

There’s no going backwards, of course. No one, least of all me, is about to trash their laptops, smartphones, and tablets. But given
the sobering impact of decreasing intimate contact on public health, among other things, it seems that it’s time for a slight course correction.

1
Live in a community where you know and talk to your neighbors.

MAKING TRADEOFFS

The digital revolution, like the automotive revolution that preceded it, has enhanced society in countless ways. But it has also had unintended consequences. Many of the hangouts where people used to meet (which sociologist Ray Oldenburg called third places and techies call meatspaces) are disappearing.
⁸
And given the impact of less social contact on people’s health and morale, not to mention on the bottom line, it’s no wonder that employers such as Yahoo and Bank of America are calling their remote workers back to the office. It’s not that their employees are less productive at home. It’s that without the opportunity to bump into colleagues and have real conversations, innovation and social cohesion take a hit. One 2010 study led by Harvard’s Isaac Kohane shows that the farther scientists are from each other geographically, the less influential their work is on their discipline, and on society. Indeed, the medical studies cited most often by scientists are more likely to be the work of researchers who work together in the very same building, within two hundred meters of each other.
⁹

Evidence like this is why Google designed its Mountain View campus as a series of weirdly angular buildings, all clustered around a common green space equipped with seating and shade, much like the village square I described in
Chapter 2
, as well as the Pleasant Hill cohousing site. The Googleplex is an effort to promote the “casual collisions of the workforce,” says David Radcliffe, the civil engineer in charge of Google’s real estate. Roughly eight
thousand employees are housed in sixty-five connected buildings (averaging a Dunbar’s number–like 123 people per building), none of whom are ever more than a two-minute walk away from any other employee. The headquarters also features 960 micro-kitchens, nineteen cafés, connected walkways, and several dozen “landmarks”—common spaces where people naturally cross paths. As urbanist Greg Lindsay points out, “Our overwhelming preference for face-to-face interaction” is why we are four times as likely to exchange ideas with someone sitting six feet away as sixty feet away.

2
Build real human contact into your workday. Save email for logistics. Use phone or face time for more nuanced interaction.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

It’s fitting that a giant search engine prioritizes interpersonal contact for its own employees, and no surprise that high-tech mavericks, who were likely the first to feel the dispiriting effects of their ballooning screen hours, would also be the first to start valuing their own face-to-face relationships. But not everyone can work at Google, and in any case this book is about more than work.

The first question I raised is whether we can improve our health by improving our social lives. As the emerging evidence I’ve laid out from the fields of social neuroscience and epidemiology confirms, the answer is yes. Daily face-to-face contact with a tight group of friends and family helps you live longer—by fortifying your immune system, calibrating your hormones, and rejigging how the genes that govern your behavior and resilience are expressed. But not just any social contact will do. The quality, type, and frequency of contact really matter. A smorgasbord of face-to-face relationships protects you from catching viruses such as colds, for example. Simply being married or having a small clutch of loyal buddies doesn’t.
¹⁰
The
same goes for your likelihood of surviving heart attacks, strokes,
HIV/AIDS
, or cancer. People with the most integrated social lives–meaning those who have overlapping relationships among friends, family, sports and other recreational or religious pursuits—have the best prognoses. I don’t mean to imply that the right social cocktail means you won’t ever be diagnosed with a dread disease; John McColgan couldn’t ward off polycystic kidney disease, no matter how large his social circle. But if you’re buffered by a tightly interwoven web of friends, neighbors, a caring spouse, and colleagues, you’ll be far less likely to die from those things.
¹¹

And the power of social contact extends beyond individuals. Who survives a disaster also hinges, in large part, on the nature of their social bonds. Hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, and ferocious winter storms are coming at us fast and furiously, bringing with them devastating loss of life. The official response to these calamities has so far been about building better infrastructure and communication systems: fortified power lines, buildings, dams, bridges, and cell networks. These changes are badly needed. But what about focusing on our social ties as well? Because the evidence is clear. From the Chicago heat wave to Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina and the earthquakes in Japan and India, those most likely to make it had people in their circle who cared enough to check up on them and lend a hand. Those who were isolated—during or after the crises—were more likely to die.
¹²

In order to build what I’ve called the village effect, you need a community of real friends you see in the real world. That community may overlap with your online networks, but is almost certainly smaller and more intimate (even for the most gregarious among us, likely no more than 150 to 200 people). A face-to-face network is not only more intimate, it is also more dynamic. As people fade away or your needs change, you really do need to repair or replace the face-to-face relationships you’ve lost, for the sake of your well-being, health, and longevity. Like a perennial border that
develops gaps when certain plants don’t come back after a dormant period, you have to fill in the empty spaces. And much like gardening, cultivating a personal village comes naturally to some people and takes more planning for others.

Researching this book has changed my own habits. In the past, my preferred plan for the evening was to stay home, reading or working. Now I build in social contact the way I build in daily exercise. I swim on a team—some of whose members you’ve met in these pages—because I’ve discovered that exercising with a group gives me more bang for my buck than I could ever get from swimming laps alone. Like Marietta Monni, the longtime friend and neighbor of Sardinian centenarian Zia Teresa, I make a point of attending social events and engaging with the people I happen to meet, exchanging more than just hello. And now that I’m paying attention, I can detect an upswing in mood when I extend my inner circle past the tight boundaries of my family and my three or four close friends.

One of these social outlets is not enough. You may be married to the person of your dreams. But if he or she is the only person you feel close to and can confide in, you’re one person away from having no one at all. Immunologically speaking, you’re almost naked.

3
Create a village of diverse relationships. Build in social contact with members of this village the way you work in meals and exercise.

INTROVERTS AND EXTROVERTS

Is regular face-to-face social contact good for everyone? What about introverts, who can find too much social contact painful? In
Quiet
, author Susan Cain makes a strong case for leaving introverts to their own devices. Defining them as “reflective, cerebral, bookish, unassuming, sensitive, thoughtful, serious, contemplative, subtle, introspective, inner-directed, gentle, calm, modest, solitude-seeking,
shy, risk-averse, and thin-skinned,” Cain argues that “in a world that can’t stop talking,” introverts should be allowed to think and create in peace. That certainly sounds sensible, and given that flattering list of attributes, many of us, including me, may now identify as introverts (sensitive, unassuming, thoughtful, and cerebral? Hell, yes).