The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding. A carpenter merges with the tool in his hands. A mathematician loses herself in the problem she is solving. In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved.

  The desire for limerence propels us intellectually. We all like to be told how right we are (some radio and cable-TV pundits make millions reinforcing their audience’s inner models). We all feel a surge of pleasure when some clarifying theory clicks into place. We all like to feel in harmony with our surroundings. As Bruce Wexler argues in Brain and Culture, we spend much of the first halves of our lives trying to build internal models that fit the world and much of the last halves trying to adjust the world so it fits the inner models. Much late-night barroom conversation involves someone trying to get other people to see the world as we do. Nations don’t clash only over land, wealth, and interests; they fight to compel others to see the world as they do. One of the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been so stubbornly unresolved is that each side wants the other to accept its historical narrative.

  Most people are deeply moved when they return to their childhood home, to the place where their mental models were first forged. When we return to the town where we grew up, it is the details that matter most—the way the drugstore is in the same place as it was when we were young, the same fence around the park, the angle of the sun in the winter, the crosswalk we used to traverse. We don’t love these things for their merits, because the crosswalk is the best of all possible crosswalks. The mind coats home with a special layer of affection because these are the patterns we know. “The child will love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever taken any notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is making every attempt to win its regard,” C. S. Lewis once observed. “But it must be an old gardener, one who has ‘always’ been there—the short but seemingly immemorial ‘always’ of childhood.”

  The desire for limerence is at its most profound during those transcendent moments when people feel themselves fused with nature and with God, when the soul lifts up and a feeling of oneness with the universe pervades their being.

  Most important, people seek limerence with one another. Within two weeks of being born, babies will cry if they hear another baby in distress, but not if they hear a recording of their own crying. In 1945 the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an American orphanage. The orphanage itself was meticulously clean. There was a nurse for every eight babies. The babies were well fed, but they were left alone all day, in theory to reduce their exposure to germs. Sheets were hung between the cribs for the same reason. Despite all the sanitary precautions, 37 percent of the babies in the orphanage died before reaching age two. They were missing one essential thing they needed to live—empathetic contact.

  People gravitate toward people like themselves. When we meet new people, we instantly start matching our behavior to theirs. It took Muhammad Ali, who was just about as quick as anybody ever, 190 milliseconds to detect an opening in his opponent’s defenses and begin throwing a punch into it. It takes the average college student 21 milliseconds to begin synchronizing her movement unconsciously with her friends.

  Friends who are locked in conversation begin to replicate each other’s breathing patterns. People who are told to observe a conversation begin to mimic the physiology of the people having the conversation, and the more closely they mimic the body language, the more perceptive they are about the relationship they are observing. At the deeper level of pheromones, women who are living together often share the same menstrual cycles.

  As the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni notes, “Vicarious” is not a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mental processes. When we sense another’s joy, we begin to share that person’s laughter as if it were our own. When we see agony, even up on a movie screen, that agony is reflected in our brains, in paler form, as if it were our own.

  “When your friend has become an old friend, all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity,” C. S. Lewis writes. A friend’s love, Lewis continues, “free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”

  Once people feel themselves within a group, there is a strong intuitional pressure to conform to its norms. Solomon Asch conducted a famous experiment in which he showed people three different lines of obviously different length. Then he surrounded the test subjects with a group of people (secretly working for Asch) who insisted that the lines were the same length. Faced with this group pressure, 70 percent of the research subjects conformed at least once, reporting that the lines were the same length. Only 20 percent refused to conform to this obvious falsehood.

  Bliss

  We don’t teach this ability in school—to harmonize patterns, to seek limerence, to make friends. But the happy life is defined by these sorts of connections, and the unhappy life is defined by a lack of them.

  Emile Durkheim demonstrated that people with few social connections are much more likely to commit suicide. In Love and Survival, Dean Ornish surveyed research on longevity and concluded that solitary people are three to five times more likely to die prematurely than socially engaged people.

  Achieving limerence, on the other hand, can produce an overwhelming feeling of elevation. When the historian William McNeill was in the U.S. Army in 1941, he was taught, in boot camp, how to march. Soon, this act of marching with his fellows began to alter his own consciousness:

  Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.

  Millions of soldiers have risked and surrendered their lives in war because of the primordial connection they felt toward their fellows. Families are often held together through thick and thin by that feeling. Social life is held together by the lower-level version of that feeling we call trust. And for most of us, the strongest longing for limerence takes the form of that intense desire we have to meld with the special other—love.

  This drive, this longing for harmony, is a never-ending process—model, adjust, model, adjust—guiding us onward.

  Eros Reconsidered

  Today, when we hear the word “eros,” we think of something quite distinct and compartmentalized—sex. Erotica is separated in the bookstore from the other books. But this is the narrow, chopped-up meaning of eros that we have inherited from a sex-centered culture. In the Greek understanding, eros is not just the desire for orgasm, sex, or even genetic transmission. The Greeks saw eros as a generalized longing for union with the beautiful and the excellent.

  People driven by lust want to have orgasms with each other. But people driven by eros want to have a much broader fusion. They want to share the same emotions, visit the same places, savor the same pleasures, and replicate the same patterns in each other’s minds. As Allan Bloom wrote in Love & Friendship, “Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction.”

  People sometimes say neuroscience is destroying the soul and the spirit. It reduces everything to neurons, synapses, and biochemical reactions. But in fact neuroscience gives us a glimpse of eros in action. It helps us see the dance of the patterns between friends and lovers.

  Harold and Erica were never more alive than in the first weeks of their love for each other. One afternoon they were sitting on the couch at Harold’s place, watching an old movie. “I know you,” Erica said after a lull, apropos of nothing, peering into Harold’s eyes.
Then a few minutes later she fell asleep on Harold’s chest. Harold went on watching the movie and shifted her head a bit so he could be comfortable. She made a soft nuzzling sound.

  Then Harold brushed his hand over her hair and face. Her breathing quickened and slowed with the pace of his touch, but still her eyes were closed and she didn’t stir. Harold had never noticed how deeply she could sleep. He lost all interest in the movie and just watched her there.

  He picked up her arm and put it around his neck. She made a sweet puckering gesture with her lips, but remained asleep. Then he put her arm back down on her side. She nestled back into his chest. After that he just watched her doze, measuring the rise and fall of her chest, a feeling of tender protectiveness sweeping over him. “Remember this moment,” he thought.

  Not that everything was perfect. Each found that they still had deep unconscious inhibitions that blocked the union they sought most. There were still frictions and conflicts.

  The longing for limerence doesn’t automatically produce perfect romances or easy global harmony. We spend large parts of our lives trying to get others to accept our patterns—and trying to resist this sort of mental hegemony from others. On a broader scale, people don’t just connect; they compete to connect. We compete against one another to win the prestige and respect and attention that will help us bond with one another. We seek to surpass one another in earning one another’s approval. That’s the logic of our complicated game.

  But especially during those first eighteen months, Harold and Erica experienced a sort of worldly magic. They worked together. They ate together. They slept together and fit together in nearly every respect. They tasted the synchronicity that is the essence of all great professions of love: “Love you? I am you.” “We are one, / One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.”

  CHAPTER 14

  THE GRAND NARRATIVE

  AS ERICA’S CAREER GREW BRIGHTER, HER HOUSE GOT DARKER. She and Harold had started their consulting firm when they were both twenty-eight. For the next few years everything went great. They racked up clients. They hired new people—eighteen in all. They bought new phones and nice printers. Their time was consumed by consulting projects—during the day, at night, and on weekends. Occasionally they would carve out time for vacations, for friends and even dinner dates alone. But there was never time for chores around the house they bought. Everything began to fray at the edges. If a lightbulb burned out, it would stay in the socket for months while Erica and Harold learned to navigate their way in the dark. The cable went out in their downstairs TV, but neither had time to call the cable company and take care of it. Windows cracked. Gutters filled with leaves. Stains lodged in carpets. They adapted to each peripheral dysfunction, content to trade professional achievement for domestic decay.

  After about four years, though, the company began to fall apart. A recession hit. Physically, nothing changed. The buildings and the people were all there. But the psychology was different. One moment everyone talked heroically about embracing risk, the next they were terrified. Consulting contracts, which had seemed essential for long-term growth, were now perceived as useless luxuries. Companies slashed them back.

  Dozens of friends disappeared from Erica’s life. These were clients she’d played tennis with, gone on trips with, invited into her home. They worked at companies she advised, and the bonds of trust and camaraderie between them were real.

  But when the contracts were cut, the relationships dissolved. Erica noticed her witty sarcastic e-mails no longer generated responses. Calls went unreturned. It wasn’t that people stopped liking her. They just didn’t want to hurt her. They were cutting off her contract, and they didn’t want to cause her pain by telling her, so they just withdrew. Erica began to recognize the dishonesty of niceness. The desire to not cause pain was just an unwillingness to have an unpleasant conversation. It was cowardice, not consideration.

  The office grew quiet. It was hard in turn for Erica’s staff to see her helpless in this way. She couldn’t show fear, but they all felt it within her. “Nothing is over until it’s over,” she would tell them, calm and focused. But the money was not coming in. The banks were unhappy. Lines of credit dried up. She was paying employees off her credit card, and begging new clients for work.

  Finally, the biggest contract disappeared. She called the CEO asking for a renewal. It was hard to hear her vulnerable like that, her life’s work resting on one call. And the CEO lied to her nicely like the others had. It was just a blip in the relationship, he said. They’d be back in a year or so, blah, blah, blah. She couldn’t tell him that, without his contract, her company wouldn’t last a week. It was the death sentence, and yet as she hung up the phone she found she wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t hyperventilating. “So this is what it feels like to fail,” she thought. The emotional impact came only an hour or so later. She retreated to the ladies’ room, heaving with sobs. She wanted to go home and crawl into bed.

  At the end of the week, she gathered her staff. They sat around the conference room, trading gallows humor. Erica looked across at them, the individuals who would soon be unemployed. There was Tom, who carried a laptop at all times and typed every significant thing he heard into a file. There was Bing, who was so mentally hyperactive she could only get through half a sentence before she started on the next one. There was Elsie, who had no confidence in herself; Alison, who platonically shared a bed with her roommate to save money; and Emilio, who kept antacid pills in a row atop his computer. People were stranger than you could imagine.

  In moments of crisis she became eerily calm. She announced that she had no choice but to close the firm. Gone. Belly-up. She told them the national economy had gone wrong and it was nobody’s fault, but then she spoke too long and her mind naturally started rehearsing things she might have done differently. There was something inside her that had trouble with the concept of “nobody’s fault.” It wanted to assign some concrete blame, justified or not. Then she started giving the old entrepreneur’s mantra that there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just a step in the process of learning. Nobody was comforted.

  For a few weeks after that, there was still stuff to do. Sell the office supplies. Write letters. But then there was nothing. Erica was shocked at how disorienting this was. All her life she had worked. Suddenly she lived in a pathless universe.

  She had thought she might actually like a little tranquility. But it was terrible. “There is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment,” the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, “and this desire seems the foundation of most of our passions and pursuits.”

  Her thoughts began to disintegrate. After a few weeks, she had trouble organizing an argument or composing a memo. She was exhausted all the time, though she never actually did anything. She longed for some difficulty to overcome.

  Eventually, she began to scaffold her days. She had long been a member of a gym, but barely went as she struggled to save her firm. Now she worked out feverishly. She dressed each morning and went to Starbucks, where she sat with her briefcase, phone, and laptop. Going out among the employed was tough—like being a sick person in the land of the healthy, an internal exile. She watched the great mass of coffee sippers trudging thoughtlessly back to their offices. They had obligations; she didn’t. She rotated between different Starbucks so it wouldn’t be so obvious she had no place else to go.

  In an essay for The Atlantic, Don Peck summarized the research findings on the psychological costs of unemployment. People who suffer long-term bouts of unemployment are much more likely to suffer depression, even years later. For the rest of their lives, they cling more tightly to jobs, and become more risk averse. They are much more likely to become alcoholics and beat their spouses. Their physical health deteriorates. People who lose jobs at thirty have life spans a year and a half shorter than people who never lost a job. Long-term unemployment, some researchers have found, is the psychic equivalent to the d
eath of a spouse.

  Erica’s relationship with Harold suffered. Growing up as he had, Harold assumed that your worth depends on who you are. Erica assumed that your worth depends on what you do. Harold always had these random interests he was happy to throw himself into. He spent the first few weeks reading. Erica needed the upward climb, the mission. Harold was willing to take any job that seemed interesting, and before long he got a job as a program officer for a historical society. Erica needed a job that would set her once again on the path to dominance. She’d sit in Starbucks, calling her old contacts, looking for an opening at the vice-president level or above. The calls were almost never returned, and soon her expectations slipped. She began thinking about entrepreneurial opportunities. She could open a smoothie franchise, a Mongolian grill, a nanny agency, a spicy-pickle supplier. She could start a company of pet butlers. These were not exactly the career paths she had ever considered before.

  After a few months, a friend told her that Intercom, the cable company, was looking for somebody to help with strategic planning. She had always hated that company. The service was awful, the repairmen were ill-trained, the customer support was slow, the CEO was famously narcissistic. Of course none of that mattered now. She applied.

  The interviewer kept her waiting and then greeted her with a condescending amiability. “We have the smartest people on earth working here,” he told her. “It’s a pleasure coming to work each day. It’s like The Best and the Brightest.”

  Erica wondered if this guy had missed the Vietnam parts of that book.