Back in 2000, Harvard professor and political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, about the decline of American civil society. Putnam’s diagnosis was that Americans were engaging less and less with their communities and this was damaging American society as a whole.
Americans were far less likely to participate in voluntary work, to go to church, know their neighbours, invite friends home, go to bars, join unions or just spend time hanging out with friends (and their cats).
This is part of the reason why, over the past decades, countries like the US have become richer but have at the same time experienced a drop in happiness levels. Across the world, we seem to be looking for happiness in all the wrong places. To make matters worse, this is not a US thing but a global thing. We – human beings – are happier when we feel connected with others. And, so far, I have yet to discover a more powerful force to explain human happiness than the fulfilment of our longing for love, friendship and community. So, people want to belong, but they are not exactly sure how to make it happen.
This challenge has become even bigger with the advance of technology. We are connecting like never before, yet we still feel alone. Our relationships are complicated, they are demanding and they are messy – so we attempt to clean them up with technology. We prefer calling someone to meeting them in person – and would rather text than call. We are drawn in by the illusion of connection without the demands of intimacy, and while there are positive aspects of social media, for example, keeping in touch when geographically apart, we find that people who reduce their consumption of social media are happier and connect more in the real world.
In 2015, we ran an experiment at the Happiness Research Institute. We asked participants about different dimensions of happiness and then randomly allocated the participants either to a control group, which continued to use Facebook as usual, or a treatment group, which did not use Facebook for a week. When the week had passed, we asked the participants to evaluate their lives once more.
What we found was that the treatment group reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction. The people in that group also reported higher levels of enjoyment in life and felt less lonely, and not using Facebook led to an increase in their social activity and their satisfaction with their social life. Further study is needed to understand the long-term effects of such an intervention but, for now, it is another piece of evidence demonstrating that, while digital technologies are still in their infancy, we, too, are still in our infancy in terms of our ability to use it. One of the challenges is to organize critical analogue mass at the local community level. By critical analogue mass, I mean enough people that are not sucked into their devices so there is someone to play or talk with. How do we ensure that we have somebody to play with if we disconnect from the digital community? As we shall see below, a Danish school might have found a means to do that.
HAPPINESS TIP:
CREATE CRITICAL ANALOGUE MASS
Encourage your friends and family to have tech-free periods during the week, avoid the temptation to check your phone, and detox digitally.
In addition to bonfires at summer solstice, the field across from our summer cabin was used for play. When I was a child, we could easily muster twenty-five kids for a game of roundball (best described as a simple version of baseball); of course, this was in the pre-iPad age. Last year, a survey from Action for Children in the UK showed that parents find convincing kids to turn off their computer, phone or other device tougher than getting them to do their homework. Almost one in four parents found it difficult to control the amount of time their children spent playing on computers or tablets, while only 10 per cent struggled with getting their children to do their homework. One of the reasons behind this is that kids do not want to be left out of the online community.
A Danish boarding school is going to what the kids consider extreme measures to create community. The staff confiscate smartphones and other gadgets; Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat can be accessed for only one hour per day, as pupils are allowed one hour of gadget time per day. After the first term, the system was put to a student vote. Should we continue with this system, or be given back our phones and gadgets and be free to use them as much as we want? Eighty per cent voted for the first option. Obviously, these kinds of measures work only when a sufficient number of people are on board.
If you are the only one without your phone and the rest of the class is Snapchatting with their friends back home, that is a lonely experience. So it is important to get critical mass within your social circle. You could convince a number of families on your street to make Thursday night analogue night and send the kids out to play together, or start at home by making Thursday night family night. Other options are to create a no-phone zone for two hours around the evening meal, or place a basket for phones by the coat hangers and encourage friends to deposit any devices there when they visit.
TOGETHERNESS
Bof?llesskab
Denmark: The co-housing scheme is designed to create privacy as well as community. Families live separately yet together, reducing social isolation and the hassle of everyday logistics. Read more on this page.
Turning streets into communities
Perth, Australia: Using the wisdom of The Little Prince, Shani, a young Canadian woman, turned a street into a community by introducing pizza nights, movie nights, herb gardens and goats, through asking people to dream of what kind of street they would like to live in. Read more on this page.
National Neighbours’ Day
The Netherlands: The Dutch notion that a good neighbour is better than a distant friend has turned an initiative to get neighbours together over a cup of coffee into a nation-wide event that is celebrated in two thousand Dutch districts. Read more on this page.
From motor city to garden city
Detroit, USA: After the financial crisis which destroyed the economy in Detroit, people have started to revitalize the city by transforming it from a ‘motor city’ into a ‘garden city’. Urban community gardens have been established throughout the city, which is currently one of the world’s biggest urban agricultural movements.
Moai
Okinawa, Japan: Home to some of the healthiest people in the world, where many live to over a hundred years old. Some suggest it has to do with moai, which means to ‘come together in a common purpose’. It is a solid part of Okinawan tradition to create small, secure social networks in which members commit to each other for life. Moai is created when a child is born and helps to integrate the child into a lifelong community. Whether you face serious problems in life, economic struggle, sickness or grief over the loss of a loved one, the moai will be there.
Día de los Muertos
Mexico: The Day of the Dead celebrations take place between 28 October and 2 November each year. The belief is that, on this day, the deceased have divine permission to visit friends and relatives on earth. People visit the graves of families and friends, taking food and drink with them. The events are a celebration of life rather than a sober mourning of its passing and create a sense of togetherness even with lost ones.
It takes a village to raise a child
Western Africa: The proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ exists in many different African languages but is sometimes said to have originated in Igbo and Yoruba, which are spoken in Western Africa. Our language shapes our behaviour – and the proverb is a reminder that if we honour the notion that we are each other’s keepers, we all become happier.
MONEY
One day, when I was about eleven, I read the headline ‘THE DOLLAR IS GOING TO RISE TO 8 KRONER IN A YEAR’ on the cover of B?rsen, the Danish equivalent to the Financial Times.