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Having hundreds of “friends” on Facebook or followers on Twitter is not the same as having true friendships with real people. I can’t say it any more plainly than that. More and more, we are investing in horizontal relationships (widespread and superficial) rather than vertical (focused and in-depth), and we may simply be overwhelmed by superficial connections.
Up until the twentieth century, humans dealt with just a few dozen people over the course of their lives. We are healthiest when we have a small number of confidants, a slightly larger number of good friends, a larger number of acquaintances, and so on, not dozens and dozens of “friends” online and almost no intimate friendships. In 1985, Americans reported having three close confidants. By 2004, it was down to two, and about one in four say they don’t have anyone at all they can talk to about personal issues.
As the anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar said, “Our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.”
His research led to the creation of the “Dunbar number”: the number of relationships that a human being can reasonably maintain. The Dunbar number is 150.
The internet is perhaps too efficient at connecting people.
“When we pull our phones out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got,” Harris writes. “When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.” Experts have shown that people become addicted to slot machines three to four times faster than to other types of gambling, partly because of the uncertainty involved. It’s no wonder software designers would emulate that model.
Or sleep, apparently, since the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, told investors that the company’s real competition is sleep. Boy, does it work. Netflix eliminated the closing and opening titles for many shows so another episode starts before you’ve even registered that the previous one ended.
In centuries past, our ability to remain alert to potential threats was often the difference between life and death. The urge to have the most current information is primal.
When you’re looking for something to blame for our current state of stress and anxiety and social isolation, you can start with tech, but you have to end in the workplace. The office is where the dysfunction began, not the internet.
Tech is a tool that should be used for specific tasks and then set aside. If you use social media to stay in touch with friends and family, check in once a day and then get back to real life.
According to a survey from Cigna, the most isolated and loneliest among us are the most technologically savvy: young people born since the mid-1990s.
What’s true of digital connections is also true of the office. Relationships with coworkers also do not satisfy the need for intimate interaction. Those friendships are often dependent on the job, meaning that your employer has ultimate control.
the more success I had, the more anxious I became.
Many people in the industrialized world have what I call “busyness delusion,” or the mistaken belief that we are busier than we really are. This may be difficult to accept, but many of us tend to think we work more hours than we actually do.
If you keep track of your schedule in a detailed way for a couple weeks, you’ll be able to get a clear picture of how your time is spent. Before you address any of the other issues associated with addiction to efficiency and productivity, you must have an accurate assessment of how that addiction is influencing your habits and choices.
believing that you are short on time has real, damaging effects. Keeping your eye on the clock, even subconsciously, can lead to a sharp drop in performance. Research shows that when you are highly aware of time passing, it even makes you less compassionate toward others. What’s more, it can interfere with your ability to make rational decisions. Because of that, feeling pressed for time can lead you to make bad choices about how to use your time.
On the other hand, people who have high time perception scores, who are very aware of their schedules, actually tend to set aside more time for leisure. These people allow for time to contemplate and reflect, and that gives them the sense that they have more time.
You may believe you can relax if you put in a few more hours and get ahead of your workload, but actually you’re more likely to reduce your stress level by taking a break.
A study in 2009 showed that even after controlling for income, if you make someone believe they have time to spare, they feel healthier and happier.
if you are not scrambling to pay for water, food, clothing, and shelter, you might discover that increasing your time perception (becoming aware of how you spend your time) will bring greater happiness than a higher salary.
once you venture into the upper-income brackets, higher pay is often associated with a lower sense of well-being and less enjoyment at work. That is one of the ironies of our current system: Pursuing higher salaries can bring less happiness, not more.
We work long hours in order to make more money, not realizing that once we’ve met our fundamental needs, it is leisure time that increases happiness, not necessarily extra cash. If you have time to relax and you’re not using it, that’s a serious issue. It may be you’re experiencing unnecessa...
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A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
we strive to be as busy as or busier than our friends and colleagues instead of deciding what’s best for us.
Because we have cut back on our in-person interactions with neighbors and friends, the people we compare ourselves to are often not the people who lead similar lives to our own. This adds another layer to the inaccuracy of our judgments.
People used to yearn to break into the economic class just above their own. Now we strive to emulate the top 20 percent of income earners, because those are the families we’re watching on TV. Those are the photos we see online and the videos that pop up in our Facebook feeds. Many people around the world are now more knowledgeable about the daily lives of reality TV stars or celebrities than about the lives of other people who live on their block. The more TV you watch, it turns out, the more likely you are to overestimate how much other people make and how many things they own.
Comparing ourselves to the highest earners in the country has made us all feel poor and might be driving us to work harder and put in more hours in a futile attempt to create the lifestyle we think others have.
the urge to make comparisons is not necessarily bad unless our perception of others is inaccurate and therefore the comparisons aren’t valid.
Research shows that perfectionism has been increasing among college students since the 1980s. An emphasis on competitive individualism has driven this, especially in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Now, twenty-somethings are more demanding of themselves than ever and more demanding of others. They expect perfection and are far less forgiving of mistakes than previous generations.
Unreasonably high standards and severe self-criticism are linked to high blood pressure, depression, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation. Therapists will tell you that you cannot both strive to be perfect and enjoy good mental health. They are mutually exclusive.
The rise in perfectionism seems to have begun about forty years ago, which means that many of those early high achievers are parents now and are unknowingly passing that perfectionism along to their children. “They can feel our anxiety about them,” Rachel Simmons tells me. “They can feel our dissatisfaction with who they are. Why doesn’t my kid want to build things? Why doesn’t my daughter have many friends? They only realize they’re not okay when we send those messages to them.” Parents may think they’re helping their kids succeed by pushing them to reach the top of the class and be the best
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This is the danger of unhealthy comparisons. When we measure ourselves against unrealistic or distorted ideals, we can do real psychological damage in trying to match them. I’m reminded of the story of Sisyphus, always trying to roll a boulder up a hill, never getting it to the top, never allowed to rest. How much worse would it have been for him if he’d thought he was the only one of his friends who couldn’t get that damn rock all the way up the hill?
That should be the new measure in most things: Is it good? Forget how it looks in photographs and ask yourself if you like it. Does it work? Instead of worrying about whether you stayed at the office longer than anyone else, focus on what tasks you accomplished and how well you completed them. Don’t look at your friends’ vacation photos and juxtapose them with your own. Instead, ask whether they enjoyed their time off.
It may seem naive to tell you to track your hours and look around instead of up, but these simple acts can be revolutionary.
Solid research shows forcing yourself to get out and go to the bar with friends, have dinner, see a movie, meet people and socialize, reduces your stress and makes you more efficient.
Under our current system, because we have so slavishly followed the dictums of corporate culture, income inequality is so high in the United States that working full-time is not enough to support two people, let alone a family.
Workers are heavily punished for cutting their hours. Why would that be, if not to feed the corporate appetite for time on the clock?
If your goal is less stress and more happiness, years of scientific research have proven that rather than trading your time for money, it’s best to trade your money for time.
In a study that gathered data from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands, researchers concluded that “buying time promotes happiness.” In other words, paying others to mow your lawn, clean your car or house, or do your laundry is a great use of your money, even if it means you can’t afford a bigger TV or an expensive vacation.
Buying time leads to much higher levels of life satisfaction, whereas feeling short on time leads to poor sleep patterns, anxiety, and less happiness, and is even linked to obesity, because people who feel t...
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In 1951, two men at the Illinois Institute of Technology kept track of nearly two hundred of their colleagues in the scientific and technical fields. They found that those who put in excessive hours were the least productive of all. After people passed a couple dozen hours in the lab, they saw decreasing returns on their labor. In fact, the most productive of the group were those who put in between ten and twenty hours a week, or two to five hours a day.
The human brain can accomplish incredible things when we give it the right environment in which to work. More and more, it’s clear that the ideal schedule is short bursts of very focused work, followed by regular breaks. Research shows that if you work without interruption for fifty to fifty-seven minutes, then take a short break, you’ll get much more done, and because you’re more likely to engage the executive part of your brain while using this schedule, your work may be more insightful and creative.
Surveys have determined that the average person can focus for a few minutes shy of an hour,
When you have fewer hours available to you, you automatically focus on the task at hand and ignore what’s irrelevant. The quality of your work goes up as the allotted hours go down, so you can often accomplish more in four hours than in five.
“Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.”
Once you break your focus for any reason, it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to get back to full concentration.
While managers tend to value lots of hours spent on the job, there’s no evidence that working long hours results in better or more work. In fact, a professor at Boston University studied a large group of consultants and discovered that the managers couldn’t tell the difference between people who actually put in eighty hours of work each week and those who pretended to. There was no discernible difference in their productivity.
Surveys reveal that 30 percent of knowledge workers claim they do absolutely no thinking while they’re at work and nearly 60 percent say they do less than half an hour of thinking. It’s fair to say that’s an almost complete lack of mental stimulation.
Proving your worth by logging an arbitrary number of hours is more than silly—it’s a practice that is killing productivity and, more seriously, endangering your health. Get up and get out.
We work to have leisure, on which happiness depends. —ARISTOTLE
