If you look at the literature in positive psychology, it gives us a really obvious answer to this question. Because the number one behavior that we could engage in that seems to make us much happier than we expect is social connection. The simple act of connecting with somebody, talking with somebody, feeling close to somebody; the opposite of experiencing loneliness and isolation. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. Just to give you a sense of one, here's a really famous one by the psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, they did the standard thing that positive psychologists do where they find these happy people and they say, how are happy people spending their time? We're going to have happy people just code their behavior of what they're doing moment to moment, and we're going to compare their behavior with not so happy people. That's just what they did. They had these happy folks and not so happy folks rate their activity on a scale that you do them a lot, from 1-10, and then we're just going to compare. Where are the spots where the happy people differ? It turns out the happy and unhappy people differ only in two different spots. One is how much time they spend alone, with unhappy people are doing that much more often, and the second one is when they look at how much time you report spending with your friends, your family members, loved ones; people you actually want to hang with. The very happy people are doing that a little bit more often. Now, you might say, well, that could be because spending time with other people and not being alone makes you happier or it could be because if you're happy, you're motivated to spend time with other people. Maybe if you're miserable, you don't want to hang out with anybody else. To test that, we need an experiment. We need to force people to hang out with others and see if that boosts their happiness. That's just what researchers have done, but they haven't done it in a context that looks like this; forced you to hangout with your really close friends and family members. They've actually done it in a perhaps surprising context where they force you to socially interact with complete strangers. In one study, they walked up to people on a commuter train and said, for the rest of the train ride, I want you to socially interact with somebody else, make a rich connection. Or they said, for the rest of the train ride, I just want you to be by yourself; don't talk to anybody, try to be solo, and enjoy your solitude. What do people predict? People predicted this is going to be way awkward. It's going to suck frankly, it's going to make them feel miserable, and weirded out, and whatever. But what really happens when people engage in this is that the people who talk to the other strangers on the train feel better. They experience more positive emotion, and this is true even when people self-report being a little introverted or a little socially anxious. It's not what we predict, but it's what the data show. But the interesting thing is if you think about what happens on commuter trains, pretty much nobody's talking to one another. In part because they're all doing this thing right here, which is looking at their phones. That raises this interesting question about whether or not our phones, having our technology with us, all these apps we have, are they reducing our social connection? They give us this crutch that we can go to when we don't feel like talking to someone. That's one problem with phones. But another big problem with phones is that these specific apps we have, in many cases, they are particularly designed to do stuff without people being involved. They're systematically reducing our social connection. What do I mean here? Well, think about the way we used to, back in the day, look at photos. Some of you in your house might have a photo album that maybe your mom had when she had a click photo thing. We used to take out physical photos and look at them. Now they're on this device that we have in our pocket so we tend not to share as broadly with other people. It's not on the shelf anymore. Let's take how we used to buy books. We used to have to go to a bookstore because there was no online merchant that we would buy books from, and that meant we had to interact with other people, and talk to a clerk, and the other people who were buying books. Now, of course it's Amazon or whatever we're using to buy our online books. Back in the day, we used to have to go to restaurants. If you didn't want to cook at home, you'd have to physically go out to a restaurant where there are other people. Now, there's Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, pick your thing, it's just going to bring you food, you're not going to have to talk to a waitress, it just comes to your house. Back in the day we used to have to talk to a taxi cab driver and tell him where we wanted to go. Now, there's Uber and Lyft that's doing it. Back in the day, we used to have to go physically to a grocery store and talk to a checkout clerk. Now, it just comes into your house, and you don't have to do it. Back in the day, you could only have a class if you're doing it like we are right here, where we're all together in the room watching it. But nowadays, it's whatever you all are doing online where you're watching it separate. Don't get me wrong, some of these technologies are great. I'm really happy that I can reach everyone I'm reaching with this class. But it means that our technology might not always be helping us get as social as we want to be. Don't get me started on social media, which is probably the media that keeps us the least social as possible. It's us by ourself in our lonely room looking at things not being social. The fact that these technologies and these apps have come up and up in your generation is one of the reasons that these days teens are reporting loneliness that's much worse than it has been in any other generation. Here's just one study by Jean Twenge and her colleagues that looked at this. They've actually been measuring loneliness across a big group of teens, so more than one million teens across 37 different countries, and they've been looking at this longitudinally. They've been doing this survey of a million people over time from 2000 up until 2018 at different time points. What they find is that loneliness across these years got higher in 36 of the 37 countries for teens, and most bad, the number of lonely teens doubled between 2012 and 2018. That's just six years, but the number of teens that reported feeling lonely have doubled in just that short time. 2012 is telling because that was the time when smartphones really started to kick in. If you graph smartphone use in teens and teen loneliness, it rises at the same rate. This is a problem. Our joy seems to really depend on our social connection; it's one of the easiest things we can do to be very happy, but we're not getting it. How can we increase it? Luckily, we have our psychprotips. The biggest psychprotip is perhaps the most intuitive, which is that if you want more social connection, you literally just need to talk to people. The studies bear this out. The simple act of talking to someone, even if they're a stranger will make you feel better. The key is that our minds don't predict this. This is what the stranger study I mentioned just shows, we predict it's going to be awkward, it's going to be weird, but it's not going to be as bad as our mind predicts. It's just another one of those visual illusions that we've talked about before; our minds just lying to us and getting it wrong. Another psychprotip though, is that you don't just need to be talking to strangers, you need to be putting time into maintaining the friendships you do have. I think this is another problem for your generation because your generation is busy. We look at your calendars and we just feel overwhelmed and sad because you're busy all the time. A lot of that business is with academic work and extra curriculars. It's not necessarily just like chilling with your friends and hanging out and having a good time. I think this needs to change if we really want to improve our social connection, we have to get a little bit more of our time back too. A final psychprotip is that if you really want to improve your social connection, you need to find ways to engage with other like-minded communities or even a faith-based community. If you find other people that do the same thing as you, or they're on a soccer team with you, or they're in a book club with you, you have something instantly to engage with. Sometimes it can reduce the social anxiety too, because you're doing the same thing with other people, and it often meets very regularly, so you have something in your calendar where you can really hang out with other people. A particularly good way to do this from the perspective of becoming happier is to engage in a like-minded community that involves faith. One very striking finding in the positive psychology literature is that religious individuals tend to be happier. But the evidence suggests it's not because of what they believe; it's not because they believe in God and so on. It's because religious individuals tend to actually be more social. Think of going to church or going to synagogue, or engaging in a supper with your faith-based group, you're actually engaging in social connection. The evidence suggests when you remove extra social connection, religion doesn't improve happiness that much. But engage in your faith-based community, use the power of their social connection, and get the happiness boost that comes with it. All this goes to say that we need to start prioritizing social connection in a way that we often don't. Especially the individuals in your generation need to do this. We need to fight that curve that loneliness is getting worse and worse, and the good news is that you can do that through your own intentional action.
