We Need People

If you want to live a longer life, try to choose and create environments in which you live that foster a lot of in-person interactions with a variety of people.

What I watched: “The secret to living longer may be your social life” by Susan Pinker. Published on TED April 2017.

You are likely to live longer if you maintain an active social life. That’s not just a suggestion from my own bias and experience. That’s the conclusion of Susan Pinker who studied why some people live longer than others.

Pinker noted that in the developed world women live six to eight years longer than men. However, she noticed there is a place where men live as long as women. She decided to do research in one of these places, an Italian island where there are six times the centenarians as on the nearby Italian mainland. Pinker wanted to know why.

I started with a genetic profile. I discovered soon enough that genes account for just 25% of their longevity. The other 75% is lifestyle.

As Pinker undertook her research, she met people who are living far longer than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Some of the things you’d assume intuitively add to these people’s long lives might not have the impact we assume.

Referencing the research of Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University, it was clear that many of the factors we believe influence a longer life don’t have the proportionate impact we typically think they do.

Holt-Lunstad studied every aspect the study cohort’s lives – diet, exercise, marital status, frequency of doctor visits, smoking, drinking, and so on. Holt-Lunstad documented her results, then waited seven years to see who was still alive among the study subjects to try and determine what reduced their chances of dying the most. Her study results were surprising.

Once the data was crunched, what rose to the top of factors that contributed to a longer life were two aspects of your social life – good close relationships and social integration. Close relationships are those people you have strong, lasting connections with, people who will be there when you truly need them. But social integration was the top predictor of a longer life.

Social integration refers to the people you interact with as you move through your day. This doesn’t need to be people with whom you’re extremely close. It means both your weak and strong social bonds. It’s about people you chat with as you walk down the street, the person who makes your coffee every morning at the coffee shop, your postal delivery person, and friends you play cards with – essentially anyone you interact with throughout your day whether it seems brief and cursory or extended and deeply meaningful.

It also turns out that our online social interactions don’t have the same positive impact as in-person connections. Holt-Lunstad points out some of the physical and psychological benefits of in-person interactions. Then she references other research that used MRI scans to map the difference between brain activity when we interact in person versus when we're watching something static.

You’ll see in the video that the researchers discovered that the areas of the brain associated with attention and social intelligence become much more engaged when we're interacting with someone in person.

As an interesting aside, Holt-Lunstad mentions that this might explain why when job recruiters from Fortune 500 companies evaluate candidates they thought the candidates were smarter when they heard their voices rather than just read their application pitches as text.

Think about that for a moment. If someone hears your voice, they think you’re smarter. That seems like useful information we can all use and suggests we should try to speak directly to people when possible when we’re trying to influence a decision such as getting hired for a job or persuading someone about an important issue.

Back to why women generally live longer than men. A big reason for women’s longer lives is they are more often likely to prioritize face-to-face relationships over their lifespans. There is evidence that these more plentiful in-person friendships create a “biological forcefield against disease and decline.”

Now let me get personal and explain why this research resonates so strongly with me.

I have lived much of my life in dense urban settings. I’m a city person generally. I’ve lived in suburbia. I’ve lived in less dense cities. I’ve lived in smaller towns. What I’ve learned after my decades on the planet living in these different kinds of places is this – dense environments in which I’m more likely to casually bump into other people, interact with people throughout my day, and have easier access to social life opportunities, make me happier. This is something I know about myself. I’m going to intuit that such happiness is going to make me live longer than were I to be isolated away from people much of the time and have to get in a car to travel to a place where I encounter other human beings with whom I can interact and socialize.

This is why I believe we need to build in-person interaction opportunities into our cities. Our workplaces and work cultures should be designed to foster meaningful interactions. Individually, the more we can create day-to-day situations in which we can interact with other humans regularly, the longer we’re likely to live and I contend the happier we’re going to be.

Some examples. I’d like to see our transit culture default to a walking, bicycling, and public transit and move us away as much as possible from the isolation car culture fosters. City and town designs should default to denser living situations with more places people can meet and interact as they go about their daily activities.

And if you happen to live somewhere such as a suburb or rural town where interacting with others is a less common occurrence, perhaps you can create your own opportunities to be with others through travel or at-home friend meetups.

The bottom line is for most people, more social interactions are better than less. And for those reading this who claim an introvert status and believe this data doesn’t apply to you, I say keep an open mind. I often describe myself as an ambivert because I feel like equal parts introvert and extrovert. Sometimes my introversion tendencies are strong and last for quite a while. When that happens, I find I have to nudge myself out of the introvert’s cocooning comfort zone and go out and be with people. Rarely has that not immediately improved my mood.

We need people. Not just a handful of people comprising an intimate circle. We need people around us for casual encounters too. Close friendships and relationships coupled with an abundance of casual social interactions throughout our day can help us to live a longer and happier life.

Just as I was finishing this post I ran across an article, “Why life is faster but depression is lower in bigger cities,” that perhaps underpins the reasons why I seem to gravitate to living in highly populated and dense cities most of the time.

Cities have historically had a bad reputation for mental and physical health. However, in a fast-urbanising world, the higher social connectivity of larger cities could have positive influences on city dwellers’ mental health. While more social contacts make containing epidemics such as COVID-19 harder, they also lead to greater economic opportunity, more political and technological innovation, and, apparently, lower rates of depression. As more people live in cities every year, it is important that we acknowledge, measure and internalise how the physical places we inhabit – and the people we share those spaces with – influence our wellbeing in ways we might not expect.

I believe we need to move toward more dense living for many reasons such as reducing climate change impacts and sharing resources that are growing more scarce. But it turns out city living might be of great benefit to our mental health too.

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