No man is an island

December 5, 2008
New York Times

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says

By PAM BELLUCK

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.

“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.

Publish Post

... (see NYT or BMJ for the rest)

yep. Humans are not solitary animals, and our spirits are not contained within our one body, at least effectively not so, however this is managed. For practical purposes we ARE each other.

This is not just arguing about words. If we are so interconnected that a change in your life produces a change in my body's hormone levels, how is that different from your heart and your own adrenal gland? Connected is connected, if they influence each other, whether our puny math can easily "see" how that connection operates or not. Heck, we can't see how gravity operates either, but we accept that gravity is real.

And so is the fact that we are not really many bodies -- we are one spirit sort of distributed out across many bodies, like a TV image and pixels. The image is not the pixels, but it is, but it isn't.

We lack good words for these simpler concepts, and so discussion of the actual nature of composite and hierarchical, diffusely coupled life is difficult.

And that thing that seems to "take on a life of its own" ?? Why don't we stop pretending and just admit that it does exist and it does have a life of its own, even though we so often kill it?

Life is not contained just within each living "thing", but fills the spaces between us as well, on every scale, letting us effectively become "one", while staying apart, at the same time.

"Love" is not a fantasy - it is science that has the catching up to do here on the very nature of life itself, especially the connectionist, diffuse forms of life.

If you think about it you realize that an image is not "just a collection of pixels", because a heap of those colored dots would have no image at all. It is the arrangement with respect to each other, the inter-relationships, that stores the image, not the pixels.

It is the same with the nature of life, or a tornado. Life is a transient, a set of relationships, briefly, between smaller living things and larger living things, at the same time. Our entire educational system focuses on the pixels, not on the image, and we've carefully been graduating bigger and brighter pixels and wondering why things are still falling apart. It's the working together thing that we've neglected that turns out to be the "baby", and the rest of it, including individuals, is the "bath water".

This is a hugely unpopular and inconvenient notion, instantly attacked by the wealthy as some scheme to remove their money. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with realizing that our personal and national wealth consists of relationships, of "social capital". We've neglected this, and no amount of cash bailout of institutions will make up for it until we wake up and fix the actual problem.

Quoting the song Suzanne, sung by Judy Collins, from memory:

But when He saw that only drowning men could see Him, He said "All men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them!"

See also my prior post "Are you my mommy? What shape am I anyway?"

For Whom the Bell Tolls

by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The end of our exploring (T. S. Eliot)
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This also has very strong implications for policy. If we are all effectively one body, then the idea that the "rich" can get sufficiently far "above" the "poor" to be free of their plight is bogus. It can never work. The US can't operate with 20% of the population of the US totally neglected, or with 5.7 billion people in the world starving. This has "National Security" and "Homeland Security" and long-term strategic direction implications for all nations, if true.

We best put more energy into finding out if it is true, and stop wishing gravity would just "go away" because the political and social structures we've built, and the stories we tell ourselves about "how things are" have a serious built-in fatal flaw the way they stand, idolizing the individual and ignoring "all of us", and thinking that could ever possibly end well. For anyone.

Wade