Decades of research tell us that humans are social animals, happier and healthier when we’re connected to each other. So, as psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel asked at Hinge’s Heads Up conference this month, “What the hell is going on that we find ourselves increasingly sleepwalking into isolation?” For a generation that grew up online and spent formative years staggering back to social normalcy after the lockdown, closeness can feel strangely hard to come by. Most of us can message anyone at any hour, and still struggle to find a friend to help us assemble furniture.
Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos calls this paradox the “closeness crisis.” Still, the conference took place in New York, a city whose mayor met his wife on Hinge – clearly not all is lost. On a panel titled The Attention We Owe Ourselves & Each Other, Perel joined Jantos and poet-podcaster Saeed Jones, with gen Z historian Kahlil Greene moderating, to ask where all our attention has gone and what it would take to give more of it to each other.
“We live in a cacophony of information,” Jones told the room. “We have all of this information and very little wisdom.” Below is some of the wisdom we took home.
1. THINK OF FOCUS AS A FORM OF CARE
Attention is where every connection starts, and like a muscle, it atrophies when we don’t use it. Even Jones, a published author several times over, found that during the pandemic he couldn’t focus long enough to get through a couple of pages. So he bought three hourglasses, timed at 15, 30, and 45 minutes, and started small, reading until the sand ran out without letting himself take notes or look up words. “I was rebuilding my skill of thoughtful attention,” he said. “And if you can do that with a book, you can certainly do that with another person.” It takes effort, he admitted, but the labour is worth it. “It’s a gift we can give ourselves and each other.”
2. LET IT BE AWKWARD
It’s difficult to encourage awkwardness in a generation that seems to be allergic to it, especially when technology has made discomfort so easy to swerve. But Perel suggests a little more friction might do us some good, starting with choosing to meet people in person. “If you do not come into contact with people, you have no sense of what you are doing to them when you’re hurting them, because they slowly become less people,” she said. “The friction is what allows us to come together with people that we usually would not be in touch with, and think of them as people anyway. And that is where basic respect, for me, starts.”
3. HAVE A REGULAR SPOT
Connection is much easier when people know where to find you. When Jones moved to Cambridge, assuming he’d only be there for a year, a friend of his made a standing announcement: Every Tuesday at 2pm between classes, she’d be at a particular cafe, whether anyone joined her or not. Jones thinks more of us should do the same, and suggested picking a bench where people know they can find you every Friday at lunchtime. “If I’m by myself, I’m going to have a book,” he said. Regular meet-ups let people know that connection is on offer. “You’d be surprised.”
4. FIND DEPTH IN THE DETAILS
According to Esther Perel, modern loneliness tends to mask itself as hyperconnectivity. “You can have a thousand virtual friends and no one to watch your dog, and it’s less an absence of people and more an absence of depth.” Part of the issue is how generic so much of our communication has become. In a WhatsApp group, the same emoji might be sent out for a wedding and a bereavement. “If you just put everything on the same level, you flatten reality,” she said. “You cannot have empathy, because empathy is layered, it is nuanced, it responds to the high specificity of things.” The more specific we are with each other, the more room there is to invite depth in our connections – that way, your dog doesn’t get lonely either.
5. STOP TALKING LIKE HR
Many of us are stretched thin, so it’s no surprise we’ve become protective of our time and energy. “The burdens of the self have never been heavier,” Perel said, and in guarding it so closely, some people establish so many boundaries that they shut themselves out of living altogether. Our language has followed suit, borrowing heavily from the office. We talk about “bandwidth” and “load” and “assets” and “alignment.” Drawing on the sociologist Eva Illouz, Perel calls this “emotional capitalism,” and it can leave people feeling like products. “You screen and evaluate before you even explore and discover,” she said. The psychologist suggested asking yourself, “What is the social practice that you have dropped and would like to pick up again?”
6. MAKE YOUR DATE A PLUS-ONE
Somewhere along the way, dating became siphoned off from the rest of our lives, Perel argued. You leave your world to “go and check something out,” and then come back, “empty-handed,” to report to your friends. “If you’re going to do an activity, just invite the person to join you, bring them in, and then people around you will have lots of data points,” Perel said. “If it doesn’t work well, the person doesn’t show up again, and you have a weekend with your friends no matter what.” People tend to baulk at first, she admitted, but those who try it find that it lowers the stakes and often has a “beautiful return.” And if nothing else, your friends get a story out of it.
7. SEND THE FOLLOW-UP TEXT
For all the effort connection asks of us, it helps to remember how good it feels when it works. After a great dinner with a friend or a thoughtful conversation with a mentor, Jones suggested taking a moment to write down what made it special. Perel added that it’s worth telling the other person, with something as simple as “Last night was so wonderful… I’m still laughing about that thing you said.” Doing both, Jones said, helps us curate an index of experiences we would want to replicate with another person. “It feels good,” Perel added. “And this is what pleasure is about.”