The Social Animal (33 page)

Millions of soldiers have risked and surrendered their lives in war because of the primordial connection they felt toward their fellows. Families are often held together through thick and thin by that feeling. Social life is held together by the lower-level version of that feeling we call trust. And for most of us, the strongest longing for limerence takes the form of that intense desire we have to meld with the special other—love.

This drive, this longing for harmony, is a never-ending process—model, adjust, model, adjust—guiding us onward.

Today, when we hear the word “eros,” we think of something quite distinct and compartmentalized—sex. Erotica is separated in the bookstore from the other books. But this is the narrow, chopped-up meaning of eros that we have inherited from a sex-centered culture. In the Greek understanding, eros is not just the desire for orgasm, sex, or even genetic transmission. The Greeks saw eros as a generalized longing for union with the beautiful and the excellent.

People driven by lust want to have orgasms with each other. But people driven by eros want to have a much broader fusion. They want to share the same emotions, visit the same places, savor the same pleasures, and replicate the same patterns in each other’s minds. As Allan Bloom wrote in
Love & Friendship
, “Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction.”

People sometimes say neuroscience is destroying the soul and the spirit. It reduces everything to neurons, synapses, and biochemical reactions. But in fact neuroscience gives us a glimpse of eros in action. It helps us see the dance of the patterns between friends and lovers.

Harold and Erica were never more alive than in the first weeks of their love for each other. One afternoon they were sitting on the couch at Harold’s place, watching an old movie. “I know you,” Erica said after a lull, apropos of nothing, peering into Harold’s eyes. Then a few minutes later she fell asleep on Harold’s chest. Harold went on watching the movie and shifted her head a bit so he could be comfortable. She made a soft nuzzling sound.

Then Harold brushed his hand over her hair and face. Her breathing quickened and slowed with the pace of his touch, but still her eyes were closed and she didn’t stir. Harold had never noticed how deeply she could sleep. He lost all interest in the movie and just watched her there.

He picked up her arm and put it around his neck. She made a sweet puckering gesture with her lips, but remained asleep. Then he put her arm back down on her side. She nestled back into his chest. After that he just watched her doze, measuring the rise and fall of her chest, a feeling of tender protectiveness sweeping over him. “Remember this moment,” he thought.

Not that everything was perfect. Each found that they still had deep unconscious inhibitions that blocked the union they sought most. There were still frictions and conflicts.

The longing for limerence doesn’t automatically produce perfect romances or easy global harmony. We spend large parts of our lives trying to get others to accept our patterns—and trying to resist this sort of mental hegemony from others. On a broader scale, people don’t just connect; they compete to connect. We compete against one another to win the prestige and respect and attention that will help us bond with one another. We seek to surpass one another in earning one another’s approval. That’s the logic of our complicated game.

But especially during those first eighteen months, Harold and Erica experienced a sort of worldly magic. They worked together. They ate together. They slept together and fit together in nearly every respect. They tasted the synchronicity that is the essence of all great professions of love: “Love you? I
am
you.” “We are one, / One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.”

THE
GRAND
NARRATIVE

AS
ERICA’S
CAREER
GREW
BRIGHTER
,
HER
HOUSE
GOT
DARKER
. She and Harold had started their consulting firm when they were both twenty-eight. For the next few years everything went great. They racked up clients. They hired new people—eighteen in all. They bought new phones and nice printers. Their time was consumed by consulting projects—during the day, at night, and on weekends. Occasionally they would carve out time for vacations, for friends and even dinner dates alone. But there was never time for chores around the house they bought. Everything began to fray at the edges. If a lightbulb burned out, it would stay in the socket for months while Erica and Harold learned to navigate their way in the dark. The cable went out in their downstairs TV, but neither had time to call the cable company and take care of it. Windows cracked. Gutters filled with leaves. Stains lodged in carpets. They adapted to each peripheral dysfunction, content to trade professional achievement for domestic decay.

After about four years, though, the company began to fall apart. A recession hit. Physically, nothing changed. The buildings and the people were all there. But the psychology was different. One moment everyone talked heroically about embracing risk, the next they were terrified. Consulting contracts, which had seemed essential for long-term growth, were now perceived as useless luxuries. Companies slashed them back.

Dozens of friends disappeared from Erica’s life. These were clients she’d played tennis with, gone on trips with, invited into her home. They worked at companies she advised, and the bonds of trust and camaraderie between them were real.

But when the contracts were cut, the relationships dissolved. Erica noticed her witty sarcastic e-mails no longer generated responses. Calls went unreturned. It wasn’t that people stopped liking her. They just didn’t want to hurt her. They were cutting off her contract, and they didn’t want to cause her pain by telling her, so they just withdrew. Erica began to recognize the dishonesty of niceness. The desire to not cause pain was just an unwillingness to have an unpleasant conversation. It was cowardice, not consideration.

The office grew quiet. It was hard in turn for Erica’s staff to see her helpless in this way. She couldn’t show fear, but they all felt it within her. “Nothing is over until it’s over,” she would tell them, calm and focused. But the money was not coming in. The banks were unhappy. Lines of credit dried up. She was paying employees off her credit card, and begging new clients for work.

Finally, the biggest contract disappeared. She called the
CEO
asking for a renewal. It was hard to hear her vulnerable like that, her life’s work resting on one call. And the
CEO
lied to her nicely like the others had. It was just a blip in the relationship, he said. They’d be back in a year or so, blah, blah, blah. She couldn’t tell him that, without his contract, her company wouldn’t last a week. It was the death sentence, and yet as she hung up the phone she found she wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t hyperventilating. “So this is what it feels like to fail,” she thought. The emotional impact came only an hour or so later. She retreated to the ladies’ room, heaving with sobs. She wanted to go home and crawl into bed.

At the end of the week, she gathered her staff. They sat around the conference room, trading gallows humor. Erica looked across at them, the individuals who would soon be unemployed. There was Tom, who carried a laptop at all times and typed every significant thing he heard into a file. There was Bing, who was so mentally hyperactive she could only get through half a sentence before she started on the next one. There was Elsie, who had no confidence in herself; Alison, who platonically shared a bed with her roommate to save money; and Emilio, who kept antacid pills in a row atop his computer. People were stranger than you could imagine.

In moments of crisis she became eerily calm. She announced that she had no choice but to close the firm. Gone. Belly-up. She told them the national economy had gone wrong and it was nobody’s fault, but then she spoke too long and her mind naturally started rehearsing things she might have done differently. There was something inside her that had trouble with the concept of “nobody’s fault.” It wanted to assign some concrete blame, justified or not. Then she started giving the old entrepreneur’s mantra that there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just a step in the process of learning. Nobody was comforted.

For a few weeks after that, there was still stuff to do. Sell the office supplies. Write letters. But then there was nothing. Erica was shocked at how disorienting this was. All her life she had worked. Suddenly she lived in a pathless universe.

She had thought she might actually like a little tranquility. But it was terrible. “There is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment,” the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, “and this desire seems the foundation of most of our passions and pursuits.”

Her thoughts began to disintegrate. After a few weeks, she had trouble organizing an argument or composing a memo. She was exhausted all the time, though she never actually did anything. She longed for some difficulty to overcome.

Eventually, she began to scaffold her days. She had long been a member of a gym, but barely went as she struggled to save her firm. Now she worked out feverishly. She dressed each morning and went to Starbucks, where she sat with her briefcase, phone, and laptop. Going out among the employed was tough—like being a sick person in the land of the healthy, an internal exile. She watched the great mass of coffee sippers trudging thoughtlessly back to their offices. They had obligations; she didn’t. She rotated between different Starbucks so it wouldn’t be so obvious she had no place else to go.

In an essay for
The Atlantic
, Don Peck summarized the research findings on the psychological costs of unemployment. People who suffer long-term bouts of unemployment are much more likely to suffer depression, even years later. For the rest of their lives, they cling more tightly to jobs, and become more risk averse. They are much more likely to become alcoholics and beat their spouses. Their physical health deteriorates. People who lose jobs at thirty have life spans a year and a half shorter than people who never lost a job. Long-term unemployment, some researchers have found, is the psychic equivalent to the death of a spouse.

Erica’s relationship with Harold suffered. Growing up as he had, Harold assumed that your worth depends on who you are. Erica assumed that your worth depends on what you do. Harold always had these random interests he was happy to throw himself into. He spent the first few weeks reading. Erica needed the upward climb, the mission. Harold was willing to take any job that seemed interesting, and before long he got a job as a program officer for a historical society. Erica needed a job that would set her once again on the path to dominance. She’d sit in Starbucks, calling her old contacts, looking for an opening at the vice-president level or above. The calls were almost never returned, and soon her expectations slipped. She began thinking about entrepreneurial opportunities. She could open a smoothie franchise, a Mongolian grill, a nanny agency, a spicy-pickle supplier. She could start a company of pet butlers. These were not exactly the career paths she had ever considered before.

After a few months, a friend told her that Intercom, the cable company, was looking for somebody to help with strategic planning. She had always hated that company. The service was awful, the repairmen were ill-trained, the customer support was slow, the
CEO
was famously narcissistic. Of course none of that mattered now. She applied.

The interviewer kept her waiting and then greeted her with a condescending amiability. “We have the smartest people on earth working here,” he told her. “It’s a pleasure coming to work each day. It’s like
The Best and the Brightest.
”

Erica wondered if this guy had missed the Vietnam parts of that book.

Of course he started talking about himself. “I owe it to myself to live up to the highest standards. I owe it to myself to provide legendary excellence.” This phrase was apparently a buzzword that had been circling around in the company propaganda. As the session went on, he turned into a little jargon machine. “At the end of the day, we try not to boil the ocean but just look for the best win-wins,” he told her. Apparently people at this company were always drilling down and disintermediating the dialogue. They were driving maximum functionality, with end-to-end mission-critical competence to incent high-level blue-ocean change.

Erica sat there with a smile pasted on her face. She appeared eager and supplicating. She debased herself. When he asked her what she wanted to do at the company, she slipped into the argot and threw it all back at him. She would save self-loathing for after she got the job.

He said he would call in a week, but it took two. She had her phone on vibrate the whole time, and every little tingle, real or imagined, sent her grabbing for the thing. The call finally came. Follow-up interviews were arranged and after another month or so she was an employee once again. She had a nice office. She began going to meetings and found herself surrounded by the lords of self-esteem.

The human mind is an overconfidence machine. The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine. Ninety percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel. Ninety-four percent of college professors think they are above-average teachers. Ninety percent of entrepreneurs think that their new business will be a success. Ninety-eight percent of students who take the
SAT
say they have average or above-average leadership skills.