All Together Now

My partner, Kenny, maintains a kind of detached interest in whatever I'm writing. ("Detached" because he knows better than to encourage a writer at the dinner table.) But when I told him Dr. Bone's story and said I'd like to write something about solitude, he put down his beer and looked at me. "Have you even been alone before? For longer than — I don't know — a day? Really alone?" Now my own glass was down and I frowned into middle distance. "I must have been...." But of course I hadn't, not really. He suggested, with annoying saneness, that I might want to try it.

I pivoted the conversation, but it was impossible to ignore that a gauntlet had been tossed. My eyes narrowed. Kenny would be away the following week, and I silently pledged to spend a day entirely alone — with neither people nor their digital avatars making any contact.

When the day arrived, however, a text came at 9 a.m., and I checked it as though fulfilling some Pavlovian law. An offer to drink in the park with friends from out of town. Disaster!

I cheated. And then I cheated again. I went to the café. I answered a call from my mom. I went on a jog and stopped to pet a puppy. By bedtime I counted up a dozen interactions in all. I couldn't even be alone for one day.

I might have the wherewithal to leave the phone at home sometimes, to slightly curb my media gluttony, but real removal from the demands of society? This was a sensation — barely remembered — from childhood, from a time I could go hiking into the woods with my Polaroid camera and forget, for hours, about the existence of other humans.

I had changed — just grown older — and I'd acquired the webs and wires that tie adults to each other. I woke one day to find that those empty spaces had been filled in with nervous worries about the development of my friends' children, about the happiness of far-flung relatives, about the security of my peers in a precarious economy — and to this was added more selfish worries about my reputation (my sketchy "brand"), which could be bruised at any point by a crude remark online or a gossipy insinuation. In short, I had become enmeshed.

Then again, maybe it was the world that had changed; perhaps it no longer made allowances for solitude in the same way. Or perhaps, more likely, it was a combination of the two forces — my own growing older and the world's self-tethering to online things. It had all changed, within and without, so that now, in a haze of social anxiety, I woke each morning thinking, "What did I miss?" and went to bed thinking, "What did I say?"

The crowd, that smorgasbord of perpetual connection, left me hungry. In fact, I realized, I'd been hungry for years. But now that hunger was putting me to work. A little reading — and a hero in Dr. Bone — had turned a malaise into a mission. I wanted to become acquainted again with the still night, with my own hapless daydreaming, with the bare self I had (for how long?) been running from. I kept asking myself: why am I so afraid of my own quiet company? This book is the closest I've come to an answer.

To be clear: none of what follows is a pining for Thoreau's old cabin in the woods. I don't want to run away from the world — I want to rediscover myself within it. I want to know what happens if we again take doses of solitude from inside our crowded days, along our crowded streets.

It's not so easy. I step outside, intent on a solitary ramble, and I compulsively observe the social exchanges of others. A forlorn teenaged couple coos on the sidewalk, performing their morning farewell; on the nearby grass, a mother plays peekaboo with her eternally delighted infant; a rabbi gets in his Audi while managing someone on the phone; a woman leans out the window of a coffee van and passes a macchiato to her customer, chirping, "Beautiful coffee for a beautiful lady." Everywhere and anywhere, we groom each other. Indeed, it's with these soft but persistent offerings that we ensure the survival of our culture and our species.

* * *

Living in large groups, we have learned, puts a major tax on any animal's brain — in particular on its neocortex. In fact, all the markers of social complexity among primates — their group size, grooming cliques, mating strategies, tactical deception, and social play — are strongly correlated with the relative size of that primate's neocortex. The bigger the neocortex, the more social the primate. The more social the primate, the larger the group they can live in without having that group implode with violence and fractious behaviour.

The data bears this out. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in developing his "social brain" theory in the 1990s, found that the relative size of a simian's neocortex was directly related to how large their groups became: night monkeys and tamarins, for example, have small neocortices relative to their brain size and hang out in numbers less than ten; chimpanzees and baboons have relatively large neocortices and have groups of fifty-plus. Humans, for the vast majority of our history, have hung out in groups of around 150 — and we also (no surprise) have the largest proportionate neocortex of any primate. Dunbar argues that our big brains may well have helped us become tool users, but the real advantage was that we became able to increase the size of the communities we live in. More peers means more safety, more strength, more chances to pass on wisdom, and, ultimately, more chances for survival.

Something else Dunbar discovered was that the larger a primate group becomes, the more time it devotes to social grooming. All those affections, frustrations, and aggressions need to be perpetually monitored and managed. Surviving in a large group of primates is a sophisticated bit of work. Depending on group size, the amount of time primates spend grooming each other can reach 20 per cent of a given day. Dunbar was struck by the fact that, given our enormous social groups, today's human animal should be forced to "groom" for enormous portions of each day. So how did we get around Dunbar's rule? How did we manage to grow our social groups without being forced to spend all our time picking proverbial lice out of each other's hair?

The answer lies in the game-changing emergence of language, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. The preverbal primate must lay hands on a friend or foe in order to groom them. A primate that can speak, that can make complex social suggestions beyond raw vocalization, can in effect "groom" several members of his or her social group at once. This is a powerful bit of multiplication. What's...