“What?!” you may be thinking after reading this title. “I value my drive for more, it’s what gives me a sense of competence and value in life.”

Fair enough. Yet hold your judgment for a moment. At least until you read this next story.

The authors Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller attended a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager on Long Island.

Vonnegut pulled Heller aside and shared with him that their host made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his bestselling novel, Catch-22, in its entire history.

Heller looked back at Vonnegut and replied, “Yes, but I have something he will never have.”

“What’s that?” Vonnegut asked quizzically.

“Enough.”  

What Are You After?

Let’s consider our drive for more vis-à-vis the new technologies we allow into our lives. After the car was invented, people sought any excuse to go for a drive. It was all the rage to go to drive-in theaters.

After a while, people decided they really didn’t need to sit in their cars while watching a movie. As the novelty of driving a car subsided, drive-in theaters faded into obscurity.

A few decades later, in the late 1950s, another new technology, the television, was so captivating that it was moved from the living room into the dining room so families could watch their favorite shows during dinner. This practice was soon deemed uncouth and TVs were moved back to the living room.

The New Technology Adoption Pendulum

Perhaps we are currently experiencing a similar pendulum swing of a new technology. The iPhone will experience its fifteen-year anniversary this year. Perhaps soon—mirroring the TV’s parabolic trajectory—looking at a smartphone during dinner will also be considered poor manners and the practice will subside.

It already has in many homes, including ours—but only after precipitating more than a few marital and family arguments (with children as young as one and a half weighing in).

As with the automobile and television, we are undergoing a similar acculturation with a new technology, and our current obsession is also likely to diminish (although, unlike most drive-in theaters, not disappear).

My concern is for our current generation caught in the crosshairs of the current technological revolution whose experience of real life is fading while we sort out this new acculturation process.

What Happened?

Given the astronomical increase in loneliness among people in just about every culture—along with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic—it is safe to say that figuring out how to keep our phones in check has become a global issue.

It certainly is in the UK, for instance. Subsequent to two studies that found that nine million British citizens are often or always lonely and that British children spend less time outside than prison inmates, former Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018.

As with not just the television and automobile, but also the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, bicycle and every other once-novel invention that has changed the way we live, in the end it is we who decide how to adapt new technology to our way of life.

The Internet—due to the sea change it has ushered in to how we live (or is it a tidal wave?)—may take a bit longer, but we will adapt. As MIT professor Sherry Turkle wisely cautions, “Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that, first of all, we have to figure out what they are … We’re going to slowly, slowly find our balance, but … it’s going to take time.”

Fancy More Candy?

One thing is certain: we’re up against a lot. The Internet is amazing— let’s face it. It offers some incredibly exciting options. This is why we’re on it so much!

If we’re going to reclaim our lives, we must first understand what’s so appealing about our laptops, tablets and smartphones. Once we have a better understanding of this gravitational pull, we can envision some goals to guide our use of these enthralling new tools in our lives.

Thirty years ago, we never would have imagined we could see a video on just about anything we want, be in contact with people from all over the globe, think of a book we want to read or a song we want to hear and then—within seconds—read or listen to it.

We would have been incredulous were we told that one day we would throw away our encyclopedias and have all the same information they once contained—at our fingertips 24-7, more easily accessible, at no apparent cost whatsoever.

The Internet is so amazing, in fact, that we have each become like a kid who has taken up permanent residence in a candy store. We just can’t get enough.

Open the Door

My fear, again, is that a whole generation of people will miss out on real life because they can never quench their voracious hunger to consume from the digital trough.

For many, this hunger has grown ravenously during the Covid-19 pandemic as we tap, hover and click voraciously to learn the latest trajectory of an intractable virus. Like the hedge fund manager Heller refers to (if Heller was right about him, that is), we just can’t get enough.

Take time out from your busy life to reconsider what “enough” means to you. Then determine how you can revitalize your relationships with the people around you.

Can you remember the enduring pain of being ostracized from a social group as a teenager? I certainly can. 

I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday the day that Charles, who I thought was my best friend when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, told me that the group of five guys with whom I was planning to create a yearbook page said to him, “I’m just not sure I want to be remembered as being friends with Tony Silard.” 

I retreated into myself after that conversation and stopped making so much effort to be their friends. Instead, I started hanging out with students from Holland, India, and Iran who went to a nearby international school. 

Surprisingly to me at the time, the international students didn’t seem to care about the common labels I had been tagged with at my high school (e.g., “geek” and “nerd”) and were more interested in who I was as a person.  

I managed to cope with the ostracism and use it as fuel for growth and intrigue with other cultures that have become self-defining over the years and have led me to spend about half of my life overseas and marry a Mexican woman. 

Rejection Flies Fast and Furious Online 

Let’s now fast forward a few decades to the digital era: Try to picture the accelerated ostracism young people are currently experiencing at the hands of peers they thought were their friends through the medium of texting, email, or social media.  

If you have trouble forming this picture, consider David Molak, a high school sophomore in San Antonio, Texas. David received relentless text messages from classmates insulting him and his physical appearance.  

He committed suicide on January 4, 2016. His older brother Cliff wrote on Facebook: “I saw the pain in David’s eyes three nights ago as he was added to a group text only to be made fun of and kicked out two minutes later. He stared off into the distance for what seemed like an hour. I could feel his pain.” 

Imagine that after being insulted and told you are nothing and not desired as a friend, you are sitting at home alone like David Molak rather than ensconced in a social milieu of other teens, as I was, some of whom are friendly toward you. 

These small acts of human kindness may be all it takes to provide the buffer you need to move past the toxic emotions associated with feeling ostracized and once again to feel some semblance of self-confidence and inner strength. For this reason, a National Institutes of Health study found that victims of cyberbullying subsequently become more clinically depressed than those of in-person bullying.  

These incidences of cyberbullying most often occur through instant messaging from someone the victim knows—about half the time, from their school.  

I Thought You Were My Friend 

Surprisingly, the bullies are often either former friends or current “frenemies” (friendships in which both affection and aggression coincide). As incidents of bullying are a source of embarrassment for the victim and increased social standing for the bully, 90 percent of such incidences go unreported. 

The line between bully and victim can be fainter than you might think. In a sample of sixth graders conducted by UCLA psychologist Jaana Juvonen, 9 percent had been victims of bullying, 7 percent had been bullies, and 6 percent had occupied both roles.  

All of the students who had been exposed to bullying, independent of their role, experienced academic problems and challenges getting along with their classmates.  

While the victims of bullying were the most socially marginalized and emotionally distressed in the sample, the group with the highest levels of academic and behavioral problems, including getting along with others, were those who had acted as both bullies and victims.

These are some of the social costs teenagers are paying for their socialization in the digital era.  

We have to remember that it hasn’t been their choice: we’ve unquestioningly accepted the rise of a few social media companies and the associated consequences for how our children grow up. We must remember that when we point the finger at anyone— including Facebook or Instagram—three fingers are pointed back at ourselves. 

Emerging from Rejection 

While rejection certainly hurts—and bullying can easily add injury to insult—we must keep in mind that both rejection and acceptance are inextricable elements of learning how to develop what I call “CMSRs” (Compassionate, Meaningful, Sustainable Relationships). It’s an idea I have included in my new course Managing Loneliness: How to Develop Meaningful Relationships and Enduring Happiness.  

If we are going to enter the ring of building social relationships—and your ability to survive and thrive in this lifetime requires you to do so—we must learn how to internalize the true meaning of “NO”: “Next Option.” 

When a “friend” offers you a gift of rejection or aggression, don’t accept it. Instead, move on to find other friendships that have the potential to become the CMSRs you need. 

Is there a panacea for living a long, meaningful, healthy life? As it turns out, based on the convergence of numerous studies, there is one factor for long-term wellbeing that consistently stands out above the others. 

Research based on data from three longitudinal studies in the 1920s and 1930s (life events included the Great Depression and World War II) examined why some individuals crumble after adversity while others sustain their wellbeing. Both children and adults who were embedded in strong social networks were more likely to find meaning and purpose in the adversity they experienced than those who did not have such robust social relationships in their lives. 

Also, When the Good Times Roll 

Strong connections are not only needed in adversity but also in good times. A study of 79 dating couples by University of California Santa Barbara social psychologist Shelly Gable found that, when it comes to both relationship wellbeing and dissolution, supportive responses to positive news bear more influence than supportive responses to negative news.  

So you don’t only need healthy relationships to protect you from bad times; they carry even more weight in good times, so you have others with whom to celebrate your successes. 

Perhaps the longest-running study to examine the link between social connection and wellbeing over the life span was launched at Harvard University in 1937. Harvard’s health services director Arlie Bock formed a team of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, medical doctors, and anthropologists to conduct the study.  

Bock’s team conducted extensive medical examinations every five years, surveys every other year, and even sent social workers every fifteen years to the homes, first of 238 Harvard sophomores, and then (starting in 1938)—so as not to bias his longitudinal study toward the well-heeled, tweed-jacketed elite—to the homes of 486 eleven-to-sixteen-year-old male adolescents from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.  

Bock and his colleagues tracked the life outcomes of these men for over seventy-five years. Among the Harvard elite, four participants ran for the US Senate, and one even became president.  

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist George Vaillant took over from Bock and ran the study for over four decades. He discovered that, by their mid-50s, about a third of the participants had become mentally ill. “They were normal when I picked them,” Bock told Vaillant in the 1960s. “It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.” 

Friend It Forward 

Vaillant also discovered that the most critical factor for successful aging for these men in their 70s and 80s was the quality of their social relationships during middle age. When asked in a 2008 interview what he had learned from dedicating over half his life to this longitudinal study, Vaillant replied, “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” 

The current Harvard Study of Adult Development director, Robert Waldinger, reinforced Vaillant’s primary lesson from the study in a TEDx talk that has over twenty million views: 

What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we’ve generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The most apparent message from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 

Waldinger also learned from over seventy-five years of data that “social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to the community, are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.” 

The primary finding of the Harvard Study of Adult Development comports with one of the most widely agreed-upon findings in happiness research—that one of the most critical contributors to our long-term wellbeing is the social connections we share and the time we spend with family, friends, and people in our community. 

Get Over Yourself and Revitalize Your Friendships  

So what can you do to start developing what I call “CMSRs” (Compassionate, Meaningful, Sustainable Relationships) in my new course, Managing Loneliness: How to Develop Meaningful Relationships and Enduring Happiness?  

Waldinger offers advice on that, too: 

It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven’t spoken to in years because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges. 

In short, get over yourself. Move past the misconception that social overtures symbolize that you need others and are not doing well in your life. Instead, recognize that putting yourself out there and reaching out to someone new or old in your life, even if you’ve gone through some challenges together, is a sign of strength, not weakness.  

As Gandhi once said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” And he had to forgive the British for almost a century of occupation! What you have to forgive to create the relationships you need to survive and thrive is likely much easier and possible. 

Imagine you are sitting home alone (not so difficult to imagine these days, considering over 3 in 5 Americans were lonely even before the pandemic) and have some time on your hands. What will you do with your free time? Call a friend? Read a book? If you’re like most people these days, you may be thinking, “I wish, but that’s so passé, oh out-of-touch writer. Why don’t you climb out from the rock you are under and greet the 2020s?”  

Yes, it’s true (sigh) that most of us are choosing Facebook, Instagram, or gaming over playing the guitar, going for a walk with a friend, or belting out some karaoke tunes. Alternatively, we are plopping down on the sofa, grabbing the remote, and…  

Watching the People We Once Were 

It is no coincidence that “reality shows” became popular after the advent of social media. Before the Internet, many would have responded to the concept of a reality TV show with “Why would I want to watch someone like me?” Now we watch because we are not viewing people like ourselves; rather, we are viewing people like who we once were. 

There is now a huge demand to know what’s transpiring in the lives of real, everyday people who interact with others in real time (which reality shows supply) because these real, everyday people are gradually removing themselves from our physical lives—lock, stock, and barrel, but not from our Facebook page. 

Capitalizing on our social isolation, reality shows tend to feature highly social characters with extended families and friendship networks. We want to know what real people are doing, but unlike the characters we binge-watch, craving what they have, we’re not prepared to step away from our screen to walk or drive over to see them. Instead, we follow them virtually on social media and watch them on TV. 

Your Worst Quenches Their Thirst 

Social media has, strangely, created its own demand. By isolating you from your friends, your loneliness becomes greater and you feel more motivated by what the British psychologist Pamela Qualter calls the “reaffiliation motive” to check your social media and see what your friends are doing. 

It doesn’t work. In some ways, social media is like calling the delivery number of a pizza franchise in your neighborhood. The more frequently you order, the fatter and less capable of walking outside to a grocery store or restaurant you become. 

So what do you do? You call the delivery number more often to save yourself from an increasingly challenging walk (to real, face-to-face connection). Perceptively summarizing this phenomenon, the Italian novelist Umberto Eco once wrote: 

“The Internet is one thing and its opposite. It could remedy the loneliness of many, but it turns out it has multiplied it; the Internet has allowed many to work from home, and that has increased their isolation. And it generates its own remedies to eliminate this isolation — Twitter and Facebook, which end up increasing it.”

Immobilized Without Connection 

By putting you in contact with the many who matter little to you (e.g., former classmates you didn’t even speak with in real time back then, friends of friends who are not friends for a reason), social media diminishes your ability to connect in real time with the few who matter a lot. Again, research identified this paradoxical effect of the Internet. So we know what’s happening, yet seem helpless to change our habits. 

Even worse—and more chilling—a new study has found that the more time you spend on your phone, the less enjoyment you derive from real-time conversations with the people who have truly been there for you in your life. You begin to perceive them, with all of their time-consuming idiosyncrasies, as requiring too much effort. 

Yet you still crave the intimate connection that only real-time interaction produces, which expands your demand for what seems the easiest, most effortless way to tap into it—ironically, the technology that’s stamped it out of your life—social media. 

So, like the pizza chain gleefully delivering delicious, non-nutritious food to your home, social media throws you overboard and then dangles a life preserver in front of your flailing, desperately lonely, sputtering body. You never quite make it back into the boat of human connection, but neither do you have the capability to swim away. 

Make It Happen 

Here is one strategy I can recommend from my new book, Screened In: The Art of Living Free in the Digital Age, to stop touching your phone, on average, over 2.600 times per day, and begin replacing screen time with people time. 

Put the apps you open multiple times daily—including all social media apps—onto your last screen. Decide how many times you want to check these apps weekly and only right swipe to the final screen on those occasions. This single act will make you more conscious of the decisions you make innumerable times every day of your precious life to attempt to connect with others through your phone rather than in person.  

What will happen when the existential angst sets in of not having your electronic comfort object to turn to at every potentially calm moment in your day? You may actually use your phone as … get ready … a phone. You might call some of the people who are or could become part of your social convoy that travels with you through your successes and challenges in life and keeps you in good social, physical, and mental health.  

Give this strategy a try. Once you become accustomed to regulating how often you check your most addictive apps, you will begin to answer the phone and no longer perceive the caller as an irritating obstacle to the pruning of your social media message queue. You will start to replace social media loneliness with real-time connection and derive more enjoyment from this vast, beautiful world out there.  

Whether it’s a friend not returning our call, being broken up with, or being pulled off an important project, each of us has experienced rejection and we are very aware that it hurts. The following personal story can be applied to any leadership role, too.

A series of experiments led by social psychologists Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University found that even a brief experience of social rejection can propel someone into a downward spiral that includes feelings of hopelessness, increased aggression, binge eating, and irrational, risky behaviors. 

It sent me into a tailspin a few weeks ago. While my wife was away on a trip for ten days, my four-year-old daughter Chloe and I became very close. Once my wife returned home, in Chloe’s eyes, I all but disappeared.  

This past weekend, we were walking around visiting a nearby town, and on about four or five occasions, I reached out for Chloe’s hand to help her across the street and she pulled away and ran up to my wife and reached out for her hand. 

The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back emerged a few evenings later when my wife and I were in our children’s room, and my wife lay down with Chloe to tell her a story. Meanwhile, I lay down on the other side of the room with our son, Alexander. After five minutes, as is our custom, my wife and I switched beds.  

“I don’t want you to lie down with me,” Chloe exclaimed, words that pierced my heart. 

“OK, but then don’t ask me to lie down with you when your mommy is away,” I caustically replied. Then I left the room.  

“You are taking it too hard,” my wife said half an hour later. “Sometimes Chloe screams at me or even hits me; it’s not a big deal. Also, you are holding Alexander’s hand more than Chloe’s, and she sees that.” 

“That’s because Chloe pulls away from me sometimes when I reach out for her hand, which Alex never does,” I replied. “Have you ever experienced Chloe pulling her hand away from you and then running up to me to hold my hand?” I asked, knowing the answer. 

“Well, no,” she replied. 

“You just don’t understand what it’s like to be a Dad,” I shared. Then I went up to bed and sulked for a while. 

Later, my wife joined me and suggested that next time, I talk with Chloe about her feelings and ask her a few questions, such as “Are you angry at me?” to help her share what’s going on inside her. 

The next morning, I woke up at five to go to the gym—as much for the self-regulating benefits of exercise as for the physical benefits. In short, exercise helps me regulate challenging emotions and remain sane. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to write this hopefully clear-minded article.  

While on the elliptical machine, I replayed everything that had happened. I realized that I had allowed the sting of rejection to dictate my behavior, resulting in precisely what educator and author Alfie Kohn rails against in his book Unconditional Parenting. In other words, I was setting conditions for my love for Chloe—you never reject me, I will continue to lay down with you and support you. 

Additionally, Chloe was reestablishing her relationship with her mother after their longest time apart in her four-and-a-half years on this planet. Rather than being about gender—many mothers also experience rejection and their children’s preference at times for their father—Chloe was simply reuniting with her primary caretaker and the most important relationship in her life. 

The next morning, when I dropped Chloe at school after joking around with her and Alexander for twenty minutes in the car, she reached out for my head and hugged me, whispering in my ear, “You’re funny, Daddy.” I smiled, and then reminded myself that our relationship will be replete with both acceptance and rejection over the coming years, and I have to make my peace with that. 

Not wanting Chloe to feel any pressure that evening, I figured out a solution. At their bedtime, I walked into her and Alex’s room at bedtime and simply asked: “Who would like me to lie in their bed when I tell the story?” Before Alex could react, Chloe shouted, “Me!” I lay down and she hugged me. Then Alex joined us. It was a highlight in this Dad’s life, a moment to treasure while it lasts. 

While it’s certainly true that no two pandemics are alike, it’s also true that no two emotional responses to a pandemic are alike. Whenever we feel a distressing emotion, there are two primary ways in which we can process it: suppression and reappraisal. Suppression is perhaps not the best named response, as it is impossible to suppress our feelings; we can only suppress how we display our feelings.

If suppression is our go-to response when we experience an uncomfortable emotion, numerous studies have found that we are likely to experience stress, burnout, and isolation from ourselves and others. Reappraisal, which is to reframe your thoughts in response to a challenging situation, is much healthier.

This pandemic has been an extended period of collective trauma — in fact, the most distressing period of our lives — for most of us. The best we can hope for after experiencing trauma is what is called post-traumatic growth. A concept developed in the mid-90s by two University of North Carolina psychologists, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, post-traumatic growth is the ability to achieve positive life changes after a traumatic event.

Tedeschi and Calhoun have found that the people who experience the most post-traumatic growth are those who also experience the distress of the traumatic situation they have undergone. When we allow ourselves to truly feel our emotions, including trauma, it is from the depth of our suffering that our growth can emerge.

Then, the real question that will determine our potential growth from the largest public health crisis of our lifetimes is whether we will run from our distress or embrace and learn from it.

Easier said than done. How can we confront the challenging emotions — including loneliness, anxiety, trauma, and sadness — we have experienced during this pandemic?

Here is a wonderful strategy I first read about in Susan Piver’s book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart — you guessed it, after a devastating breakup in my life: Invite your challenging emotions over for dinner.

As you set the table for this feast, you will realize that you cannot invite over a dinner guest you can’t identify. Then, the first step is to say to yourself a few times each day, “I feel….” and see what comes next. Write down these emotions.

Once you have named how you have been feeling, literally imagine that these emotions are guests at your dinner table. Ask each guest, “So, why have you shown up this evening?” and “What are you here to teach me?” Then ask yourself, “What are my deeper values that are emerging from the presence of this emotion?”

Keep in mind that, as Berkeley psychologist Richard Lazarus elaborates, we only feel an emotion when something is important to us. While this characteristic of emotions is well-researched, what is lesser known is that we only experience an emotion when we still have something to learn in relation to the life events in which it is encoded.

This understanding comes not from academic research but from spiritual practices. For example, in her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Buddhist practitioner Pema Chodron sagely remarks that “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know … it just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter.”

Why is confronting your emotions important? Enter addiction. All addictions stem from the very human tendency to avoid the experience and subsequent learning associated with a challenging emotion. Whether it’s frustration, anxiety, abandonment, grief, trauma or any other distressing emotion, it can be easier in the short-term to attach to an external object — work, porn, gaming, your phone, alcohol or other drugs — than to acknowledge what the emotion has shown up to enable in your life.

Just as Luke Skywalker decided to confront his fears and embark on his journey to become a Jedi rather than staying home in Tatooine, we each always have this decision to make — avoid the distressing emotions we feel or rise to the learning they have shown up in our life to provoke.

Each of us is called to a personal mission that begins with recognizing that our emotions signal who we are and what we value. If we are willing to read the writing on the wall they etch for us, we move to our next level of personal development. Many of us will go to great lengths to avoid this internal work, which is why the definition of addiction is to repeatedly engage in a behavior despite its negative effects on our ability to function in our lives.

Then, our Shakespearean question is whether to confront or avoid who, at our most profound level, we are as human beings. How we answer this question will determine whether, ten years from now, we look back at the pandemic as the purveyor of all things negative in our life or as a giant reset button that enabled us to be who we are destined to become.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with John, a friend of mine in California in his mid-60s who is grieving the loss of his wife from cancer. John was struggling to manage his grief, not an easy task at any time, and especially not during the social isolation of the pandemic. He told me he had recently spoken with a retired friend of his, who told him, “Life is a solo journey.”

“What do you think of that?” he asked me, knowing I research loneliness.

Riding Solo?

The words of John’s friend reminded me of what I used to tell people when I was a graduate student in my mid-20s: “We enter this world alone, and we will leave it alone.” Influenced by the trauma I experienced from my parent’s divorce and its aftermath, including a physically abusive
step-father, that statement made a lot of sense to me at the time.

I don’t believe it anymore.

Why? To explain how my view has changed, let’s first examine how we entered this world. Then, in the next part of this article, let’s consider how we will leave it.

How We Arrived Here

To subscribe to the belief that we entered this world alone is to forget one minor detail. We only exist in the first place thanks to the greatest sacrifice one human being can make for another: to birth them. Another human being has undergone untold physical, psychological and emotional duress, initially for nine months—replete with unprecedented levels of daily pain that anyone who has not gone through this process, including myself, cannot even begin to fathom—to accompany us on the first part of our journey.

These sacrifices don’t end when we are born. Consider this account from science writer Lydia Denworth in her book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond:

“Before he could have his [closest] friend Christian, my son Jake had to have me—and his father, and some loving babysitters—but, in his case, mostly me. He and I spent our days together. For the first few weeks, that meant that he lay on my chest in the living room of our London apartment … Later, after we moved back to Brooklyn, we dug in the sandbox of the playground, put puzzles together, and chatted … We spent our nights together too, or at least it felt like it in the early months when we were up every few hours, nursing and rocking … In each of these interactions, even the exhausted ones, when I smiled at Jake, and he eventually smiled back, when I talked to him, and he eventually talked back, when I laughed, and he eventually laughed back, and when I cried, and he stared at me and tried to work out what was going on with Mommy, he was honing the early social skills on which his later friendships would depend.”

I hope this puts to rest the idea that we come into this world alone.

“Not so fast, Mr. Jump-to-Conclusions Author,” you may be thinking. “My parents were not as doting and attentive as Jake’s; they taught me through their neglect and abandonment that life really is a solo journey.”

Hmmm. Let’s come back to what you have shared in a later part of this article after we consider whether we leave this world alone.

Is Life a Solo Journey?

In early December of last year, my wife, our kids, and I all had Covid-19. Not a fun experience. On my fourth day after testing positive, I remember thinking about how it would either improve or deteriorate in the next few days, as has been the pattern for so many. Ensconced in my twelve-hour-per-night-sleep-filled cognitive haze, I had to face my own mortality. I didn’t really know what would happen next.

A Covid-Induced Epiphany

I’d like to say that the following epiphany came to me in my few lucid waking hours while under the thrall of the virus, but that’s not what happened. It came to me a few weeks later as I felt an ineffable gratitude that we had all regained our health.

At this point, I experienced two realizations. First, that the two most important things in life are love and life itself. Second, that of these two, we can only take one with us when we go: the love we’ve shared with other people along the way.

I now understand at a much deeper level why, at our wedding twelve years ago in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, my wife and I engraved the back of the handcrafted diorama that we gave to all of our guests depicting a typical wedding scene—with the exception that, in true Mexican style, the bride, groom, and accompanying musician were all skeletons—with the words “El Amor es el Unico que es Eterno.”

These words mean, “Love is the Only Thing that is Eternal.” The rest, including life, is ephemeral.

A Difference between Love and Fear

In this sense, love is associated with gain. How does this come to be? When we express the love within us toward others and receive love from others, we gain this invisible yet highly coveted, critical resource that will extend beyond our brief time on this planet.

Fear, on the other hand, is always associated with the opposite of gain: loss. We fear what we may lose in our lives: material possessions, a friend, our health, and of course—a fear accentuated during this pandemic—life itself.

For this reason, people who exist in a state of fear do not tend to be very kind toward others. In this sense, fear is narcissistic—we haven’t received the love we feel we deserve in our lives, and so we become angry toward others; after all, they haven’t given us what we’ve needed from them. This is the carrying card of the narcissist: blaming others for what they haven’t received.

Love is About What You Give

People who live in a state of love, on the other hand, do not think very much about what they have or have not received from others. Instead, they are focused on what they can give to their relationships. In this sense, they are empowered: while others are cognitively paralyzed by their ruminations on what they didn’t receive, the thoughts of those who live with love revolve around how, how often, when, and what they can give to help others experience more happiness in this life. They are the living embodiment of the Italian expression “Ti voglio bene” (“I desire for your happiness.”)