I have this hypothesis that the more people you add to your life, the harder it is to be happy. My thinking stems from the fact that, since everyone is different and has different opinions, likes, dislikes, etc, the more people you deal with the more chance you'll have for conflict because it's much easier to make one person happy than 10 or 100, right? So if people are like added variables in the equation of happiness, the simpler the equation, the better your chance of happiness. If we grant that most of humanity is busy trying to make their happiness equation more complex, is true happiness with other people impossible?
Is this question strange? You can tell me. I get that a lot so I'm used to it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Translation: I decided to give up on trying to fit in and be all things to all people, and become an asshole. Welcome to sciforums.
Sigh. I rest my case. Would it have hurt you to ask for further clarification or elaboration before you concluded a complete stranger is an asshole. Now I know it was I who posed the question and I don't fault you for answering but this is exactly what I'm talking about. If this is the level of interaction one can expect, what is the fucking point?
Hmm. You may have missed the obvious irony, but no matter. I would say that most people are overwhelmed to some extent with having to deal with a lot of people. For instance, airport security staff eventually develop a don't care attitude which seems to be a common trait that such jobs elicit.
I was almost ready to totally lose it before your follow up post. Lol. In the past 2 days I've been flamed on 3 different forums for asking innocuous questions. Thankfully I misinterpreted your first reply because, after I saw it, I was ready to give up on humanity. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! and with it being on a science forum, I was practically flipping out not more than a few minutes ago. Whew. Thanks for clarifying. That's one case where it really prevented a major breakdown. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You are aware of things like the "Dunbar Number", I presume. There is research into optimal human group size. You have to remember that humans evolved in groups. We are adapted to group survival strategies and social living. That means that, contrary to your prediction, the optimal group size is not 1 (or is it 0? Since we all have conflicting impulses we must work through--like I want to surf the web...but it's 2 a.m. and I have to get up in 5 hours), wouldn't we be unhappy even if left alone with ourselves?) It seems likely to me the optimal number in terms of happiness will vary from person to person, but that it's probably closer to Dunbar's number. http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html Not that we'd be close friends with every single person, but that we take some positives from having those connections which ultimately outweigh the negatives. Imagine this: some guy you meet through your friends seems a bit dull and you hate his politics, which he references a lot. Because of your common friends, he's in your social group now so you have to interact with him somewhat, but avoid talking politics when he's there. Six weeks later you lose your job and this guy helps you get a job at his company. That unpleasant guy has now added significant happiness to your life, even if he adds little interacting with him from day to day. You have to consider all the sources of happiness and unhappiness people add, in all aspects of your life, not just the enjoyment/unpleasantness you derive from purely social interactions.
Oh. The title made me wonder if this might be a tentative venturing into a physics of society. Econophysics: Only One Rule For The Rich: In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas. The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko. Utopia Theory: A physics of society cannot tell us how things should be, but it can hopefully elucidate the consequences of particular choices and policies. [...] The basic idea is simple: we replace the atoms of conventional statistical mechanics by people. Of course, while atoms interact via well defined forces of attraction and repulsion, people are seldom so straightforward. But in some situations human interactions do not amount to very much more than this basic concept. For example, by avoiding collisions and not encroaching on one another's "personal space", we act just as though there was a repulsive force between us. [...] the fashion for applying physics to social science has arisen largely within the community of statistical physicists, who have developed sophisticated tools forstudying the behaviour of systems with a large number of components. Attempts to understand systems like this are often ushered under the umbrella of complexity theory, which holds that simple rules often underlie complex behaviour. [...] On the other hand, a multitude of simultaneous interactions does not necessarily generate complexity. Indeed, statistical physicists often find quite the reverse. While the behaviours of the individual components are too numerous and complicated to follow in detail, the emergent effects are remarkably simple. No two water molecules, for example, are doing the same thing, but a large number of them reliably conspire to produce a freezing transition at 0 °C. The real surprise that emerges from the physics of society is that social behaviour is sometimes extremely simple and, moreover, governed by mathematical laws.
The problem with this logic is two-fold: 1] it assumes that relationships in general have a negative effect on happiness. The more you have the less you are happy. Most people consider relationships a positive thing in their life. Each one adds to their happiness, not subtracts from it. 2] if it were true, best state is to have no friends, keeping the negativity of relationships at its minimum. Which is fine if you're a hermit.
I have fond memories of large groups I have associated with. Family groups especially, but also people who treated each other like family. I think the drawbacks you are referring to might have to do with concern for others, so if one or more are in jeopardy of some kind, it could cause anxiety. Then, when one dies, there is grief. And you face the same pitfalls in smaller groups. But the alternative is loneliness. I think a lot of people have come to realize that, in order to have a lot of comfort and security, a large family is not the logical route, so they set out with some kind of plan for their future that doesn't revolve around the "big happy family" ideal. Others don't care or don't share this outlook. It just depends on your circumstances, your vision of yourself in society and the path you choose for yourself.
That is probably only true to a point. The Dunbar Number suggests there is a maximum number of people our brains are designed to have relationships with. Relationships may, in general, even be subject to the diminishing marginal returns, in which case you would maximize your personal satisfaction by reaching a point where the expected marginal cost of maintaining an extra relationship (in terms of time, effort and resources spent) equals the expected marginal return of adding a new relationship.
That is an eye opening link. Thanks. I guess, depending on what you want to achieve in life, there is an optimal group number for you. I mean, people who have less ambition maybe will feel more comfortable in a smaller group than people that rely on networking to secure employment, such as in your example. Beyond casual relationships, I'm partial to conclude the optimal group number for grooming is two, as in a person and their romantic partner. Yes we need a source of employment but I'm tempted to think that employment, while it may provide added physical comforts and survival value, it unessessarily complicates things in the area of social grooming and is also superfluous since all the social grooming one really needs can come from ones romantic partner. And theoretically, a person can survive on an unihabited island themselves. So the survival value of relationships beyond a romantic partner is really only one of degrees, not necessity. I mean, as in my island example, suppose we postulate that you CAN survive on your own? The only problem left to solve would be loneliness and that can be solve in totality by a single romantic partner. A romantic partner can theoretically satisfy ones needs from the most basic to the deepest. So it seems to me, again, beyond those relationships that gave birth to you and your partner, relationships beyond the number of two are superperfluous complexities.
You can replace the job with a countless other possibilities. For example if you are the lone hunter in you group of two, you are in trouble. If one day's hunt is bad for you because your aim is off that day, you'll be weak the next, and you can wind up starving by random chance relatively easily. The variance in the amount of food a single hunter can bring in is relatively large. As you add more hunters to a group though, the variance declines (until all the "specific risk" of a poor hunt for each individual hunter is 0, and all that's left are systematic risks of a poor hunt) (i.e. you can diversify away the specific risks of a bad hunt just as you can the specific risks of a portfolio). You can also hunt larger game in groups, and drive entire herds off cliffs...so in addition to lowering the variance in your hunting yield, you can increase the mean amount of food reaped per hunt with a group. Perhaps less esoterically, and more directly analogous to the friend who gets you a job hypothetical. Imagine you are a living the life of a stone age hunter on an island where you can survive. Suppose you break you leg or get sick or "age". You and you mate are again likely to starve (unless she can hunt well enough for both of you...but what if you both get sick or age together?). Worse, what if your leg heals poorly? Then the condition plagues you forever, even if you happen to survive. Having multiple tribe mates help tremendously in those situations, on that island. In the circumstance where you are an invalid, you want the largest group you can get, so long as that size doesn't result in a majority that doesn't care if you live or die. In other words, you want the largest size that still leaves most people feeling as if you are a part of their social "ingroup" and therefore a sense that they are morally obligated to protect you. (In a sense, this is a kind of "social insurance" that allows people to know that if they become injured, ill or infirm that they will be taken care of.) I can see 150 as being near that limit. Further, I get along with and really most people in my social network, and I'm an introvert...so I am not sure why you feel people are a net negative out of the box. I think most people get along with their friends better than they do with their spouses. Friends do go their separate ways sometimes, but I don't get the sense that there's anything akin to or 50% divorce rate among friends. If you feel that on average, people you know take satisfaction from you more than they give it, that's valid...but I think you are in a distinct minority on that one. Your conclusion, then, may be valid for you, but not generalizable to a wider population. Just a thought.
Well, I think I do personally qualify as the minority here as I would definitely say my relationships take more satisfaction from me than they return. I mean, almost anyone in an abusive family would qualify and I don't think that's all that rare. As far as your examples, they are, again, only examples of degree. No matter how large the group we are a part of, we are all going to die anyway. I would rather live a shorter life filled with harmony than a longer life filled with conflict. And to further expand on the law of diminishing returns, there will also be occasional circumstances, as in the case of Nazi Germany, where connection to the larger group becomes a huge liability to ones comfort and survival. I'm sure many who went to the gas chambers would trade that fate for a life spent in isolation with their romantic partner.
I was raised in an abusive family, and while it certainly strained my relations with my family, I still find enjoyment in the company of others who are not abusive. That's true, but as we are discussing the optimal group size to generate personal satisfaction from 0 to around 150, matters of degree are important. The difference between "slightly happy" while living alone and "moderately happy" living in a group of 42 people is certainly a matter of degree, but how else other than in shades of difference can we approach the question of optimality? Even adding a mate for grooming is a question of degree, since you raise the population from 1 to 2. (Plus, if you have a mater, unless you limit that mate to grooming, I note that you are likely to spawn additional relationships when the pair of you have children. Those children will not have anyone but siblings around them growing up, and their welfare will affect your own.). That's true, but starving to death at a young age while suffering from illness or injury has a particularly adverse effect on one's lifetime aggregate utility ("utility" in the sense it is used in utilitarianism and economics, that is). Wouldn't you rather go ungroomed that "suffer" the presence of a mate? If not, why is grooming more fundamental than other goods offered by a society? But that begs the question. You are *assuming* that having more people in the group (again, say 42) creates more conflict than it does "harmony." That is the point we are trying to decide. If your premise in your original post is correct, then what you say here follows. If your premise in the original post is incorrect, then what you are saying here does not follow at all because there would be *more* harmony in a slightly larger group than there would be in a group of one or two. Once you get to the level of a nation, I agree with you...but here's the thing, not everyone in Nazi Germany was in the same social network (which is what I thought we were discussing). Their social networks, like ours, still had limits based on (if nothing else) the limitations imposed by their brains. Large groups certainly do have drawbacks, but at the level of a few dozen it is possible for everyone in the group to be considered "ingroup" (by a majority of the members of the group) rather than "outgroup". Again, I am guessing that the optimal group size for the average person is likely between 3 and 150, not numbering in the millions. It's also good to remember that not every nation becomes Nazi Germany, and you can't take much of use from an observation of one outlier.
Pandaemoni, sorry to hear of your family life. While i can't say my own family life qualifies as traditional abuse, it is trying at times. unless of course, you agree that george Costanza's family or Ray Barone's qualifys as abuse. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Though I can't agree with you on the ultimate superiority of any group over a number of two, if it doesn't sound too uppity, I grant you this has been a satisfying exchange. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
