Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Surprising Truth About America's Friendship Crisis

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Modern loneliness is often treated as a simple problem: People are simply spending more time alone. But what if that's not the whole story? Over the last several years, Derek has written about workism, the rise of a culture that puts work at the center of our lives, and the "antisocial century," in which technology has made it easier than ever to avoid spending time with other people. The result is a world where many of us trade deep connection for convenience, productivity, and fleeting hits of entertainment. Today, Derek talks with Yale psychology professor and Happiness Lab host Laurie Santos about the science of friendship, connection, and loneliness. What do we misunderstand about being alone? Why are male friendships harder to maintain? And how can we build stronger relationships in a world that seems designed to pull us apart? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Laurie Santos Producer: Devon Baroldi Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've been thinking a lot recently about friends and friendship. I turned 40 a couple weeks ago, and many of my close friends from high school and college of the same age have also celebrated this milestone in the last few months. So the past year has had more opportunities to connect with old friends and close friends who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. And these reunions are always wonderful. But as you get older, I think there's an undercurrent of sadness or wistfulness

that comes through, as you recognize how hard it is to keep the candle of old friendships truly alive as middle life takes over. I think about my own daily calendar. I have two young kids, two and six months old, and that means my typical day begins around 6.30, making breakfast and coffee, pulling together the toddler's lunch and backpack before getting her to daycare. By 8.30, I'm at work. With two podcasts per week, plus a newsletter, plus maybe the occasional speech, I am pretty much book solid between 830 and 5. And then the second that clock hits 5, I am back on the road picking up the toddler,

getting her home. And then as parents of young kids surely understand, the next two hours are just a blur, a very loud blur. It's feeding and cleaning and wrangling, negotiating. Honey, eat your potatoes, but I don't want potatoes. I want cheese hits. No, darling, cheese hits are not, a dinner food,

but I want them, and so on. And then it's on to bath time, on to bedtime, which is its own multistages. adventure. And so kids, plus work, that's your 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. But you still need time for your partner. Maybe time at the gym, maybe even, God forbid, time for yourself, a book, a video game, a TV show, a podcast. And when you add it all up, it's just not as easy as it used to be to find time to socialize or to maintain friendships, much less make new ones. I don't think it has to be this way. In the last two years, I've written several long essays about the many ways.

the modern world keeps us from seeking deeper connections with the people in our lives. Several years ago, I wrote an essay about a phenomenon I called workism, or the belief among many people that work and career ought to occupy this almost religious centerpiece of our life. Last year, I wrote about the antisocial century and how technology and policy made 21st century life more alone and isolated. I think if anybody listening to this podcast checks their weekly average screen time on their phone, they'll see in clear and unambiguous detail how much time they could be using this device to talk to real people whom they know, but instead use that same device to scroll through posts from parasycial celebrities who they've never met and will

never meet. So yes, I do think life is busy. But also, yes, I think many people, perhaps including me, have at times lost the art of connection. And for you, for you, I do think life is busy. And for forgo social connection for these little quick blips of momentary joy and happiness. Today's guest is Lori Santos, a Yale professor and the host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab. We talk about the psychology of connection, starting with men, friendship, and the often misunderstood phenomenon of loneliness. And we talk about the pursuit of happiness, 250 years after Jefferson put that phrase on parchment. Many of us have turned happy. into a lonely and individual pursuit,

when it was originally a quality meant to be pursued in the company of other people. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Lori Santos, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for me back. So your upcoming season revolves around several issues that we've covered in this show that have completely obsessed me.

This includes friendship and relationships and the way that we misunderstand loneliness, the way we underrate deep conversations, the benefits of connection versus isolation. These are some of my favorite topics to talk about, whether it's on the show or off mic, off camera with my friends. I want to get us started on the psychology of friendship. And let's get rolling with a big question.

Do you think that men are worse than women at maintaining friendships in adulthood? Yeah, I think there's lots of evidence to show that they are, unfortunately. Like, I don't think this is something like deep-seated biological about being a guy. But if you look at the data, it seems like men are doing worse in the friendship department. And I think we have to couch this in what's happening generally in the friendship department, which is that over time everybody's friendships are going down, right? If you look at American time-use survey data, which has been studying people for decades now,

what you find is pretty much everybody across all age groups, both genders, are spending less time in person with their friends than they did a few decades ago. But that decrease is much worse for men, right? One of the studies found that if you look at what's standardly considered like a good level of friendship, like do you have six close friends that you could talk to, men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple decades. So like half of men have the number of friendships that they used to have a decade ago. And if you ask how many men just say they have no close friendships at all, you see

around 15% of American guys in midlife these days are saying, yeah, I have no close friends at all. And that's a fivefold, like, decrease in friendship than since folks have been running this American time use survey. So, like, that's not great. It's not bad. And it suggests that men are, like, not doing as well when it comes to women. And I think I'm sure we'll talk about it. There's probably lots of reasons why that might be the case. Yeah, this is getting a while right now. I think you've already put your finger on something that's really important, which is that there is an overall structural trend toward aloneness and away from sociality. This is something I've covered a lot.

I'm obsessed with it. I've called it the antisocial century. But what I'm interested to really narrow in on here is why the phenomenon of the antisocial century has been particularly isolating for men. And just one piece of information to bring in here is I remember a conversation I had with Richard Reeves in this podcast a few years ago where he made this. interesting comment where he said, women and even children are more likely to hang out in face-to-face contexts, in face-to-face contexts. But adult men are more likely to hang out in what he called

shoulder-to-shoulder context. That is to say they require a kind of centralizing activity to provide an excuse for hanging out. So, you know, let's get cocktails, let's get martinis, not as common as let's play golf. Let's watch the game. Let's go. Let's go. to the bar and, you know, see some hockey, watch the NFL playoffs. I don't want to overgeneralize here because, of course, there's so much heterogeneity within all men, all women, but this idea that women are more likely to meet up in face-to-face contexts that don't need an excuse, and men are more likely to need that excuse, video game, sports, might mean that it's, like, harder for them to come up with the reason to hang out in the first place, which multiplied over

time might hurt their long-term friendships. So that's one sort of stylized theory for what's going on with guys. But maybe you know the research better than I do. To what extent is this interpretation even valid? And number two, what is your interpretation for why it's harder for men to maintain friendships through adulthood? Yeah, yeah. I think this face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder thing is really important. In fact, one of the researchers that I interviewed as part of this season, Todd Rogers, who's a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, really interested in the loneliness crisis, he actually did this cute study where he looked at this. So he went back to that American Time Use survey, which just looks at like, how do people spend their time? Are they eating? Are they

cooking? Are they shopping? Are they playing video games? What are they doing? And he took all those categories. And he went to men and women and he said, how likely would you be to like invite somebody to do one of these categories with you? Right. And when he looks at women, it's like most of those categories, like, yeah, I could invite somebody to go shopping or sit and have coffee or come over while, you know, bullshit while I'm cooking, whatever. But guys, it was basically like, watch sports, do sports. Right? It was. exactly this like shoulder to shoulder thing where you're not sitting face to face and interacting. And his idea there is like it just seems like it's not as culturally acceptable for guys to invite

other guys to do the things that these time you surveys are showing that we spend our, or we spend a lot of time doing, right? And so it's like the kind of categories that guys feel okay inviting other guys to take part in is just much smaller. And given that you're not spending that much time watching sports and playing sports, a lot of the rest of your day is, you know, chit chatting or hanging out or whatever, that means that there. there's a lot of missed opportunities for guys to get together with other guys to, like, hang out in the ways that we normally hang out. I think a different thing, though, that we have to point to is, like, why is it so hard for guys to get together and chat face to face? And I think if this gets back to, you know, a whole set of traditional gender norms that guys are fighting these days where for better or for worse, again, not all guys, as you said, you know, hashtag not all guys.

And there's a lot of heterogeneity here. but more guys wind up growing up with these traditional male norms about independence, self-reliance, be stoic, don't talk about your emotions, right? And I think that makes it hard to have the vulnerable face-to-face chit chats that a lot of guys tend to seem to avoid, at least in some of these data sets. And so I think it's partly like what seems like it's socially acceptable, but it's also driven by a set of values that we have culturally. And I think it's worth noting a set of values that we have culturally that are relatively new. One of the things I learned making these episodes is that if you look back in history, like, dude friendships were the norm for most of human history, right? You rewind to classical Greece and you'll find, you know, the tragic bromances of like Achilles and Patriclos

and the Iliad where like literal warrior dudes were like so into their friendships that they like openly, you know, when Patrick's died, no Iliad spoilers there. but, you know, this is what goes on. You know, if you rewind to, you know, the early part of our own country's history, you'll find our American forefathers walking hand in hand, writing effusive poetry to one another, saying how grateful they are from one another,

how much they love one another, right? Like, it was the, these norms were not always there, and I think it's worth kind of interrogating, like, where did they come from, and what damage are they doing to prevent guys from having these close relationships? Where did they come from? What damage are they doing?

I mean, it's interesting to think, just to fill out, that question. It's interesting to think that, you know, in the late 1700s, early 1800s, and certainly the, you know, whatever, 9th century BCE, whenever theoretically the Greeks were in Troy trying to get Helen back, you have these incredibly close friendships, even homosocial relationships, which I think were more common in ancient Greece. But, you know, you compare that to the iconography of the modern cowboy. Yes, John Wayne is not holding men's hands, right? High noon is not exactly. No poetry and high noon whatsoever written from one guy to another. Yeah, not a lot of wee things. So what, you know, not that this necessarily had to have changed around the 1940s, but is there a period of time when you think this did change? Yeah, it seems like what I'm learning from historians and sociologists as part of these episodes is it seems like a lot of it changed kind of late 19th century because of a couple things, right? One is just real differences in the way people were conceptualizing the genders. Like back in the day, if you look in,

like the 1700s, you look at like Montaigne and so on, the idea is that men were just more empathic than women. Women didn't have the requisite emotions, you know, scientist thought, to experience close friendship, close empathy, and so on. And that kind of changes around the 19th century. Right now, women are the, you know, the caretakers, the providers, they have more empathy. So our ideas of gender are changing around then.

This was also around the time that there was more of an awareness of queer culture, of gayness and so on. And I think that that, because that is an identity that at the time, unfortunately still is stigmatized that got, you know, straight cis guys to be like, oh, I don't, you know, want to be quote unquote gay, right? It caused men to be a little bit more paranoid about their self-presentation and closeness with other men because they didn't want to be mistaken for this other stigmatized identity. Then as you get into the early 20th century, now I think you have these so-called traditional male gender norms cropping up everywhere, right? In novels, you know, from the like, you know, Jack Kerouac, you know, be your own guy on the road to John Wayne to whatever. these things are kind of coalescing. And so seem like, you know, through the 18th century,

early 19th century, guys could be friends. They had lots of close friends, openly expressing emotions and so on. And then that changed a little bit over time. You're reminding me that one of my favorite history books is the Republic for which it stands, which is this multi-hundred-page history of America in and around the era of the Civil War. And that book kicks off with an introduction that explains, what is America like in the 1850s? How is it changing? How are we setting the scene for the Civil War. And there's this long section that utterly fascinated me about the ways that that phase of the Industrial Revolution was sending men out of subsistence farming. They were working out of the home and they were developing their own sort of sphere of influence as the

primary breadwinner within this new mechanized economy. But that allowed women to develop their own sphere of influence in the home. And women became seen as the garland. And women became seen as the guardians of the home in a way where maybe previously in the age of Montana, it was considered the man who was in charge of the home. No, this book is saying by the 1850s, 1860s in America, men were not seen as being in charge of the home. They were seen as being in charge of work. And so you maybe have the beginning in the middle of the 19th century of this sort of separate spheres of influence for men versus women that then has these knock on effects of, well, what type of a person is the worker versus the caretaker versus the person? Versus the

person in charge of the home. And maybe that might accentuate certain differences that play out in terms of masculinity versus femininity and male friendships versus female friendships. I never thought to make that connection, but that's very interesting. Yeah. And I think we see the knock on effects of that all today. As part of my episode, I interviewed the 80s actor Andrew McCarthy, who you might remember from like, you know, Weekend at Bernice and the Brat Pack and his portrayals of male friendship. But he recently wrote this book about the history of male friendship and what's gone on. He kind of realized that in his own midlife, he'd sort of lost his own friends. And so he went on this big road trip to connect with old friends that had kind of gone defunct over time

that he needed to connect with, but also to just talk with guys around the country about their notions of friendship. And one of the things that was so intriguing in this book is that everybody he talked to you from like Texas oil rig guys to like random dudes in cities and so on talked about that one of the pressures they have in midlife as guys, and one of the things that prevents them from having the time for male friendships, is this pressure to provide, is this idea that like men are the breadwinners and you got to work and you got to make a living and that's all on us, right? And that pressure he saw as really integral to the fact that men just weren't making time for social connections. So yeah, I think there are all these sorts of threads that

come out, you know, and culture of how these things changed over time. But the result is that a lot of in midlife are suffering from a real loneliness crisis, as you've talked about on your podcast. And this issue that men are worse in maintaining friendships is sometimes dubbed the male loneliness crisis. And I try my best to push back lightly on this characterization. The evidence that loneliness itself, this thing we call loneliness, the evidence that that is surging among men is not nearly as clear as the fact that aloneness is surging among men. Yep. You address this relationship between aloneness and loneliness quite a bit in the upcoming season.

And you make the additional point, this is really what I want you to respond to, that the thing that we call loneliness isn't just subjective, right? Like someone can spend a week at a silent retreat and feel incredibly happy, and another person can spend 12 hours alone and feel just crippling levels of loneliness. It's not just that this concept is subjective. It's also that it's an intensely modern concept. Maybe tell us a little bit about how you think we misunderstand loneliness. Yeah.

Well, one of the cool folks that I got to talk to for this season was a historian by the name of Fay-bound Alberti. And she has a book on the history of loneliness where she argues that loneliness as the way we think about it, in the modern day is actually a pretty new phenomenon, which I found kind of surprising. Her sense was that people often talked about being alone, but there were lots of first benefits to being alone. It was a time for sort of spiritual connection, getting to know yourself, emotion regulation. It was sort of seen in this positive context. And there was this idea that you were kind of never alone, right?

You know, for most of human history, we had a sort of spiritual sense that God was around us or were one with nature, right? So it's like there wasn't really a sense of being lonely. alone and the way we think about it in the modern day. And so she argues that this too is kind of a 19th century notion that you see this kind of coming in around then as people are moving to more secular ways as we're as cultures generally becoming more individualist over time, like that there was a transition where loneliness became a thing.

In my podcast, she talked about this interesting distinction between like novels and fictional portrayals of being alone, you know, think like, you know, you get stranded on a deserted island. And she contrasts like Robinson Crusoe, right, from, you know, back in 1800s with Castaway, you know, the Tom Hanks movie where he used to talk to the volleyball because he doesn't know anyone. And she's like in Robinson Crusoe, being castaway was like this moment of, you know, spiritual enlightenment where you kind of found yourself. It was this moment of kind of understanding who you really were as a person. Like that was the point of the novel. Whereas in Castaway, the whole point was like, oh my gosh, Tom Cruise went completely crazy because he didn't have anyone to talk to. to talk to this volleyball, right?

And so there is this difference in just the idea of what alone time can do that seems to be interestingly cultural. And that's where a psychologist these days have come in to ask, well, is that really true? Is our construal of what it means to be alone? Creating, in some sense, the feelings that we get when we talk about this so-called loneliness crisis, are they creating the negative feelings that come from spending so much time alone? And researcher Michaela Rodriguez, she's currently a grad student at the University of again, she's actually going to become my new colleague at Yale, which I'm so excited about, because I love

her research so much. She's actually been studying whether or not just how much we talk about the loneliness crisis is making people more lonely. She does these studies where she has people, you know, read a typical news article about, oh my gosh, loneliness crisis, it's so bad, versus a news article that talks about the many benefits of solitude or alone time. And what she finds is that that simple intervention can change how people experience the act of being alone when they have some of their own alone time. She finds that your own perception of how bad it is to be alone

is making loneliness worse when you happen to find yourself alone. And so I think this is really profound because I think even me, right, as a psychologist who's studied animals back in the day, I have this sense that, you know, we are social primates. Like loneliness is this built-in biological response to not having the connection you need.

And she really finds like, no, it's a lot how you think about it and how your culture thinks about it that matters. I wonder when you think aloneness is therapeutic versus when you think it's clinically harmful, so to speak. Yeah. I think part of it is intention and choosing it, right? I think part of it is your reaction to it. And I think it's worth remembering that like how we feel about being alone or with other people might be very different from like whether we're actually alone or with other people, right?

I mean, I just just speak personally that some of my deepest moments of loneliness have been being around other people, you know, at a party where I just felt like I didn't connect or with my work colleagues. So I felt like I'm the odd person now. I just don't get it. You know, I'm physically around other people. I'm not alone, but I'm experiencing a lot of loneliness, right? Versus, you know, the situation you brought up, right, on a silent meditation when you feel like you're transcendently kind of part of the universe, you feel connected to nature and something bigger than yourself. You're physically alone, but you feel incredibly connected. And so I think whether we're physically alone or with other people might not be macbing on to our psychological situation of feeling like we're

alone or, you know, connected to others. But I think the way we think about it matters a lot. If you're kind of excited to be alone, if we frame it as me time, for example, frame it as solitude, right, rather than being alone, those even linguistic phrases research shows matters a lot, too. I have a bit of a hot take that you might disagree with or maybe even more specifically, Nicaela might disagree with. So I, you don't have to then try. lique as her. Maybe you can just react to this take. You should have her on the pod. She's amazing, but yeah. I think I absolutely should. But, you know, I think my position here is maybe a little bit weird. I think a lot of people, according to the American time you survey, as you said, spend historically high amounts of time alone.

I see from other surveys that they're not lonely. And when I see the decline of friendships and the decline of coupling and the decline of relationships and time spent with other people writ large, I think they're They should be lonelier. Yeah. I think that if they felt a little lonelier, they would socialize more. They'd get offline. They'd get off their couch. They'd move their body.

They'd work out their mind. They'd make friends that even if in the short term, that feels like work, right? I wish I was watching Netflix, and instead I'm out having a first drink with someone who might become a true friend six months from now. I think it pays dividends. I think there's a lot of evidence

suggesting that strong social connections are physically and neurologically protective as we get older, psychologically protective as well, because sometimes something bad happens to you and you need a shoulder to cry on. It raises this question, I think, of whether the problem isn't that Americans feel lonely. The problem to me, that, and this is the thesis

that I'm trying to work out, is that they're alone because they're so deluge with entertainment and the comforts of staying on a couch and watching television and looking at their phone, that it's overwhelming their impulses to be around other people, and that is causing chronic problems over time.

They're not feeling alone in that, or, I should say, lonely, in that moment. And so they're not making that next friend, and that next friend, and that next friend. And then 20, 30 years later, when Pew or Daniel Cox does a survey of overall friendships, he's like, oh, holy shit, friendships had declined by 50% in the last 30 years.

The number of men who say they have no close friends has tripled from 5 to 15%. Okay, now we have a social crisis. And to me, that social crisis is a phenomenon of people spending alone time when they are entertained by media. And that moment of entertainment distracts them from the evolutionary instinct to seek out social connections. So I wonder how you feel about this conceptualization of the problem. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's that hot to take because I agree with you. And I actually don't think Michaela would agree with you either.

I think her, the main point of her work is to say that we, one of the reasons that alone time can feel so bad in cases where people are alone and not maybe entertaining themselves on screen, but really feeling I'm so alone, I shouldn't be alone and so on, is how we think of it, that there are ways to use solitude in healthier ways. You know, just if folks have done, you know, in ancient traditions forever, right? You know, think about monks and, you know, some of the greatest spiritual and creative insights actually happen when you're alone, right? And so her move is to say, let's make alone time healthier by changing the way we construe it. Her move is not to say, and then never have any social connection. I think she, too, would agree that the signs of the amount of time that people are spending alone is different than it used to be 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and that there is a real problem. And I agree completely, I think, this problem was seen even earlier before it became as bad as it as today, right? I think back to Bowling Alone, you know, this famous book by Robert Putnam, the political scientist, who was really worried about what he was. what he saw is this crisis that, you know, back in the 1950s, people would join boiling leagues,

and they had this community that was, you know, politically diverse and ethnically diverse, and everyone was hanging out with everyone and really community-oriented. And then you fast forward to when he was writing his book in the late 90s, early 2000s, and now people weren't bowling in leagues. They were kind of bowling alone. Like, you just bowl with one friend. And what is this show about the death of community ties and so on? The reason I bring up Robert Putnam's book is that he was writing this in 2000,

before the internet, before streaming services, before the... this stuff. And he was like, oh my gosh, television, right? We have this thing that's so distracting is going to take over our lives. And it's so easy to be entertained by yourself, not out at a bowling league with friends. Oh my gosh, it's so easy to just be alone. And I think, wow, was that pressure? Again, he had no idea. Laurie, it's even worse than that. If you look at the criticisms of that book in the original essay that he wrote bowling alone, which I don't remember what journal like came out in, you have a lot of critics saying you're totally underrated the internet. the internet's going to come around

and it's going to totally transform socialization and it's going to bring everyone back together and the fact that you're not anticipating this just shows that you have no idea how to read the future technology. 25 years later, the American Time News survey is like, oh no, socialization is actually declined by another 30%. And the share 25-year-old, people under 25,

who say they go to or host parties has declined by 70%. Like the bottom was absolutely cut off. It's extraordinary how Prussian Putnam was and how anti-Pression his critics where. I feel like a theme that you're that you're circling and want to make sure that we put our thumb on it is that, and I agree with this, chosen aloneness can be sacred and the loneliness that you fall into that is chronic, that is what is less healthy. Like I'm, as I said in my open,

the father of two kids, two years old and six months old, when I'm traveling and I get breakfast alone at a nice hotel. It's the most incredible thing in the world. It's genuinely the most incredible thing in the world. Like, those eggs taste better than any caviar will ever taste. And it's not because I hate my children and my family. I adore them. It's because variety is the spice of life.

And this is a purposeful aloneness. This is me practically celebrating, as if in a monkish ritual, a brief and bound opportunity to be by myself before I go back into the maelstrom of a loud and chaotic loving family. And that is the way that I like to talk about this distinction between aloneness being bad and aloneness being a therapy.

It's like, of course aloness can be a therapy, but like practically every other therapeutic cocktail or molecule, you can overdose on it. Yeah, that's it. And there's a way in which people, I think, can fall into an overdose of aloneness without necessarily thinking, oh, what I'm doing with the next 10 years of my life is depriving myself of the ability to make friendships that will pay

dividends 10, 15, 20 years down the line. That's sort of how I can see that. I don't know if that's roughly how you think of it as well. I think that's exactly right. And I think someone like Michaela's point would be, and a culture can make it harder to get to that Zen like moment of aloneness, right? Because if you're eating, you know, that breakfast, you know, in your hotel, when you're traveling, you're thinking, oh my God, I'm alone. I'm not talking to anyone in the hotel. I must be a freakazoid. There's something wrong with me. Oh my, my, like, it's very hard to get to that intentional enjoyment, present, emotion regulation benefit that we get from alone time, if so many of the norms are making it hard for you to do that.

And I think, you know, Michaela is such an interesting case. She graduated undergrad in, like, 2016, right? She's part of this generation that, like, is so much more alone than they've been before. And she remembers, you know, the construal that she would have sitting in the dining hall alone as a college student, right, where it wasn't like, oh, this is such great time. You know, college is so frantic. Let me just have a moment to kind of be. by myself and enjoy my meal, like, her construe was like, I'm a freak and a weirdo. I don't have

any friends. Oh, you know. And so the idea is that what we want to do is come up with healthier ways to have a loan time. And the point is that that might help us in our social connection time, right? I'm sure every time you have that moment to have your eggs by yourself while you're traveling, when you go home to your partner and kids, like now all of a sudden, like, oh, you can you can you're refreshed. You're refreshed. You can deal with them better. You can be a better socially connected person if you have healthier alone time. And so I think these things don't have to be at loggerheads in the way we often think about it, that there's this tension between alone time and, you know, getting the social connection that we all need and that, you know, Putnam saw even

early on was going down. I think in the, through the healthiest form of alone time, you can actually be better at being social. It can give you the bandwidth to do the kind of sometimes frictiony work that it takes to set up a good social connection with other people. You've spoken to the wonderful Nick Epley, the University of Chicago psychologist who's done a lot of work on these surprising and often counterintuitive psychology of connection and what people actually want from connection. He's done a lot of really interesting work on oversharing and the degree to which people fear oversharing. They fear TMI, too much information. They're bounded and very skittish about revealing. intimate details about themselves with people who they maybe don't know so well, or they

put those kind of intimate details on a really high pedestal and say, I'm only going to share this thing with someone who I know for years and years, decades and decades. Tell me what you've learned from talking to Nick and other psychologists about how we get this wrong, how we misunderstand the best way to essentially hang out. Yeah. Well, I think we one thing we get wrong about oversharing in TMI is that we often think about it in the context in which is talked about on the internet, right, which is the typical oversharing you might see on social media, right? You, you know, blast something about your boss on Facebook or you like, you know, post, you know, too many of your meals and it's just like, oh my gosh,

you know, save that for your therapist kind of thing. We think about sharing and revealing in this online context. And of course, that might not be the best way to do it. You can't control the audience, et cetera, et cetera. But what that does is it makes it so that when we're in a in real life context with real humans, real friends, real people in real time, we assume that those same kind of cringe voices that come from the online side apply in the case of in real life. And what Nick studies, other psychologists like Leslie John, lots of folks have shown, is that no, sharing and giving more information than you think is possible in real life is actually good. This psychologist, Leslie John, has been pushing the acronym TLI over TMI. TLI is too little information, right?

And her idea is that not sharing enough can quietly reshape your life. You know, if you don't tell your work colleagues, say, about a disability, they can't give you the help you need to deal with it. If you don't tell your partner about the little things that are needling you about how they don't empty the dishwasher, those kind of micro moments of being a little frustrated wind up adding up. You know, if you don't share with that person you have a crush on, your true feeling. you can never move forward with them, right? The idea is that what we know is that being vulnerable is the path to true connection. It's the path to being known.

And of course, it feels scary. But what Nick's research has shown is that people don't react as negatively to you when you share with them, as you often think. We often get caught up in thinking when we're about to share something, well, how am I going to be perceived? You know, if I admit that I'm struggling with my kid

or somebody going to think of a bad mom or if I admit that I'm having a hard time at work, people think I'm not good at my job, right? We think about competence and how competently other people are going to view us when we share something vulnerable. But other people aren't thinking about competence. Nick Kork has shown that other people are thinking about your warmth. They're thinking, oh my gosh, this person shared something with me. They trust me.

And that builds connection. And how do you react when somebody shares something vulnerable with you and trust you? You tend not to like, you know, be like really judgy about them. You tend to like treat them warmly back, right? We tend to reciprocate these warm, vulnerable feelings. back. But when we're in the position of revealing, we often forget that. And that means that we don't reveal enough. We kind of fall prey to this TLI, too little information rather than TMI. One of my favorite stories that Nick told me when I was reporting the antisocial century is that he said

he loves to do this thing with incoming students at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, where he'll get them all in an auditorium, and he'll ask them to turn to the person closest to them and begin sharing some of their deepest fears or their deepest disappointments, something very heavy. And the first thing he'll see is these students, you know, begin to shift in their seats. It's booth. So, you know, there's a lot of quants there who did not exactly go to booth in order to immediately divulge their darkest secrets to a stranger as if to a clinical psychologist. And initially, it is so awkward just to watch this entire student body begin to like writhe with discomfort. And he says, no, we're going to do this, do it. And he gives them, I don't know what it was,

10, 15 minutes. And by the time the clock strikes zero, he cannot get them to shut up. There are tears streaming down the faces of students. And I'm sure many people listen to this are absolutely cringing, like, Jesus Christ, I'm certainly not applying to booth. It sounds like psychological torture. But the outcome, the conclusion he's trying to ask us to reach here is that there's a kind of latent desire to share that is often not acted on.

because of a kind of, I want to be careful about how I describe this, it's almost like a kind of social anxiety about the degree to which sharing a vulnerable truth about ourselves will trigger judgment from another person that will make us feel bad about ourselves. When instead what tends to happen is this principle of reciprocity reveals itself

such that when we share something that is vulnerable, we get vulnerability in response. We get kindness and empathy in response. I just love, I remember him telling me that, and I don't think I found a way to put it into the final essay, but I love this idea that people being forced to share a little bit more than feels comfortable ends up being this incredibly emotionally powerful

and positive moment for them. And I wonder what you think this tells us about modern psychology is the conclusion that we should draw that we demand or ask for too much introversion that is good for us, that we fear social connection or social sharing more than we should? Like, what is the so what of this study and this line of research about human nature? Yeah, I mean, to me, it just shows something that I talk about on my podcast all the time, which is that our minds lie to us, right?

It's one thing to pursue happiness and to go after what will feel good, but it's another to do that incorrectly most of the time because you have absolutely bad theories about what will make you feel good. And I see Nick's work broadly as just showing this. We're just bad at understanding the consequences of social connection. We're bad at predicting how other people react. We're bad at predicting how much they like us. We're bad at thinking about what expressing something vulnerable will do to whether or not a person judges us. We just have like mistaken theories about this. And like each one that you hear is just so painful to find out about because you're like, oh my gosh, this bad theory is preventing these like deep happiness boosting connections that otherwise people would have, you know.

I often find with some of these biases it's helpful to know the specific name for the bias because then you can kind of name it when it comes up. And one of, but two of my favorite ones are one that's come from the psychologist Erica Boothby, which is called the liking gap, which is just this idea that when you ask like, you know, I'm going to have this conversation with Derek today. How much is you going to like me after this conversation? I'm thinking, well, he's probably not going to like me that much. I'll probably mess up. It'll be a little embarrassing. But like Derek ends up liking me a lot. And Erica finds that if you look at, say, college roommates, workplace, newbies who like, you know, people who join an office for the first time.

And you ask them, like, how much do the other people around you like you? They consistently say, well, I guess other people don't like me as much as those people actually like you. Right. So our mind is just systematically off in guessing how much other people are going to like us, which is so sad. Right. It's so sad that our mind is walking around with these biases. Just to pause you there, and I want to hear your next bit. I think that social media is really, really bad on this.

Oh, for sure. Folks like J. Van Bavel have shown social media is so good at making in-group versus out-group messaging go viral that we can easily mistake the virality of out-group criticisms on social media for the fact that people are excited to dislike us in the so-called real or physical world. But these are two completely different worlds. Like they might as well have different rules of gravity and electromagnetism. Like online, outgroup hatred is a key to virality. In person, the principle of reciprocity tends to dictate interpersonal relationships. Like if you are nice to someone on a bus, they tend to not say go F yourself in response.

Like you tend to get what the Beatles line is. You know, the love you make is equal to love you take or vice versa. Like, you tend to get what you give. And I think it's very hard for people who spend a lot of time alone on their couch, looking at TikTok and on Twitter and on Instagram and Reddit, seeing the popularity of in-group versus out-group messaging and then imagining what it must be like to meet these kind of strangers in the real world. In many cases, you don't even meet them in the real world.

You just say something nice in response to an online criticism, and they'll say, I didn't even know you were reading this. I love your work. Like, it's incredible how many times. someone will basically be like, Derek, you're a jackass, I hate you, you're so stupid, and I'll be like, I think you could have put that more nicely. And I'd be like, oh, my God, you listen to me. By the way, I loved your last podcast.

Yeah, yeah. It's just so funny how, like, the second people can actually see each other and know they are being seen. Their impressions of the dynamics of the calculus of interpersonal psychology completely changes. So, sorry, I told you was going to let you go with your second point. But, like, that was, I just had to interject that little rant. So please continue. I'll get back to the second point in a second, but I just want to follow up on this because I think you don't have to go to like the extreme levels of like social media, polarization or online hatred. One of my favorite chapters in Nick's new book.

He is this great new book called A Little More Social, which I'm sure your fans of your show know about, but like definitely a read for everyone. My favorite chapter in his new book talks about the fact that we now have forms of communication that we just never had before. Even something simple like writing. Like for most of human history, up until like 100,000-ish years. years ago, the only way we had to communicate was face-to-face in real time, like we couldn't write stuff down. Now we have text, you know, for clay tablets, you know, now we have like text, we write each other poetry and letters.

Now we have email. Now we have slack messages, right? We have moved from the in real life connection. And one of the things we know psychologically is that text dehumanizes us. It's really hard to see a mind there because you don't get the emotional expression that you get like when you're listening to this podcast right now or seeing someone in face-to-face where you can kind of connect the emotions. This is why when you get like a text message from somebody, you're like, are they joking? Is that sarcasm? Are they being mean? Like, it's just really

hard to detect what's going on. But what that does, Nick argues, is that it dehumanizes us. It's just much easier to just see mean intentions in text. And if you think about how much more the human species has been connecting in text, you know, now text online, text that stream, like, we just didn't have that for most of human history. So it kind of makes sense that we're like screwing up so badly because we're often interpreting whether somebody likes us based on the text they sent or their Slack message at work or something like that and you just like can't see it as easily. So totally agree with this. But to get back, second bias, first bias, liking gap, people like us more than we think.

Second bias that I just love is this thing called the beautiful mess effect, right? We think if we see messy, you know, if I tell my work colleague, oh my gosh, I have this disability or I'm having trouble with my kid these days or whatever, we think that they're going to think, oh my gosh, this person's messy, like too much. Save it for your therapist. But what do they think? People like it when we're messy. We seem human. We seem more relatable. We seem more like them. And when you share your mess, we are trusting, right? We're asking people for help. People love that. And so this is the idea of the beautiful mess effect. We think that when we express and we show our vulnerabilities and our mess ups that people will not like us, but in fact, people end up liking us more.

And again, the point behind expressing these biases is to help people listening right now have a name for them, but also to realize you're just walking around with incorrect theories about how people are going to react. And that has super helped me, right? If I'm at a moment of potentially revealing or sharing or striking up a conversation with a stranger or having like a hard conversation with a friend, like I watch my instincts and that cringe voice and my voice being like, don't do it. It's going to go badly. And I have to develop some like evidence-based courage to be like, like, okay, that's probably wrong. Like, I'm probably off by about, you know, 50% or, you know, whatever, however bad I think it is, it's not going to be as bad as I think based on the data. And that helps me sometimes connect more and connect more vulnerably than I would have otherwise, just knowing those data. I think you'd agree. I love that point. I think you'd agree there's probably a limiting principle on the beautiful mess effect that we all know someone who, you know, doesn't just go from zero to one in sharing a vulnerability about, you know, struggles with a two-year-old who can't sleep. They go from one to one million of like never ceasing to complain. about something in their personal life and we're like, oh my God, you know, there's Jenna, you know, doing it again, you know, interrupting our meeting by talking about something. And so, as with everything, the dosage counts. But I like... In the how counts, right?

And the what? I said in the howl counts, right? Like, Jenna taking over your work meeting to complain about her kid is different. Jenna putting it on blast on social media, you know, with pictures of it. Like, that is cringe. But Jenna, in a private one-on-one conversation, being like, you know, Derek, I need your help and I want you to help me think about this. Like, usually those aren't the people who are thinking about. And that's often, you know, if we like to think most of us are sane and not oversharing

in these bad ways, like for many of us, we are not worried about TMI. There are people who do TMI. Otherwise, we wouldn't have that word. And sometimes they do it in person and in real life. But most of us are erring on the side of TLI. And worrying too much about TMI prevents us from these opportunities to truly connect with good people who care about us in real life. In thinking about social connection for happiness, I want to broaden the scope and think about this general principle of happiness and the pursuit of happiness. I mean, as Americans, the pursuit of happiness is inscribed into our foundational document. But I wonder, a theme that's recurred through this episode is the idea that many of these

modern notions of male loneliness and male friendship are recent inventions. I'm curious in this being the 250th year of America how the concept of pursuit of happiness what that meant in 1776 versus what we think the pursuit of happiness means in 2026. Yeah, as you might guess, like, we're pretty off with how happiness works. And this was something I got to learn from the amazing Darren McMahon.

He's a historian at Dartmouth, who is this great book called Happiness of History, where he looks at happiness across history. And fascinatingly, for most of the history of happiness, like, you just didn't think there was a way to pursue happiness because it just came down to luck, right? Even the word happiness comes from hap, right? Like, happen stance or it happens, or I think Shakespeare said,

like, what hap may, right? Like, it's not, it's like just, it could happen, it could not, right? It was stupid to think about going after it and getting it for yourself because it just didn't work that way. Then you slowly, during classical times, like Aristotle, you know, all the smart Greek philosophers, started to think that the pursuit of happiness was possible. But the way you did it wasn't to go after happiness per se.

It was to go after virtue, right? It was to go after prudence or courage or kindness or all these virtues that allowed you to live a good life. So happiness was really about, you know, as Aristotle called it, eudaimania, right, living a life of flourishing. It wasn't about your own hedonic pleasure. It was about doing that. And because of that, Aristotle kind of had the idea of like,

Good to go after happiness, but like don't expect it. Like most of us are not going to be up for the job of like actually pursuing like true you die many on virtue. Like it's super hard, right? So it's like you could go after it, but probably not going to happen. A lot of this changes interestingly, and this is Darren's main point in the 18th century around the time of the founding of the United States for lots of different reasons. One is that hedonic pleasure was becoming more of a thing that we could achieve, right?

You know, pestilence, war, all these diseases was kind of going away in the 18th century. This was also around the time that people were just like changing little things about their lifestyle. Like there was like smoke control on chimneys and the bedding got more comfy. There was like better lighting. It was like little creature comforts were like more possible technologically around this time. Religious notions were changing. Right. Before you had these old like Calvinist notions of God was like, you know, like be miserable now.

But then in the next life you'll be happy. And then in part because of scientific notions of like, you know, we have these senses that can seek out good wine and pleasures. there was this idea of like, well, you could be happy in this life and the next life. Like hedonism is cool as long as you're doing the virtue thing, right? And so this is the domain in which our forefathers like plopped out. This is the first time that we thought that like pleasure was a good thing, wasn't so bad, you can go for it. You can get hedonic pleasures. But these are scholars who are seeped in all these classical notions that really what happiness is about is about virtue and so on.

And so Darren McBan's idea is that there's this dual notion of happiness that the forefathers meant. It is about pleasure. It is about seeking out hedonism. But the way you do that is to cultivate virtue. The way you do, the way you seek happiness for yourself is to seek out happiness for all, for the state, for your community, and so on. That was what they meant by happiness. But interestingly, they also had this notion in the 18th century that the pursuit of that was going to be tough. Literally the word pursuit, I didn't realize this until I did the episode, meant something different in the 18th century. It was kind of connected with like prosecution. It was kind of like you could go after happiness in the hunt, but in the act of doing so, you just might kill it. So there's sort of this

irony to the notion of pursuit, right? And I think that's powerful because if you look at the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, like when Jefferson and the other forefathers were writing this, we get these unalienable rights to life and liberty, right? If you don't get those, something bad happened, or at least if you don't get those and you're a landed, white, rich, like, guy, then something bad happened for the women and the poor and the slaves working on Jefferson's, you know, plantations. They didn't get those rights. But, you know, bracketed. But, you know, rich landed white guys, if you didn't get life and liberty, something went terribly wrong. But if you didn't get happiness, oh, well, you don't have an

unalienable right to happiness. You just have a right to pursue it, right? And so implicit in this was this idea that it wasn't given to us. It was something that we really had to work on. And that work was really the classical work of cultivating virtue, right? You know, that was what 1776. Fast forward now to 2026. And you look at, you know, looks max. X-Tick, TikTok influencers, and self-help podcasts, and you're like, oh, man, we got way off track, right? We got way off track because we forgot the virtue part, A, and B, we forgot the pursuit part that, like, it wasn't guaranteed to us. Like, you know, toxic positivity is all about something's wrong. If you don't have good vibes only, like something's gone terribly badly. And I think the forefathers

would be like, nah, you're probably not, it's a quest. You probably aren't going to get it. And the best way to get it is to really focus on the things that are worth being happy over, which is about virtue and doing nice stuff for others. One conclusion I take from that story is that the Aristotelian concept of happiness, which might have inspired Jefferson's writing of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, had this patina of virtue, which has social benefits, which in many ways extends. toward other people, right? You are courageous, not for yourself, but for others, right? And so all these Aristotelian principles are almost inherently social. In fact, I think he called humans the social animal. I think is that an Aristotle quote?

But when you think about looks maxing, and we think about this sort of constant monitoring of, am I happy now? Are these good vibes? Are these good vibes? Is this moment a good vibe? That is entirely an internal monitoring system rather than a pursuit of external virtues that help others. I wonder if that's one of the key dynamics that you're pulling on here

is this shift of happiness from something that exists for the purpose of extending ourselves toward our networks. But it's evolved towards something that like pulls us inside of ourselves such that we are in a state of constantly monitoring our own little interoception of like, like, is that happiness, is that sadness? Is that happiness? Is that anxiety? That's an interesting distinction

that I hadn't quite thought about. Yeah, and I think there are two things that go wrong when we do that, right? And this is worked by the psychologist Iris Mouse at UC Berkeley, who's studied what she calls the paradox of happiness, which is that the more we pursue happiness, the less happier we tend to be, right? And so the question is why.

One of the things we get wrong is this individual part. She finds that people who think about the pursuit of happiness as pursuing something social, as kind of cultivating everyone's happiness, they're not as subject to the normal things that go wrong when we pursue happiness, something like what's called hedonic adaptation. We get used to stuff, right? We go back to our baseline when it comes to happiness.

That only works if you're going after hedonic pleasures. If you're going after trying to do good for others, kind actions, and so on, we're just not as subject to hedonic adaptation for that stuff, right? And so the normal pitfalls that come when you're pursuing happiness, they don't come up as much if you develop this more virtuous, this more eudaimonic, this more social notion of happiness. But there's a different part.

You talked a lot about the Lix-Maxing culture being about, like, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? And another pitfall of pursuing happiness is that we tend to take ourselves out of the moment when we judge whether or not we're happy. We tend to be less present. But we also tend to do something else,

which is so we bring up what psychologists call lots of meta-emotions. What are meta-emotions? As you might guess, they're emotions that are about emotions. Even if you haven't heard that term, you probably know what they are. There are things like frustration,

judgment, shame, like guilt, like, you know, like wanting more, right? Often when we do that question, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? We feel like we come up short. And then we have all these nasty meta emotions that come with it. Like, oh, why am I not doing as well? I should be doing better. I should be doing something different, right? And what does that do? It makes us feel crappier. And so Iris Mous's point is that the pursuit of happiness is often a paradox. We often go, get further away from happiness the more we pursue it, in part because we do it wrong. We get judgy over it, we're constantly monitoring in ways that are bad and paradoxical for our happiness, but more we go after the wrong things when it comes to happiness. We've kind of strayed from the

forefather's notion that it is about other people, like it is about social connection and these social goods, and we think it's all about us. And it turns out that that's, it's a pity because ironically, when we think it's all about us, we make the us feeling worse. It also seems to me that when we help other people, we can know that we've helped other people in a way that we can't sometimes know that we've made ourselves happy, if that makes sense. Like, self-happiness is like a difficult endpoint to measure. Like, if I have, like, a great meal, I know for sure that I enjoyed the food, right? I know that I had a delicious glass of wine. I know I enjoyed the glass of wine. But if I look inward and ask, like, in a self-monitor kind of way, like, what is the Geiger

counter for happiness, say, unlike Derek's happiness, between like 7.9 and 9.4, it's actually very hard to know. What's easier to know is, was I with my wife? Did we share a great glass of wine? Did we speak lovingly about our children? If I'm helping someone else with a problem, did I offer advice to a friend, right? If I'm donating to a charity. Did I, in fact, donate to a charity? All these things have, like, clear yes, no answers in a way that creates a sense of falsification, finality. But when you're just doing something, to make yourself happy, the end point goal of your behavior is actually impossible to truly know. Yes.

Not only is it fleeting, and of course it's fleeting because no one's like the same level of happy for like five straight years, maybe unless they have like a deep clinical depression, but also it's actually really difficult to know exactly like what it is that you've done for yourself because happiness is is so spectral and so hard to get your hands around. This, I think, also goes to this reason of why, who was it, Ira Moss, who said, you know, this effort to chase happiness can sometimes be self-defeating. Because you are chasing a rabbit that by definition, not only can you not catch it for a long period of time, you'll never actually know whether it's in your hands. It'll be like a little bit of a Schrodinger's rabbit, even if you have your hands around it. And that, I think, also speaks to this, this, you know, lovely, somewhat old-fashioned, but I think fundamentally true, a recitalian concept of virtue being.

an interesting path toward happiness. Like, at least you know, at least you have a clearer feeling that you've acted in a way that is in keeping with your values, right? That is something maybe you can know in a way that, like, exactly how happy am I right now is an unansweral question. Yes, I think that's right. I think the knowing is a problem. And I think we just tend to have less of these nasty meta-emotions

when it's about other people, right? You know, if it's like you're eating a, you know, having a delicious glass of wine to make yourself happy, is like, was this wine really good? Should I got another one? I don't know. But like, if you gift a friend a bottle of wine, we're really like, was that really the right one? Are they really good?

It's like you just don't have those judgy kind of emotions come up as much when you do nice stuff for other people. Perhaps in part because we have so many of these mechanisms to, you know, have this warm glow when we just do nice stuff for others in a way that's just less judgy. So I think this all fits, right? We're built to be these connected individuals. And the more we get away from connection, we really do that at apparel, both for our own sense of connection and the happiness we get from that. but just for our overall pursuit of happiness generally. And then to that, Laura Santos, thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

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