The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Social Overshoot? Dunbar's Number, Real Relationships, and Musical Chairs | Frankly 94

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

With more people on the planet than ever before – with most having constant digital access to one another – there is an abundance of potential relationships available to us. Despite this, there is also an increasing loneliness crisis across global society. What can evolutionary psychology teach us about this lack of meaningful relationships at a time of hyper-connectivity? In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on the effects of technology on modern relationships, and how Dunbar's number infers a ceiling on the number of people we can meaningfully interact with. He emphasizes the rare value of full attention in close relationships, and the implications of our current social dynamics as we face more turbulent times and a smaller world ahead. What are the negative effects of overextending our social networks and how does that shape the way we build community? How can we foster and strengthen connections with the people who are most important to us? Finally, what will our networks look like when the economic music speeds up or stops, and those who are closest to us become our most important support systems? (Recorded May 6, 2025)   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

When I started this work or this inquiry 25 years ago, I was really focused on the supply side, like how much energy is available. What are the impacts of that energy? What are energy alternatives? And more and more, I'm turning to the demand side. What does it mean to be happy and healthy and connected to the web of life? How much energy do we need? how is our relationships with others? And I think there is a unsustainability of our energy and

material throughput, but there's also an unsustainability of our social relationships, both the number of them, which are fully supported by the energy dynamics of the carbon pulse and social media and flights to different cities and countries and conferences and the quality of the relationships. We can't have hundreds and hundreds of real relationships that are healthy because that requires time and effort and full attention and awareness of being in real relationship and conversation with the other human. That can't happen with terse status seeking transactional interactions.

So today I would like to talk about our ancestral social brains and the very real musical chairs dynamic that we're in with respect to the number and the quality of our social interactions. So of all the topics I cover on this platform, some I am kind of slightly kind of slightly I'm confident in, some I have medium confidence, some I have a lot of confidence in. In that category is the fact that we are evolved social primates and our minds in addition to our bodies are a product of what worked in our evolutionary past. For instance, the sclera, the whites in our eyes, we're the only ape that has such a proportion

of sclera. And this is because of theory of mind and evolved intent of what are that other? person doing. We have a small mouth, which suggest cooperative hunting and eating in the past. We have very little hair. We are bipedal. There are many epigamic traits like earlobes or blue eyes or limbar ridges in the eyes. All these things led to evolutionary or sexual selection in the past. However, our brains, just as much as our bodies, are a product of what worked in the past. If you say roughly it takes that women reproduce at the age of 20 historically just to make the math easy, that's 15,000 generations of modern Homo sapiens.

The vast majority of that, all but 500 of those 15,000, were pre-agricultural revolution. We've only had 12 generations since the founding of the United States and one or two generations since the founding of the Internet and social media. So there's a prominent theme in evolutionary psychology called Dunbar's number, which is the social brain hypothesis, which is that certain primates because of the social arrangements had to develop an advanced neocortex. and Robin Dunbar extrapolated that because of the complexity of the social arrangements of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, that roughly 150 individuals was about the capacity that we could have stable, meaningful relationships with.

And that was kind of the midpoint. I think it was between 50 and 300 was the sweet spot. And there are some critiques of that analysis. But I think what can't be critiqued is the fact that for most of our past, we grew up in communities of relationship, people that we had relationships with that we saw every day. And we paid deep attention to those relationships. And being ostracized from those groups was a death sentence back then. but if we bring this to today, we can't have full, stable relationships with everyone we know. One of the hallmarks of the social brain hypotheses is we have different hierarchies of

relationships and there's like an inner core, your family and your really, really close friends, and then there's an outer circle, and then some kind of okay friends, and then there's a friend. and then there's a fringe people that you've met and know, but they're outside of your network. I have 1,800 people's phone numbers on my phone. I don't know that I'm the average person because I have a podcast and a lot of social connections. But I looked this morning and I added up how many messages, either video or text I sent last week on WhatsApp and Signal and the SMS. and it was over 200 on Signal and about 150 on WhatsApp and about 120 on the SMS. And this got me to thinking.

It got me to thinking about Ian McGilchrist, believe it or not, who told me, and I believe he said that in the podcast, that the greatest gift that humans can give to another human isn't money. It's related to time, but not time exactly. It's attention. It's full attention to the moment, to people, to nature, to art, and that what has happened, one of the things that's happened in the supernormal stimulus smorgasbord of modern culture is that the left brain reductionist transactional aspect of our hominid brains has been hijacked and has become the master and not the emissary. And that full attention, like full concentration focus listening to the other person or the bird or the painting, is really becoming a rarity. And yet that that's,

is the ultimate of human expression is to have full attention. But how can you have full attention to hundreds or many, many hundreds of people? I don't think you can. And so a story from a friend of mine who is kind of a psychonaut and he lives in Europe and he does mushrooms and Iiawas and has different experiences. And he and his partner periodically do MDMA or ecstasy as kind of a marital counseling tool because it improves their relationship because it's love and bliss and connection and all that. And I was talking to him last week and he said, my girlfriend told me something really profound. She's like, I don't really like doing MDMA.

doesn't make me feel great, but the reason I like doing it, it's the only time that you pay full attention to me. It's the only time that I feel seen by you. And I was like, whoa, because that kind of hit me. Because in my own life, I'm so busy. And again, this isn't about me, but I'm using myself as an example of a human in the belly of the superorganism in the modern world trying to, you know, do the right thing and manage my relationships and my work and my personal life and everything. And I don't think I'm that dissimilar than the average person. There are a few people in my current life that I focus on every single word they say. I look them in the eye when we're together and I am riveted with attention. I can do this when I meditate

I can do this with my ducks. I try to do this when I'm interviewing podcast guests and those of you that have followed me from the start, I've gotten a lot better. I used to either get distracted or I would interrupt the guest and I'm doing that much less because I'm learning. I've been doing some meditation. I went to this Mahamudra retreat

where awareness and attention is the ultimate. Not meditating and forgetting and trying to clear your mind of anything, of everything, but actually to have full awareness of everything in your sphere, which is sounds and sights and smells and thoughts. And even the self, the self is not real. It's just one of the things that we come across in our awareness. So in my life, there are people that I, because I'm so busy,

I don't have time to listen and be fully present for that person, even though that's what they need and that's what they deserve. And I find myself interrupting or being impatient. And where I've gotten is I just don't respond. About 40 of my WhatsApp and signal messages from last week are recordings from people that I haven't even listened to. And that makes me feel shameful. and that I'm not being a good friend.

But big picture, flying up high for the aerial view, how does Dunbar's number, which is our ancestral heritage of being able to manage around 100, 150 real relationships, coupled with the carbon pulse and the social media who's grabbing our attention, reducing our attention spans, and the fact that we are on the precipice of the Great Simplification, how does this all fit together? I don't know the answer because I think we can't have meaningful relationships with that many people. So that means you either have partial relationships with a lot of people or you consciously focus on these are the meaningful relationships I'm going to have.

or you just delay two, three, four weeks before getting back to people, but then it's not even a real relationship because you can't have intermittence of two, three, four weeks. The real upshot of this is at some point, the carbon and available credit smorgasbord that we've become accustomed to is going to slow or stop. and kind of like the Crosby Stills and Nash song, Love the one you're with. We're not going to have the mulligans of being able to find a new boyfriend or girlfriend or move to a different city because you've burned your relationships.

Or I'm sorry I didn't pay attention to you all those years ago. Or you've lived next to me for eight years and I've never met you. And yeah, we should plan about the future. I don't know the answer here, but I suspect the default is we're all going to have to become more friendly in a real relationship sort of way with the people that are close to us in proximity. And at some point, the music is going to speed up and then stop. It's really interesting because I go still, not as much as I used to, but I go to conferences and convenings on various topics. And every time you go, you connect with two or three or five humans and you get their business cards. And you establish a friendship and you share social media, I mean, messages and phone calls and Zoom calls.

And we cycle through all these new people. And at some point, it's going to be the people who are in our inner circles right now who are there with us for the duration. So this is a long-winded way of saying that the carbon pulse and the modern technology have extended our social networks far beyond what our ancestors had, far beyond what is sustainable, but also far beyond what gives us meaningful interactions with other humans. would you rather have 300 or 200 or 100 kind of marginal connections or 10 intense really good ones? It's a question I ask myself. Of course, I am unique because I host a podcast and I have so many people that are interacting with us. But I think the loneliness epidemic that is just a lot. under the surface of our culture, I think focusing on awareness and attention in the moment

with the other human you're with is ground zero for a better social milieu going forward. And I'm going to have more to say about this. I'm really interested in awareness, attention, and how we might better integrate that into a new cultural model. I'm going to be searching for experts to have on the podcast. I'll talk to you next week. The next two Franklies are going to be graphically intensive and very interesting. So stay tuned for those.

And go and hug your loved one and go meet a neighbor today. I'll talk to you soon.