Remote Life, the Middle Ring, and New Norms

“All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional.”

Hello and (Happy) New Year Human

How’s that quote above as a kick-starter to what will be another year filled with challenges, changes and opportunities?

Derek Thompson published an article in this month’s edition of The Atlantic titled ‘The Anti-Social Century’. It was an epic 40 minute read but it served to set my mind wandering about us as human beings, and being lonely, being alone, being in solitude, and belonging.

The article has a distinctly American context to it, and while we are a long way away from the grand old US of A in many ways, not just geographically, I think there’s parallels to the current state of life here in our great land down-under.

Let me drop a couple more attention-grabbers from the Thompson article and then riff on them a little as we kick into 2025 in earnest.

“If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware (the mobile phone) has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak.”

“Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.”

And this gem:

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century.”

So, humans, here we are in 2025 living ‘remote lives of self-imposed solitude’. How’s that going for you?

You may well be in solitude and alone, but are you lonely?

You may well be in solitude and alone, but do you belong, somewhere?

My riff on this phenomena is that alone and lonely are different, and there’s plenty of brain science around to support that.

Similarly I think that alone and belonging are not polar opposites either. With those things said though, in a world that is being designed, at every step, to keep us humans at home, from my perspective preventing loneliness and maintaining a sense of belonging will require greater levels of vigilance and proactive intervention than has been required in decades past. ‘It’s the dosages that matter’.

Belonging and the bottom line

Before I move to ‘the middle ring’, here’s some data from a December 2019 HBR piece (The Value of Belonging at Work) about belonging. In short - belonging is good for business. I should note too that ‘social belonging is a fundamental human need’ - we are hardwired to belong.

“If workers feel like they belong, companies reap substantial bottom-line benefits. Highbelonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days.” “Employees with higher workplace belonging also showed a 167% increase in their employer promoter score (their willingness to recommend their company to others).”

The middle ring - it’s not all bad news

More from the Thompson article.

On the familiar but not intimate theme the article talks about the middle ring as being the ‘village’ ‘the community’ where we live - your neighbours etc, and says we used to know them, but now we don’t. I’m inclined to agree. My riff on the middle ring has ‘work colleagues’ in it as well - familiar but not intimate right? With the remote work movement well and truly in place are we as connected at work as we might have once been?

The middle ring is key to social cohesion. ‘Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village - the middle ring - teaches us tolerance’. The village - the middle ring - is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise - in other words, democracy.

I reckon a neat place to close this month’s Muse is here:

‘Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade. The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century’.

New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. It doesn’t have to change the world, just your part of it. There's an opportunity for all of us to take part in reversing today’s ‘anti-social’ state and to nurture belonging.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.

Here’s to a stellar 2025.

Go well, human.

Mark