Our Anonymous Age is Making us Mad: Finding Clarity in a Lost World
We've been thrown into a global world when we evolved to live locally. And our brains haven't caught up.
The community faced a major problem. It was thriving, growing rapidly as more and more were flocking to it. But, then as soon as the group reached 150 people, chaos took over. Insubordination, discontent, and even violence grew. Factions developed, the once tight-knit community fractured, and people left. A few years later, after picking up the pieces, they’d try to grow again only to find themselves stuck in the same cycle—growth, division, separation.
Welcome to the world of our ancient ancestors. For a long period of time, hunter-gatherer tribes were stuck. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that tribes had a kind of inbuilt cap. Once they hit 150 people, discontent took over and the once civil society split apart. In a small local community, it’s easy to understand who you are, what your roles are, and where you belong. As a tribe grows, we lose the cohesion that held society together. We don’t quite know where we stand or whose in our in-group. We transition towards an anonymous society, where we don’t quite know where anyone fits in, including ourselves. We’re facing the same problem today. You can see it in our polarization, division, penchant for conspiracies, and latching ourselves to any group or ideologies that may provide temporary relief. The internet has created an anonymous society on steroids. And as I argue in my new book Win the Inside Game, it’s driving us towards living in a heightened threat state I call survival mode.
In 1959, humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers wrote that in order to grow, we need an environment that provides genuineness, acceptance, and empathy. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr relayed a similar message: “I want to make sure that my guys feel valued, respected, important, and relevant.” In studying meaning in life, existential psychologist Tatjana Schnell simplified to focus on four key components. To have a meaningful life, we need to feel coherent, significant, directed, and belonging.
Whether we like Schnell’s, Rogers’, or Kerr’s paradigm, all converge on a similar theme: They clarify who we are, what matters, where we’re going, and where we belong. In short, when our world and our place in it add up, we have hope. We orient ourselves toward growth. We are more likely to feel energized, motivated, and happy. And almost as a by-product, be successful and fulfilled.
Unfortunately, the modern world has mastered making it damn near impossible to fulfill these needs and experience clarity. Take the aforementioned list. Coherence? We occupy a place where our Instagram self is a carefully crafted beauty, our Twitter self is the right combination of wit and snark, and our TikTok self is outgoing, jubilant, and exquisitely coordinated. Not to mention our real-life self. Significance and direction? A few decades ago, it was easy to find a role and contribute. We could obtain status somewhere. Being the fastest on the block or the best cook in the family was not difficult to achieve. Now, the comparison point has shifted from local to global. Thirteen year old’s know where they stack up against their peers in the college basketball recruitment game. Comparison helps provide clarity and motivation when the world is small, however. It’s much harder when our comparison feels like the entire world.
But what about belonging? We live in a world that is hyper-connected. You can stay in touch with just about anyone you have ever interacted with. How can we not feel like we belong? The truth is that the modern world has replaced a handful of deep, meaningful connections with the allure of many shallow ones. We forgo the weekend softball team, the in-person book club for a meta world. We’ve replaced genuine connection with it’s cheaper superficial version: fitting-in.
We’re facing a new kind of anonymous society. And the end result is the same that our ancestors faced. We now occupy a world that is too big for our minds to handle. We live in a time where every single day we have reminders that we aren’t good enough. When we feel uncertain, insecure, or under threat, we respond by desperately trying to make ourselves and the world add up. In the meaning-maintenance model, researchers Steven Heine, Travis Proulx and Kathleen Vohs outlined a simple psychological truth: When our sense of meaning is disrupted, we experience a state researchers’ term disanxiousuncertilibrium, which then pushes us to restore order and security somehow.
Put another way, when our world, self, or pursuits don’t add up, we experience a cacophony of negative sensations, and we do whatever we can to eliminate those feelings and give us some sense of order. We get desperate to make the world, and ourselves, add up to align our expectations and experience—even if it means deluding ourselves. We have a self-preservation system that defaults to the quick fix.
In my new book Win the Inside Game, I call this living in survival mode. It’s a state where we start to see threats everywhere and prioritize immediate safety and self-protection over long-term growth and well-being. It’s at the heart of choking in sport, self-sabotaging in our daily lives, and feeling stuck with a sense of apathy and hopelessness in our work. What’s the solution? We need to learn a bit from our ancestors.
They finally cracked the 150 person threshold by reworking society to allow for significance, connection, and coordination among larger groups. In research analyzing how societies transitioned from hundreds of inhabitants to thousands, social institutions grew alongside the population. For example, religions became increasingly important, helping maintain social cohesion, compared to secular societies. Similarly, activities that facilitated group connection, like feasts and dancing rituals, played a prominent role. Monogamy and marital arrangements helped bring structure to an area that often led to competition and violence. And outlets for societies more volatile individuals (i.e., males), such as a rise in clubs or activities for men, were crucial. Even the proliferation of writing helped communities break through the approximately 150-person ceiling. According to biologist Mark Moffett, writing allowed for the proliferation of a common understanding or mental model. We could label ourselves and our tribes to help us make sense of ourselves and our groups. As Moffett concluded in studying human and ape communities, “anonymous societies of all kinds can expand only so far as their labels can remain sufficiently stable.”
When the world seems too large, when we don’t know where we fit-in, or have a path forward, we cope by going in one of too directions. We narrow and constrict, simplifying the world into us versus them, becoming increasingly defined by our job or group, or latching onto a group to provide a temporary form of security. We create rigidity to deal with the complexity. Or we expand. We deal with the messy details, integrate our work and home self, and stop seeing the world through a zero-sum lens. According to one psychological theory, when we choose the latter, we expand our self. People who score higher on self-expansion tend to be less egocentric, more empathetic, more inclusive, and less likely to play the social status and power games that occur in groups, while relationships high in self-expansion report increased levels of satisfaction and commitment. How do we do this? We orient ourselves and the world around us towards growth. We do real things in the real world, with other people, that are sometimes challenging or novel, which broadens our horizon and teaches us about ourselves and those around us.
The antidote to our modern iteration of the anonymous society rhymes with that of our ancestors. It starts with paths for those foundational needs outlined above. As Robert Putnam outlined decades ago, too many people are bowling alone. We’ve moved from doing to observing. From local to global. We need to bring back groups, activities, and other outlets for proximate social connection. In studying tightly bonded groups like the military, psychologists have found that a large driver of these connections are the in-between times, the shared boredom. It’s the same in the workplace, where water cooler talk about the latest episode of Squid Games helps to transform Jane the accountant into Jane, a complex multifaceted human being who I can shoot the shit with. We’ve largely engineered these out of our workplace and lives thanks to a push towards workplace optimization or that rectangular device in your pocket.
We need more and better paths for significance. Research clearly shows as your status goes up, so does your health. But we’ve been sold one path to obtaining status: dominance. A feeling that we are winning the game of life. Yet, research shows there are other paths for status: competence and prestige. Our world pushes the accumulation of achievements, when psychologically doing something meaningful, impactful, or with a touch of mastery can fill that basic need. It’s the craftsman of old. A path towards striving for excellence. But it takes doing, not just observing. Whether that’s lifting weights, running, making music, or welding. Part of the problem, though, is that society has defined excellence or greatness too narrowly. We’ve taken helping professions like teaching which used to have an air of prestige and we’ve made them low status. Is it any wonder why caring professions have such a high rate of burnout? And we’ve limited the paths for young adults, focusing on a college for all conveyor belt that has diminished the status of electricians and similar trades.
As I argue in Win the Inside Game, we need to redefine striving for a global world, so that doesn’t just equate to shallow paths of achievement and fitting-in, but to the depths of pursuing something meaningful in the real world with real people. As philosopher Joseph Campbell pointed out decades ago in an interview with Bill Moyers: “People say that what we’re all seeking is meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” When Moyers asked Campbell about such experiences in his own life, he didn’t describe his genre-defining work in mythology or his influence on the biggest movie of his lifetime, Star Wars. He replied by describing a relay race he ran in college at the Penn Relays. We need to connect the inner and outer worlds to make us feel alive. Our anonymous society keeps tricking us into thinking achievements, likes, follows, and fitting-in will fill the void and get us out of survival mode. It won’t. We need to feel alive again. That we have a path towards significance, direction, coherence, and connection.
To put it simply, we haven’t adjusted. We’ve been thrown into a global world when we evolved to live locally. And our brains haven’t caught up. They are doing what they are supposed to do: sounding the alarm, making us feel lonely and disconnected, hoping that the feeling will nudge us towards interacting with loved ones. Yet, for many, the avenues just aren’t there. From our relationship with phones to the pathways for young adults to what we prioritize and reward, it’s time for us to deal with our anonymous society. To develop and bring our social institutions in line with the world we occupy.
This was excerpted from my new book WIN THE INSIDE GAME. It’s about how our achievement culture is driving us mad, and what we can do about to still be excellent in our pursuits, but in a sustainable way. Grab your copy today.
-Steve