The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  Children living in such environments did fare better. But even after orphanages and hospitals took these drastic measures, many infants were still inexplicably getting sick and dying. They had good food, good shelter, and as much protection from communicable diseases as possible, but they were continuing to develop infections and fevers that would not go away. What was going on?

  That’s when René Spitz entered the picture. In 1945, Spitz published the results of a seminal study on the critical role that love plays in the healthy development of a child. Spitz, who had come to the United States after fleeing from Europe to escape the Nazis, was not just a pioneer in this area of research; he was a renegade. In the study that he conducted, he compared two groups of disadvantaged children—infants who lived in an unnamed orphanage, and infants who attended a nursery at a prison in upstate New York, where their mothers were incarcerated.

  The children in the orphanage, all younger than three years old, were kept in a state of what Spitz called “solitary confinement.” Every measure was taken to prevent the spread of germs. Hanging sheets separated the cribs from one another. The attendants wore gloves and masks. They rarely handled the infants.

  The prison nursery was a very different environment. Children were free to play with each other and to climb into each other’s cribs. Toys were everywhere. And, most important, mothers were permitted to spend time in the nursery with their children, and would often play with and comfort them.

  Unlike the foundling home, the nursery was a chaotic place, the perfect breeding ground for disease. But when Spitz looked at the mortality rates of the children in each group, he was stunned. Of the 88 children in the orphanage, where human contact was avoided, 23 had died by the end of his study. None of the children in the nursery had died.

  The finding exploded the idea that the children in the orphanages were dying simply because of exposure to germs. Rather, Spitz argued, they were dying from a lack of love, which compromised their health. There were probably other factors at work, too, like the lack of a stimulating environment, but it was undeniable that the children Spitz studied did not have a core person in their lives with whom they could forge a lasting, intimate bond—in whose company they felt comfortable, safe, accepted, welcomed, and wholly cared for. They were prevented from feeling any sort of belonging. As a result, they languished and suffered.

  In 1947, during a meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine, Spitz showed his colleagues video footage of the psychologically impoverished children at the unnamed orphanage he studied. The black-and-white film, crude and grainy, was called Grief: A Peril in Infancy. In one of the first title cards, the audience read, “During early infancy the sum total of the baby’s human relations is represented by its mother or her substitutes.” Then Spitz’s colleagues saw a little girl named Jane, who had just been dropped off at the foundling home by her mother. At first, Jane was happy and full of life. When Spitz leaned over her in the crib smiling and playing, she smiled back and laughed joyously.

  Then the film cut to footage of her taken a week later. She had become an altogether different child, with a depressed and searching look on her face. When a female attendant came over to her crib to play, as Spitz had done the week before, Jane looked at her and then started to cry. When Spitz came over and tried to comfort her, she was inconsolable. During the three-month period she was observed, Jane appeared to be in a state of grief, moaning with tears in her eyes.

  The other children also suffered. Upon entering the orphanage, they smiled, played, and explored the world around them—they were normal infants. But after having spent time in the orphanage, their personalities transformed. Their eyes went blank. They looked scared and worried. One baby trembled in her crib as if she were having a psychotic episode. Another avoided making eye contact with an attendant trying to play with her, burying her head into her crib. Instead of crying, the infants let out “a thin wailing” sound.

  These babies were, Spitz said, in despair. It was like they were giving up on life. Those whose lives prematurely ended died from what almost seemed to be a broken heart. Modern research helps explain why: chronic loneliness, scientists have found, compromises the immune system and leads to early death. Those infants who lived suffered physically and psychologically. They were smaller, less confident, and more socially maladapted than the prison nursery children.

  As the film went on, a title card appeared that read: “The cure—give mother back to baby.” Jane was on the screen again, this time after being reunited with her mother. The infant was her old happy self. Rather than rejecting a researcher’s affection by crying, she welcomed it, bouncing and smiling in an attendant’s arms. But the psychologists and doctors watching the video knew that Jane was the exception, not the rule. Most of the children in an orphanage would never receive anything approximating parental care.

  The video was heartbreaking and shocking. It drove at least one of Spitz’s hard-nosed colleagues to tears. It also helped spark a shift in how psychologists understood human nature. In time, as a result of studies like Spitz’s, psychologists began examining and affirming the vital importance of attachment early in life. They discovered that people, young and old alike, need more than food and shelter to live full and healthy lives. They need love and care. They need to belong to someone.

  —

  The way we satisfy our need to belong transforms over the course of our lives. In our early years, the love of a caregiver is essential; as we grow older, we find belonging in our relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners. What remains the same, though, is the vital importance of these bonds.

  But sadly, many of us lack close ties. At a time when we are more connected digitally than ever before, rates of social isolation are rising. About 20 percent of people consider loneliness a “major source of unhappiness in their lives” and one third of Americans 45 and older say they are lonely. In 1985, when the General Social Survey asked Americans how many people they’d discussed important matters with over the last six months, the most common response was three. When the survey was given again in 2004, the most common response was zero.

  These figures reveal more than a rise in loneliness—they reveal a lack of meaning in people’s lives. In surveys, we list our close relationships as our most important sources of meaning. And research shows that people who are lonely and isolated feel like their lives are less meaningful.

  Émile Durkheim, the father of sociology, died a hundred years ago, but his insights about social isolation and meaning are more relevant now than ever. In his groundbreaking empirical study Suicide (1897), Durkheim explored the question of why people killed themselves. Why do some European societies, he wondered, have higher suicide rates than others? To answer that question, Durkheim investigated the relationship between suicide and variables like marriage, education levels, and religious orientation. What he found is that suicide is not just an individual phenomenon arising from people’s personal troubles. It is also a social problem.

  Here in the West, we take individualism and freedom to be foundational to the good life. But Durkheim’s empirical research revealed a more complicated picture. He found that people are more likely to kill themselves when they are alienated from their communities and free from the social constraints those communities impose on them. Places where individualism is highly valued; places where people are excessively self-sufficient; places that look a lot like twenty-first-century America, Canada, and Europe—people don’t flourish in these environments, but suicide does.

  Durkheim combed through statistics from a number of European nations—including France, Sweden, Austria, and Italy—to examine how “integrated” people were into their various social networks. When he looked at the family, he saw suicide rates were generally higher among unmarried people than married people, and among people who didn’t have children versus those who did. Turning to religion, he found that more Protestants killed themselves than Catholics and Jews, who lived in more t
ightly knit communities and had more religious obligations. Education, too, was associated with suicide. Educated people, like the Protestants he examined, tended to leave home for school and work—and, thanks to their education, they were also more likely to challenge traditional values. Going against the grain can be lonely. But being integrated into a community offset these effects. The Jewish people Durkheim studied, for example, were highly educated, but their strong bonds and traditional beliefs buffered them against suicide.

  Meanwhile, factors that united people and imposed more duties on them, like living in a nation at war or having a large family, were associated with lower suicide rates. Without the constraints and traditions of the community, Durkheim argued, society devolves into a purposeless and normless state that he called anomie, where people feel directionless and despairing.

  Recent empirical research confirms Durkheim’s points. In the first chapter, I described a study by Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, which showed that wealthy countries have higher suicide rates than poor ones, and that their inhabitants are less likely to consider their lives meaningful—but I didn’t explain why. Beyond asking respondents about meaning, the researchers also gathered demographic and social information from each country on religiosity, education, fertility, and individualism. When they looked at the data, they saw that Durkheim was right. In wealthier countries, people are more educated and individualistic, have fewer children, and are less religious. Poorer countries showed the opposite pattern: people overall were less educated and individualistic, more religious, and had more children. Oishi and Diener found that these factors, with religiosity leading the pack, made individual residents rate their lives as more meaningful.

  In a similar vein, a study from 2010 probed into what was driving the increase in mental illness among high school and college students. The researchers discovered that the young people they studied were significantly more likely to suffer from poor mental health than older generations did as students—and that this was associated with a decreased concern for meaning among the students and an increase in social detachment across society. And when Australian researchers Richard Eckersley and Keith Dear looked at societal factors predicting the incidence of youth suicide, they found that it was associated with several measures of individualism, like personal freedom and control, just as Durkheim had suggested.

  In our age of isolation, it’s more critical than ever to actively seek out social groups and work hard to build close relationships, especially because many traditional forms of community are dissolving. People like Edward are leaving their small towns—and sometimes their countries—to go to school or find work, or because they want to see and experience the bigger world. Across society, people are spending less time with friends and neighbors and more time in front of television, phone, and computer screens—we are “privatizing our leisure time,” as the sociologist Robert Putnam puts it. Meanwhile our busy, increasingly mobile lives make it hard to integrate into local groups. The average American moves eleven times in his life; many will change jobs at least that many times, if not more. We are growing apart from one another in many important ways. The challenge we face, then, is figuring out how to build relationships in spite of these trends. Fortunately, there are still ways to cultivate meaning-building friendships.

  —

  In the fall of 2015, I traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to see how people come together to deliberately create community. As I approached the grand Gothic church of St. Stanislaus, located on the south side of the city, I saw several hundred people of all ages gathered in small groups laughing, talking, and joyously greeting one another.

  “It’s been—what—twenty-five years?” one man called out, pulling his old friend in for a hug. “It’s marvelous to see you.”

  It could have been a college reunion—except that people were dressed in brocade and breeches, and some of the men were carrying shields. They were members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an international organization of medieval enthusiasts and re-creationists. During the week, SCA members lead ordinary lives as accountants, students, construction workers, parents, and scientists. But on many weekends, they get dressed up in elaborate costumes, adopt medieval personae, and step into a make-believe world of armored combat, crown tournaments, and royal court. That day in Cleveland, some three hundred of them had traveled from all over the Midwest to attend the coronation of Nikolai and his wife Serena as Czar and Czarina of the Middle Kingdom.

  Inside the church, women in billowing dresses fanned themselves in the pews as they waited for the coronation to begin. Knights with swords hanging from their leather belts took their seats next to ladies wearing white veils and dainty crowns. A count in breeches spoke to a duke in a wide-brimmed feathered hat about the celebratory feast that would take place that night. And a small troupe of musicians in matching linen garb played fourteenth-century court music on their recorders. Nearby stood the two wooden thrones of the soon-to-be king and queen. Later that morning, Nikolai would kneel at a sword there and solemnly take his oath of kingship.

  The SCA was founded in May of 1966 when Diana Paxson, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, threw a medieval-themed party, complete with a tournament and feast, in her backyard. About fifty people came, all dressed in period attire or something close to it. After a tournament victor emerged and crowned his lady the fairest of them all, the group thought it would be appropriate to hold a demonstration—this was, after all, the Berkeley of the 1960s. So they marched down Telegraph Avenue “to protest the twentieth century.”

  That original group of fifty has, six decades later, blossomed into an organization with sixty thousand members worldwide. As the society grew, the members divided themselves into geographical regions or “kingdoms,” like the Middle Kingdom, which includes Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and parts of Iowa, Kentucky, and Ontario. Twenty kingdoms make up the “Known World,” each of them ruled over by a king and queen who host events like the one I attended in Cleveland. Every summer, members from all of the kingdoms in the Known World gather at a lakeside retreat in Pennsylvania for two weeks to camp, duel, teach and take classes, shoot archery, dance, display their artistry, and reunite with old friends. Over ten thousand society members come to the “Pennsic War” each year. When they arrive, they are met at the gate by a greeter who tells them, “Welcome home.”

  The SCA is an unusual organization with an unusually strong pull over its members. There are a few reasons why the community is so vibrant—and knowing what they are sheds light on how we all can build new relationships and strengthen old ones.

  First, the SCA’s structure encourages people to invest time and effort into the community. Many SCA members have been involved with the organization for decades; many raise their children in the organization; and many attend twenty to fifty events each year. The frequency of SCA events is particularly important, because research has found that people naturally grow to like others whom they see regularly. SCA members are together a great deal, which contributes to their feelings of closeness. Our culture makes it easy to dismiss potential friends or partners based on a single interaction: if two people on a first date don’t click immediately, they usually won’t invest the time in getting to know each other better afterward. SCA members don’t have that supposed luxury, which gives them a leg up in forming close relationships.

  Second, people are more likely to befriend those with whom they share common experiences and values. Beyond a fascination with medieval history, the members of the SCA also share a set of principles centered around the chivalric virtues of courtesy, service, loyalty, and honor. Those who are models of these knightly virtues receive awards, or “peerages.” The Order of Chivalry is awarded to those who are outstanding in armored combat. The Order of the Laurel recognizes those who have mastered an area of medieval arts and sciences, like thirteenth-century stained glass. And the Order of the Pelican is for those who exemplify the virtue of service. These virtues inspire SCA members to t
reat others, both inside and outside the group, with dignity and respect, even when their worst instincts impel them to do otherwise. This is a major reason why SCA members have such a strong sense of belonging in their community: they know that their peers will aim to treat them with dignity and respect no matter what. “I have to remember,” one baroness told me, “that my job is to love others even when they are bringing me down or being annoying.”

  Howard—who goes by Sir Laurelen—is an optical physicist living in Cleveland. He’s been an active member of the SCA for more than forty years. “I was an outcast, a nerd, a geek all through elementary school and high school. When I got to college,” he told me over the clanking of heavy-armored combat happening nearby, “I had the chance to ask myself, ‘Who am I going to be?’ I had a choice.” Howard chose to be himself—a geek long before it was cool. One day during his sophomore year of college, Howard was on his way home from practice for the varsity fencing team when a man on the bus noticed the two swords sticking out of his backpack and struck up a conversation. The man was in the SCA, and after the two talked about fencing and medieval fighting, he immediately recruited Howard to join the society.

  “When I was a kid,” Howard said, “I told people I wanted to be a scientist and a knight when I grow up. Today, I’m both.”