There is as yet no measuring unit for unconditional positive regard, so let me invent one: the kilocuddle (kCu). A kilocuddle is the amount of vitality required to get out of bed on a damp January morning, at 6:45 am, under low barometric pressure. It is equal to a thousand gram cuddles. At rest in an emotionally neutral environment, the average adult will exhibit a basal cuddle metabolic rate (BCMR) of around 60 kCu per hour (kCu/hr), with children under 5 going as high as 110. At present, most people get by on a daily intake of roughly 1750 kCu (just over 72 kCu/hr). In what follows, I will try to argue that this is in fact woefully inadequate and that the vast majority of people are severely and routinely malcuddled.
I found myself strolling down that thought path a number of times over the past few months. Here is why.
The first thing you will discover, if you happen to become unemployed, is that it becomes extremely difficult to introduce yourself. Unless you speak with a foreign accent, the first question anyone asks you is "what do you do". At an alumni event last month, I challenged a group of people to introduce themselves without giving their job title. Everyone struggled. One guy gave up: "Gosh, I don't know, all I do is work".
Why are job titles so important? One theory is that they replace conspicuous consumption. They signal to hurried strangers, in shorthand, key bits of information about ourselves: education, money, status, likeliness to enjoy sushi, opinion re:what constitutes a valid Sunday morning and cetera. Lawyer and musician are loaded terms. In different situations, from different people, they purchase different amounts of social capital. (Social capital is measured in kilocuddles.)
This is not a joke.
Here is one scenario. I have just met my future husband, Barry. He is intelligent, successful, handsome and kind. He is compassionate and strong. He loves me. Moreover, he likes me. (Which is no small feat because, while I am not a Yahoo, I'm quite a lot Yahoo-like, quite a lot of the time.) Meanwhile, Zanny Minton Beddoes offers to hire me to run a new blog for The Economist called "The Economist Explains Why Sausage Manufacturing is Difficult" (it is a series of explainers that debunk "why don't we just" political initiatives - like "why don't we just bring back the gold standard"). It's a roaring success. Life at 120 kCu/hr is great. When I receive optimal levels of affection, I am an infinitely better version of myself. I am patient, calm, balanced and compassionate. I am resilient and calm. I play. I welcome criticism. I am eloquent and witty. I exude empathy, talk with more enthusiasm and listen with fewer interruptions. All people, not just the smart and attractive ones, become fascinating. I exercise. I eat well. I take initiative and risks. I feel warm and expansive and open to experience. I laugh. I learn with renewed vim and explore with fresh curiosity. I can sit with interest through 90-minute of slides on pelicans. It is that general joy of living that is peculiar to new and reciprocated love (or to the renewed possibility thereof), and which reminds me of Pierre Bezuhov at the end of War and Peace:
"A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable, possessed him. The whole meaning of life - not for him alone but for the whole world - seemed to him centered in his love (...) Often in afterlife, Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct. 'I may have appeared strange and queer then,' he thought, 'but I was not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary, I was then wiser and had more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in life, because... because I was happy.' Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed 'good qualities' in people, before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them."
Consider now what happens at the other end of the spectrum. Barry, turns out, is a cheat. He married me for my EU passport. The Economist gig falls through because the government has banned immigrants from holding public opinion. Meanwhile, Joan from the party never approves my friend request and Lilly the writer from that networking event cancels our meeting. I sulk so often that my friends begin to keep me out of the loop. My pet turtle dies. Trump bans Hamilton. My marketable skills become outdated and I become poor and unemployable. Soon I am denied the baseline level of esteem in society otherwise known as dignity. Life below 50 kCu/hr is not fun. In fact, it turns into one long (unrelenting) love withdrawal symptom. No matter how enthusiastically the Harvard Business Review likes to claim otherwise, shrugging off rejection and failure is hard. Resilience is a tricky talent. Practice might help somewhat (compassion certainly does), but normal people don't operate reliably at such levels of self-assurance. I for one don't. Without Barry and Hamilton, I become quiet and tetchy. I am consumed by shame1. I succumb to a slow smouldering rage and fantasies of omnipotence. I am vengeful. I lose interest. I find everything boring and everyone ugly. My intrinsic motivation weakens and I space out during conversation. I am always anxious. I feel tired and distracted. I don't return phone calls. I eat too much. I hate anyone who disagrees with me and pelicans.
In unemployment you can worry a lot about those scenarios. In those particular emotional terms.
This is very interesting because when your life is closer to scenario one, the attractiveness of the two outlines is exactly reversed. In the first scenario, the fabulous job and the loving relationship are burdens. They are incredibly tiring. Your time is forever occupied. You spend every hour executing the commitments accrued by your past self and have very little actual agency. You are weighed down by ridiculous expectations. You live off meal replacement shakes. You worry permanently about falling behind. You never feel good enough. Ever.
Conversely, the second scenario sounds blissful. You are master of your own time. You can, as Henry David Thoreau once put it, "go confidently in the direction of your dreams" and "live the life you have imagined". Freedom. Happiness.
At this point you might think that all I've done is proven that it is possible to find fault with any situation. Standing outside the rat race looking in was fun for a while, but then it got lonely. Maybe I just learned, the long way, one obvious truth: that competition is not really for money and status, but for the social capital they purchase. We compete for stuff we actually need: esteem, validation, respect, affection, recognition, regard, the interest of others, their attention, curiosity and time - their "love". That is the real scarcity in the system2. You are free from the weight of expectation, but the result is not happiness3. The result is a sort of dreary limbo, like living outside of time. Sure - "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" is a great quote, but even Henry David Thoreau wrote a book. What higher bid for social capital is there?
Actually that is not the conclusion.
The conclusion is that the compromise is always between authenticity and belonging. Between individual and society. Between being free and being loved. This is not to say you cannot have your cake and eat it. It is to say you can only have however much of the cake you didn't eat. Life is about choices.
The conclusion is also that Love4 is a very accurate predictor of behaviour, mood, personality, character flaws (or virtues), vitality, performance and, in general, sanity and well being. We all have within ourselves the capacity both for great good and great evil, both for fun and staggering dullness. The world can feed one or another of our impulses.
For me, life is optimal at or above 100 kilocuddle per hour. I get by on 90. Below 60, things get tricky. Below 20, I die. You have to work out these numbers for yourself.
There are ways to lower your basal cuddle metabolic rate. Meditation, for instance. Culture. Philosophy. Art. Accepting the idea that you are alone, actually alone, irredeemably alone and that the promise of "love" is for the most part an illusion. Breathing. Reading Proust. Good quality marijuana5.
Until then, I only mean to point out this permanent tension: person vs people. Authenticity vs belonging. Doing what you want vs doing what is expected of you. Freedom vs love.
We are like cells in a body - only saints and psychopaths can live without others. Love is highly addictive6. You notice this in the language: "self-worth" is distinctly transactional7. The result is that everything is extremely interlocked. You cannot talk about self-worth without talking about money, status anxiety, the culture of meritocracy, politics, advertising and capitalism. Normal people cannot exist in a vacuum. Only saints and psychopaths.
Unemployment, even the wealthy "gap year in Thailand" sort that I am fortunate enough to enjoy, teaches the value of belonging. Work is hard, often boring and always a limit on your individual freedom. It is also a way of participating in the human project.
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1 I warmly recommend studying Brene Brown. This audiobook is short and excellent. And for a quicker start there are her two TED talks (they are funnier in chronological order).
2 If I had to guess. Economics seems to have a hard time reasoning about surplus. It never ceases to baffle me how, on the one hand, journalists complain that they must produce more copy than ever , while, on the other, there is too much news and everyone feels like they are drowning in pointless garbage. You would think the solution is obvious. But how do you stop an arms race? A discussion for another time, perhaps.
3 Unless you are an accomplished Buddhist.
4 Dignity, respect, regard, esteem, validation etc etc etc
5 Joke!
6 It may actually be an opiate. I will include the first reasonable link returned by Google because I am too lazy to look up the many source whence I derived this belief.
7 Self-worth, to nobody's surprise, is also measured in kilocuddles.
