At the end of July, I attended the EFT Triage Conference in Las Vegas and had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Dr. James Coan describing some of the mechanisms of Social Baseline Theory and their implications for couples therapy. There was a lot in the presentation that I could write about, but if I had to whittle the central premise that landed with me most it would be this: we regulate one another and we need other humans in order to thrive.
This is something that makes intuitive sense to me as a therapist, particularly as someone who works from an attachment-oriented and trauma-focused perspective. Our nervous systems do not exist in little hermetically sealed containers. We are constantly responding to the people around us, taking in cues of safety and threat, settling in the presence of people we trust, becoming activated when connection feels uncertain or ruptured. So much of what we understand about attachment, trauma, and emotional regulation points us back toward this profoundly simple and sometimes inconvenient truth: human beings need human beings.
At the end of Dr. Coan’s presentation he took a question from an audience member about community and bonding.
Dr. Coan said:
“How do we know we belong to a community? Is it because someone brings us flowers? Turns out, not really!
How do we know that we’re really bonded to someone else? Is it because they hold our hand? Nope. It’s because we face it together.
But it’s also when we know that we have to invest. You know what doesn’t treat loneliness? What doesn’t treat loneliness is someone coming to your house talking to you, showing you support and love and gratitude.
You know what really treats loneliness? Feeling necessary. Feeling like someone else needs you to come in and help them. That’s a better predictor and buffer against loneliness.
And you know what that is: ‘a pain in the ass’. So you know that you’re bonded when they are a pain in the ass!”
I love this because it captures something about community that I think can actually be quite difficult to hear. We tend to talk about community in terms of having people who show up for us. Who checks on you? Who brings you soup when you are sick? Who sends the text? Who remembers your birthday? All of those things matter enormously. But building a community isn’t only about finding people willing to show up for us. It also requires reaching toward other people, asking for help, allowing ourselves to need them, and being willing to tolerate the inconvenience of being needed in return.
When we share from a place of vulnerability and take the risk of asking someone for help, we are letting them in. We are essentially saying: you matter enough to me that I am willing to let you see that I cannot do all of this by myself. That is an incredibly vulnerable thing to do, particularly for people who have spent much of their lives learning to be self-sufficient. But it needs to go both ways. If one person in a relationship is always the one asking for help, revealing their needs and exposing the messier parts of their life while the other remains completely stitched up, never needing anything and rarely risking that same kind of vulnerability, eventually there can be a barrier to a felt sense of reciprocity. There may be care there or even love, but something about the closeness can begin to feel asymmetrical.
Because part of intimacy is getting to matter to someone else. And mattering to someone is, frankly, sometimes a pain in the ass.
Part of intimacy is getting to matter to someone else. And mattering to someone is, frankly, sometimes a pain in the ass!
Being Needed Costs Us Something
Being needed is hard. It costs time, energy, effort, and occasionally financial resources. It means driving across town when you would rather be sitting on your couch. It means answering the phone when somebody is falling apart and you had planned to go to bed. It means helping someone move, watching someone’s child, picking somebody up from the airport, sitting in a hospital waiting room, bringing food over, listening to the same heartbreak for the fifth time, or rearranging something in your own life because somebody you love genuinely needs you.
There is a reason community can feel exhausting– because often, it is. This is particularly true for those of us who are neurodivergent, have health issues, sensory challenges, are prone to more introversion at baseline, or simply have overloaded lives.
But Dr. Coan’s point, as I understood it, was that the cost is not incidental to connection. Some of that investment is part of what creates the connection in the first place. We experience ourselves not merely as recipients of other people’s affection but as meaningful participants in their lives. I am here, you are here and your existence fundamentally changes what is required of me. And, my existence changes what is required of you.
As soon as Dr. Coan finished his presentation, I had a song running through my head: Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” which has been one of my favorite songs for much of my life. There is a moment in the song that describes wanting someone to “sit in my chair and ruin my sleep,” and I immediately thought, yep, that’s it.
The song is so powerful to me because it captures the dichotomy of what it actually means to be in connection with other people. Connection is a messy business. Other people interfere with us. They disappoint us. They misunderstand us. They require things. They hurt our feelings. We lose them. We grieve them. Sometimes they make us feel suffocated, sometimes they make us feel incredibly safe, and sometimes they manage to do both within the span of about twenty minutes.
To love is to expose yourself to all of this.
And yet, somehow, that is also being alive.
I Wonder If We Have Made Life a Little Too Easy
I have been thinking about this a lot since returning from the conference, particularly because I have become increasingly aware of how much of modern life is designed around eliminating inconvenience. And I want to be careful here, because I am not anti-technology, nor am I particularly interested in romanticizing some idyllic past in which everything was supposedly better. I use these conveniences constantly and I benefit enormously from them. There are many ways technology has made life more accessible, manageable, and connected.
But I do sometimes wonder if in culling all of this friction out of our lives, we have inadvertently cropped out some of the experiences that once forced us into contact with one another.
I notice it in my own life. I can sit at my computer doing administrative work while bouncing between three different AI models, getting answers to questions almost immediately, and sometimes I can actually feel my patience growing thinner. Waiting becomes more irritating. Not knowing becomes more irritating. The normal inefficiencies of interacting with another human being, who does not immediately understand exactly what I am asking for and generate an answer within seconds, begin to feel somehow more cumbersome than they used to.
Sometimes I eat a prepared meal from a meal-delivery service because I am busy and it saves me time, and I am grateful that this exists. But something has also been removed from that experience. There is no one standing in the kitchen chopping onions. There is no smell moving through the house for an hour. There is no person I love handing me a plate of something they made and watching my face to see whether I like it. I have gained convenience, and occasionally I notice that I have lost the feeling of food cooked with love by another human being.
I notice something similar at the self-checkout. It is faster. Sometimes I actively choose it because I don’t want to wait. And then other times I find myself missing the banter. I miss the tiny, seemingly meaningless interaction with a cashier. I miss saying hello to somebody I don’t know, making a stupid joke, having them comment on something I’m buying, or experiencing thirty seconds in which another human being and I briefly enter each other’s lives.
None of these moments individually amounts to community. A conversation with a grocery store cashier is not a substitute for intimate friendship, and cooking dinner from scratch is not inherently more psychologically healthy than eating a prepared meal. That isn’t my point. I think I am simply becoming more aware of how many tiny opportunities for human contact we have engineered out of our days, and how easy it has become to move through enormous portions of life without actually needing another person.
We can order groceries without speaking to anyone. We can have food dropped outside our doors. We can work remotely. We can entertain ourselves endlessly without leaving the house. We can ask a computer questions we once might have called a friend to ask. We can date through screens, socialize through screens, shop through screens, exercise through screens, learn through screens, and sometimes even receive what feels like emotional companionship through screens.
Each individual convenience is understandable. Taken together, though, I sometimes wonder whether our lives are becoming a little anemic.
I Remember When We Had to Need Each Other More
I feel strangely grateful to have grown up as an older millennial because my childhood straddled two very different worlds. I remember technology arriving, but I also remember life before it became the organizing architecture of nearly every waking hour.
I remember having a Walkman that broke on the way to school and crying because that was it. I couldn’t access my music. There wasn’t another device in my pocket with every song ever recorded waiting for me. I remember when the internet started showing up in our homes and sitting at a computer clicking around, making ridiculous GeoCities pages and then physically showing my friends what I had made. I remember sleepovers where we stayed up too late talking and laughing and doing whatever strange things children do when they are bored together, because there wasn’t an infinite feed of individually curated entertainment available to each of us.
I don’t say this to fault Gen Z or Gen Alpha. In fact, as a former educator, I have an enormous amount of compassion for young people who had important years of their social development profoundly disrupted by the pandemic and who are now growing up inside a social environment that none of us fully understand yet. They didn’t create this world. And, frankly, neither did any one of us.
But I do think something has shifted beyond the pandemic. Our lives have become increasingly effortless in ways that are genuinely wonderful, and I am not convinced our nervous systems are entirely benefiting from the trade.
Humans evolved in conditions in which survival was profoundly interdependent. We needed other people. Not abstractly. Literally. Our bodies developed in relationship with other bodies. We learned safety through proximity, touch, voice, facial expression, shared labor, shared food, shared danger, and the knowledge that if something happened to us, there were other nervous systems nearby to help carry the load.
Social Baseline Theory offers one framework for understanding this: our brains and bodies appear to account for the availability of social resources when calculating effort and threat. In other words, connection is not merely a lovely psychological bonus we add onto an otherwise independent human organism. The presence of trusted others can fundamentally change how demanding the world feels to us.
Which makes me wonder whether the pursuit of a perfectly frictionless life is actually compatible with the kind of creatures we are.
Community Requires Distress Tolerance
I think one of the challenges of building community now is that community demands a certain tolerance for discomfort, and I am not sure modern life gives us enough opportunities to practice it.
Community requires waiting. It requires misunderstanding. It requires repair. It requires being disappointed by someone without immediately deciding that the relationship is toxic. It requires sometimes doing things you don’t particularly want to do because they matter to somebody you love. It requires tolerating the vulnerability of asking for something and hearing no. It requires letting someone help you imperfectly instead of doing everything yourself because you know you can do it better. It requires forgiving ordinary human limitations while still maintaining boundaries around behavior that is genuinely harmful.
It also requires discernment. I don’t think the answer to loneliness is indiscriminately tolerating bad relationships or abandoning healthy boundaries in the name of community. Some relationships are exploitative. Some people take without reciprocating. Sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is leave. But there is an enormous territory between accepting harmful behavior and expecting our relationships to never inconvenience us, disappoint us, frustrate us, or require sacrifice.
Real people are inefficient.
They text back late. They misunderstand what we meant. They need things at inconvenient times. They have bad moods. They tell stories we’ve already heard. They make plans and then occasionally cancel them. They get sick. They age. They struggle. They grieve. They need rides and meals and phone calls and patience. They sometimes require us to sit in discomfort rather than immediately resolving it.
And when we are the ones struggling, we become inconvenient, too.
There is something profoundly humbling about accepting this. I am not merely choosing whether other people are worth the trouble of loving. Other people are making that calculation about me. I, too, will need help. I will disappoint people. I will someday need someone to drive across town for me, sit beside me, tolerate my grief, hear the same story again, or rearrange some small portion of their life because mine has temporarily fallen apart.
That isn’t a failure of independence. It is the deal.
The Cost of Being Alive
I think this is ultimately why Coan’s words landed so deeply for me and why “Being Alive” immediately began playing in my head afterward. Both are pointing toward something I think we sometimes resist: there is no version of meaningful connection in which we get all of the regulation, belonging, intimacy, safety, and love without also assuming some of the burden.
We have to need people.
And perhaps even more challengingly for those of us who have learned to pride ourselves on self-sufficiency, we have to let people need us.
Our bodies are blood and flesh. We are mammals with nervous systems that developed in relationship to other nervous systems, somehow trying to make sense of what it means to be conscious and vulnerable and temporarily alive on this enormous rock floating through a seemingly endless universe. Of course we reach for one another. Of course we need someone beside us.
But reaching means risking rejection. Loving means risking grief. Depending on someone means risking disappointment. Becoming necessary to other people means surrendering some portion of our autonomy. Being part of a community means occasionally being inconvenienced by the fact that other human beings exist and have needs that do not perfectly align with our own.
Maybe we have spent too much time trying to engineer our way out of that discomfort.
I don’t want to give up my conveniences. I am probably going to continue using self-checkout when the line is shorter. I will continue ordering prepared meals when life is busy. I will certainly continue using technology. But I also want to pay attention to the moments when convenience quietly becomes isolation, when efficiency begins replacing interdependence, and when protecting myself from the discomfort of needing other people also protects me from the experience of being deeply known by them.
When protecting myself from the discomfort of needing other people, I am also protecting myself from the experience of being deeply known by them.
Because community is a pain in the ass.
People are a pain in the ass.
I am sometimes a pain in the ass.
And perhaps some part of becoming more fully alive is not trying to solve that problem, but accepting it as part of the extraordinary, painful, inconvenient privilege of belonging to one another
