Transcriber: Cecilia Salvador Sánchez Reviewer: David DeRuwe
We’re all born alone, and ultimately we’ll all die alone.
But in between that time,
we need each other far more than we can possibly realize.
We all need social connections.
And that's the inherent primitive response to way back.
When you look at Neanderthal times,
we had different people doing different roles in order for us to survive,
and they all worked together.
You had somebody who was a hunter, somebody who was a cook,
the lookout, procreators, and they all had a job to do and a role to do.
But between them all, it was social connections that worked.
You step forward to the 21st century,
and that primitive response is still there.
It’s just that now we don’t have to go and hunt our food.
It’s easily available, but we still need those social connections
of other people near us.
And even 60, 70 years ago, when we lived really closely to our extended family,
they potentially moved out for work or they’ve just moved
and we’re not essentially as close to our neighbors or friends anymore.
That leaves some people feeling extremely isolated.
But what can we do?
Well, we can do lots of things,
and we can really try and help with some of those social connections.
We meet people all the time from a whole range of different backgrounds
and diverse backgrounds,
and throughout our lives, we’ll have encounters with many people.
And I think within less than a minute, you’ll know if they’re the people
that you want to connect with, you want to work with,
want to be with.
So a little bit like a sieve that you’ll meet all these different people
throughout different periods of your life.
You’ll have school, college, potentially university, work, sports, clubs.
All these different people will come into your life,
and some of those relationships may be transient and they’ll fall through,
and other relationships will be there for the whole duration,
but not necessarily as straightforward as that.
You may have some that fall in, and then they’ll drop out
and then fall back in again.
With different bits of your personality, you’ll have different relationships.
You’ll have people you’ll laugh your head off with,
people that you’ll cry buckets with,
and people you’ll have those deep, meaningful conversations with.
And not just necessarily from a personal point of view,
but also from a work perspective.
We’re all different.
You’ve got potential people who do finance, people who are the creatives,
and people who are the doers and the practical people.
And not everybody always sees eye to eye.
The finance people think the creatives are messy and disorganized,
and the creatives potentially
think the finance people have got real attention to detail,
but actually everybody has something to offer.
And if you can get those different people into a room
and you can get somebody to bring those connections
and those people together and a skilled leader in businesses,
then you can end up with a really high-functioning team
where everybody’s needs are getting met, and actually everybody’s happy as well.
And the same about organizations.
If you’re an organization, say for example,
you’re in education and you stay within your education field,
you’re just meeting other people in education, that’s all you know,
and the same for corporate,
the same for health, and lots of other different sectors.
But if you can get people out of their sectors
and actually into a room having one conversation,
amazing things can happen.
We’re all in this journey of life together and we’ll all basically have a life.
It’s a bit like a flatline, but it’s not.
It'll have ups and downs going all the way through.
Some people you’ll see will have downs mostly,
and you’ll wonder how they’re still actually surviving
the amount of knocks that they’ve had.
But all these different bits, it’s all better -
the highs are better, the lows are better -
and actually that normal day-to-day existence is better
if we’ve got other people near us and around us.
I lost my brother suddenly when I was 16.
and my dad to a brain tumor ten years later.
And during those periods of the grieving process,
it felt like somebody had pulled into my heart,
ripped it out, and put it into a bucket of ice.
Sometimes it just felt quite difficult to breathe.
But it was all made more manageable by having people around me.
And as a society, we have that within us.
And you can just see from recent times, from the COVID situation,
we all didn’t have the same experience
because some people’s lifestyles were different from other people’s,
but we did have that sort of collective environment
that we never experienced together anymore.
We could go out for exercise one hour a day.
We couldn’t go on holiday. We could hear the birds.
But something quite amazing happened within communities.
Thousands of people came forward to help each other out,
and also at a real local level, neighborhoods came together.
And you found people going out shopping for other people.
and some amazing stories of humanity and kindness,
and people really, really going the extra mile,
and the memes, you know, some of the fun as well.
Then, you know, people were sharing that
and we had this whole environment that we were helping each other out.
We also had that clapping on the doorstep.
And I, for one, thought that was such an amazing thing that happened,
and I’m really glad that we got to experience that,
it’s nothing I’d seen in my lifetime,
and I'm really glad that my children got to see that as well,
because that experience made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up -
people coming together, neighbors coming together.
We had a WhatsApp group on our street that came about,
and some of us knew each other but not all of us,
and all of a sudden we were helping each other, we were supporting each other.
We became a little bit of a mini-community in our own self
and not just from a psychological perspective of helping each other out,
but actually from a safety perspective.
There’s real strength in people coming together
because if you know that Edna at number 18 is on her own
and Jack is a single parent with a couple of boys at number four,
we’ll look out for each other -
you’ve got that name, you’ve got that connection.
So all of a sudden, our whole environment’s become a lot safer.
We are a lot stronger.
Now we actually ring each other up and say, “Has anybody got any tape?”
but it’s still there because it was created.
I’d really hoped in that lockdown period that those things would really continue.
And in some communities, they have,
and you’ll see little pockets where it’s flourishing,
but unfortunately, I feel as though, you know, we have gone back a little bit
to where we’re busy, we’re doing things,
and we’re all getting on with our day-to-day lives.
But we’re all going to experience a sea of emotions throughout our life.
We’ll have ups, we’ll have downs, we’ll have sadness, we’ll have loss,
loneliness, anxiety - we’ll all experience that.
And if there’s anything we can do as a society to help each other out,
we have to try and do that.
Because at the end of the day,
it’s unlikely we’ll be thinking about the houses we live in, the cars we have.
We’ll be thinking about the people that we’ve met,
the memories that we’ve made, and the people who’ve gotten to here.
We've all got a chance to change the narrative that we're here.
We just have to really amplify the good, the kindness,
and we can do that one word at a time.