The Lone Monkey

So many people look back on their average childhoods, where they were cared for and protected and given everything they needed, and still feel that they weren’t well-loved. Meanwhile, parents everywhere find that no matter how hard they try and how many sacrifices they make, they still can’t shake the feeling that they’re coming up short. What’s going on there?

There’s an old saying about social animals in general and primates in particular: “A lone monkey is a dead monkey.” Our superpower as a species--the one that allowed us to conquer the planet without sharp claws, venomous fangs or fast legs--was our ability to think, communicate, and cooperate as a group. The survival of any individual depended on its inclusion in that group, where the sharing of resources, protection and information made us far more formidable than such a slow, weak, hairless animal had any right to be. 

But of course, this superpower came at a cost. We need a prolonged childhood for our brains and our complex social skills to develop.  In those early years, we are especially vulnerable, not only because we lack the ability to defend and care for ourselves, but because we have nothing to contribute to the well-being of the group. From the perspective of species survival, children are just dead weight--except they’re also the future, and for that reason, they’re everything.

Nature solves this problem by giving adults parental instincts. Our small, weak, profoundly helpless children trigger our deepest impulse to nourish and protect them. At the same time, our children are engineered to magnify those impulses by focusing relentlessly on gaining our attention and our love. The system works, more or less, in that most children survive to adulthood without being abandoned by the side of the road. That’s a win, right? Along the way, though, we acquire a few scars.

The thing about a child’s desire for attention and love is that it’s almost limitless. The more resources and protection they receive, the more likely they are to survive to adulthood and pass on their genes to the next generation. As far as their instincts are concerned, more is always better, and those instincts evolved back when the stakes were survival itself. This leaves kids with the constant fear that they’ll never get what they need, and parents with the gnawing feeling that they can never give enough. Essentially, nature has designed human children with an unfillable hole, and most of us carry that hole into adulthood.

I don’t think we can ever make that hole go away. What we can do is recognize it for what it is, and be intentional about how we try to fill it. We have to remember that the hole in all of us is the fear of being the lone monkey, and that the only thing that fills it is membership in the tribe. Most primates spend hours everyday picking ticks and lice off of each other, not just for the between-meal snack (Mmmm, extra protein!), but because it reinforces the social bonds that we are all programmed to crave. Since our mutual grooming opportunities are pretty limited, we have to do the modern equivalent. We need to reinforce tribal membership with our words. 

“You are one of us.”

“We love and accept you exactly as you are.”

“We will never vote you off the island, or leave you by the side of the road.”

A lone monkey is a dead monkey. But a monkey who knows they belong has a lot fewer ticks, and they don’t need psychotherapy for nearly as long.