“Life is better with humans.”
I wanted to answer, “You see it as a choice?”
The sentence stayed with me for three days. I slept, walked, changed hotels, bought groceries. It returned among other thoughts, familiar each time. I had words for my objection. I had yet to arrange them well enough to see what else they might contain.
“Better” is an easy word to receive. It sounds generous. It offers company, perhaps affection, perhaps the reassurance that we belong among others. But it also introduces a comparison. There is this life, with humans, and somewhere beside it another life against which the first has been judged.
Where is that other life?
I can travel alone. I can spend an afternoon without speaking to anyone. The room was built by people, the food brought by people, the language in which I consider my solitude learned from people. Even a withdrawal from society carries some of society away with it. The absence of someone beside me leaves a great deal of human presence intact.
Before I could decide whether I liked people, people had kept me alive. Someone fed me, handled me, responded to needs I could not yet name. My later capacity to choose developed within that dependence. It did not precede it.
I remembered the nursery studies from the end of the Second World War: infants deteriorating in institutions where sustained personal care was lacking. The account is often compressed into babies dying because they were not hugged. The research concerned a wider deprivation of responsive care; touch was part of a situation that cannot be reduced to one missing gesture. Still, the question it raises is substantial. What we receive from others begins long before companionship becomes a preference.
Later in life, the need may become very practical. Shopping grows difficult. Driving becomes unavailable. Someone brings the groceries, provides a ride, helps with a staircase. Affection may accompany the assistance. The groceries have to reach the kitchen either way.
Research on social relationships also finds an association between stronger relationships and greater survival, while psychological research describes belonging as a fundamental motivation. These findings tell us something about life within human relationships. They do not supply a comparison with a viable life outside all human dependence. Nor do they make every relationship beneficial, every person interchangeable, or one arrangement suitable for everyone.
We can call this interdependence. The word recognizes that support runs in several directions and across time. It may also be more comfortable to say. Receiving help can sound easier when the sentence includes the possibility of giving it. But a baby does not need to repay a feeding for the need to be real. Someone who needs a ride may have nothing equivalent to offer that afternoon. Reciprocity can belong to the wider arrangement without appearing in every exchange.
What changes when we give the dependence a more agreeable name?
There are choices inside it. We choose companions, negotiate distance, leave relationships, hire assistance, build households. Those choices matter enormously. They take place within conditions we did not first elect to have. “Life is better with humans” seems to lift the whole condition onto the same shelf as those particular choices, as though we had compared the available versions and selected humanity.
AI makes the shelf look more crowded. Here is something that answers, remembers parts of a conversation, helps organize a thought. It can become part of the texture of a day. Yet a conversation with AI takes place through human language, human records, and equipment people built and maintain. Choosing it does not transport me beyond the human world. The apparent alternative contains that world throughout.
It also leaves practical questions standing. Who brings the food? Who helps me up? Who notices that I have not returned? A useful conversation and a complete provision for living are different things. Calling one an alternative to humans can obscure how much human work remains necessary around it.
Then I thought of Star Trek.
Imagine saying “Life is better with humans” in a room containing Vulcans. The word human becomes conspicuous. Someone across the room could reasonably ask whether their company had just been judged inferior. A distinction between species has acquired a rank.
On Earth, the sentence can pass as an expression of warmth because human company is its assumed setting. Move it into that room and another possibility becomes audible: perhaps the speaker means that humans are better company than the others present. The sentence has not changed. The available comparison has.
Suppose, someday, a nonhuman being invited us to live among its kind. They need not resemble us. Suppose their world could sustain us, and that assistance, communication, and relationships were possible there. Then there would be another life to encounter. We might discover what we missed about humans, what we could receive elsewhere, and what we had mistaken for uniquely human because humans were the only ones from whom we had received it.
The invitation would make questions available. It would not answer them in advance.
Until then, what experience supports the comparison? Evidence that human deprivation harms us does not tell us what life among such beings would be like. The imagined invitation helps expose the missing alternative in the original sentence.
In another piece, we wrote about a roulette wheel. It spins once, but the result answers many wagers. Red or black, odd or even, a particular number, a range of numbers: one landing has consequences across the table. “Reality is more generous than inquiry.” Something happens, and it bears on more than the question we happened to ask.
A sentence can have that reach too. “Life is better with humans” arrives as one small assertion, but several places on the table light up. There is supposedly an alternative. Species is supposedly the relevant category. Companionship may be getting ranked. A personal preference may be speaking with the voice of a universal fact. “Better” may concern pleasure, health, morality, or fulfillment, without specifying which.
The speaker may intend only one of these. A listener can hear several. A conversation could begin by discovering which wager each of us thought was on the table.
That is what interests me about “You see it as a choice?” It gives the speaker somewhere to go. Perhaps they mean choosing to call a friend. Perhaps they are contrasting human conversation with AI. Perhaps they mean that our dependence on others is something worth appreciating. Each answer opens a different discussion.
I do not have to decide which one they meant before asking.
“Life is better with humans.”
“You see it as a choice?”
I would like to hear what comes next.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
Research behind the essay
● Katharina Rowold, “What Do Babies Need to Thrive? Changing Interpretations of ‘Hospitalism’ in an International Context” (2018). Historical context for the institutional-care research and its interpretations.
● Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong” (1995). Review examining belonging as a fundamental human motivation.
● Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk” (2010). Meta-analysis of 148 studies examining associations between social relationships and survival.
Travel in Life 