Connected Is the New Rich

I’ve been thinking lately that we may have been taught to measure success wrong.

When we’re considering a new opportunity (especially a job opportunity), we’re pretty good at calculating what we stand to gain. How much more will I make? Is this a better title? Will it open doors for me? Will I get to live somewhere more exciting? Will this be good for my career?

These are, of course, very reasonable questions.

But there’s another column on the balance sheet that most of us were never taught to consider:

What will this cost me in connection?

Imagine you’re 25 and offered a great job in a city 500 miles away. It pays more. It’s exciting. You’ll meet new people. You tell yourself you’ll go for a couple of years, get some experience, and figure out what comes next.

And everyone congratulates you.

Very few people will say, “Before you decide, have you considered the value of living ten minutes from your parents? Of having cousins nearby? Of being in the same area code as friends you’ve known since you were 12?”

These things don’t show up in the salary offer. You can’t put them on a résumé. So we tend to value them at zero.

And I think that’s been a massive mistake.

I see the consequences of this all the time in my psychology practice in New York City. So many people came here for an incredible opportunity…a chance to work for the most prestigious company in your industry, a better salary, the chance to advance. Those are real gains. But there was a cost on the other side of the ledger that was much harder to see at 22: their roots were left behind somewhere else.

Years later, they may have built impressive lives and careers while their family, longtime friends, and sense of community remain hundreds of miles away. They can be doing extraordinarily well by every conventional measure of success and still feel profoundly disconnected.

I think our modern loneliness epidemic is forcing us to confront how much we have been trained to undervalue that social infrastructure.

For decades, we’ve encouraged people to go where the opportunities are: go to the best school, move for the better job, take the promotion, relocate for the raise. Sometimes that is absolutely the right decision. But we’ve become very good at calculating what we’re moving toward and not nearly as good at calculating what we’re moving away from.

That’s the part I want us to change.

When you’re making a major life decision, look at the money, the opportunity and the possibilities. But also ask: What will this do to my relationships? What will I gain or lose in connection? Am I leaving something behind that will be difficult to recreate somewhere else?

Maybe you still take the job. Maybe you still move across the country. Maybe the opportunity is absolutely worth the trade.

The point isn’t that connection should always win. It’s that connection should finally get a vote.

Because perhaps we need a broader definition of wealth. Money, freedom and opportunity matter. But so do having people who know you, having somewhere you belong, and having relationships with roots deep enough to sustain you.

Maybe one of the lessons of the loneliness epidemic is that connected is the new rich.

~ James K. Ellis, Ph.D.