People live in society. If you do not take into account the hermits and single navigators, usually a person is surrounded by friends, relatives, colleagues, and just passers -by. In moments of special fatigue, we dream of being alone in silence, but if we part with our loves – we yearn from loneliness. Why are we surrounded by people?

Many people know Maxim who is beloved by existential therapists: “A person is born alone and one dies”. Apparently, having thought about it, you need to feel very lonely, closed in your individuality and very responsible. But if you really think about it, you will have to honestly say – this is an abstraction that has nothing to do with reality.

Even before birth, a person is in a maternal womb in complex interdependence with all its systems. And his mother is in society at the same time. During childbirth, there is a midwife, a doctor, and sometimes relatives. A person in a hospital or at home also dies, but almost always among people, except for rare cases.

Loneliness throughout life is also more fantasy than reality. Moreover, if we ask ourselves an important question where my “I” ends and others begin, we will not be able to answer. Each of us is woven into a complex network of physical, food, economic, social, psychological and

different types of relations.

Our brain only seems to be a physiological organ, in fact it is a complex, constantly trained information system. It has much more culture and sociality than biology and physiology. Moreover, the pain about its place in the social system or due to the discord in close relations is as strong as physical pain associated with bodily discomfort.

And our strongest motivation is imitative. Let’s look at two examples. A poster in a stone forest, on which it was written that last year 5 tons of fossils were taken out of this reserve, only stimulated tourists to take away even more: “After all, they still do this!”

An experiment was conducted: residents of the same district openly asked the question, which would make them be able to spend electricity: care for ecology, saving their funds or knowledge that their neighbors do this. The answers were different, but the neighbors fell in the last place.

Then everyone was sent to everyone with an appeal to protect electricity, and the reason was indicated in each one of three. And what do you think it turned out after they measured the real energy consumption? That’s right, with a large margin, those who have the neighbors allegedly also cherished her.

It is very important for us to be like everyone else. That is why many turn to psychotherapy when they feel that they fall out of the accepted ideas about how others behave. And in general most often come to solve the problems of relations. “I cannot build a relationship” – the most common female request. And men most often turn with the difficulty in choosing between old and new relationships.

It only seems to us that we care about ourselves – more often we care about our place in the system. Another example of the influence of the environment on our behavior. Analysis of a large number of data showed that the success of our intention to quit smoking directly depends not only on whether friends quit smoking, even friends of friends, whom we know nothing, affect it.