What if your life was built around dignity – not just yours, but everyone’s? In this episode, behavioral scientist and proud Solo Cait Lamberton joins Peter McGraw to unpack how dignity shapes Solo living, partnered life, and everything in between. They explore what dignity really means (hint: it’s not just self-esteem or being nice), the everyday moments we affirm or violate it, and how to design a life rooted in clarity, voice, fairness, and ownership. Onwards!
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Listen to Episode #247 here
Dignity
Welcome back. Our guest is a fellow behavioral scientist, a friend, a member of the Solo community, and co-author of Marketplace Dignity, a book that asks a beautifully human question. What if we built the world around people’s need to be respected? If you’ve ever walked into a space and felt either fully seen or completely dismissed, you felt what my guest studies. Welcome, Cait Lamberton.
Thank you so much. That was such a nice way to put it. I love that. Thank you. That’s great.
That means a lot coming from you. I’m quite fond of you, not as a fellow professional, but also as a friend and as someone who reached out to me from my other world, the academic world. You’ve been so incredibly supportive of the Solo project for years.
It was interesting. I was on a long drive one day, looking for podcasts. I had no idea you even did this. All of a sudden, I was like, “Pete McGraw? Are there two Pete McGraws? That Pete McGraw.” I started tuning in to one of your podcasts. When you talk about feeling seen, suddenly, I felt like, “There is a community of people that sees each other in this way.” It’s an interesting connection to dig into. One of the wonderful things that these massive podcast libraries do is allow you to hear from people, to make them seen, but also to feel like there are others out there that have something in common with you that you would never otherwise find.
There are two things. I saw you at a conference. We did a plenary session, which was super fun. I hadn’t been to a professional academic conference in a while. I had several elevator experiences where I’m in the elevator and someone from the conference, whom I either know or don’t know, said to me, “I listened to your podcast.” It wasn’t a conversation about academics. It wasn’t about, “I love your paper.” It was, “I listen to your podcast.” I was like, “That’s so neat,” because I only think of you when I think of those listeners. There are a few other people.
One of the messages I get when people sign up for the solo community, which you can sign up for at PeterMcGraw.org/Solo and is free, is that I ask, “How did you hear about the show?” Searching is very common. It’s probably the most common. Word of mouth is the second most common. I say, “Tell me your solo story. Short or long, it doesn’t matter. One of the things, either in those messages, in volunteered emails that I get, or other types of messages, is that people say, “I thought I was the only one. I found my people.” This notion of being seen resonates.
I’m sure you’ve heard this around other walks of life, too. For example, my friends who have had children will go through these horrific times. It can get very dark. It can be wonderful, but it can also be dark. Because I’m the one without children, I’m the one they’ll tell the truth to because I’m not going to judge them. There’s no competition. What’s amazing is that I hear the same stories from multiple people. I want to say, “You guys need to talk to each other because you’re not the only ones living through that either.”
As I was talking with somebody about hitting certain development and certain milestones in life. We stopped thinking that there’s any common experience after “adulthood.” The truth is that when you hit these milestones, you often have similar experiences. We don’t talk about them. Other communities have different barriers to connecting, but hopefully, all of this allows us to be a little more transparent about what’s going on.
At that very same conference, I had met three other guys for a drink. We were talking about middle life, middle age. Sleep came up, and I was asking them about their sleep. All of them are up in the middle of the night at some point in time. All of them are a little bit overactive intellectually in the middle of the night. I thought, “It was just me. There’s something wrong with me,” rather than, “This might be something that is a little more universal,” at least among middle-aged male academics, which I am.
My big idea about this is that we are still developing. There are still developmental phases that probably have a definable characteristic. We just stop at late adolescence and then call it adulthood from there forward. There are historical models of growth, but they tend to assume we stay the same through the middle of our lives. We don’t. We keep growing. We keep developing. We keep learning. The way our brain works changes, but it doesn’t just stabilize.
Thank you. I’ve never thought of that.
We need names for these things. When you intersect it with the other things of our life that have materialized by that point, whether it’s married, single, children, or no children, you would get an interesting matrix of development because people who take different paths develop in different directions.
I like to say that the variance goes up as you get older. I look around at twenty-year-olds. I don’t want to say, “They are all the same.” The amount of variance in a twenty-year-old is much different than the variance in a 55-year-old.
That’s because you have to take into account that if the columns are age, we now have more rows than we could have fallen into. The developmental phases fragment more.
Different Relationships Have Different Trajectories
Our field is mostly focused on those commonalities a lot of times and not enough on the differences because they’re hard to study and for a variety of other reasons. Before we get deep into dignity, I want to ask you, because I appreciate how thoughtful and articulate you are. I’m going to put you in the hot seat as someone who was early to the solo movement, discovering it on that road trip. What’s your current take on it as someone who’s involved, paying attention, and thinks too much about things?
I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had some wonderful people in my life. I was also raised with a very strong idea, as many people are, that the pinnacle of a relationship is marriage. If it’s going well, that’s where you’re headed. That’s the trajectory. That’s the expectation. If it’s not going well, you might never get there. That’s terrible. If you never get there, then that means it wasn’t going well. It took me a long time to have the insight that perhaps that is not the trajectory of every relationship.
These are the ideas you come to at some point, where you think, “Why did I ever think there was only one?” There are reasons. To your earlier point, it’s because we think in terms of large groups, averages, and norms. To me, that’s the big insight behind what you’ve created here. It’s that different kinds of relationships in our lives have all different kinds of trajectories and purposes. We’re going to learn different things from some of them than others, but that’s all valuable. This idea that it’s a disappointment if it doesn’t reach some predefined pinnacle is bizarre. It robs so many of our interpersonal experiences of positive value because we say, “It ended, and therefore it must have been wrong.”
I don’t think that’s true of my life. I don’t think that’s true of my relationships. If you’re able to liberate yourself from that idea, it’s a lot more fun. You don’t feel this enormous pressure in every relationship to make it go somewhere. You’re allowed to let it become what it is. See what it offers you. See if that’s worth keeping in your life. See what you can offer to someone else. See if that’s a value to them. You don’t even know what that is until you know the other person.
It’s funny. Sometimes, I meet people. They’ll say, “What are you looking for?” I don’t know because that’s completely contingent on who the other person is. You want something different with different people because that’s what you can offer each other. To me, that’s a different conversation to have. I appreciate that. What I also appreciate is that it doesn’t seem as though the community is anti-relationship. It’s not that we hate people.
“Hell is other people,” as Mark Twain allegedly said.
It’s not quite that either. There are other communities for that. It’s been nice to see it not become that because there’s a little bit of danger that that’s where it could go.
It could become zero-sum, us versus them. You want to punch back because you feel like you’re not being seen. You’re not being respected. I agree. It started as a project. I realized that it’s part of a movement more generally that we tapped into. The thing that was going to make it work for me, given my disposition and orientation in life, but was also going to attract my people, was going to be positivity. It was going to be a celebration and an opportunity, but not dismissing the challenges.
That’s the other part of it that is important. It pushes us rather not to blame others, but to take responsibility for our own lives. The other danger, aside from this trajectory expectation, is the belief that if we orient our life around another or others, that’s the best life we can have. It’s so easy to do it, especially for people who are very socially capable. You find somebody with a strong personality in your orbit. You orient around them. It feels like your life gets a lot easier for a while because whatever they want to do, you’re going to go with it.
You’re taking a lot of responsibility for your own life when you step back and say, “Maybe that’s not the right thing for me.” For many of us, the problem is we’ve tried that. We found it doesn’t work. We have to figure out how to take that responsibility back. That means not blaming ever. It’s not up to them whether you orient your life around them. It’s very often something we get pulled into.
I never thought about this. I’ve always thought about the people who struggle. The world is pushing you with norms, actual rewards, monetary rewards, the benefits of coupling up, and so on. I’ve always been more engaged with the people who struggle to do it for whatever reason. They have particular proclivities. They have mental health challenges. They have physical challenges. They have other goals that make relationships difficult, which creates conflict in a world where your partner should be everything. Orbiting is the word you used.
That’s difficult.
I haven’t thought much about the people who are good at it, it works well for them, and how limiting that can be for their development. They can shut themselves off because this little container works very well. The world reinforces it, rewards it, and celebrates it. They stay in that groove. They miss out on the richness of the soul of life in many ways.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a “grass is greener” problem. The people who find entry to the coupled life difficult think, “It must be better over there.” The people who find that quite not all that hard look back and go, “Wait, what’s happening?” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the saying, “Your preference in things like furniture and clothing gets stuck at the moment of your last milestone.” Sometimes, people say graduations, but weddings will do that, too.
We like this thing. We’re going to invest in things that look like the things we love right now. Three years later, what if somebody’s aesthetic taste, as trivial as that is, has changed? You’ve got to negotiate that change with someone else. You’ve got to figure out if you can change your environment to reflect that change. There’s a lot of inertia to stay where you are, even on something that simple. It’s hard to deal with that for some people.
I’ve never heard this about milestones. I imagine a wedding haircut. You end up having the same haircut for the rest of your life.
That’s what you’re expected to be, so that’s what you are. To your point, it’s very comfortable. It’s reinforced. Everyone expects it. You don’t create any problems. The minute you change, it’s going to create tension.
Establishing The Right Relationship Language
I want to say one other thing about your first point. I dislike this phrase, “A waste of time. This is a waste of time. Don’t waste my time. That relationship was a waste of time.” It’s zero-sum thinking. It’s very narrow thinking in that if this relationship does not produce the desired outcome, I have misused my time in it. I think about every one of my relationships, which have not resulted in a wedding, is valuable in some way.
It provided joy, growth, learning, meeting new people, new opportunities, new perspectives, etc. To chalk those things up to a waste of time because it did not bear the fruits of the relationship escalator makes me sad. It even colors the opportunities that you may have or the benefits of a relationship that you know is not going to that place or is not as highly valued by society, but can be very rich and remarkable.
That does raise the stakes on self-understanding and transparency because there are people who have goals that are time-bound. I have friends who want to have children. They want to have big families. They do have a limited amount of time to set up the structure within which they want to do that. For them, it’s very painful to feel that they’re moving in a direction that they expect to lead to that life. They’ve lost X years. Another important thing about having a language around different relationship structures is the ability to communicate that to other people.
Without that language, beginning of a relationship, everybody assumes we all want the same thing. We don’t know how to say, “I love my remarkable life. My goal is to keep building a remarkable life and growing in whatever directions I can.” These are the things that I see as helpful in that. These are the things that create more of a challenge for me. We have to have a vocabulary to say that. Otherwise, it’s very easy to drift along with one person thinking that you have the same goal. They do feel betrayed and hurt because they knew exactly what they wanted and that there was a ticking clock. So much of this is about taking responsibility for your own life and being able to share that with others in a way that makes sense.
I’ll call out two previous episodes, especially since we have a bunch of new listeners because of the TED Talk. It’s hard to catch up on 240-plus episodes. There are two that are quite relevant to what you said. The first one is an episode called Waiting. It’s with Kinneret Lahad. She has a paper about this very experience, especially around biological clocks. I thought it was an outstanding conversation and a deep dive into what you mentioned.
The other one is so good that I re-released it. It’s the Relationship Design episode because following the principles of relationship design is about co-creating relationships. It requires people to talk about what their desires are. It stimulates a conversation that can help avoid a later surprise that could be disappointing and even seen as a waste of time because there wasn’t a disclosure.
For some of us, our drive to resolve dissonance is so strong that we need to find a way to not ever say it was a waste of time. I’ll admit there’s a little bit of pride in there. There’s a little bit of, “Surely, I didn’t make a massive mistake, but it’s a very healthy reconstrual.”
Writing A Book About Dignity
I get it. I’m not saying that there are never wastes of time, but that’s true. Let’s pivot to talking about dignity. One of the things I like about your book and your work is that I’ve never considered this topic before, at least never overtly thought about it. I never had a language about it. I love my frameworks. For people like me, how do you go about defining dignity? What drew you to this concept? How did you get started on this work?
I got started on this work because I read another book that said that economists were wrong, which is always an entertaining place to start, when somebody says, “There’s a whole thing that you guys aren’t looking at. You should look at it.” I thought, “Maybe, they’re not looking at it. Maybe they are.” Francis Fukuyama, who’s a bit controversial in his own right, wrote this book about identity politics. What he talks about at the beginning of the book is the idea that Plato wrote about the soul having more than one part 2,300 years ago in The Republic. He said, “Yes, there’s a rational part of the soul that thinks carefully, and then there’s this appetite part of the soul that makes quick decisions.”
He said, “Congratulations, behavioral economists. It took you 2,000 years to figure this out. You give each other a bunch of prizes for it, but we’ve known that for a long time.” Fukuyama said, “If you turn the next page, there’s a third system. That’s the drive for dignity.” He said economists are never going to pay attention to that because that is so messy. Is it true that they don’t? At first, I thought he was right. They’ve completely ignored this. When I bring this up with some of the fancy behavioral economists, they’d tell me that dignity was an emotional response of some sort or an appraisal.
I ran across work by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, who won the Nobel Prize. They’re development economists. In their book, Good Economics for Hard Times, they say that if we reconsider dignity, we put human dignity back at the center of what we do. We have to rethink all of economics. Their argument is that that’s probably the right thing to do. They don’t go on to define it or experimentally figure out what creates it. It’s implicit throughout all of their work that we should be helping people to experience lives with dignity, not just throwing money at them.
There are development goals that might sound really good, but if we carry them out in a way that undermines dignity, we aren’t getting anywhere. For example, you could get a full education, which is a UN sustainable development goal, by making it compulsory. Create these educational systems where people’s spirits are crushed, and they experience abuse. You’ve ostensibly furthered human rights, but you’ve done it in a way that denies dignity. You haven’t gotten anywhere. All of that seemed very interesting to me.
At the same time, I also started reflecting on my own experiences and how meaningful these moments are when you feel that you’re seen, you’re heard, and you have freedom and choice. Conversely, the moments when you feel humiliated stick with you for a long time. If these are big experiences in our lives, maybe there’s something we should look at. It is the confluence of the personal and the intellectual that brought it together.
It makes for the best research project, given how.
It is at least the most fun, if not the most publishable.
For the reader who’s not aware of the machinations that happen behind the scenes, you’re often working for years on a single paper and having not just pluck, but having some skin in the game. Feeling like this matters to you and to people who you care about can help you persist against a reviewer.
Also, your own boredom. There’s that, too. We started collecting data. It’s a wonderful thing that happens where people share stories with you. You start reading people’s experiences, let’s say in healthcare, when they go in, they have a doctor who talks to them, and that may not even spend any more time with them, but they feel like they’re treated as a human, as opposed to a doctor who comes in, slices off the offensive mole, walks out, and never even says their name.
You realize that the same amount of money was charged for that service. The same amount of time was taken. All it took was for somebody to come in, greet them by their name, and ask them if they’d had a good day. It’s a profoundly different experience. It seemed as though it’s an area where small changes could have a big effect on people’s lives.
Cait, I have a business idea that I’ve talked to a urologist friend about. I want you to join us. It’s a vasectomy business.
Tell me more.
It’s probably too much of a digression for us, but it’s a perfect example. This is a major change in a man’s life and a very intimate moment. It’s too often a sterile medical procedure. It deserves a lot more compassion and thoughtfulness. I have this idea that you could create an environment that does the snipping, but also is one that honors this choice and is dignified in many ways. Let’s get rich.
You’re right. It is a big decision. It’s made a joke of, or it’s trivialized.
It’s treated like a regular medical intervention that does not feel regular.
We have a lot of those.
What Is Dignity?
I think we do, too. Women talk about the flip side of going to OBGYN. What is dignity?
We’ll start with what it’s not. It gets mixed up with a lot. It is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is contingent. If you feel like the world tells you that you’ve done okay or haven’t done okay, that’s going to affect your self-esteem. If you feel socially accepted or not socially accepted, that changes your self-esteem. It’s very variable. Since 1948 or so, it’s also not anymore associated with social hierarchy in general. There was a time when if you were dignified, let’s say in aristocratic Great Britain, it was because you were the duke, the earl, or something. You had some actual title.
After the Second World War, the world started rejecting that concept of dignity because they said that if we allow that some people are inherently worth more than others, we get to a very bad place. What we want to do instead is say everyone has dignity. Everyone has equal inherent worth. The question is whether a given experience or environment affirms that dignity or denies that dignity. The position that we come to in the work that we write is to say that it is true that every human has equal inherent worth. Failing to affirm that, or worse, denying it is a lie. You’re getting it wrong.
If people want to be right about humans, then they should want to affirm this. Anything else takes us down paths that are built on a lie about differences between people that we don’t think exist. We take that position. There are those who want to say they affirm human dignity, but then they’ll start creating caveats like, “You need to earn respect.” Respect and dignity are often used synonymously. They’ll say, “What if somebody does something terrible? Can’t they destroy their own dignity?”
People certainly can take actions that make it harder to have their inherent value affirmed. They can hide it. They can distort it. I would still say inherently, it’s there. It’s an interesting conversation because what you find quickly is that there are people who are very uncomfortable with this idea. They want to create differences and distinctions. It takes you to weird places in conversation somehow. Having a language for it at least gives us something to talk about and where someone else stands, which turns out to be useful.
Let’s unpack this. What is the motivation that underlies the institution or individual who wants these differences? What do you find?
It goes very deep. Sometimes, it’s a lot of zero-sum thinking. It is the language that comes into the conversation as well. If I affirm your dignity, doesn’t that make it impossible to affirm my own or one group’s dignity? For example, this is a certain group that has been treated as though they didn’t have equal inherent worth, and we’re going to recognize that, then others say, “That takes something away from me.” The zero-sum thinking drives people to want to differentiate.
One of the things I’ve become focused on is how focused people are on their status, whether it is the status of their group or the status of them as an individual. Some of the status games are zero-sum. You’re fighting for resources. People do these perverse, manipulative things oftentimes in order to assert their status, to feel good about themselves, and to win. I could see how that motivation could persevere when it comes to this adjacent topic.
Sometimes, people truly do have beliefs about what alters a person’s worth. For example, in your domain, we come back to the solo movement. There are conversations where people say things like, “If people have children, they have created more worth in the world. Therefore, they should be treated with a different kind of respect. They should have different kinds of opportunities.” That’s part of what happens there. There is an implicit belief that in doing so, they have created more worth in the world. It’s an interesting conversation to have. I would rather know someone believes that and have the conversation than not know they believe it. Without this concept of dignity’s inherent value, it’s hard to talk about the way they see the universe.
I come back to a conversation I had with a retired Navy pilot who was a pilot during Desert Storm. His squadron commander called everybody together and said, “We’re sending four pilots to Iraq,” or wherever in the Middle East. “I’m looking for volunteers. If I don’t get any volunteers, here’s the list of who is going.” The four names on the list were all single pilots. They were not married. They didn’t have kids. Their life was worth less in the eyes of their squadron commander because of their singlehood.
It is interesting and disturbing, but you understand where the thought process comes from. If he passes away, then there are kids who can’t eat. You understand pragmatically. We know that there’s some sense to that, but it would be interesting to have a conversation about that decision-making process.
I stumbled upon this fascinating character from the fourteenth century in Japan. This guy’s name is Ikkyū. It’s a crazy story. He was a Zen master. He was a poet. He was a drinker. He would go to brothels. He was this robust character. He was playing outside vibe lines, bending and breaking the rules, and so on. One of the most appealing things about Ikkyū was that in a world where there was very clear status, he treated everyone with dignity. It didn’t matter if you were a beggar or a Zen master. He treated you the same. He saw your humanness in him.
I’ll go to a much lower-brow literature source. If you’ve ever heard of the Bosch series, Harry Bosch is a detective. In those books, what the character often says is, “Everybody matters, or nobody matters.” It’s his credo. It’s a light detective fiction, but it’s supposed to explain his motivation that, “Whoever it is that we’ve lost, they deserve to have somebody look into what happened.” It sounds like a similar idea.
How Dignity Is Created From External Sources
Am I correct in hearing you when you say that dignity is created from external sources?
Yes, and that’s always an interesting conversation. We can do things to affirm our dignity. We can talk about that. That’s part of crafting your life to recognize your worth as your autonomous force. In many cases, the environment we’re in communicates to us how much we are valued. We bring up these three things. The first one is autonomy. We all have had that experience. Probably the one that we relate to very easily as adults is autonomy.
What we find is that between the ages of 35 and 54, it’s when we feel like we don’t have freedom and choice. We feel like our dignity is most threatened. If you go into an environment and people say, “You have no choice. This is what’s going to happen to you,” it sends an immediate feeling that you must not have any value here. Someone else has more value because they get to control what’s going on. It’s interesting because there are very subtle ways that this happens.
If you go into a retail space and there’s only one traffic flow, you’re only allowed to go in one direction. There are those of us who will immediately be like, “I want to go the other way.” It’s the high reactance people. There are subtle cues everywhere about whether you’re allowed to control what’s happening. Often, we have more control than we think, but people don’t tell us. What we found in our experiments is that even telling people you have some control changes the way that they feel. There are a lot of things we can do there.
The next thing is fairness. We’ve used the word equality, but that tends to get sticky for people. We have complicated conversations. We mean this inherent feeling that if I put in the same amount as you, I’ll get the same amount out. That’s fairness. Price fairness is like that. We often don’t know what the rules are. We infer that things are unfair. They may or may not be. That’s an interesting decision. Do we tell people the rules or not? You probably should, and then show people that you’re applying them evenly.
The third thing is being seen and heard. We find that for people under 34 or so, the primary violation of dignity comes from not being seen and heard and being excluded. When we are older, once we’re in the 60 and up age range, people start to feel invisible. In the middle, autonomy is important. Fairness is something we become sensitive to when we’re seven months old. It carries all the way through.
You have autonomy, fairness, and representation. The weight that each of those gets is somewhat dependent on development or where you are, at least with regard to autonomy and representation, in your lifespan.
That’s what we’ve seen anyway. We could do more research in that area, but that has been the pattern that comes out.
With these forces that lead someone to not feel like they have control, their life is unfair, or they’re not being seen, there are institutions. You can imagine the church, government, or education. The workplace is something that you’re very keen on studying and understanding. There is the marketplace, the way businesses treat you in retail environments, advertising, and so on. This sounds to me like something that not many of these institutions are paying much attention to. To your point, the old dual model of reason versus emotion overlooks this spirit. I’ve been reading Plato also. I like this tripartite model, which I was not educated on.
It makes more sense. You think about something that humiliates you. You’re in a situation where you feel like, “Something went very wrong, and I feel humiliated.” Is it rational? Maybe. Is it an emotion? Is it just going to disappear? No, it’s going to stick around. There has to be something else that gets activated in those moments. I’ve been encouraged by how many companies I talked to are interested in this. They may be seeing it from a somewhat cynical point of view, like, “This is a way we can differentiate somehow,” but that’s fine. I’ll take it.
What we do find is that when an ad, for example, communicates more respect for people, it’s also more persuasive. If people have their agency affirmed in a situation, they’re much happier with their choice, even if it’s something they don’t want to do, like paying taxes. It does have the business case pieces that go along with it. I’ve seen that most receptivity is in pharmaceuticals because they’re working with people who are in a state of vulnerability, particularly if you have rare and ultra-rare diseases. They’re very open to figuring out how to build dignity into, let’s say, your chemotherapy treatment, which can feel hard on your dignity. They’re surprisingly open to it, particularly if they feel like it’ll make them money. In general, it is for the sake of their customers’ well-being.
I am doing advocacy work via the media. I am doing a show here. I do think that at least in America, the United States, businesses are faster to change than other institutions. I could see that being a place where it could take hold more readily and more easily, and be more transferable to being measurable.
That’s it. You can measure it because we can all say how much we feel respected. It’s an easy metric. Why not take it and see if it explains something you weren’t otherwise capturing? You’re right. In more established institutions, non-market institutions, you get a lot more defensiveness. For example, it’s a market institution, but say a hospital, they’ll say, “We can’t give patients agency. We have to control that. We have regulations. We have rules. Everything will go wrong. It’s a very complex system. We can’t do it.”
There is more resistance because there’s more institutional investment in things working the way that they do. What people have to realize is that you can do it in nearly trivial ways, and it still works. You can still say, “Would you rather sit here or there? Would you like a blanket?” You don’t have to have a blanket. “Would you like a red piece of paper or a green piece of paper?” It doesn’t have to challenge your entire structure.
My friends who have kids do this all the time. They’re like, “Do you want X or Y?” They give the kid a choice, but it’s a very limited choice.
Carrots or broccoli? That’s our intuitive sense of how we’re going to make our kid feel like they matter. It’s funny. A few years ago, I was at Qdoba. I was standing in a line. This woman had probably a four or five-year-old kid. She was asking them, “Do you want black beans? Do you want pinto beans? Do you want rice? Do you want this? Do you want that?” Suddenly, the kid exploded into tears because all those choices were completely overwhelming. That’s interesting, too. Infinite choice doesn’t always translate to agency. We can feel completely overwhelmed.
That’s what you’ve seen with Southwest Airlines. They thought they had this whole thing where you got to choose your seat when you got on. It created so much anxiety for people. Let’s move that agency up to when you book the ticket, choose your seat, then you still get agency, but you get it in a context where you don’t have to confront this whole mass of other people’s preferences. It makes a lot more sense.
Harnessing And Maintaining Autonomy
Especially with someone who has freakishly long legs, flying Southwest was not beneficial. They were like, “I thought there were eight seats that I would want, and there were four that I really wanted. I’ll pay for that privilege.” Singleism doesn’t rise to the level of racism or sexism, or heterosexism. Nonetheless, it is something that people experience and feel. There are material costs associated with being single, over a thousand different laws, regulations, and benefits that married people get that single people don’t. It can activate this feeling, but most of it is about feeling dismissed, feeling ignored, being omitted, and being left out. I suspect that the partnered life also experiences moments of indignity. I don’t know the right way to say that.
If you feel disrespected. I think that’s right. It’s evenly spread around. It’s just very different ways. To your point, because society understands couples so much better, and they know what to do with them, it’s easier to be included in many ways. We have to be a little bit careful because some of that is certainly not intentional disrespect, but we experience it the same way anyway. It doesn’t matter if somebody deliberately created the environment that way or not. I still feel the same way. That makes it tricky because it can make us angry and resentful in a case where we’re not sure where we should direct that.
That’s what disrespect does. You look for some source of disrespect because we all know we’re valuable. Our self-esteem might go up and down, but we fundamentally know that we have worth. When the world starts telling us we don’t, we try to figure out what’s going on. Is it because they’re bad? Is it because they’re dumb? Is it because they’re blind?
Is it because they’re a bigot?
There are some centuries of institutional inertia that I’m running into, which is a much less satisfying explanation. I think it’s right. The good news about being in control of one’s partnership status is that we can more proactively build dignity into our relationships. For example, I know that, for a high reactance person, autonomy and freedom are super important. I didn’t fully understand how much freedom is baked into who I am, frankly, until I was in my second marriage. It’s objectively very good for a good person. There’s still this part of me that feels like I’m driven by obligation and duty. That wasn’t their fault. That’s my wiring that I bristle against a set structure and a routine. It’s hard for me.
People have different thresholds for what they need. What I realized was that this structure doesn’t work for me because I feel like my autonomy is restricted so easily. Even when nobody is trying to do it, I feel it. I’m super sensitive to it. What I had to realize was that to have a relationship that works, I need to feel that I still maintain that autonomy, and I don’t get sucked into giving it up. It took me a long time to figure out how critical that was for my sense of dignity. Different things are more valuable to other people.
Some people don’t want all that autonomy. That’s too much pressure.
What they would rather have is a sense of predictability. There’s nothing wrong with that. The safety that comes from that is extremely valuable. If you understand that about yourself and you have that conversation, whether you’re solo, coupled, or permanently coupled, it’s still a good conversation to have.
We’re cut from the same cloth. When I think back to my romantic relationships, when they ended, there was always heartbreak, sadness, some disappointment, and loss, but there was always a little bit of me that felt free. I felt released. I could get back to the life that clicks in a little bit better there.
It’s a huge responsibility. You have to do something with your freedom, and you can live a lousy life. You can live a terrible life married, a terrible life single, a great life married, or a great life single. That’s not the determining factor. The question is what you do with the freedom that you have. For me, it would always take a while to reclaim that for myself and to say, “You’ve got it. Now, what are you going to do?”
Let’s be frank. We are talking about these two things simultaneously. The society, which is made up of these institutions and these cultural norms, and the individual who is operating within society. Going back to our previous comment, society is built for the average. It’s designed to get you to behave in particular ways that are good for society and not always good for the individual. You end up getting these perspectives, like the Peter Pan syndrome. I don’t know what the female version of the Peter Pan syndrome is, but I’m sure it’s been thrown your way. It is like, “Come on, Cait. It’s time to grow up. It’s time to put away childish things.”
I’ve done that a few times. It does not work out.
Peter Pan is free. It is this notion. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing the solo life, the partner life, or some hybrid, but what do you do with that time? I agree that a grown man who drinks, gambles, womanizes, and is living this very shallow life is probably not living his best life. It is a little bit of gambling, a little bit of drinking, a little bit of womanizing, and mixed in with some volunteering.
That’s exactly where you end up with autonomy. We’re talking about freedom in the sense that we’re not constrained. What you see in the research is that one of the most powerful ways to affirm one’s dignity is to help others. You are using your agency in a way that allows you to show who you are. You get representation. You’re in a position where you’re not subordinate to someone else. You’re in a position where you’re lifting someone. You’re creating more fairness in a sense. The best dignity-affirming projects are not those that are irresponsible. That’s not the point of autonomy.
The point is that you choose the ways in which you present yourself to the world. You take actions that create more justice from your perspective. You see other people, too. There’s a lot of listening. Listening to people in itself affirms dignity. If you want to create a dignified environment, you’ve got to do all this stuff for other people, too. There are many cases where people give up their autonomy when they’re completely driven by their short-term impulses. If you let system one take over, you lose your autonomy. That’s what addiction is. It’s not as simple as, “Do whatever you want.”
That’s not what will make us feel respected or make us be able to respect ourselves. It does have to do with making choices about the constraints we accept because they allow us to develop in an interesting way in the world. When I look at people who have children, that’s what they’ve accepted. They’ve said, “Yes, this is an enormous set of constraints, but it’s going to help me be who I feel I authentically am,” best case. That seems to me like a legitimate reason to choose a certain structure of life. You also have people who fall into things. It wasn’t autonomous. It’s a fight to make that all work for them.
I love this idea of understanding the relationship escalator and then choosing it, being like, “Yes, these rules work for me. These milestones work. This is going to be my best life.” What a powerful way to approach an important relationship by being, “I’ve considered all the options. I even experimented with them. This one is right for me.”
It’s hard because we do keep developing. It’s very hard to know what your future self is going to feel like. That’s when you get into the things that are not just tropes, like the midlife crisis car. It’s hard to know who you’re going to become. You have to be willing to deal with that uncertainty. I have a friend who’s talked to me before about relationships. She’s like, “What if I get into this and I find out I like somebody else better?” My answer is, “You figure that out when you get there. You’re going to have to have the courage to change if it’s no longer the right thing for you.” There’s the great Montaigne, in Essays. He says something in the tone of, “The most important thing is to be willing to give up who you are for who you’re becoming,” but it’s very hard.
Yes, especially as you get older. You’re often rewarded for being the person that you’ve been in the past.
It’s confusing to people when you change.
How Dignity Impacts Your Relationships
This idea is so fascinating because it’s hard to think about dignity without thinking about others. Let’s use singles as a case study here to talk about people’s experiences. How do they affirm their dignity? How do we go about influencing others when they act in a way that minimizes it? I’ve done a little bit of writing about singles in the marketplace. One of the things I say is, “One of the easiest things you can do is show thriving singles in your advertising.” You just say, “We see you. We’re the brand for you. We’re the solution for you.” So often, it’s families happily driving the car. If it is a single, they’re shown in some sad, lonely way.
They’re looking for someone. Be a single, but you’d better be on the prowl. That’s completely right. This is a problem that multiple identities have struggled with. Interestingly, if you look at historically excluded groups, Black men, for example, their appearance in advertising started going up maybe ten years ago because people recognized there was a representation problem. For a while, their appearance in the media and advertising was always as superheroes, these extraordinary, very special people. The call then came in a few years ago to say, “You just need to show depictions of Black men with everyday virtues, everyday normal people that don’t make this separation.”
People had overshot by saying, “We’re showing superheroes. We’re showing athletes. We’re showing rockstars,” to bring it back and say, “It’s just normal. It’s different but also in the same world as everybody else.” Maybe you’re saying we’re in a similar place. If you’re going to show a single, you have to over-explain why they’re single or they’re super sexy. They’re only single momentarily or something like that.
There’s that trying to advocate to these institutions and other people, then there’s advocating to yourself, I suspect. What are the conversations like? You are a single person. You know lots of single people who are living in a world built for two. How is it that they might feel not seen, not treated unfairly, and not given autonomy, and then how do you approach this conversation?
Something you alluded to a few minutes ago is that being aware of it in our relationships is important. If we understand which of these things is most important to us, we can directly advocate for that. You can say, “For me, fairness is important. It’s important that in a relationship, I feel like you’re setting stuff up half the time. I’m setting stuff up half the time, or whatever that is.” Having that conversation, advocating there is important.
Appropriately diagnosing the problems that arise when we don’t feel respected in terms of these three things can help you have a much more productive conversation. If I’m interacting with a business, it’s interesting. I can’t say I’ve ever done that. The closest that I’ve gotten is when you set up these travel packages, and I think you’ve talked about this, there’s a supplement for a single person. There are these interesting conversations where I say, “I eat less, though. I take up less space on the bus. I’m less, so can you help me understand what that supplement does?”
That feels very unfair to people.
We have this interesting conversation where people say, “You’re going to spend less. Therefore, there’s less potential for the business to make money because you’re only one person.” They may not change anything, but it’s an interesting conversation. Maybe there’s a little bit of rethinking whether that makes a lot of sense. In other cases, I don’t know. I would love to hear from people what they do, if they do anything. What we probably do is affirm our dignity.
If our environment’s not going to feed us, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. What we find in our research is that when one piece is threatened, we’ll go get the other two. For example, if I go into a store and it seems like people are cutting in line, I’m not going to try to restore fairness. What I’m going to do is complain. I’m going to use my voice instead of trying to fix the actual thing that’s broken. We probably do that somewhat naturally in these environments rather than trying to fix the piece.
That should be better. We just adjust to something else. For example, if they’re going to charge me more for a single supplement, then I will ask for more variation in what I get. I’ll take autonomy to make up for what I see as a lack of fairness. I pick up the phone, call, and talk to them. I turn up my voice. Even if I can’t fix the fairness, I can fix something else. I feel seen and heard.
That makes good sense. The problem is that most time, people have this feeling. “This feels unfair. I don’t feel seen.” Because we don’t talk about it and it’s not part of our vernacular, they sit with it. They don’t think that there is a potential solution, at least to help you feel better about it.
You find the piece that’s broken, and you go with the other two. See what you can do there because often, you can’t take on that piece that isn’t working directly. It’s an interesting conversation if you try.
It seems to me that probably, more valuable conversations are with the people who you’re close with, like your family, your friends, your employer, your boss, or whoever it might be. You sense you have this immediate response that feels awry.
What an interesting conversation to say to somebody, “I don’t feel seen and heard here,” and then say, “How do we fix it? What else can we do?” “I feel like I want to have control over what’s happening here. I don’t have any control.” I don’t even know what people would say if you said that to them, but I think they’ll kick into solution-finding mode. They’ll be like, “Okay.”
A lot of these things are well-meaning, or at the very least, they’re automatic. The classic one is that you get divorced, and you stop getting invited to the dinner party. That can be hurtful. That feels unfair. “I need to have a partner in order to be included in this fun event.” You are saying to a friend, “You can invite whoever you want to your dinner parties. I don’t get invited anymore. Have I done something wrong?”
I wouldn’t even go to, “Have I done something wrong?” That’s to blame. All of a sudden, we’re in this position where we’re going to have to allocate what the problem. What you say from a dignity perspective is, “I feel like suddenly, I’m not as valuable to you as I was,” or “Just so you know, here’s my preference. My preference would be to be invited if it makes sense.” They might be thinking, “It’s going to be awkward. They’re going to feel uncomfortable.” Take the autonomy back in that situation and say, “I completely understand. Do whatever you’d like to do, but if it’s up to me, this is what I would love.”
They should be inviting us solos to these dinner parties. We’re so much more interesting and entertaining than these couples. My friend Darwyn’s mom, Mama Metzger, sent me a text. She said, “You’re not the third wheel. You’re the steering wheel.”
That’s nice. I ran into this a few months ago because a friend invited me to do something with a bunch of other couples. She said, “I hope it’s okay to invite you.” I said, “Of course, but I understand you guys sometimes do things. It’s probably awkward to have an extra person.” It was so interesting because what she said was, “It’s not about awkwardness. It’s just that we all know you have very large boundaries.” I thought, “That’s so interesting and completely true.” They knew that if they invited me a lot, I would start feeling crowded because that’s how I am. The whole situation was reconstructed.
Cait, you’re such a solo.
I was in a relationship with a fantastic person. In the end, the conclusion we reached was that he was a dog, and I was a cat. The cat metaphor works sometimes. I explain to people at the beginning that I’m a cat, and they get it. You’re a cat person or a dog person.
With this idea of relationship design, one of the things that I will say to someone is, “I like you. I enjoy spending time with you. The fact that I want to go off and do these things is in no way a reflection of how I feel about you, this relationship, or the value that it has. It has just to do with me living my best life.”
That’s autonomy. That’s you saying, “I see myself. I have listened to myself. I’m taking autonomy over my own life because that’s fair. That’s my job, not yours.” You put that on somebody else. It’s not fair to put that on somebody else, but we do it all the time. I’m in a relationship with somebody who understands that what I need is to go hang around in Malaysia by myself and not talk to anybody for a week. That’s my ideal vacation. That’s very hard for a lot of people to understand. They feel excluded. It doesn’t work.
Cait sends me these sweaty pictures of her out in rural Malaysia, out on her own, no phone or anything. It brings such joy to me. When I have that conversation, I also say, “I understand this may not work for you. You might have a desire that I can’t fulfill without making myself less happy, small, or whatever the term is. That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with you wanting this. Can we find that sliver in the Venn where your desires and my desires are able to match up?”
That is such a dignity-affirming conversation because you are presenting someone with a real choice. “This is what you’re choosing in a relationship with me.” That gives them autonomy, whereas if you don’t have that conversation, it’s certainly not fair because you have more information than they do about what the options are here. You’re going to let them drift along, not even realizing there’s a choice to be made.
You’re presenting an environment where another person can, with full self-respect, choose or not choose to be part of this. It is a lot better than letting them drift along and then feeling like you’ve disrespected them. “You’re not going to get what you thought you were getting,” or “No, I’m not on the same page as you.” That’s when people feel disrespected. That’s when they say things like, “You’ve wasted my time.” There’s a lot in that conversation that creates an environment for everybody to have their dignity affirmed.
Standing Up For Your Authentic Self
I mentioned on the Solo community site that we were going to be talking. I had a couple of readers chime in. They’re not questions per se, but they’re worth having you comment on them. One member of the community said, “I had to message a neighbor to stop trying to set me up with someone. It felt like a dignity win, but I wrestle with whether to speak up when people make comments about my singlehood or whether I should just laugh it off.”
That’s a matter of representation. What’s happening in dignity language is that they are seeing you as an incomplete person. You don’t see yourself as an incomplete person. It’s not being seen. It’s being seen accurately. What you’re saying is, “Please don’t see me as a person who needs that,” step one. The other piece of it is autonomy. You’re not choosing to be put in this situation. They’re choosing it for you. These things become connected to each other. When you speak up, you’re addressing both of those things. It is to say, “This is who I am. I’m not a person who sees myself as incomplete in that way, nor do I need you to impose something on me.”
Probably, the seeing-yourself communication is going to be easier for them to take because nobody wants to feel like they’re forcing somebody into something. That’s a wonderful conversation to have. I can also imagine the awkwardness because they think they’re helping you. They feel like they’re affirming their dignity by doing this. What they’re not realizing is that they’re missing out. It’s not the right audience for what they want to do. They may want to do something gracious and helpful, but that’s not it.
If one wanted to make sure that their neighbor felt affirmed in this, you would say, “That’s not something that I need, but here is something that you could do for me.” That person probably does want to help. They do want to be supportive. You say, “Here’s what you could do for me that would be helpful. Why don’t we have wine on the porch once a week, hang out, and catch up?” That way, they still feel like they can do good for you, and that they want to do so in a well-intentioned way.
This is interesting. It reveals the complexity of this topic. Another member of the community wrote, “I stopped bending over backwards to explain being a solo and aro ace.” For people who are unaware, this is short for being aromantic and asexual, meaning they don’t experience romantic or sexual attraction. They go on and say, “If someone can’t believe I know myself, that’s on them.”
That again is this question of how people see you versus how you see yourself. You’re pretty close to you, so you probably have a front row seat. They can’t see it. When they don’t know about you, what we know from research is that they project themselves onto you. That’s how we fill in blanks. We draw from our source. That’s what’s happening. They’re misrepresenting you. That creates a whole bunch of other problems.
I can understand the decision of saying, “I don’t need to fix what you’re seeing. Maybe I even can’t. Maybe your assumptions are so strong that there’s no point.” I guess the question is whether you’re then able to somehow manage the implications of that misperception. Because people see you that way or they project themselves onto you, they, for example, do want to keep setting you up with people. We’re going to break the cycle. Is it our job to help other people see us in the way we want to be seen?
That’s up to the individual.
That’s the other thing. You have three parts. Representation is off. You can’t fix that, but what you can do is make sure you preserve your autonomy and make sure that this doesn’t put you in some unequal position that’s uncomfortable for you. Stop telling the story, but if your dignity starts to feel wobbly, see if you can use those other two pieces to make sure that you are preserving your self-respect as much as you feel is warranted. It’s a valid step to say, “I don’t need to fix their representation.” You also don’t deserve to have that bleed over into other things.
I hear this with other underrepresented groups about how exhausting it can be to constantly be correcting stereotypes and so on. At some point, it’s easier to be like, “Have a nice day.”
That is saying, “Whatever’s out in the environment doesn’t have implications for how I see myself, so I don’t care.” Practically speaking, if their misperceptions are going to change the options you have in life or are going to change whether you’re in a fair or unfair situation, one would still want to see what they can do to make sure that doesn’t become a toxic misrepresentation.
Taking Control Of Your Solo Life
I want to end by asking you if you have some advice, in general, for how to build a life that affirms dignity, specifically for solos. I’ll tie it in with a final comment from a reader that one of the very simple things that she started doing was giving herself a solo anniversary every year. It was a way to affirm that, “I’ve made the right choice. Couples get their anniversaries. I get my anniversary.”
You can see why it works. It is because it’s chosen. It’s about, “I am taking control over how I interpret my life. It is seeing myself and recognizing my own good decision, my own identity. This is truly who I am. It’s fair because you all get anniversaries all the time, so I’m going to get my own.” It’s perfect. When I talk to companies about this, what’s fun about it is sometimes, we see why the stuff that works works so freaking well. That’s a great example.
I would love it if people shared those things. What are the things that hit all three notes at the same time? Is that such a simple, brilliant thing to do? It’s a great idea. The first thing to do is to see if you have a differential value for one of these three things. For me, it’s autonomy. If people don’t want to talk to me, that’s okay. If they don’t want to recognize me, that’s okay. As long as I feel like I can leave the situation, I’ll manage it.
It’s different for different people. For some people, the fairness of a situation is critical to them. That’s important. For other people, “I need to feel heard. I have a story that I need to tell. I need to be understood,” or “I don’t feel confident. I don’t feel safe. It’s not okay.” The first thing to think about is where you fall on there to the extent that you want to be able to share that with people. Having a language for that is a good first step. Beyond that, also recognize that sometimes, what people are treating as small annoyances is much deeper. This is a common thing where people say, “I didn’t say anything bad. I didn’t do anything bad. I just said X or I just did X.”
If you find yourself responding strongly to something, consider whether it’s a dignity issue. Something that is quite rational is if you recognize threats to your dignity, to remove yourself from that situation. There’s no reason that you should trust a situation that tells you you’re not worth it. If somebody is communicating to you that they think that you’re not worth as much as they are, it’s going to be a big uphill battle to get the everyday things like kindness, generosity, grace, and compassion starting from that baseline. If you have that experience, do think about its implications for the other goals in your life and how it might get in the way.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
What I hear you saying is that the key is to understand where your triggers are. You have a choice. You can remove yourself from the situation, or you could seek to fix it and decide which of those is best for you in that way. Cait, thank you so much for meeting. I’ve always enjoyed your work and your intellect. I’m happy that we’ve been able to connect around these perspectives. You’re a little bit of a mirror for me in some ways.
I would love to hear what other people in the community’s experiences are with this topic and the things that they do. That in itself would be an interesting exploration. Other people’s experiences are richer and more varied than mine or yours. That’s a great thing that you’ve done to bring people together to share how they navigate these things.
We have a thread called episode discussions where people can do this. I encourage the readers who are signed up to go there and share their experiences. For people who are intrigued, go to PeterMcGraw.org/Solo and send me a note. Thanks so much, Cait.
Thank you.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Marketplace Dignity
- Cait Lamberton on LinkedIn
- Solo – Peter McGraw
- Waiting – Part 1
- Relationship Design (Again)
- The Republic
- Good Economics for Hard Times
- Essays
- Cait Lamberton on the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School’s Website
About Cait Lamberton
Cait Lamberton is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at the Wharton School.
She’s a leading expert on consumer behavior and co-author of Marketplace Dignity, which explores how systems can better honor human worth.
Her research spans representation, agency, and fairness—and she’s on a mission to build more humane, dignity-affirming spaces for all.