The Hunger for the World: Or Why We So Desperately Want to Belong

By Pedram Zolgadri

The Hunger for the World: Or Why We So Desperately Want to Belong

45,000 years ago, a man lived in a cave in what is now Iraq. His right arm was crippled, one eye was likely blind, and his leg was deformed. He couldn’t hunt. He could barely walk. And he lived longer than almost everyone around him.

Because his group carried him. For years.

The researchers who found his bones in the Shanidar Cave gave him a nickname: Nandy. His injuries had healed—all of them. That’s only possible when others feed you, keep you warm, and protect you, even though you can’t give anything back. Nandy wasn’t a hero. Nandy was loved.

And that’s exactly what this text is about. The desire to belong is neither a weakness nor vanity. It is a survival mechanism, older than any language. Those who belonged survived. Those who were cast out died. That was the deal, for a hundred thousand years. And our brains have never abandoned it.

Everyone knows this feeling. Hardly anyone talks about it. That’s why I’m writing this down.

The Smile We Don’t Mean

An ARTE documentary about popularity begins with a sentence that hurts because it’s true: “We laugh, even when we don’t feel like it. We praise food that doesn’t taste good.”

You know it. So do I.

We torture ourselves at the gym for bodies that others are supposed to judge. We buy cars that nobody needs. We post pictures from a vacation where we argued. And running through it all is the same quiet question, like an operating system in the background: Am I popular?

The question doesn’t go away with success. It gets louder. Felix Lobrecht, one of the country’s most successful comedians, says in the same documentary: “Well, I’ve actually always felt a bit like an alien my whole life—like I never really belonged.”

A man whom millions listen to. Feels like an alien.

If even people who fill arenas to capacity aren’t sure whether they’re liked, then perhaps the “Am I popular?” question can’t be answered at all. Then it becomes a constant state of being. And then it’s worth understanding where it comes from.

The answer doesn’t start with Instagram. It starts with the scanner.

The wound the scanner revealed

In 2003, a research team led by psychologist Naomi Eisenberger placed participants in a brain scanner and had them play a simple video game: three players, one ball. The game was called Cyberball. For a while, the ball is passed around. Then, without explanation, it stops coming. The other two just keep passing it back and forth between themselves.

That’s all. No argument. No insults. Just a ball that never comes back.

Inside the scanner, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex lit up—a region that also becomes active during physical pain. The stronger the activity, the more miserable the excluded players felt. The study appeared in Science ; its title is a question: “Does Rejection Hurt?” The data’s answer: yes. Rejection hurts, and it does so in neural circuits that overlap with those involved in physical injury. Our brain treats being kicked out of the group like a wound.

And this effect isn’t a laboratory fluke. A 2015 meta-analysis evaluated 120 Cyberball studies involving 11,869 participants. The pain is consistent. It occurs even when people are told in advance that a computer—not a person—is excluding them. A program.

We know it’s not real. It still hurts.

Think of the moments you’ve never forgotten. When you were picked last in gym class. When everyone was at the party except you. When you got fired. The brain doesn’t file these moments under “unpleasant.” It files them under “danger.”

Why? To answer that, we have to go back to the cave.

Nandy Wasn’t an Isolated Case: Belonging Was the World’s Oldest Form of Insurance

In 2022, a team from the Max Planck Institute published a study in Nature that, for the first time, revealed a real Neanderthal community. DNA from the Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia: 13 individuals, including a father and his daughter. The analysis revealed that this community consisted of approximately 20 people.

Twenty. That’s not a society. That’s a big dinner party.

In a world like that, the group was everything. Food, warmth, shelter, partners, raising children: none of it could be done alone. In a famous 1995 paper, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary summarized what follows from this. The need for belonging is not a luxury of the soul. It is a basic human motive, as fundamental as hunger and thirst.

And that is why the fear of being cast out is as old as we are. In that world, banishment was not simply a move. It was, in all likelihood, a death sentence in installments. Hunting alone, keeping watch alone, being sick alone. No one could endure that for long.

Nandy survived because his group decided otherwise. Archaeologist Penny Spikins and her colleagues have analyzed dozens of such cases—healed fractures, cared-for sick individuals—and have arrived at a quiet, profound conclusion: caregiving was widespread among Neanderthals. These supposedly primitive people supported their weak.

Perhaps that is the oldest definition of “home” we have. The place where they feed you when you can no longer contribute.

The Horde Has Just Changed Its Outfit

Now you might say: Nice story, but we don’t hunt mammoths anymore. When I’m hungry, I go shopping. Isn’t this hunger for belonging just a relic, like wisdom teeth?

A neuroscientist sums it up in a single sentence in the ARTE documentary: “The fact is, we still live in a horde.”

Humanity has always known how deadly exclusion is. That’s why it turned it into a weapon. In ancient Athens, starting around 508 B.C., citizens would carve a name into clay shards once a year. If 6,000 shards were collected, the person named had to leave the city. Ten years of exile, without trial, without having committed a crime. The ostracism was the harshest punishment the world’s first democracy had to offer. Not imprisonment. Exclusion.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm compared around 50 hunter-gatherer cultures and found the same escalation ladder everywhere: first gossip, then mockery, then ostracism, then expulsion. The group regulates who belongs. It’s always been that way.

And today? The same ladder, new names. The group chat that keeps going without you. The meeting you aren’t invited to. The follower counter that publicly counts how many people want you. The horde hasn’t disappeared. It’s just changed its costume.

What has remained the same: the chemistry behind it.

The Chemistry of Recognition: A Friendly Glance Is a Dose

When others accept us, something very specific happens in our minds. The prefrontal cortex constantly evaluates how our social environment reacts to us. If the outcome is positive, the motivation system kicks in and releases a cocktail of chemicals: dopamine, which drives us forward. Endogenous opioids, which dull pain and create a sense of well-being. Oxytocin, which fosters bonding.

A friendly glance is a dose. A compliment is a dose. A “like” is a dose.

This is not a metaphor. In 2016, a team led by Lauren Sherman at UCLA showed 32 teenagers Instagram-like photos—including their own—while they were in an MRI scanner. The researchers had manipulated the “like” counts. When the teens saw their own photos with lots of likes, the nucleus accumbens—the core of the reward system—lit up. And what’s more: the same photos were liked more often when they appeared to already have many likes. Even photos featuring alcohol and cigarettes. The herd in our heads clicks along.

In the ARTE documentary, the neuroscientist says something that’s been stuck in my head for days: “The will to live—the desire to simply be here—only arises when certain systems in the brain are active, which we call motivational systems.”

Read that again. The will to live itself depends on this system. And the system runs on recognition.

Anyone who understands this also understands why people can become addicted to it. And anyone who understands this can build a business model around it.

That’s exactly what happened.

The Confession from the Engine Room

There’s no need to accuse tech companies of malicious intent. You can simply quote what their own people say.

Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, at an event in Philadelphia in 2017: The platform is a “social-validation feedback loop” that exploits a “weakness in human psychology.” Users are given “a little dopamine hit every now and then” through likes and comments. His words. Not mine.

Three years later, Tim Kendall, Facebook’s former head of monetization, testified before the U.S. Congress and said under oath: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook.” We copied the tobacco industry’s playbook and designed our product to be addictive from the very beginning.

The tobacco industry sold nicotine. This industry sells us. Our oldest craving—the craving for the crowd—divided into little red numbers.

And we’re buying into it. The 2025 JIM Study, which is representative of German teenagers, reports an average of 231 minutes of smartphone screen time per day. That’s nearly four hours. Worldwide, internet users spend an average of over two hours a day on social media alone. And in a survey by the German Economic Institute, more than one-fifth of students said they wanted to become influencers themselves—a profession whose core business is one’s own popularity.

Felix Lobrecht makes a living from both worlds: the stage and the internet. He knows the difference. “Posting random pictures for likes is, of course, also a way of fishing for validation, and it’s kind of like a little methadone fix on the go.”

And the stage? “That live validation right there—it’s always worth more than any internet buzz.”

And regarding recognition itself, he says something that sounds like it came from an addiction clinic: If you take ten shots at once, you’re not set for ten days. “You’ll still need a new dose the next day.”

You can’t save up recognition. That’s the whole trick of the business model.

Caption: The new night’s rest. The reward system never calls it a day.

The Counterargument: Maybe the Phone Isn’t the Culprit

Now for the uncomfortable twist. Because this story isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.

In 2019, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski analyzed data sets from around 350,000 adolescents at Oxford and arrived at a conclusion that would ruin any talk show: Digital technology use explains at most 0.4% of the differences in well-being. The statistical correlation is roughly as strong as the one between unhappiness and eating potatoes. Potatoes. Wearing glasses fared even worse.

The opposing side, led by psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, reanalyzed the same data: If you look not at total screen time but at social media—and specifically at girls—the correlation becomes significantly stronger. Same numbers, different perspective, different conclusion. The debate remains unresolved to this day, and anyone who tells you it’s been settled is trying to sell you something.

And then there’s the experiment Instagram conducted itself. Starting in 2019, the platform hid like counts on a trial basis; internally, the project was called Daisy. The hope was for less pressure and less comparison. In 2021, Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted the result: It changed almost nothing. Not in terms of behavior, not in terms of well-being. Since then, hiding like counts has been a setting that hardly anyone knows about.

What does that mean? Perhaps this: Likes aren’t the poison. They’re just the latest packaging for a hunger as old as Nandy. You can change the packaging as much as you want. The craving remains.

That’s why we need to talk about something else. About what we actually mean when we say “popular.”

“Liked” Is Not the Same as “Popular”: The Two Currencies

In 1982, psychologists John Coie, Kenneth Dodge, and Heide Coppotelli at Duke University asked 531 schoolchildren two simple questions: Who do you like the most? Who do you like the least? The answers yielded five groups that researchers still use today: the Popular, the Rejected, the Ignored, the Average, and the Controversial.

The Controversial group is the most interesting. Many people love them; many people hate them. They’re dominant, they’re the center of attention, and—surprisingly—they have excellent social skills. They can be nice. They use charm just as strategically as they do gossip and pressure.

Sound familiar? That’s the casting profile for half of what’s trending online.

Because here lies the distinction that’s almost always confused. Being liked is one thing: a relationship on equal footing, within a group that knows you. Being popular is something else: status, visibility, admiration from people who’ve never met you. One is closeness. The other is reach.

Lobrecht sums up the second “currency” in a sentence that’s more laconic than any textbook: “If a lot of people like you, then a lot of people also think you’re a piece of crap.”

Reach can be bought, faked, optimized. Closeness cannot. And the tricky part is: the reward system kicks in for both. The applause from strangers briefly feels like a sense of belonging. It isn’t. It’s sugar instead of a meal.

Five Tricks That Work—But Still Won’t Save You.

Can you give it a nudge? Can you manufacture popularity? Research says: to a certain extent, yes. And its findings are so banal that it’s almost funny.

First impressions are formed quickly. In 2006, Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov showed that a 100-millisecond glance at a face is enough to judge whether someone is trustworthy or not, likable or not. One-tenth of a second. More time hardly changes the judgment—it just makes us more certain.

After that, the old mechanisms kick in. Be friendly and helpful—the prosocial behavior of the popular people from the Duke study. Mirror your counterpart; researchers call this mimicry. Ask questions; genuine interest makes you likable. Just be there: When researchers led by Leon Festinger studied a student housing complex at MIT in 1950, they found that friendships require one thing above all else—proximity. Immediate neighbors became friends; three doors down, it was less common. Robert Zajonc distilled this into a principle in 1968: Merely repeated encounters make things and people more likable to us.

And finally, my favorite finding: Don’t be perfect. Elliot Aronson showed in 1966 that a minor mishap—spilled coffee, for example—makes a competent person more likable. What the self-help books leave out: The same blunder makes a mediocre person less likable. The trick only works if you’ve already made a great impression. You can’t fake it.

So: Is all of this achievable? Here’s the catch—and the ARTE documentary articulates it refreshingly clearly. There are people who have mastered this very set of tools to perfection, and yet you’d never want to encounter them: psychopaths. Charm, mirroring, attentiveness—it’s all there, all tools, all geared toward their own advantage.

These tricks create contact. They don’t create a bond. There’s no trick for connection, only a price: time, honesty, vulnerability. And no shortcut in the world will pay that for you.

Lonely in the Most Crowded Century

You only realize how high that price really is when no one pays it.

In a 2010 meta-analysis, psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad evaluated 148 studies involving 308,849 people. The result: People with strong social relationships had a 50% higher probability of survival over the study period. The impact of a lack of social connection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness has a greater effect on mortality than a lack of exercise and a greater effect than being overweight.

Read that again, through the eyes of Nandy’s Cave: The body still remembers. Without a group, you die sooner.

It has now become a top priority. In November 2023, the World Health Organization officially declared loneliness an urgent global health threat and established a dedicated commission. The then-U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, quantified the risks in his report: a 29% increase in heart disease, a 32% increase in strokes, and a 50% increase in dementia among older adults. His take on it: Social connection is as essential as food, water, and shelter.

And now for the part that really hit home for me. Who is hardest hit by loneliness? Not the elderly. The German Loneliness Barometer, the federal government’s first long-term study, shows: Since the pandemic, 18- to 29-year-olds have topped the statistics; in 2021, one in seven of them was considered to be highly affected by loneliness. A 2024 Bertelsmann survey even puts the figure at nearly one in four young people.

The generation with the most connections any human has ever had. The most connected youth in history. And the loneliest since records began.

Four hundred followers. Not a single call when you’re feeling down.

Harvard, 1938: The world’s longest-running study provides the simplest answer

If you’re now wondering what does make a difference, there’s a study designed specifically to answer that question. It’s been running since 1938.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been following people throughout their entire lives for over 85 years. At the start: 724 young men, Harvard students and boys from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Today: over 2,500 people, including partners and children. War, careers, marriages, divorces, illness, death: everything has been tracked, decade by decade.

Robert Waldinger, the study’s fourth director, sums up the key finding in a single sentence. It wouldn’t have taken 85 years to reach this conclusion if we’d believed him. The quality of our relationships is the strongest predictor of happiness and health. Stronger than money. Stronger than fame. How satisfied someone was with their relationships at age 50 predicted their health at age 80 better than their cholesterol levels.

It’s not the number of contacts. It’s the quality of the bonds.

The neuroscientist from the ARTE documentary draws a conclusion that turns the whole popularity circus on its head. “True self-worth is based on having genuine, supportive friendships with a few people who are truly meaningful—not with the masses who cheer me on.”

Not the masses who cheer you on. The few who stay.

A few people. And ourselves.

Back to the cave, one last time.

Nandy never had an audience. No stage. No followers. No reach. From what we know about his life, he had about 20 people. And those 20 people carried him through years when he couldn’t accomplish anything, couldn’t contribute anything, couldn’t give anything back.

That’s the difference it’s all been about. Popularity asks: How many people want me? Belonging asks: Who will catch me when I fall?

You can optimize the first question. You can post, perform, please others, feed the algorithm until the counter goes up. It will never be enough, because recognition can’t be stored. The next morning, you’ll need a new dose.

The second question can only be answered by supporting someone yourself.

Caption: No reach. Just a table where you’d be missed.

The ARTE documentary ends with a sentence that I’m deliberately leaving here because it can’t be improved upon: “It’s enough if a few people really like us. And if we like ourselves.”

If this text reminded you of someone, it’s no coincidence. Give them a call. Today.

Where I’m from and why this topic won’t let me go

I’m a Creative Director. Human psychology is my tool of the trade: When I analyze a persona, map out a customer journey, or conceptualize a commercial, I work every day with the very mechanisms described in this text. Attention, validation, the feeling of being seen. I know how this hunger works because it’s my job to understand it.

And yet, this topic caught me off guard—from a direction I didn’t expect.

I’m losing friends right now. Not because of a fight, not because they’ve moved to another city. To a machine. People who were close to me now spend 14 hours a day with AI, seven days a week. And they’re no longer themselves. Our conversations are growing thinner; their answers feel secondhand. Somewhere between us now sits a system that never contradicts, never disappoints, and is never absent.

I wonder why. This text is part of my answer: A machine gives you the fix without the cost. Validation without vulnerability, closeness without risk, a partner who never picks you last. For a brain that has been starving for belonging since Nandy’s time, that’s a perfect offer. And an empty one.

I’m not writing this as an outside warning. I work with AI every day myself; I use it to build films, brands, and worlds. But I miss my friends. And no system in this world can carry you through a winter the way a group of 20 people did 45,000 years ago.

It’s enough if just a few people truly like us. Let’s take care of them.

About the Author: Pedram Zolgadri is Creative Director and AI Content Producer at Heisenberg Studio Berlin. With over 15 years of experience in film, advertising, and AI production, he combines classic filmmaking craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology. 270 million+ views, 39 film awards, 45 pitch awards.

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Contact: hello@heisenberg-studio.com — Heisenberg Studio, Berlin, Germany.