It is the fourth day of January, and I am doing what I have done for seven decades: pondering the annual ritual of resolution-making while suspecting the entire exercise rests on a philosophical confusion I cannot quite name.

This morning, over coffee, I read two articles that arrived in my inbox within hours of each other. Paul Graham’s sprawling meditation “How to Do Great Work” offers ten thousand words on following your curiosity to the frontier of knowledge, noticing gaps others miss, and pursuing them with obsessive focus. Celeste Davis’s pointed critique argues that the top American resolutions—save money, eat healthier, exercise more, lose weight—systematically ignore what Harvard’s 85-year longitudinal study identifies as the strongest predictor of lifelong health and happiness: the strength of our relationships.

Graham speaks the language of individual excellence. Davis speaks the language of collective flourishing. Both arguments are compelling, both rest on substantial evidence, and I find myself suspecting that the apparent contradiction between them is itself the problem.

The question that haunts resolution season: Am I personally responsible for my flourishing, or is flourishing fundamentally a group activity? The American answer has been emphatic. Protestant individual salvation secularized into individual achievement, then monetized into individual consumption. Graham’s essay represents the most elevated version—not wealth but great work as the measure. Yet it remains fundamentally “you” against the frontier.

Davis points toward something the American framework cannot accommodate. She cites Abraham Maslow’s visit to the Blackfoot tribe, where he discovered that 80-90% of tribal members exhibited the self-esteem he found in only 5-10% of Americans. The Blackfoot weren’t better at self-actualization; they had rendered it unnecessary by embedding individuals so thoroughly in community that the isolated self never formed. Maslow spent his remaining years trying to revise his theory, eventually writing that “self-actualization is not enough” and that psychology “without reference to other people and social conditions is not adequate.” The revision was never published. We inherited the pyramid with self-actualization at the apex.

Here my mind made an unexpected leap: to Julian Jaynes and his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes proposed that ancient humans experienced their two brain hemispheres as functionally separate—one generating commands heard as voices of gods, the other obeying. Modern neuroscience has not been kind to his mechanism. Imaging reveals that virtually all complex cognition involves distributed networks spanning both hemispheres, connected by some two hundred million fibers in constant communication. The “two minds” framing works as metaphor, not anatomy.

But here is what remains useful: Jaynes reminds us that we habitually think in binaries that don’t map onto actual structure. Left brain versus right brain. Reason versus emotion. Individual versus community. These dichotomies feel natural because language makes them easy to articulate, not because they carve reality at its joints.

I have some data on this question: my own life.

Long ago, prompted by the end of my marriage and the prospect of rebuilding a social world, I undertook systematic study of my own psychology. Personality assessments consistently returned the same profile: INTJ. Introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging. This did not surprise me. I knew I was introverted—not antisocial, but replenished by solitude rather than depleted by it. I experience emotions sensitively; I cry at films and personal tragedies. I value thinking highly and maintain scientific skepticism. I make decisions with what I hope is reliable judgment.

The important point: introversion describes processing and recharging, not the presence or absence of relational capacity. The Harvard study measures strength of relationships, not quantity of social contact. An introvert with three profound connections may score higher than an extrovert with fifty acquaintances.

I dated after the divorce. I held relationships. A second marriage lasting seven years. I learned what honest people learn across decades: I am committed to serial monogamy rather than the myth of permanent completion. Each relationship was real for its duration. None was a waystation to the “real” relationship that would finally perfect me.

At seventy-one, marriage and full-time cohabitation are not among my goals. Happiness and health are.

This is quietly radical in American culture, which treats marriage and cohabitation as the “serious” forms and everything else as failure. But the Harvard study measures strength of relationships, not legal structure. What I have designed—monthly visits with my partner, each of us driving the distance, each maintaining rich independent lives between—may optimize for relational quality in ways full-time cohabitation cannot.

I need substantial solitude for morning writing, for long walks where ideas percolate, for deep work on projects spanning years. A partner who experienced this as rejection would make the relationship constant negotiation. A partner who maintains her own rich life, understood as chosen each time one of us makes the drive, operates in a different grammar entirely.

I wake early, around five, and have coffee in solitude while the day is dark. This is when I think, write, engage with ideas without interruption. Later, there is walking—two and a half miles through the park, where the rhythm of movement loosens thought. And there is Merry, three hundred miles away, living her own life until one of us drives and we are together with full attention, having chosen each other again across the distance.

I am not offering my architecture as template. An extrovert would wither under these conditions. Someone with young children could not structure time this way. The point is not the specific form but the act of designing—the recognition that flourishing requires architecture fitted to the actual person.

The World Happiness Report organizes its chapters around relational themes: sharing meals, connecting with others, supporting others, trusting others. Every metric involves other people. Yet the report measures individual subjective wellbeing as the outcome. This is not contradiction. It is recognition that the individual and the relational are different scales of the same phenomenon. My happiness is mine—subjectively experienced, individually reported. The sources of that happiness are substantially relational.

Davis is right that we have a community-shaped hole in our model of flourishing. Graham is right that curiosity drives great work and consistency compounds into contribution. Jaynes is usefully wrong about hemispheres that refuse the binary we impose on them.

The insight I would offer is this: the question of whether happiness comes from individual achievement or relationship is malformed. It is bicameral thinking applied to a brain—and a life—that operates as integrated whole. The real question is architectural. How is your life structured? Does the structure serve both the work you want to do and the connections you need? If not, the problem is probably not insufficient willpower. The problem is design.

I have stopped asking which matters more, self or community. I have started building structures that refuse the question—and discovering that the answer must be constructed rather than chosen, specific rather than general, revised across a lifetime that is still, blessedly, in progress.