Last night I attended a fascinating talk by Merlin Sheldrake, the biologist and author of Entangled Life, and something he said stopped me in my tracks. All complex life on Earth, he explained, began through collaboration. The lichens covering our rocks and trees aren’t individual organisms—they’re partnerships between fungi and algae, working together to survive in conditions neither could tolerate alone. This ancient collaboration between two completely different life forms created the foundation for plants to move from water onto land over 500 million years ago. Without this partnership, terrestrial life as we know it simply wouldn’t exist.
As I sat there absorbing this insight, I thought about research I have read on human evolution and adaptation. Her work examines a crucial turning point in our species’ history: when humans stopped simply adapting to our environment and began adapting the environment to us. But here’s the revelation that connects to Sheldrake’s fungi—when we look at why Homo sapiens became the most successful human species, it wasn’t our superior intellect or physical strength. It was our unparalleled ability to communicate, share ideas, and collaborate.
The Collaboration Imperative Written in Our DNA
The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Evolutionary anthropologists increasingly view cooperation as core to the evolutionary success of our species and foundational to current everyday life and global society. Our prehistoric ancestors didn’t survive the harsh realities of early life through rugged individualism. They survived through mutual aid, shared childcare, collective hunting, and the exchange of knowledge.
Research suggests that what set Homo sapiens apart from other human species, including Neanderthals, was not cognitive superiority but a kind of “cognitive superpower”—cooperative communication and an exceptional capacity for friendliness. We evolved to work together with others, even strangers. This ability to communicate about shared goals and work together to accomplish them, combined with the evolution of traits like social tolerance and the capacity to share knowledge, allowed us to thrive when other human species went extinct.
As researcher Michael Tomasello summarises: “To an unprecedented degree, Homo sapiens are adapted for acting and thinking cooperatively in cultural groups, and indeed all of humans’ most impressive cognitive achievements—from complex technologies to linguistic and mathematical symbols to intricate social institutions—are the products not of individuals acting alone, but of individuals interacting”.
Think about that for a moment. Your capacity to read this, the device you’re reading it on, the therapy practices we use at Sisu—none of these exist because of isolated genius. They exist because humans shared, built upon each other’s ideas, and worked together across generations.
The Alarming Unravelling
Yet here we are in 2025, and something fundamental is shifting. The very collaborative nature that elevated our species is being systematically eroded by a cultural ideology that prioritises individual success over collective wellbeing.
The data from across Britain and Europe is stark. According to the Office for National Statistics, 27% of adults in Great Britain report feeling lonely always, often or some of the time, with 7% feeling lonely often or always. Young people aged 16 to 24 are most at risk, with the highest rates of loneliness in the UK. In England alone, approximately 3.1 million people report feeling lonely often or always—a figure that has been rising since 2020.
Across Europe, the picture is similarly troubling. Eighteen percent of European citizens—equivalent to 75 million people—are socially isolated. Research tracking volunteering and civic participation across Europe reveals a predominantly negative trend, with 18 out of 30 European countries showing declines in participation in groups and associations. The UK, whilst having middling to higher levels of volunteering compared to other European countries, shows a similar trend of decline.
This isn’t just about feeling sad or disconnected. Research conducted by Nesta and the University of Bristol found good evidence that loneliness causes substantially worse mental health outcomes—people who report feeling lonely are 2.25 times more likely to have been diagnosed with depression. Social isolation was also found to cause lower levels of happiness and meaning in life.
The Individualism Paradox
What’s driving this? Research points to a complex web of factors, but at its heart is the veneration of radical individualism. We’ve built a society that celebrates the “self-made” person, that prizes independence above interdependence, that measures success in individual achievements rather than collective flourishing.
Contemporary research suggests that groups perform at their creative best when members both embrace their individual identity and value the group as a collective—it’s not either/or, it’s both. Yet our cultural narrative increasingly pushes us toward one pole: individual achievement, personal brand, self-optimisation. The collective dimension is fading from view.
As noted by researchers at the European Economic and Social Committee, civic space is shrinking amid growing populism in Europe, opportunities to volunteer have likewise shrunk, making people more individualistic and more prone to engage in one-off voluntary work rather than sustained community engagement.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are. Just as lichens aren’t fungi or algae but a collaborative ecosystem, humans aren’t atomised individuals. We’re social beings who have always depended on networks of mutual support for survival, innovation, and meaning.
What We’re Losing
When we lose our collaborative capacity, we lose more than just social connections. We lose our evolutionary advantage. The truly unique trait of Sapiens is our ability to create and believe in shared fictions and cooperate flexibly in large numbers. This has made us masters of the world, but also dependent for our very survival on vast networks of cooperation.
Consider the implications for mental health. Social connection is widely acknowledged as a fundamental human need, linked to higher wellbeing, safety, resilience and prosperity. When we’re cut off from our collaborative nature, we’re fighting against millions of years of evolution. No wonder anxiety and depression rates are soaring across Europe.
Research from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing shows that older people living alone have a 23-29% higher risk of falls requiring hospital admission. Chronic loneliness is associated with weakened immune systems, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and a worsening of multiple health conditions. The breakdown of social capital doesn’t just make us sad—it makes us sick.
Reclaiming Our Collaborative Heritage
So what do we do? How do we reverse this trajectory and reclaim the collaborative power that made us human?
First, we need to recognise that this isn’t just a personal problem requiring individual solutions. Yes, each of us can make choices to prioritise connection—joining community groups, volunteering, showing up for neighbours. In the UK, the government’s 2018 strategy A Connected Society recognised the importance of tackling loneliness through community-level interventions, not just individual efforts.
But we also need to challenge the cultural ideology that got us here. We need to question narratives that glorify isolation and self-reliance at the expense of community and interdependence. Research across Europe consistently shows that associational engagement—being actively involved in voluntary organisations and community groups—is positively related to both civic participation and overall wellbeing.
In therapy, this means helping clients see their struggles not just as personal failings but as symptoms of a disconnected system. It means validating the human need for belonging and collaboration. It means creating spaces where people can practise being vulnerable, where mutual support is normalised, where success is measured not just by what you achieve alone but by how you contribute to and draw strength from your community.
We need to remember what the fungi and algae have always known: collaboration isn’t a weakness or a compromise. It’s the very foundation of complex life. It’s how we survived. It’s how we thrived. And it’s how we’ll continue—if we choose it.
The Power Is Still There
Here’s what gives me hope: our collaborative capacity hasn’t disappeared. It’s been suppressed, yes, but it’s still encoded in us. Every time we reach out to a friend in distress, every time we share knowledge freely, every time we work together toward a common goal, we’re exercising that ancient evolutionary gift.
The power that allowed our ancestors to build communities, share resources, and create culture hasn’t left us. We just need to remember it’s there. We need to practise it. We need to insist that our social structures support it rather than undermine it.
Because at the end of the day, we have a choice: we can continue down the path of hyper-individualism, growing more isolated, more anxious, more disconnected from the very thing that made us successful as a species. Or we can remember what the lichens, what our ancestors, what every thriving ecosystem teaches us—that collaboration isn’t just nice to have. It’s how life works.
The question isn’t whether collaboration is important. Evolution answered that question millions of years ago. The question is: will we remember it in time?
At Sisu Therapy, we believe that healing happens in connection. If you’re feeling isolated or struggling with the pressures of managing everything alone, reach out. Sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is remember we were never meant to do this by ourselves.
References
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Campaign to End Loneliness. (2023). The State of Loneliness 2023: ONS data on loneliness in Britain. https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org
Community Life Survey. (2024). Loneliness and support networks, England: 2023/24. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. GOV.UK.
Damian, E. (2019). Formal volunteering in Europe: Evidence across nations and time. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 30(6), 1372-1388.
Divjak, T., & CNVOS. (2021, September 29). Volunteering empowers society as a whole and each one of us as individuals. European Economic and Social Committee.
Hare, B., & Woods, V. (2024). Humans evolved to be friendly. Scientific American, 330(3), 58-63.
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Harper.
Nesta. (2024). Investigating the impact of loneliness and social isolation on health. University of Bristol & Amsterdam University Medical Centre.
Office for National Statistics. (2024). Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: 13 December 2023 to 1 January 2024. ONS.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2009). Culture and the evolution of human cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1533), 3281-3288.
Roots of Loneliness Project. (2025). Loneliness statistics by country, demographics and more. https://www.rootsofloneliness.com/loneliness-statistics
Sarracino, F. (2017). Social capital in Europe from 1990 to 2012: Trends and convergence. Social Indicators Research, 131(1), 407-432.
Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. Random House.
Tierney, S., et al. (2024). Developing social capital through community-based interventions to address loneliness: A scoping review. Lifestyle Medicine, 5(1).
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. MIT Press.
Tomasello, M., Melis, A. P., Tennie, C., Wyman, E., & Herrmann, E. (2012). Two key steps in the evolution of human cooperation: The interdependence hypothesis. Current Anthropology, 53(6), 673-692.
UK Government. (2018). A connected society: A strategy for tackling loneliness. Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
van de Waal, F., & Whiten, A. (2022). Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377(1851).
What Works Centre for Wellbeing. (2024). What we know about loneliness and connection 2014-2024. https://whatworkswellbeing.org
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