Is There a Social Contract Worth Keeping?

On one of my live streams, I mentioned that I’d been thinking about the value of social contracts. Gir-bot called me out right away: what do you mean you care about social convention? Isn’t that the entire reason you started UNICULT?

It’s a good point. I’ve spent my whole life outside the lines. So let’s ask the question honestly: is there a social contract worth keeping?

My answer

As an autistic person, my honest answer is: I don’t think there is.

So much of what we call the social contract is a set of unwritten rules that some people absorb naturally and the rest of us have to decode, perform, and mask our way through. Say this, not that. Make eye contact, but not too much. Ask how someone is, but don’t actually tell them how you are. For a lot of neurodivergent people, those rules were never a shared agreement. They were a test we were graded on without seeing the answers.

That’s why I find the way younger generations play with language so exciting. Their slang is super punk, super Dadaist. And there’s an argument that rigid grammar has always been a tool of control: if you want to uphold a rigid structure, you control the language. So when people break the language open, they’re exploring what it means to be free and not beholden to conventions, jobs, or expectations they never agreed to.

But a lot of people love their rules

Here’s the thing, though. Not everyone experiences the social contract the way I do. Plenty of people find real comfort in shared standards.

Take the HOA, the ultimate symbol of rules for rules’ sake. I would never live in one. But in the 2022 Homeowner Satisfaction Survey, conducted by Zogby Analytics for the industry’s research foundation, 67% of people living in homeowners and condo associations rated their experience as good or very good. Their top reasons were being maintenance-free, safety, and cleanliness. That survey comes from an industry group, so take it with a grain of salt, but the pattern has held for twenty years.

For a lot of people, standards mean predictability. They know what to expect from their neighbors, their street, and each other, and that predictability feels like safety and belonging.

The small rituals

Then there are the tiny pieces of the contract. When you say “hi, how are you,” is that a valid and important thing to say? Or should we just start saying “skibidi toilet” whenever we want?

The research suggests those little rituals do something. In 2014, behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters on trains and buses to strike up a conversation with a stranger. People predicted they’d hate it. Instead, they reported a more pleasant commute than people who kept to themselves. That same year, Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn found that people who smiled, made eye contact, and chatted briefly with a barista left feeling better and more connected than people who rushed through the transaction.

So maybe the value isn’t in the specific script. Maybe it’s in the moment of acknowledgment: I see you, you see me, we’re both here.

The record store and the dating app

My dad has a great way of describing what culture was like when he was young. There were only as many albums as the record store carried. Most people didn’t listen to anything that wasn’t on the radio or in that store. TV had maybe ten channels, and the news had three stations at most.

That sounds limiting, and in a lot of ways it was. But it also meant everyone was drawing from the same well. And that shared well was how people found each other. If you loved the same record as someone, that told you something real about them.

Research backs this up. In a 2011 study, psychologists Diana Boer, Ronald Fischer, and colleagues found that shared music taste creates social bonds because it signals shared values. When people learned that someone liked the same music they did, they assumed that person held similar values, and that assumed similarity made them like the person more.

Now think about dating today. You’ll almost never share the same music taste with someone, because there are infinite artists, infinite genres, and an algorithm feeding each of us our own private soundtrack. The thing that used to be a shortcut to finding your people has splintered into a million microcultures.

As someone who’s anti-hegemony, I think that freedom is exciting. But I also worry that some people feel disoriented, like they don’t have a place in the world or can’t connect with anyone because there’s no common ground left to stand on.

The contracts we choose

So, is there a social contract worth keeping? I still don’t think there’s one universal contract that everyone should be forced to follow. The old one was built for a narrow kind of person, and it left a lot of us out.

But people need common ground. If the old shared culture is dissolving, the answer isn’t to drag it back. It’s to build new common ground on purpose: communities where people choose their agreements because those agreements reflect shared values, not because someone handed them down.

Maybe that’s what the social contract becomes in this new era. Not a rulebook you inherit, but a set of agreements you make with the people you’ve chosen. And maybe the smallest version of it is still worth saying out loud: hi, how are you. I see you.

Sources

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