Study: Loneliness, Social Isolation Greater Health Problem in US Than Obesity
studyfinds.org
studyfinds.org
Look, there are people all around us. Neighborhood streets have, what, 50 people on them? People congregate at churches, bars, coffee shops, even Wal-Marts.
Loneliness is a self-inflicted problem. I'm not saying that to belittle it, I'm saying it because the reasons most people give for being lonely have nothing to do with the actual reasons.
Real, authentic human connections banish loneliness with a ruthless effectiveness. And you can make one with anyone. But we never want to make an authentic human connection with just anyone. We place conditions on the people we're willing to get close to. And paint ourselves into a very lonely corner by doing it.
I used to get lonely a lot in my mid-twenties. I had a bar I went to, a coffee shop I frequented, and good friends at both of them. But I was still lonely. It took a lot of self-inquiry, but eventually I realized that I didn't have a loneliness problem, I had a status problem that was presenting as loneliness. I wasn't seeing my life as having turned out the way I wanted it to, so I was beating myself up over it.
Psychological problems respond really well to talk therapy. Unfortunately that's not a very good solution. We don't have the resources to give everybody with the problem therapy. Instead I think we need to adopt a similar approach that's being used for suicide prevention. Train "gatekeepers" to identify at-risk individuals and get them the help they need, and increase awareness in the general public.
I wish we could do more. But without massive a public investment in psychological health, personalized treatment will remain a luxury solution for those who can afford it.
There's also the problem that, even if the infrastructure were there, that doesn't mean people will take advantage of it. Loneliness is tied very closely to the pride part of the brain, nobody wants to admit they have a problem and seek out help for it.
No. It does not. It was just as hard 30 years ago as it is now. As it was 300 years ago. 3000 even. People still congregate in places where it's easy to meet them. They still do it today, they did it all throughout history. People don't want to go, that's the problem. They don't want to talk. They don't want to open up.
We idealize the past I think. There was never any magical time when people weren't lonely. There was never any magical time when people didn't kill themselves.
If anything the Internet has made it easier for people to find the connection they want. It doesn't solve anybody's status problem, that still requires good ole-fashioned hard work and achievement and luck.
If you're lonely, ask yourself why you refuse to go out and meet people and make connections. Even if it's just at the grocery store. Even if it's just with the homeless guy down the road. Keep digging and eventually you'll find a root cause.
The nature of the problem is such that you have to be the one to reach out. You can't expect society to do that for you. Nobody can solve your loneliness problem for you. That's the hard lesson I had to learn.
It's easier, until it isn't...
I think you are missing the point. Loneliness is not solved by simply being around people.
I’ve been living in the US for 5 years now and the amount of people I can call friends here is very small, despite all the attempts at grocery stores, bars, meetups and even homeless folks.
Society doesn’t seem to be open to take in someone that apparently doesn’t fit certain criteria they impose. And unless you are willing to do exactly as other people do, you’re going to have a hard time. People may disagree, this is just my personal experience.
I understand what you're saying, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that dynamics have changed - and we don't need to go back 30 years to see it.
As recently as 5 or 6 years ago, I would quite often strike up conversations with strangers at the bus stop or on the train or at the post office.
Usually these conversations would last for just a few minutes, sometimes an hour or more, and in a handful of instances I made a long term friend.
I find that this is vastly harder to do now, because nearly everyone in those common spaces is now engrossed by their phone. This changes the dynamics of interacting and striking up a conversation substantially by adding a lot of social friction.
Historically, the interaction was something like: slightly awkward silence -> random comment about the weather or some equally anodyne topic to break the awkward silence -> possibly a rewarding conversation.
Now, the awkward silence never occurs in the first place. It's been entirely replaced by everyone scrolling the feeds on their phones. To start a conversation, you have to proactively interrupt what the person is doing and ask for their attention.
What's more, even if you successfully navigate that dynamic and start a conversation, the soft dings and tapping reminders from the phone constantly pull people's attention back to the virtual from the physical.
Smartphones have been a boon in myriad ways, but I do miss the chances to engage in face-to-face conversation with strangers in the real world that existed before they commanded every second of our spare attention.
Sure, most interactions never develop into anything lasting, but you only need one to click every few years...or even a lifetime!
Excuse a slight tangent, since it was on my mind today: I'm sure I'll be defensively sniped at as an "extrovert" here (lol), but I do think we have a duty to each other to be outgoing, warm, forbearing...to make every effort that others feel at ease. Techies will sometimes make icky demands like that a social interaction must be "useful". Yes, looking random people in the eye and talking to them...even when they're not giving you anything...is tough. I know well that it can be among the hardest and most draining things. But I, anyway, believe we're obliged to learn to do so well and to suffer through it.
Resolving to take on this incredibly modest, day-to-day responsibility of making others feel acknowledged and at ease---of trying to bring out the best in everyone---should surely be one key step in addressing your own loneliness.
Obviously part of this skill is respecting the extent to which others want left alone. And I, for one, prefer to spend most of my own time far away from people. Please don't snarl at me for not understanding "introverts"! :) But the point is of course tied with how tech can affect what people in fact expect and want and how tech can adjust the "cost" of an interaction (smartphones, public spaces optimized for laptops inside and cars outside...and on...and on...).
Just a bit of background. I'm an introvert, I'm happy in my own space. Too much noise or too many people make me very uncomfortable. Birthdays, for example would have to be up there as one of the worst events of the year only topped by Christmas Parties. So you see, I'm not one for talking to random strangers. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a fairly contented person with a small family group of about 6 people I happily interact with on a regular basis.
I travel to work via bus and it is a rare day when I don't get approached by somebody at the bus stop or on the bus who is looking to chat. I'll go through the polite hi how are you type of thing before getting back to my book or whatever I was filling the time with. My point is, that most of the people on the bus seem to be conducting some degree of social interaction with semi random strangers and if I were a different person I guess I'd be right along with them. Even with my attitude I still enjoy the fact that on our bus there is a small thriving community where people share the time of day.
Yes, there are a lot more phones being used than 10 years ago, but people still seem to be chatting, the phones are just there as an adjunct rather than as a barrier to communication.
The main thing I learned from this is, if I started conversations with random people on the bus, I'd be that odd person who makes people uncomfortable. I wish it didn't work that way.
Local cultures can vary a lot. In NYC, riding the bus, I more often end up in a conversation than not. In Boston, that is just not done. Except with tourists sometimes. I used to travel more, and it became a standing joke... At someplace not Boston, chatting. While traveling, chatting. Hit the subway by Boston Logan airport, chatting... sort of... with people awkwardly uncomfortable... facepalm, back in Boston, burned again.
That is exactly right. No one can be bothered to exert the effort to carry on a relationship--not when their handheld Internet has an ocean of stuff that's easily more entertaining and less judgmental or potentially problematic, whether that content is memes, videos, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter posts, or incoming text messages, which now look more like rebuses, with the emojis. I saw a very representative meme that said "In the early 2000s, it was 'Why would I text message someone when I can just call them" and now it's 'Why would I call someone when I can just text message them?'" The asynchronous nature of those communications, and how the contact is divided across multiple services, whether text message, WhatsApp, Kik, Instagram, or whichever, makes it that the user gets used to having low expectations for the reliability of their dozens or hundreds of online "friends," and of course Facebook redefined that very word.
See this statistic from a recent article in The Atlantic published just the other day:
> The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out.
"Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...
And the New York Post had an article saying that those in the next oldest generation (Generation, or I suppose "pre-Millennials") should try to address those problems, as though people in their 30s and 40s aren't glued to their phone screens as well:
> Generation X needs to save America from millennials
http://nypost.com/2017/08/05/generation-x-needs-to-save-amer...
Wikipedia: Generation Z and their use of technology and social media:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z#Technology_and_so...
What happened to being bored? To doing things, not because they were "cool" or even "fun", but simply because there was time that had to be killed? Going out because there was nothing inside, and meeting other bored people, connecting on anything because it was better than nothing?
Technology is raising the "minimum acceptable interest level" for activities - killing our mental slack, the slack where offline novelty could slip in.
I've been thinking about it for a while, but this thread has made my decision. Next time I'm off-call, 3pm tomorrow, I'm going to cut the cord. Unplug the modem and tell my friends I'm only answering phone calls (disable data) - no internet outside of work.
I want to feel bored again. Not brief moments of boredom, the hours of boredom I felt as a kid, the boredom that drove me to do new things... instead of today's boredom, that merely leads me to learn new things.
To me, that's an alien experience. I was and am never bored when I'm alone, I just think and imagine. I only get bored when I have to pay attention to boring stuff that prevents me from drifting off.
It will be interesting to see which ways AR/VR goes.
() You're walking somewhere, displaying a side banner of things you're enthused about. So there always fodder for striking up conversation when standing around. And look, the gal unlocking the eyeglass shop is an Atlantic winter solo sailor. Perhaps a "good person to have a conversation with" rating system might help cope with those that aren't.
() Standing at the bus stop, you don't see the stop. You don't see the people waiting, and they don't see you. Especially the homeless guy. You see a "tree", placed so you don't run into the pole. A log for the guy, so you don't walk into him. You see bushes, or boxes, or bears. But no people. The bus pulls up to a stream in a glade in the woods.
() Bus? Are you going on vacation? Wouldn't your vacation be a nicer at home, and around your block, in VR? Like work. And play. And getting together with friends?
() No more two-body problem. What's a "long distance relationship"? Oooo, that sounds like what you were telling me about yesterday, how when you were meeting someone in olden times, you had to arrange exactly when and where you would meet, because without real phones, otherwise you might fail to find each other. Wieerrrrd.
Your posts come off as an extrovert who doesn't understand why introverts find socializing with random strangers a draining and unpleasant process.
> There's also the problem that, even if the infrastructure were there, that doesn't mean people will take advantage of it. Loneliness is tied very closely to the pride part of the brain, nobody wants to admit they have a problem and seek out help for it.
For some people, maybe.
I don't care about random strangers, pride, and a number of other things people (like you) expect me to. People seem to think I'm lying or confused when I say this. My accomplishments in life (outside of work) have been as anonymous as anyone could make them.
I've still had times I felt lonely but it has more to do with the fact I realized a group of people I thought were trustworthy were not. As a result, its transient until I'm done pulling the knives out of back and addressing the wounds.
As such, a large number of interactions with strangers isn't useful to me. I wouldn't trust them because most people are too selfish to be trustworthy. And trust is necessary to deal with loneliness and form connections.
I learned a harder lesson: some people don't need to reach out. They are naturally attractive. Some of it can be helped, but not all of it. If people aren't approaching you, you're not likely in that category and connections will be more difficult for you. Do you try to change yourself, your environment, or something else?
Knowing that it's a harder road puts off some people from taking that road. It's a classic trade off of playing to your strengths vs. covering your weaknesses.
For example, hitting on girls at the gym goes down differently depending on how you look. Same for approaching people in public for casual conversation. Some people say you shouldn't hit on people at the gym at all. Do I risk offending someone at the gym or try to make a connection?
When people report about bad experiences with casual connections in any place, do you let that change your behavior or not?
It's quite another thing not to have any friends.
Most of the people in the coffee shops around here have their noses buried in their laptops or books, and when they talk to people they mostly talk to friends who they went to the coffee shop with. Very few people are actually meeting new people and making new friends with random people at coffee shops.
Bars are geared towards hanging out with people you already know, or hitting on strangers. I'm not sure how many people are making new friends there, unless they're relatively extroverted.
Therapy these days is kind of weird. Because insurance companies don't want to pay much, it's geared towards short-term, behavior-oriented therapy. That might help with certain conditions like phobias, but I'm not sure how much it can help with deeper issues. There are other types of therapies, but because insurance mostly doesn't cover them, they're not really practical for most people (not to mention that they're out of fashion these days, as most therapists want to practice CBT because that's what the insurance covers and that's what they're taught in school as being "scientific", "modern", and "evidence-based" -- even when there's evidence it doesn't actually help).
I do think the modern world, especially for people who spend a lot of time online or consuming a lot of media like TV, movies, and games, can be pretty lonely, or at least devoid of deep human contact. I'm not sure what the solution is, apart from unplugging and spending a lot of time and effort in making connections. But being psychologically ready to do that in the first place is an achievement in itself.
> With some qualifications. I would put the _differences_ between various types of psychotherapy at very close to zero percent... It turns out that treatment is just as effective without the particular ingredient. ...As long as what they’re doing is believable, accepted, is given by a therapist who’s skilled and believes in the treatment as well, the treatment tends to go well.
You make a good point about some level of extroversion being required, but one of the things I enjoy about bars - as an introvert - is the ability to have low-cost conversations with strangers. Sometimes I make friends; sometimes I just talk to someone without having to worry about forming a long-term relationship (friendship) with someone.
Sometimes it's nice just to talk to someone you don't have to meet again.
Hopefully with greater automation, we can free up more people to become therapists.
I love shortsighted technological solutions to social problems.
>Predictions that automation will make humans redundant have been made before, however, going back to the Industrial Revolution, when textile workers, most famously the Luddites, protested that machines and steam engines would destroy their livelihoods. “Never until now did human invention devise such expedients for dispensing with the labour of the poor,” said a pamphlet at the time. Subsequent outbreaks of concern occurred in the 1920s (“March of the machine makes idle hands”, declared a New York Times headline in 1928), the 1930s (when John Maynard Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment”) and 1940s, when the New York Times referred to the revival of such worries as the renewal of an “old argument”.
>As computers began to appear in offices and robots on factory floors, President John F. Kennedy declared that the major domestic challenge of the 1960s was to “maintain full employment at a time when automation…is replacing men”. In 1964 a group of Nobel prizewinners, known as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, sent President Lyndon Johnson a memo alerting him to the danger of a revolution triggered by “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine”. This, they said, was leading to a new era of production “which requires progressively less human labour” and threatened to divide society into a skilled elite and an unskilled underclass. The advent of personal computers in the 1980s provoked further hand-wringing over potential job losses.
and based on a simplistic understanding of how automation impacts the demand for labour.
Automation reduces costs, and this increases consumer spending on more difficult to automate goods/services. [2]
That has been the pattern for 200 years, and why wages today are 20X what they were in 1800.
Unfortunately, ideas like yours are very common [3] and lead to terrible government policy.
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700758-will-...
[2] https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivi...
[3] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/11/the_big_four_ec.html
Its fascinating that you you have chosen to state this as fact without any supporting data.
>"Loneliness is a self-inflicted problem."
Again based on what, just because you say so?
There's an excellent book called "Bowling Alone" that came out in 2000 long before social media. The book traces a phenomenon of declining "social capital" that began in post war boom. Social media and the large scale replacing of real interaction with those conducted by phone has only exacerbated this. There plenty of real data in the book and the author conducted half a million interviews over 25 years.
See:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/putnam-alone.html
>Look, there are people all around us. Neighborhood streets have, what, 50 people on them? People congregate at churches, bars, coffee shops, even Wal-Marts.
There is big difference between being alone and "feeling alone." Going to Wall Mart or coffee shops solves the problem of the former. This "being alone" however is generally not the one psychologists are referring to when they talk about the modern phenomenon of "chronic loneliness."
Of hose 50 people on the street you refer to, how many of those people have ear buds in and are/or are staring at, typing on or talking on phone as they walk? How many are cognizant of those around them? Most of them wouldn't hear you even if you did try talk to them.
Spend just 5 minutes walking anywhere Manhattan and it is quite apparent. Walk into a bar and most everyone waiting for their friend is staring at or typing into their smart phone. Their maybe 50 people around on the street but most of them are in their own private bubble.
The Atlantic recently had an interview with John Cacioppo who is something of an expert on the subject. He sites both cultural and environmental reasons for an uptick in loneliness. See:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/how-lonel...
One key indicator over the last 100 years has been: if I get a bad cold and lie in bed for 3 days, will anyone phone or knock on my door? If the answer is no, you might feel very lonely. Going to a coffee shop isn't going to change that.
> Loneliness is a self-inflicted problem. I'm not saying that to belittle it, I'm saying it because the reasons most people give for being lonely have nothing to do with the actual reasons.
I met two strangers today, in the sense of having a long-ish conversation with them. One of them was incredibly boring, to the point where I'd rather be on an island by myself than with that person. The other, maybe could become a friend, if we both put some effort into it.
Saying that there are 50 people living on the same block as you is like telling a hungry man that people threw away the remnants of 50 meals. Sure, you could dig through the garbage and eke out an existence, but it's not really a good solution to hunger.
* As material wealth increases, there's less need to share physical resources (bathrooms, courtyards, etc). These resources tended to bring the same people together frequently, which is a (the?) important precursor for developing a close social tie.
* Many bright ambitious women used to organize all sorts of social capital increasing endeavors; this was reduced when society reformed and excellent private-sector career paths became more available.
* People often move for college, and then again for work (perhaps more than once) -- this used to be more rare. Moves like these have big negative externalities, since they rip the shared social fabric.
These problems arise mainly from collective decisions and changes in culture and economics, and aren't self-inflicted by individuals.
It doesn't really make sense to say that a problem is self-inflicted when it applies to a large percentage of people-- almost by definition there's something else going on.
I don't have friends...
But it is not really a self-inflicted problem, I did tried to strike conversations with random strangers the most I could, be pleasant, whatnot.
But the places where I lived, it just didn't worked.
1. My neighbourhood has a race problem, most people there are mixed race but think themselves as black, I am mixed race too, but I look white. Trying to talk to neighbours didn't led to friendships, it led to people threatening to sic their pitbulls on me or showing to me their baseball bats and telling me to get my white ass out of their black neighbourhood.
2. For some time I lived in a Brazil's biggest city, where most people moved there to work, and are always in a hurry, there is always something to do, and they are always 'just passing', people frequently don't want to have friends, because they don't want to get attached to a place where they want to be only temporarily, and often people don't even strike random conversations, they are too busy, sometimes it wasn't even possible, like overcrowded and noisy public transport where you couldn't hear even yourself, much less someone else talking to you.
3. I went to some startup-related events, my company wasn't famous, and I didn't even had money to look fancy, for example I can't afford a nice watch. (an object I saw lots of successful startup owners wearing, despite today most people checking time on their phone...). Many people flat out refused to talk to me, they were dismissive in some ways, or moved away, or one guy I approached in a obviously expensive suit, that immediately said: "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?" and when I tried to tell him my name, he immediately made a 'eeeew gross' face, like he was royalty talking to a dirty peasant, and physically pushed me (not strongly) away from him.
So I don't think it is self-inflicted no...
> Look, there are people all around us. Neighborhood streets have, what, 50 people on them? People congregate at churches, bars, coffee shops, even Wal-Marts.
I like the idea of "personalized help"! I don't like the "psychological" part, though. In my experience, psychology is all about blaming people for their problems, labeling them, and looking for solutions in their minds instead of the greater context.
A friend of mine has had several hundred hours of psychotherepy, ranging from psychoanalysis the CEBT, and it did not help at all, but put a lot of pressure in the form of blame on him.
He had been lonely for about 20 years. Never alone, but always lonely. Of course, everybody assumed that something was "wrong" with him. Then we met. We clicked immediately and have been good friends ever since. So the solution just came to him without him contributing anything.
You always have to have a look at the bigger picture, especially when it comes to topics as complex as loneliness. It cannot be solved in an individual. It's a social problem, period.
This is complete BS, at least in some cases. For example, social phobia or autism can be the cause of loneliness.
There is a lot more to loneliness than a superficial fixation with status.
You could be the president of the US or achieve all you hoped for and still be afflicted with loneliness.
I'd argue that success is leads to loneliness as much as the lack of success.
Also, I think rather than a psychological/therapy problem, loneliness is a philosophical problem. We all have friends, families, networks, etc, but the more aware we become/the wiser/more philosophical, the more we realize that we are truly alone. No matter what, we were born "alone" and we die "alone".
There are coping mechanisms ( religion, new age life force, etc ) but from a philosophical point of view, it is the understanding that we are all "consciously" alone. Nobody can truly know us and that we are ultimately all alone.
Sometimes, the loneliest place on earth is at a holiday gathering surrounded by your friends and family.
Calling it a philosophical problem isn't helpful because philosophical problems don't have solutions, only approaches for thinking about them. You're effectively saying that you don't want to not be lonely.
There's no way you can argue that obesity is anything other than a conflict between the environment we evolved for, and the one we live in. Anywhere you go in America, you are surrounded by cheap empty calories, sugar and white flour, both highly addictive substances, and also surrounded by advertising urging consumption of the above. For us to not have an obesity epidemic would be astonishing.
By the same token, the only kind of negotiating power the modern worker has in finding a good salary is the power to quit, and so people quit often and early, which leads to them moving frequently away from the friends they've managed to find. All of us are also surrounded by messages telling us that for our lives to mean anything we must work longer, and spend more money, which doesn't leave much time for forging social bonds. Again, you can argue that nobody is forcing you to make these choices- but for us to have an epidemic of loneliness is completely unsurprising.
I'll bite. Obesity occurs because our food is too cheap. Especially in the US, our food is horrendously cheap for a ton of calories. I (by some mistake) bought a $4 taco the other day that was about 1000 calories (and quite good).
We went from having people dying from hunger, to having too much food available for extremely low prices. I eat on about $50 a week and live like a damned king - fresh gourmet bread, chicken and steak twice a day, hand folded pasta, imported olive oil, etc.
A few hundred years ago and you were doing well to have some soup and a piece of bread on a daily basis. Now I can get a decent bottle of wine for below $8.
> By the same token, the only kind of negotiating power the modern worker has in finding a good salary is the power to quit, and so people quit often and early, which leads to them moving frequently away from the friends they've managed to find.
I don't think that's it either. I think, just like food has gotten to be too cheap and too readily accessible for our primate brains, we've managed to fake having friends. I can send a facebook friend request and get it accepted by anyone, I can have a drink with coworkers after work, or talk over the water cooler about game of thrones - and none of those are meaningful friends.
Again, it's too "cheap" to form faux relationships. There's a (probably entirely unsourced) quote that it takes about 18 months to know a person. How many people do you spend quality, non-work time with, at least one or twice a month, for at least two years? For most people that may not even include their spouse.
[1] http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/08/lonely-die.as...
Done by a Prof. at BYU
edit: Here's the original BYU new article as well: https://news.byu.edu/news/prescription-living-longer-spend-l...
In addition, finding people to date and have romantic relationships is pretty weird these days. On the one hand, there are dating apps, which seem like they would give you a lot of opportunity to meet new people, but mostly just give you enough information about people to swipe left. If you're a guy, also can no longer court the single women at your employer (even from other departments) without potentially imperiling your entire livelihood.
Most of the guys I talk to from a generation or two before me say they met their lifelong friends through a friend or through somebody they were dating, often through people they no longer talk to.
It seems like there are a lot of factors, mundane and complex, that could contribute to isolation these days, especially if you're a 7 or below.
This stuff was trending upward far before social media. See e.g. Putnam in Bowling Alone for a far more convincing explanation.
Facebook is the snake oil you're being sold as the cure for something that was already on its way up.
"The U.S. Surgeon General estimates that living with a smoker increases a nonsmoker’s chances of developing lung cancer by 20 to 30 percent."
"There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke."
-- https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...
Maybe we'll get a chance to argue it another time :)
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/IRL https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative
However, I am unsure if virtualization of social interaction is beneficial in the long run.
Welsh: Only around people