Living Alone May Be Hazardous to Your Health | Hacker News Reader

Living Alone May Be Hazardous to Your Health

blogs.smithsonianmag.com

24 pointsiamweisser25 comments

It's pretty obvious being isolated from real social and physical connection with other humans tends to have a severely negative impact on people's mental and physical health.

It's really sad how America has built itself into a lonelier and lonelier society over the past decades.

It's pretty obvious being isolated from real social and physical connection with other humans tends to have a severely negative impact on people's mental and physical health

No, it's not obvious.

It's really sad how America has built itself into a lonelier and lonelier society over the past decades.

That's just your experience.

> No, it's not obvious.

Agreed. In fact, I would expect the opposite. Living by myself allows me to precisely meter how much time I spend with others and how much time I spend alone. If I want some human contact at the moment, then I go out and get some. If I don't, then I go home. The only way that this breaks down is if the amount of time I want to spend with other people is somehow detrimental to my health.

Can I maintain this when all of my friends start getting married is another question...

Wait till your friends start having children :)

Aye. That will likely involve a lifestyle shift for me, but I figure I probably have a few more years until I have to worry about that.

@themgt (your comment is dead)

The variety of people that I interact with socially is exactly the reason why I have not been socially starved by a few of them having kids. Four or five of them having kids is of little consequence to me. A majority of them having kids would be different. Were they all in a narrow age/maturity range, I would run the risk of that happening in a short period of time, but they are not.

I think that anyone who finds themselves, seemingly overnight, in an "all my friends need to find babysitters" situation is really the one that needs to consider the breadth of their social engagement.

>Living by myself allows me to precisely meter how much time I spend with others and how much time I spend alone. If I want some human contact at the moment, then I go out and get some. If I don't, then I go home.

Err, we are not taking about 20-somethings enjoying the xbox, pizza etc nights alone.

We are talking about older people, devoid of social contact. People that cannot just "go out and get some".

Think of that Eleanor Rigby lady.

> devoid of social contact

I am suggesting that this is the important factor, not how many people are in your primary residence. Using the number of people that you live with as a proxy for your social contact seems flawed to me. You can live along and have a great deal of social contact, and you can nearly just as easily life in close proximity to others and have extremely minimal social contact.

No, it's not obvious.

Is this the monty python argument room? There's a vast amount of research into the negative effects of social isolation on humans and other mammals. Did you have something to add regarding this study, which is just one more drop in that huge bucket?

Whether there's research about it or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether it's obvious or not.

It's really sad how America has built itself into a lonelier and lonelier society over the past decades.

But we have a second car and only $18k in credit card debt.

The same thing is happening to societies that are experiencing urbanization. Not sure for how long this can go on...or what happened next.

Except it's not at all due to urbanization. I would say it's more due (in part - the causality goes both ways) to the suburbanization in which the American ideal became to live in a big empty houses in the middle of nowhere with giant flat empty stretches of grass between you and other people.

Young urban Americans are some of the few attempting to buck this trend, which the boomers heartily embraced.

Why Americans were choosing to get away from each other when say, their counterparts in western european haven't been, and aren't living anywhere near such isolated, unhealthy lives, is a question worth asking.

> Why Americans were choosing to get away from each other when say, their counterparts in western european haven't been, and aren't living anywhere near such isolated, unhealthy lives, is a question worth asking.

Indeed. When Lisbon was expanded in the 1960's the new neighourhoods were laid out so that people could walk to their local church and primary school. The model post-war development in the US was Lewittown. My theory is that it was the availability of cars that caused the difference. I do not think "white flight" (read: unskilled labor) played a part, both Portugal and America experienced urbanization in the interwar period.

I can't speak about Lisbon as I'm not from there, but up north in Porto and surrounding areas, there hasn't been much planning at all. I live in a town (Ermesinde) that in 15 years went from less than 10,000 people to slightly less than 100,000. The only planning was: build as much as you can, even illegally. About 15% of the new buildings around 2000 were actually against the law (not following proper distance from others among other zoning problems) and were mostly approved based on kickbacks to gov officials. My parents were asked for these 'gloves' from officials when rebuilding some of their old apartments, and my own house wasn't licensed correctly to live on (I bought it used, previous owner/builder didn't obtain the licensing, had to do a lot of construction to get it to code. Talked with the lawyer, he saw the name of the person that signed the papers, said it was common for his work to be illegal as long as he was paid under the table)

I can guarantee you that denser cities also suffer from loneliness (with the caveat that a minority of all lonely people love their independence and enjoy living by themselves). It's not uncommon for seniors living in high rises to have been dead for weeks or months before the neighbours notice the smell. I don't think physical proximity is the core of the problem.

That is why todays homo egoisticus will die out in the end.

All the major Asian and Western urban centers are huge population sinks with way below replacement TFR.

Correlation is not causation. Again.

And wanting explanations (much less doubting them) for the obvious is neither science nor wisdom.

What is the value of sharing articles that repeat the obvious without explanation?

It's obvious that things fall towards the center of the earth. Yet, you have hordes of physicists searching for a mathematical reason for why it happens. The point here is that nobody cares whether or not 'it is obvious' to you. Lots of things are obvious to lots of people and most of those things turn out to be false. Only rigorous justification advances our knowledge. You would know all of this if you weren't a complete ignoramus.

>Lots of things are obvious to lots of people and most of those things turn out to be false. Only rigorous justification advances our knowledge.

In hard sciences it does. There, there's no problem with "rigorous justification".

But overdoing "rigorous justification" can take our knowledge back instead of advancing it, in non hard science domains.

What I argue for here is the so-called European way of thinking about humanities and soft sciences, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon model of quantification, hard proofs, reductionism and such. Letting "rigorous justification" overtake humanities and soft sciences can be detrimental to society, thinking and freedom. Moreover, despite pretending to be "objective", the Anglo-Saxon way takes for granted a whole ideological apparatus of its own (only except of being self-reflective, like the European, it naively assumes it is inevitable and natural).

>You would know all of this if you weren't a complete ignoramus.

Thanks for the personal insult. Am I to presume it reflects your deep studies and personal cultivation?

I don't think they were implying any causation. They made some suggestions as to the causes, but were just pointing out the correlation.

The headline explicitly states causation.

Duh is my quick answer. We're social beings, well most of us. we're supposed to talk to each other, laugh, share joys, comfort each other, tease and brag to each other.

IIRC, in prison leaving someone in solitary for an extended time qualifies as torture simply because we're not supposed to be alone. You go nuts

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