A great read on the loneliness problem (click for story)
You can probably rattle off the risk factors for heart attacks, stroke, cancer, and other causes of premature death with ease: smoking, poor diets, lack of exercise, and so on. Here’s one you probably haven’t considered:
Loneliness.
I’ve been discussing restlessness and American culture for a few months now in The Restless Project, focused so far on the broken math that is the American economy. But struggling to find a job that supports an average American lifestyle is nothing compared with the struggle to find a community that fills your heart. Nothing keeps you up at night more than lonely days.
A growing body of research shows people who say they are lonely, quite literally, face heart problems so devastating they can be lethal. Really. A study by the University of California at San Francisco found that older folks who said they were lonely faced a 45-per-cent greater chance of early death.
“This is one of those outcomes you don’t want to see because it was terrible to find out it was actually true,” Carla Perissinotto, the study’s author, said. “We went into the analysis thinking that there was a risk we could find nothing, but there actually was a strong correlation.”
In an elegant gift of journalism penned for Canada’s The Globe and Mail earlier this year, writer Elizabeth Renzetti summarized the technology-vs.-loneliness research, focusing on the problem of aging singles in Vancouver and other urban haunts in North America.
“Loneliness, it turns out, is as bad for your health as smoking, or being obese,” she wrote. “Social scientists will be struggling to understand the consequences of these transformations for decades to come, but one thing is clear: Loneliness is our baggage, a huge and largely unacknowledged cultural failing.”
If your doctor says you have high cholesterol, you at least try a better diet or take Lipitor. We all cheer for friends who quit smoking. Attacking loneliness, however, is a much more perilous and hazy journey. When was the last time a friend or family member admitted being lonely to you? The word just isn’t uttered in polite company.
And yet, loneliness seems to be epidemic. One-quarter, one-third, even one-half of adults say they are lonely, depending on how you ask the question. Lonelier than before? That’s a much harder question to ask, of course, the feeling being as subjective and temporal as it can be. Like me, you’d probably look online for the answer.
You know the numbers. We have hundreds of “friends,” thousands of “followers,” and countless digital acquaintances, but how many fill our hearts with what they really need? More important, how many of our digital connections are really fool’s gold that distracts us from taking the time to mine for true friendship and love?
As a professed digital skeptic, I can certainly be guilty of laying it on too thick. There is no question that online tools help forge plenty of great friendships that might otherwise not exist, and keep people connected over great distances. My mom Skypes with her long-distance granddaughter often, and it’s delightful.
But we all know deep inside that techno-connections are the emotional equivalent of junk food. They are fun, but often leave us hungrier than when we started. Plenty of studies like social media use with loneliness, sadness, envy or alienation.
Don’t blame only tech for the loneliness problem, however. More people are living alone, putting off marriage, living far from family, than any time in the history of our society, or perhaps any society. More than one in four households had just a single person in 2012, according to the U.S. Census.
Living alone doesn’t guarantee loneliness, of course, just as living with someone else hardly guarantees bliss. The UCSF researchers found that 43 percent of surveyed older adults felt lonely, yet only 18 percent lived alone.
So neither technology nor single-ness is solely to blame. Indulge me for a moment as I share my less scientific opinion. Many years ago, I was introduced to a theory of therapy called Transactional Analysis. It was all the rage in the 1960s, but faded almost as quickly into obscurity. The idea is simple. Every day is full of interpersonal transactions, ranging from simple, “Hi! How are you? Good. How are you?” to “I’m so sorry to hear about your grandfather…Yes, I’m very sad.” Our hearts need these transactions as much as we need air and water. Like a healthy diet, we need diversity and variety. We need plenty of little hellos, and we need at least a few deep connections every day. Live for a while without enough of these transactions, and your heart will begin to starve and grow weak.
The structure of our lives can really dictate the quality and volume of our transactions, and modern life can be hostile to them. Suburban design means people can enter their cars in their garages, drive to work, ride the elevator, and arrive at their cubicles without a single hello. We can watch movies in dark basements with enormous televisions and never feel the collective gasp of a riveted audience. Sure, we can tweet about the TV series we love, but we probably are watching it at a different time than everyone else. (“Spoiler alert!” might as well say, “Please don’t listen to me.”).
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Facebook and email transactions can certainly be part of a healthy emotional “diet,” but just like eating only junk food will eventually kill you, so can over-reliance on likes and retweets.
What to do about the loneliness problem? As with all such problems, the first step is admitting there’s a problem. I know plenty of folks reading this, on the very platform that stories like this condemns, will flat-out dismiss the premise. After all, here we are connecting at this moment. In that case, I’ve never been happier to be wrong and I wish you well. But I’ll bet there are folks you know who are lonely and would never admit it, and I hope you will be open to their hints when they arrive. Even if they come via email. Again, back to Renzetti’s elegant prose.
“Inside every lonely adult is a kid eating lunch by herself on a bench,” she wrote. “On a personal level, being lonely can seem crippling, and saying “just get out and make friends” is like telling an asthmatic to climb Mount Everest.”
I worry that we are all like the frog in the boiling water, however, not realizing how much emotional junk food we are eating, and how much our hearts are shrinking, until it’s too late and we are facing real heart trouble. How to ward off that potentially painful doctor visit later in life? The same way you conquer all maladies: With baby steps. Eat a piece of fruit, go for a walk, and say a few extra hellos to strangers. Hold a door and smile, even if you’ve had a bad day. Linger outside you house for a little while extra, even if you have a garage door opener. Or my personal favorite, stay our late once in a while.
“Solitude is soul’s death. Man is mankind.”
In college I had a notebook where I would write down one-liners from authors I admired. I don’t know where that notebook is, but I always remembered that line, put into the mouth of a character by a science fiction writer I adored, Ursula K Le Guin. She was writing at a time when few objected to the word “mankind.” Please forgive her, and me. And if I see you on the sidewalk someday soon, please smile back.
So I’ll ask this way: Knowing that some loneliness is part of the human experience, and in fact can be healthy in small doses, are you more or less lonely than you were before the age of Facebook?
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