FEEL BETTER, FASTER. Some Useful Ways on How To:
Relationships?! They’re complicated. Below, a revolutionary surefire path to new sidekicks
Midsummer, I was taken aback by an unfamiliar, gratuitous concept in one of the New York dailies called “medium friends.” I found this notion startling. It appears at a time when most information outlets, even letters-to-the-editors, are addressing a “loneliness epidemic”—and suggesting, for improved mental health, to make necessary “connections” with others. The medium-friends notion popped up again in August. It seems “medium friends” are those who are not pals or BFF’s but fall somewhere in the middle. I found this concept (theory?), this strange abstraction perplexing. And I can see how it could cause confusion to one trying to categorize a new acquaintance. I question: is this one of those postures that makes a problem when there isn’t one? Perhaps the reporter needed to come up with an original theory and reached a tad too hard for a fresh hypothesis. Frankly, I could do without it. Relationships are already challenging enough.
THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY
Sure, we all agree, the pandemic caused severe disconnection between people; made it difficult to socialize. To stay in touch, we turned to our smartphones and computer devices. The founder of podcast studio “Camp-Side Medium,” Atlanta journalist Matthew Shaer, wrote a long piece on loneliness that was then picked up by multiple online outlets. The extensive article appeared in The New York Times Magazine and was called “Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?” It came with a built-in solution: “Maybe we aren’t thinking about it in the right way.”
Shaer agrees we might blame the reasons for increased loneliness on the pandemic, social media, societal changes, lack of meaningful (or any) connections — OR, conversely, perhaps it’s a new normal. Furthermore, Mr. Shaer added, to address those problems, we can’t just turn back the clock. We must rethink the problem entirely – and come up with potential solutions. That’s what I want: answers.
On the other hand, maybe in some ways, we CAN turn back the clock. I loved this from Shaer’s article-podcast: “When family was far apart and radio was new, it prevented us from feeling lonely. We used the airwaves to expand our world and to talk to people on the other side of the country…we adapted.” I still do!
My earliest memories include a radio playing 24/7 at home—as well as, at my grandparents’ house—by my half-a-dozen beautiful teenage, Italian aunts. Today, I use medium (and radio-like outlets on the computer) to savor music every day during coffee breaks and/or while shaving. It beats the newscasts I’m addicted to. (I confess, I juggle both.) Writer Shaer thinks, ultimately, we must adapt to the changes of society … rethink, he suggests, how togetherness looks. I’m game.
How refreshing is the following? Shaer says we cannot blame social media for our loneliness. Social media is our connection to the outside world when we can’t physically be there. It sometimes causes — we all feel this one, F.O.M.O — ‘Fear Of Missing Out.’ On the other hand, it can also bring us closer.
(Later, direct quotes from Matthew Shaer’s brilliant article-podcast, but first…)
More Pressing Factoids
Music speaks to some deep needs… And I’m reminded of what British dramatists William Congreve said in 1697, “Music has charms to soothe a savage beast.”
Re-listen to Bette Midler’s Top Ten 1973 hit single, “Friends,” (No small thing, it’s also called, “You’ve Got to Have Friends.”)
I recommend: “The Evolutionary Roots of Music, We are all born to sing,’” wrote Aditi Subramaniam, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, March 2024.
I often say to the chagrin of many friends, the “station,” Accu-radio via the computer, is free. I still maintain music should be available to all — at no cost.
DATING: May I take YOU to dinner?
Out of 20, New York is the worst city in the United States of America for dating. Really? And who says so? Although we have the highest population of singles, the sexual-fixation site “FetishFinder” claims, N.Y. C. is the worst city in the country to get a date. Their arguments? “Cutthroat-ness.” … “Over-saturation” -- An overrun of non-committed singles. STATS: data from US Census Bureau and Google Keyword Planner, determined which of our 20 largest cities ranked this way:
KEY POINTS: 1. The population of single folks. 2. Likelihood of marriage. 3. Annual divorce rate. 3. Those actively searching for a relationship, 4. Quality of life. And ye old bottom-line, 5. Cost of living. WHO IS NUMBER 1? Seattle is ranked the second-best quality of life rating—yet has the highest monthly average of people actively looking for a relationship/a date. (I hear it rains a lot in Seattle.) NUMBER 2: Denver. And rounding out the Top 5 Love-fest towns, Dallas, Indianapolis, & Austin. Least likely to get hooked up, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Antonio.
Let’s address New York City’s questionable (?) low-ball score, a) high cost of living, b) low quality of life c) and staggering divorce rates…even more awful d) the lowest number of people actively searching for a relationship. (Masturbators? Impotents? Work-a-holics?) “FestishFinder” does not address that issue.) I want to know why — come on — THAT would be more interesting. More horrific, when in high school, my steady girlfriend’s father wouldn’t let her go to the prom with me because I was Italian. Let’s not go there, it’s still depressing and I’m still Italian.
FetishFinder, out of Carson City, NV, Their email: hello@fetishfinder.com
FOOT-IN-MOUTH-NOTE TO ALL THAT
The New York Post reported on May 26, 2024, and this headline,“NYers TIE THE ‘NOT,” — With most unmarried residents,” Quote: “New Yorkers are the least likely to say ‘I do’ out of all Americans, a new (unnamed) study found…Behind New York’s 38.61% single population, Rhode Island ranked second among states where residents were least likely to marry, with 38.06% of its population uncommitted. Meanwhile: Wyoming residents were mostly like to be rushing down the aisle, with 72.25% of its overall population cuffed, followed by Idaho, 72.60%, Maine, 71.07%, West Virginia, 70.89% and Arkansas 70.68%. New Yorkers prefer staying single yet we’re not available. Go figure & I’d still buy dinner.
A NEW WORD
A damn perplexing one: I’m not so fond of China anymore. If you read newspapers or watch TV news, you may know why. (I don’t even eat their food these days.) I did run across a new Chinese word — term/concept: Zhiji — worth considering. Zhiji is defined as “know-self,” one who knows you like you know yourself — a connection outside of any social rule — beyond best friends… A deep intimate, understanding and connection between two people, more than just romantic or sexual. A borderline soul mate? We all know Greek philosopher Plato believed love between people could be strong enough to transcend physical attachment, hence the word platonic. But, Zhiji?
If you’ve read my stuff, you know I’m keen to write about relationships, friends, and feelings. Well, the word Zhiji is considered by the Chinese as "a fourth feeling" — chums/pals/buds who love one another as “souls.” British-Irish author C. S. Lewis describes the traditional Greek notions of family, friend, erotic and godly love (storge, philia, eros, and agape) in his controversial book, The Four Loves. I suspect this Chinese Zhiji concept is difficult for a Westerner to wrap his/her head or legs around — and she/he will probably not want to. My Calabrian father would shake his head in disgust?
The 1960 C. S. Lewis book, The Four Loves, explores the nature of love from Christian and philosophical perspective through thought experiments—and is based on a set of radio talks from 1958—highly criticized at the time for its frankness about sex. Taking a cue from St. John's, "God is Love," Lewis initially thought to contrast "Need-love" (such as the love of a child for its mother) and "Gift-love" (epitomized by God's love for humanity), to the disparagement of the former. Then, he changed his mind. Mr. Lewis happened on an insight: the natures of even these basic categorizations of love are more complicated than they appeared, at first… a child's need for parental comfort is a necessity, not a selfish indulgence, while conversely parental Gift-love in excessive form can be a perversion of its own. Doubting Thomas … Google ZHIJI.
P.S. TO ALL THAT: while we’re at it: the Greeks had 6 words for the Modern English word for love: agápē, érōs, philía, philautía, storgē, and xenía. Since the ultimate feeling is essential, why don’t we have more terms for love? Too late to invent some?
YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN AN AD TO MAKE A NEW FRIEND OR TWO
Renown Reporter-Editor Catherine Pearson, from “Huffington Post,” and the New York Times, an expert on families and relationships, devised “Catherine Pearson’s 5-Day Friendship Challenge:” paraphrased and appropriated here.
INTRO: Strengthen your bonds and find out what kind of friend you are…These five powerful, science-backed strategies to help revive fizzling friendships and deepen your close ties. Research shows that social connection is crucial to both physical and mental health plus longevity … good for our brains and hearts as well as possibly protecting us against stress.
A different 2010 study concluded that lacking social connection might be comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, author of the cigarette study; director of Social Connection and Health Lab, Brigham Young said, friendship is a specific and valuable form of social connection. “It’s difficult to be choosy about your neighbors or co-workers. You’re born into your family,” Therefore, “Friendships are chosen…because of that, we need to intentionally make time for them.” Another powerful 2022 friendship study found that when you casually check in with a friend—it’s more welcome than we realize. Too obvious? Unsure.
Friendship Challenge, Day 1: Text a friend
“Today’s challenge is a light lift—simply pick up your phone and shoot off a text. Maybe it’s for someone you’ve lost touch with. Maybe it’s for someone you’re missing; maybe for someone you actually see quite often but want to check in with ‘just because.’ Use this text-message template or with something on your own.
Day 2: Repot a friendship
“We’ve all got them: work friends, college buddies, playground dads. Whatever you call them, they’re the discrete groups of friends from different facets of our lives. Even our ‘weak ties’ seem to exist only in certain settings, like the neighbors you nod at while walking the dog, or the barista who has memorized your coffee order.”
Another expert: psychologist Marisa G. Franco, author of “Platonic,” treatise on making and keeping friends, opined “Research has found that connecting in different settings or contexts can help bring friends closer.” (“Repot” is a term coined by Ryan Hubbard, who heads up “Hinterland,” a social lab that generates reports on friendship. It’s simple: Think of friends you tend to interact with in one setting. Then invite them to join you for something else.)
Day 3: Put a friendship on autopilot
A running, middle-aged joke on TikTok: Two busy parent friends try to make plans:
You know the script: “Are you free next week?” one mom shouts into her earbuds while driving carpool.
“No, I have four dance recitals, two block parties and 67 soccer games to attend,” the other mom answers, stirring a pot of chili while answering a work email.
“Next month?”
“No, we’re finally taking that vacation we’ve put off for 10 years.”
LET’S REPEAT: Friendship Challenge Day 3: Put a friendship on autopilot.
Dr. Eric Kim, assistant professor of psychology at University of British Columbia’s, study, found having frequent face-to-face contact with friends was associated with better mental and physical health. Putting what he learned into practice: Every time Dr. Kim meets up with his three closest friends, he ends the get-together by putting their next date on the calendar. Efficient approach!
Another expert: “The more you have a routine of interacting with somebody, the less you have to work at it,” said Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. “It also gives you something to look forward to.” For example, perhaps you and a friend get together every summer to have a barbecue, or every winter when you’re back in your hometown, you visit the same friend, he said…A weekly call or text. OK, nothing beats in-person connection. But as we already established, it is also true that even a brief text that even a brief text exchange can feel meaningful. That calendar reminder again: a pop-up might prompt you to ping the same person every week, or maybe it suggests someone new. The point is to reach out.
A low-tech option is to place a Post-it note somewhere you are apt to see it, such as a bathroom vanity, reminding you to reach out to a friend. Or, while you are writing out your to-do list for the week, make a “to-love” list, Ms. Killam suggested. Corny? Sure. But a roster like this can help you prioritize your friendships.
Day 4: Reminisce with a friend
Psychologist Marisa G. Franco, “Platonic” author, about maintaining friendships, tells us something as simple as looking at an old photo of you and a friend may remind you of the depth of that bond. Dr. Franco added, one of the easiest ways to make new friends in adulthood is to simply reconnect with old ones… revisiting cherished memories can give a fizzled friendship a much-needed jolt.
Text or email a photo or video—the quickest option, Franco said, work some details into an accompanying message, such as “I’m thinking about this moment we had together, and this is what it meant to me.” Ask: “What do you remember?” Simply chatting about your shared experiences can clue you into a friend’s perspective, said Dr. Kim. When recalling that camping trip you both went on years ago, you may only remember the mosquitoes and restless sleep. But talking to your friend could remind you of the beautiful waterfall you saw and the s’mores you ate giving new insights…
“Part of reminiscing might be saying, ‘I’m so glad we had that experience together,’” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, director of Social Connection and Health Lab at Brigham Young University. “Or ‘I’m so grateful we were able to do that.’”
Day 5: Take an emotional risk
Be vulnerable with a friend.
The friendship experts Pearson interviewed for this challenge all mentioned how important vulnerability is to form close connections. If you want big, deep platonic love in your life, you must be willing to put yourself out there emotionally. The therapists/researchers also acknowledged that the very idea of vulnerability makes a lot of us squirm. “You risk rejection, exposure, judgment,” said author Hope Kelaher, a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in New York City said in her book, “Here to Make Friends.” “But it is the core component of any deep emotional intimacy.”
A SUPERB ASIDE: Nearly a decade ago, The New York Times ran the article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love”—which included a set of 36 questions that could help accelerate intimacy. Those questions had been generated for a study by researchers including Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Aron’s team had developed the questions to test whether they could create closeness between strangers, but there is growing evidence they can increase closeness between friends and romantic partners, too. Running through the full set takes 45 minutes as the questions get progressively deeper.
MORE, MORE, MORE
Confide in someone new. One simple strategy is to think about who you typically talk to about thorny issues at home or work, said author Marisa G. Franco. Instead of going to that person, talk to another friend you’d like to bond with. You might share something you are struggling with, Franco suggested, though she acknowledged that was a high-risk (and high reward!) proposition. If you need a confidence boost, keep the “beautiful mess effect” in mind: Research suggests that though we tend to worry being vulnerable will make us seem weak or flawed, others tend to see it as courageous and authentic.
And then there’s this: Offer a sincere compliment. Going deeper with a friend does not necessarily mean you must unburden yourself emotionally. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, has worked on research showing that offering a sincere compliment to a friend can increase your own happiness and lower stress levels over the course of a day. Though telling a friend what you appreciate about him or her might feel awkward, it will probably be more welcome than you would expect. Investing in our social connections is like investing in a 401(k)… It’s a way of planning for our future stability—and well-being.” I need to say, thank you, Catherine Pearson.
MORE CATHERINE. Profuse praise for Catherine Pearson, in “A Writer Who Makes (& Bolsters) Connections.” “Pearson helps readers find answers to questions about friendship, romance and more,” in New York Times, 8/30/24, by Josh Ocampo.
GREAT QUOTES
At least, near great – Bette who?
One of my favorite lines from country singer-songwriter-legend Kris Kristofferson, who passed at 88 on September 28, 2024, is from his 1970 hit, “Help Me Make it Through the Night:” “…Let the Devil take tomorrow/Lord, tonight I need a friend…”. In 2024, Rolling Stone ranked the song Number 71 on its 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time. Kristofferson got his inspiration for the lyric from Esquire Magazine’s interview with Frank Sinatra. When asked what he believed in, Sinatra replied, "Booze, broads, or a Bible...whatever helps me make it through the night…”
A new book from Other Press, by Raja Shehadeh, is titled“We Could Have been Friends, My Father and I.” Isn’t that what Bette Davis said to Joan Crawford at the end of the hilarious send-up, Whatever Happen to Baby Jane? “We could have been friends, Jane?”
Sinead O’Connor: “Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”
FOOTNOTES FROM THE ROAD
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Gentlemen of the jury, I am here to help you in any way I can. It feels great and, I’m told, it’s good Karma. The following (detailed) articles may be interesting and useful to your life and well-being.
ONE: “Unleash the Strength of Your Happiness Muscle, Simple steps can help boost the drive to seek out positive emotions and enjoy life more,” by Jenny Taitz, New York Times, August 27, 2024
TWO: David Brooks, two from… 1) You’re Only as Smart as Your Emotions, Friday, August 16k, 2024. “…our culture and our institutions haven’t caught up with our knowledge.” 2) We Haven’t Hit Peak Populism Yet, May 23, 2024 .
THREE: “HEY, LIGHTEN UP! It can be good for your health,” NO NEED FOR BELLY LAUGHS….” Even a little levity in how we see the world may increase well-being, by Carolyn Todd. “It’s looking for reasons to be delighted rather than disappointed in the world around you.”
FOUR: A BIG ONE: “How Are You, Really? A full page in the New York Times a self-guided check-in to help you take stock of your emotional well-being and then learn how to make changes,” New York Times, March 5, 2024.
FIVE: EVEN BIGGER: DOUBLE TRUCKING, OVERWHELMING, but useful: TWO FULL PAGES IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: “The 7-Day Happiness Challenge, a week-long regimen that will help you focus on a crucial element of living a good life: relationships. Start by assessing the range and strength of social ties with their quiz, then dive into their advice,” by Jancee Dunn, January 10, 2023.
PSSSTTT: That gel touted in advance by the press last year, EROXON, was made available on 10/1/24 and promises guys instant erections, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, if you can wait that long. I wonder what it tastes like.
MULTIPLE QUOTES FROM AFOREMENTIONED MATTHEW SHAER
Words below from the truly brilliant, informative, extensive article appeared in The New York Times Magazine, multiple outlets online and a podcast, I can’t get enough of, called “Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?“ Based in Atlanta, Matthew Shaer is a writer for the New York Times Magazine, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and a co-founder of the podcast studio “Camp-Side,” which specializes in episodic nonfiction. His remarkable reporting appears regularly in publications like The Atlantic, New York, Harper’s, & Wired.
Contact him by EMAIL matt.shaer@gmail.com
DIRECT QUOTES FROM SHAER’S ARTICLE ABOUT LONELINESS:
“The American Psychiatric Association says that 25 percent of U.S. residents are lonelier today than they were before the pandemic…
“A psychologist and Harvard lecturer named Richard Weissbourd approached his colleagues with a concept for a new kind of study. Loneliness, or the specter of it, seemed to Weissbourd to be everywhere — in the solitude of quarantine, in the darkened windows of the buildings on campus, in the Zoom squares that had come to serve as his primary conduit to his students…
“Two years earlier, he read a study from Cigna, the insurance provider, showing that 46 percent of Americans felt sometimes or always alone. In 2019, when Cigna replicated the study, the number of lonely respondents had grown to 52 percent. God knows what the data would say now, Weissbourd thought…
“Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you…
“… most researchers still use the definition coined nearly 3 decades ago, in the early 1980s, by social psychologists Daniel Perlman & Letitia Anne Peplau, who described loneliness, ‘a discrepancy between one’s desired & achieved levels of social relations.’”…
“Weissbourd, who serves as the faculty director of Making Caring Common—a Harvard Graduate School of Education project that collects and disseminates research on health and well-being—created a 66-question survey… mailed to 950 recipients around the United States. With the exception of a couple of straightforwardly phrased items — “In the past four weeks, how often have you felt lonely?” — a majority of the queries devised by Weissbourd and the project’s director of research and evaluation”…
“Back to Weissbourd. ‘Frankly, I was knocked back,’ he said. ‘People were obviously really, really suffering,’ and at a scale that dwarfed other findings on the topic. Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness. As Weissbourd and Batanova had hoped, the answers to subsequent questions helped clarify why. Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their family cared about them at all…
“The struggle was particularly conspicuous in young respondents, ages 18 to 25, a sizable majority of whom reported acute feelings of loneliness in the previous month. Unsurprisingly, those subjects said, the pandemic had made them lonelier; in some cases, they had effectively withdrawn from a world that no longer had much meaning.
“‘Making Caring Common’ published the results of the survey. We have big holes in our social fabric,’ Weissbourd added in a news release accompanying the paper, which he had titled “Loneliness in America.”…
“Almost immediately, the emails and calls—from reporters, other researchers and lonely Americans who saw themselves reflected in the research—began pouring in…. ‘My read was that the pandemic had exposed and turbocharged an existing problem,’ said Weissbourd ‘Everything was being accelerated.’…
“…it continued to accelerate, long after the world reopened: In March 2021, a quarter of adult respondents to a Gallup poll said they felt lonely for ‘a lot’
of the day; that same month, the portion of young people dealing with the emotion on a regular basis was close to 40 percent. The Gallup numbers have since dropped somewhat, but not everyone has reaped the same benefits:
“The American Psychiatric Association reported that 25 percent of U.S. residents are lonelier today than they were before the pandemic…
“…the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued a 71-page advisory warning of an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” with all the danger that classification implies. Murthy has estimated that a lack of social connection currently affects more Americans than, say, diabetes or obesity. Together with a concurrent decision by the World Health Organization to make loneliness a ‘global public health concern,’ the surgeon general’s report has helped nudge the emotion into the same cultural position held by depression in the era of ‘Prozac Nation’ and anxiety in the early aughts: a celebrity condition to be unpacked”…
“…in an apparently endless cascade of front-page articles and self-help books (see: “A Practical Guide to Overcoming Loneliness” or “The Path Out of Loneliness”). There are now hundreds of podcast episodes devoted to loneliness, as well as a slew of start-ups like ‘Belong Center,’ an anti-loneliness nonprofit….Japan and Britain, where loneliness is as much a concern as it is in the United States, even appointed ministers of loneliness—government officials tasked with plumbing the depths of the crisis and ameliorating it, whether through public awareness campaigns (‘Your hobbies and interests are important) or initiatives, like one in Britain, in which mail carriers were asked to check in with the elderly residents on their routes. Murthy suggested that entertainment companies might create more content that ‘reinforces the core values of connection.’ Individuals, should consider ‘being a positive and constructive participant in political discourse and gatherings (e.g., town halls, school board meetings, local government hearings).’…
“…that the solution to loneliness is only a phone call, or an email, or a text, or a friendly door knock away—that the key to closing the gap between perceived and realized levels of interpersonal relations, on a societal scale, is ultimately a matter of restoring a world that has slipped away from us…
THE REAL ISSUES. “As research like Weissbourd & Batanova’s demonstrates, when we talk about loneliness, what we’re actually talking about are all the issues that swirl perilously underneath it: alienation and isolation, distrust and disconnection and above all, a sense that many of the institutions…traditions that once held us together are less available to us or no longer of interest. To address those problems, you can’t just turn back the clock—[but] rethink the problem entirely & the potential solutions…
“Although large segments of the world have probably always been anxious, have always been depressed, have always been wrathful, they were not always lonely in the specific (and negatively connoted) way contemporary experts understand the emotion today. In her 2019 book, A Biography of Loneliness, the historian Fay Bound Alberti goes so far as to argue that before the 1800s, practically no one in the Western world spent much time discussing loneliness at all…
“In the 1950s, a small cohort of American scientists began grappling, for the first time, with the causes and effects of this new modern malady — in the process establishing what is today the growing field of loneliness studies. Among them was David Riesman, a sociologist who framed the emotion as being inextricably entangled with absence. Postwar America was prosperous, Riesman allowed, but prosperity had encouraged Americans to care about the wrong things. “Other-directedness,” he called it in his book, The Lonely Crowd, which he wrote with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. Today we would call it FOMO: Americans were constantly peering over their neighbors’ fences, admiring the barbecue kit, the pool. When they failed to get those things for themselves, loneliness set in…
“Echocardiograms, brain-imaging technology, blood and urine tests. Using those, you could actually measure what was going on inside the body of a lonely person,’” said the psychologist Louise Hawkley… “Hawkley has been researching loneliness for nearly 30 years—along with her mentor and friend, the late psychologist John Cacioppo, she has overseen or worked on nearly a hundred publications that illustrate, in often graphic detail, the physiological toll loneliness takes on the lonely. It is thanks to Cacioppo and Hawkley, for example, that we know loneliness raises our blood pressure, negatively alters our cognitive functions, is associated with Type 2 diabetes and shortens our life spans. (Subsequent studies have linked the emotion to suicidality, Alzheimer’s and leukemia.) When Vivek Murthy, in his 2023 advisory, writes that loneliness ]is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety,’ referencing work done by Cacioppo-Hawkley…
“In one of their most innovative experiments, designed to show that loneliness can cause poor health instead of merely correlating with it, they hired a hypnotist to coax a handful of test subjects into a state of heightened loneliness. Once it was induced, the subjects’ blood pressure and inflammation levels surged. “We could essentially manipulate the physiological condition by changing how lonely they felt,” Hawkley says. “And those same people, when they were made to feel not lonely” — when the hypnosis was reversed — “everything bounced back.”
“The results, released nearly two decades ago in “The Journal of Research in Personality,” manage to get at the roots of our present-day predicament as incisively as anything... In essence, Hawkley and Cacioppo argue, early Homo sapiens, outgunned by all manner of long-toothed beasts and without natural armor, achieved safety through community…learned ‘to employ and detect deceit, and to communicate, work together and form alliances,’ as the authors have it…Gradually, our brains evolved to prioritize togetherness, and conversely, to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it…
“In 2021, Daniel Maitland, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, devised an EKG-based pilot study in which he assembled a group of self-identified lonely people and asked them to participate in a series of relationship-building exercises. The moment the test subjects were asked to disclose something personal to their peers, the readings on the monitors strapped to their chests escalated, indicating that vulnerability was a major stressor on their nervous systems. Two ways to parse these results. … The first is that Maitland’s subjects were lonely precisely because intimacy was naturally fraught for them. The second is that they were trapped in their own heads, in thrall to Hawkley’s feedback loop. For these subjects, advice about attending a local town hall or church basement bingo, however well meaning, would be likely to fall flat, partly because of the fear impulse it would engender… that variety of community gathering feels so antique and unappealing…”…
“In 2000, Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, published “Bowling Alone,” a book that famously documented a steady erosion in membership of organizations and groups that once bound so many Americans together—granges and churches, unions and library reading circles, athletic clubs and neighborhood improvement associations. Nearly a quarter-century on, the trend lines identified by Putnam have not been reversed. If anything, they’ve grown more pronounced, as have the related data on household status and family: In 2024, American marriage rates are far lower than they were at the mid-century mark, while the number of one-person households in the country has more than tripled…
“Needless to say, marriage doesn’t negate loneliness — plenty of bad or abusive marriages are chillingly sad for the people locked inside them — and a single-person home is not synonymous with a lonely one. Still, it’s impossible to look at the aggregate data from the 1950s onward, including a new survey by Gallup on weekly attendance of religious services, which sank last year to 21 percent of the U.S. population, and not feel that something has been lost…
“I’m not suggesting that we should become more religious, but I want to just suggest to you that religious communities are a place where adults engage kids, stand for moral values, engage kids in big moral questions, where there’s a fusion of a moral life and a spiritual life.”’ At Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Weissbourd and Batanova conducted a follow-up to their 2021 loneliness survey, adding an open-ended prompt in which lonely respondents could try to account for the presence of the emotion in their lives. Many subjects cited a lack of ‘meaningful connection’ as the primary culprit. This was true whether or not human companionship was available to them. Physical proximity wasn’t always the issue. Emotional proximity usually was…
“Work—the office—appears to be of little help. Fewer Americans are finding purpose and meaning in their careers…the ones who do are laboring in a drastically altered landscape. Post-pandemic, office buildings in every major city remain empty; like 22 million Americans now work from home, communicating with their colleagues through Zoom or Slack. Whether or not you believe that ‘virtual commuting’ is good for productivity, it is demonstrably bad for community building. Jeffrey Hall’s July report, communication professor of studies at the U of Kansas… a team of researchers asked 4,300 Americans to talk about their social circle; most respondents said they had met their close friends through school or work… the numbers were skewed by age: People 51 years or older were more than twice as likely to have met at least one close friend at work as people under 30. ‘Removing the social aspect of work further encourages remote workers to keep their jobs at arm’s length,” Hall said, ‘This detachment could have the twin effects of maintaining a better work-life balance but leave workers lonelier than they would be had they made office friends.’”…
“The residue of the pandemic, for all of us, has proved difficult to scrub away. Studies have shown that we emerged from quarantine with less ability to make eye contact or conduct ordinary conversation with acquaintances. ‘The interactions that make us less lonely come naturally to us, but they still need to be practiced, or our skills atrophy,’ Ian Marcus Corbin, a Harvard Medical School philosopher and senior fellow at Capita, which helped fund Weissbourd’s study, told me. “’And in 2020 and 2021, a lot of people who were in a formative period of their lives saw those muscles atrophy.’” Concurrently, the usage of ‘frictionless forms of interaction,’ like self-checkout displays or meal-delivery apps, ballooned. Corbin sees these developments as evidence of “cocooning”: a retreat into a digital world that provides everything you need except the thing you need the most, which is the ‘meaningful connection’ mourned by respondents to Weissbourd and Batanova’s survey….
“You look at the data from 2003 to 2020, and you see that time alone has gone up in America, while time spent with friends and family has gone way down. Time spent with others, companionship levels: It’s all down,’” she said. ‘Then if you examine data from the national Crisis Text Line, which has information from 1.3 million texts, you see the No. 1 issue people are reporting has to do with relationships. One in three texts is related to relationship stress; one in five involves lack of human connection. In some cases, disconnection is happening due to feeling lonely. In some cases, a person is objectively isolated.” She added: “’We may lack social support; we may have poor-quality relationships. It all signals that we’re not having our social needs met..”…
“This sentiment, too, colors many of the various proposed policy fixes, like Britain’s mail-carrier plan or the 2023 guidance from Murthy, who suggests near the end of his advisory that lonely individuals ‘reach out to a friend or family member” and that parents encourage their children to participate in structured, in-person activities ‘such as volunteering, sports, community activities and mentorship programs.” One implication is that shrinking the gap between realized and desired social relations, and thus conclusively ending the loneliness epidemic, will merely be a matter of recreating, in some sort of updated form, the types of community alive in an older era…
“… we used radio to expand our world and to talk to people on the other side of the country. We adapted. And as hard as it may be to accept, the path out of loneliness in 2024 lies almost certainly via a similar route — forward…
“There are signs that a similar mass evolution is already underway. Take the smartphone, a device that gets a lot of blame for our lack of physical connection and that has simultaneously led to other, but no less meaningful, forms of togetherness. ‘I wrote an entire book about online dating, and to give you one example, I know as much as anyone about how much it can suck to be on Tinder,’ Klinenberg says. “I also know the internet is the main way people meet their spouses these days. I think about cases of people who have rare diseases and are able to share information and get better care…feel connected because the internet allows them to do so. I think about trans kids, who are at risk of distress because they feel so rejected and alone in some families, are now able to talk to people like them—to get messages that affirm them.”
“Ninety-six thousand Taylor Swift fans singing in sync, the thunder of a crowded football stadium and then a gazillion internet threads in which the attendees relive and post photos and remember the euphoria of their shared experience. A romance that exists partly in the real world and partly online, and in which emotional closeness is not diminished but enhanced by a steady stream of the sort of soul-baring disclosures that social media apps can facilitate….
“Squint, and you can see it: a scenario in which the loneliness crisis today is really a mass period of acclimatization. It’s a bridge, an evolutionary step, during which we make our peace with certain trade-offs and realities—that in 2024, we’re not all going to race to rejoin the local grange. That we’re not all going back to church or temple or the mosque. That our kids may grow up far from their grandparents and aunts and uncles—far from the towns where we were raised. That the workplace will remain diffuse, tethered by Zoom meetings and the occasional in-person happy hour. That we may often see friends more on FaceTime than we do in real life. And most important, that despite it all, we’ll find one another again…
SUPERB! From that truly brilliant, informative, extensive Matthew Shaer article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine, multiple outlets online, and a podcast. I read it over and over again: “Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?” It had this built in solution: “Maybe because we aren’t thinking about it in the right way.” To wrap, the article afforded me multiple new methods to feel about loneliness and actually completely changed how I experienced those feelings, no small feat.
Books
Step into the literary world of Jim Fragale — a realm where every page unravels a tapestry of intricate narratives, deep insights, and captivating tales from Clarksburg, West Virginia to New York City.