

Living Alone May Be Hazardous to Your Health - iamweisser
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/03/warning-living-alone-may-be-hazardous-to-your-health/

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themgt
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.

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sultezdukes
_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.

~~~
jlgreco
> _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...

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dman
Wait till your friends start having children :)

~~~
jlgreco
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.

~~~
jlgreco
@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.

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

~~~
13b9f227ecf0
All the major Asian and Western urban centers are huge population sinks with
way below replacement TFR.

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ExpiredLink
Correlation is not causation. Again.

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

~~~
gems
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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?

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OGinparadise
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

