
The Lethality of Loneliness - bitsai
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113176/science-loneliness-how-isolation-can-kill-you#
======
leoh
I thought the most profound thing mentioned in this article was that
loneliness was about intimacy. Not necessarily physical intimacy, but social
intimacy. This is exceedingly important subtlety. Too often we say things like
"go be social, go hang out." You can "be social", but non-intimate
relationships (relationships with people you don't trust, people who are
cruel, people who aren't authentic) do not have good therapeutic value.

~~~
brandall10
The loneliest period of my life was during my clubbing days in my 20s. I was
out doing something almost every night, had a few dozen people I called
friends. Sometimes it was alot of fun, but it was ultimately draining... the
connections were superficial at best.

Moved away shortly after turning 26, stopped answering almost all calls and
had little social interaction for about 6 mos. Then I got a dog and started
meeting people again but slowly and in a completely different context. That
was probably the most cathartic period in my life.

~~~
alashley
I know what you mean. A friend of mine was saying he was heavily into the
party scene in the years before he met his now fiancée. He said meeting her
earlier would have saved him years of going out to clubs for the sake of not
feeling lonely.

And of course a lot of use feel like it is easier to meet someone when we
don't have our walls up. But most connections made at a club are superficial
at best like you said.

~~~
breakupapp
So what's a good solution to shortening the time it takes to meet one's
fiancée?

~~~
greenlander
99% of mainstream dating advice is hogwash.

Learn the truth about women. Start reading:

<http://dalrock.wordpress.com/> <http://heartiste.wordpress.com/>

The best dating advice is concentrated on men who are players or aspire to be.
But the skills to seduce a fling and a future wife are very similar.

If you want to catch a great woman, you must have the skills to catch any
woman.

~~~
taurath
The above advice is probably really good if you think of women as objects.

~~~
sigkill
If you can have a Class of Human, I don't see the problem having women AND men
as objects.

~~~
Joeri
The problem is that it doesn't have a point to it. If you don't treat people
like people, instead of puppets, there's very little point to interacting with
them. Even if you could "catch any woman", what would you do with her when the
superficial fun wears off?

~~~
sigkill
Obviously I wholeheartedly agree with you. I was just trying to make a
relevant joke.

On a more serious note, people who treat others (be it men or women) as
objects/puppets are themselves devoid of any deeper intelligence. I will go so
far to generalize and say that they are pretty shallow morally, and a lot of
times, intellectually (not quite, but I don't know a better word).

------
btipling
In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside
down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis
was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very
high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research
quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest
risk for suicide. I don't remember the specific studies or evidence, but it
still resonates with me today.

~~~
tokenizer
Interesting. This makes sense from a layman's reasoning perspective as well.
People who spend an extreme amount of time with others don't spend enough with
themselves and probably lose their identity. I guess my question is, what
constitutes interaction? Does the brief conversations with my coworkers count?
What about a phone call to my mother? Does all of this interaction being
analysed have to in person and in depth?

~~~
ElongatedTowel
I wonder how romantic relationships fit in. I don't have that many friends,
but I have someone to talk to every day and I can be around my family.

But not having been in a relationship for many years, or rather, not ever
having been in one that could be called serious has started to occupy a lot of
my thinking time. It's something I'm reminded of everyday, like it was a
disease.

It is often said that one has to be happy alone to be happy together. But
might it be that even someone who is creating happiness for himself loses it
because loneliness is its antagonist?

I smile when I walk trough the rain, I laugh when I hear a joke, I cry when I
watch a touching movie. Isn't that a sign of happiness? Why does it feel so
worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I love?

~~~
hosh
> Why does it feel so worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I
> love?

Oh man, the answer to that is mysterious and beautiful.

Let's separate two things: romance and love. We think we want romance but we
really want love.

We think we need another person to love, but the truth is, Love Is. It's
present wherever you are, whatever moment. It's just, we usually have our
heads stuck up our asses and so we don't feel it. Then we wander blindly
around the world looking for our lost love. Which then gets distorted by
notions of romance.

Or put it in another way

    
    
        The minute I heard my first love story,
        I started looking for you, not knowing
        how blind that was.
        
        Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
        they're in each other all along.
        -- Rumi

~~~
kmtrowbr
Something that touched me was: "Love is the evidence of the oneness of all
things" ... how to say it, there really is only one thing, the universe, and
the ego notions that we have of our separateness are an illusion.

When you and your couple "become one" you're just like drops of water running
together. Love is the good feeling of like rejoining with like.

When you are in a couple, you still can be "couple lonely" -- you seek out
other "couple friends" ... maybe have kids? You want more love, you want to
continue joining together with other pieces of the universe.

------
rza
As a recent college-grad who'd moved to suburbia, I think the automobile-
centric culture in America is what is killing intimacy. If you were not able
to make close friends in college/early-life, than once you live on your own in
the suburbs, it often feels impossible to get any sense of intimacy. Intimacy
is built up with small moments, and when every interaction has to be a
commute-laden ordeal, you lose the opportunity for spontaneous and random
social interactions, making the process of building of relationships orders of
magnitude slower.

~~~
wybo
Had a somewhat similar experience (except that my (college) friends lived
across the Atlantic).

Ideally suburbia should become a thing of the past (and it might, with rising
energy prices). But for now I'd say the best thing you could do is move back
to the (inner) city (or back to uni for a post-grad).

It may be a hassle but being unhappy is a drain as well.

I can also highly recommend most European/UK cities, as their cores are where
people actually live and thrive, rather than that odd mix of blitz corporate
office guests and sniffling economic outcasts.

------
xxchan
> It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of
> us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because
> loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000
> identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and
> unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time.
> This figure held so steady across the pairs of twins—young or old, male or
> female, notwithstanding different upbringings—that researchers concluded
> that it had to reflect genetic, not environmental, influence. To understand
> what it means for a personality trait to have 48 percent heritability,
> consider that the influence of genes on a purely physical trait is 100
> percent. Children get the color of their eyes from their parents, and that
> is that. But although genes may predispose children toward loneliness, they
> do not account for everything that makes them grow up lonely. Fifty-two
> percent of that comes from the world.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the math is wrong. Assume prior for being
lonely is 50/50. Now, if 100% of twins reported that they are also lonely,
this would be proof that loneliness is genetic. If it was 0%, it would imply
some sadistic inverse relationship, but one that'd still be genetic. If it's
50%, the same as the prior, it means no relationship. 48% is pretty close.

~~~
jacobolus
You’re misunderstanding “heritability”.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods>

The study in question: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516>

PDF:
[http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcre...](http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/longitudinalgenetic2007.pdf)

~~~
xxchan
I see, obviously the math is a bit more involved. I assumed those 8000 were
identical twins who were separated at birth. Thank you

------
navs
So what do you folks do to combat loneliness? I've tried meetup.com but the
groups I joined haven't quite worked out for me. Outside of work acquaintances
and classmates, I don't socialize.

~~~
sinnerswing
stop being a pussy and listen to Roth-era Van Halen.

or...

2 chicks at the same time, man. ;)

~~~
illuminate
Temporary jollies don't get rid of the great chasm of loneliness. When they're
gone, it remains.

~~~
gaius
It's a reference to a similar topic of conversation in the movie Office Space.

~~~
illuminate
I get the reference, with the PUA suggestions elsewhere in the thread, I
couldn't tell if it was sincere or not!

------
yason
There's a difference between being lonely and being alone.

With regard to the latter, it's one of the fundamental insights of human life
to, at some point, realize that you've always been and you always will be
alone on this planet. There's only one you that is unique and nobody, I say
nobody at all, will somehow match you perfectly, or make you fullfilled, or
complement you essentially somehow. The only thing you can rely on is to
always have your own company so it's better to learn to be friends with
yourself.

But being lonely is another thing. Human beings aren't meant to be lonely.
Heck, even most animals aren't meant to be that way. The worst kind of
loneliness is the one that you experience among a group of people you call
your friends. The loneliness may not be obvious until you find the first
person who really becomes your friend.

As for "combatting loneliness", I suggest don't. In the worst case you're not
only lonely but you're lonely _and_ failing your social goals. Learn to live
with loneliness, if not for anything else but for the sake of if you ever
must. When you're content, perhaps not entirely happy, but content with
loneliness then it's much easier to approach people and make social contacts.
That is because you have nothing to lose and you know you'll be just fine even
if it doesn't work out. Starting from this context prevents you, out of
desperation, from selling your soul for the company of people who don't make
you feel good.

------
zupatol
> At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of
> electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d
> check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that
> day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the
> software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix.

This mobile app sounds like something that would be really easy to write.

~~~
vijayr
This will only help so much - it'll soon become a chore/annoyance, as it would
become more of "checking the box" than actually "connecting with people".

This is a problem that can't solved by tech, mobile app etc (tech can only
help a bit). I'm not sure simply "talking with store clerk" will help
loneliness. If that is the case, talking to our bosses and other colleagues
(who really don't care too much about anyone other than themselves - in many
cases) should help, but we know it doesn't.

Also, we don't need a mobile app for this - just setting up a reminder on the
calendar we use, should be more than enough.

As one grows older, making friends (and genuine connections) becomes more and
more difficult. That is a problem worth solving.

~~~
jessedhillon
I don't know that you can so easily dismiss other people as not being able to
help. I have kept a journal for a while of my mood correlated with how many
people I talk to. Granted n=1 and totally lacking rigor, the results for me
indicate very easily that even simply asking "how are you" to the person who
makes my lunch has a large impact.

I have made some quite close friends of the people who I interact with daily
-- coworkers, baristas, cashiers etc. In my experience the depth of intimacy
available to you depends on how much you're willing to risk. If you reveal
yourself first, other people feel more comfortable following your lead.

What you wrote about how relations with others can be expected to be shallow
is, IMO, what the article talks about when the researcher says that you have
to suspend the beliefs and assumptions you make when approaching other people.

~~~
vijayr
I'm not dismissing other people. I'm simply trying to say that talking to
other people, just for the "sake of talking" doesn't help much. 10 minutes
with people who we love and care about (and vice versa) is not the same as 10
minutes with a random person. That is why people feel lonely at parties, even
though they are surrounded by dozens and dozens of people. Of course, it might
very well happen that _that_ 10 mins with a random person might turn into a
life long friendship - which would be awesome. Perhaps it is worth trying it a
few times (like Jim Carey from the move "Yes man") and see where it takes.

All I am trying to say is - talking to a person just to tick a box on an app,
won't help (either of the parties). Being genuinely interested will. And this
is not a problem that can be solved by tech. If anything, tech makes it easier
to disconnect, rather than connect. It is much easier to spend 6 hours
watching 3 movies on netflix on a sunday, back to back, than going out and
actually talking to someone.

------
Aardwolf
I often select text in articles as a visual cue which line I'm reading.

Why oh why does this site needs to pop up a "share" widget when selecting
text?

Websites are really popping these "share" things all over the place lately.

~~~
qu4z-2
Maybe the websites are lonely?

------
marshray
I thought the part about gay men in-the-closet was interesting:

> the closeted man must police every piece of information known about him,
> live in constant terror of exposure or blackmail, and impose sharp limits on
> intimacy, or at least friendship

This phrase "police every piece of information known about him" would seem to
apply to everyone who wishes to retain even a baseline level of online privacy
in spite of the mega-entities seeking to acquire aggregate every possible
scrap of online information.

:-O

------
mikecane
Back in the 1980s, PBS had a science program hosted by Jim Hartz (Wikipedia
says it was Innovation). It had a program about how the lack of touch --
physical contact from others -- also affected health. Part of that program
showed the same kind of monkey research mentioned in this article. I once had
a transcript. Too bad the program isn't online for all to see.

~~~
GFischer
My girlfriend (a psychologyst) is doing a postgraduate course on Attachment.

Among a lot of material, she saw a lot of videos of monkey experiments, like
Harlow's (mentioned in the article) and I saw some too :) . It's quite
striking:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI>

from the article

"Harlow subjected newborn rhesus macaques to appalling isolation—months spent
in cages in the company only of “surrogate mothers” made of wire with
cartoonish monkey heads and bottles attached. Luckier monkeys had that and
cloth-covered versions of the same thing to cuddle. (It is remarkable what a
soft cloth can do to calm an anxious baby monkey down.) In the most extreme
cases, the babies languished alone at the bottom of a V-shaped steel
container. Cruel as these experiments were, Harlow proved that the absence of
mothering destroyed the monkeys’ ability to mingle with other monkeys, though
the “cloth mother” could mitigate the worst effects of isolation."

the article goes on to show how there are different gene expressions amongst
the differently-raised monkeys, and even posits that medication could help
with the physical expressions of loneliness:

"Cole can imagine giving people medications to treat loneliness, particularly
when it exacerbates chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
These could be betablockers, which reduce the physical effects of stress;
anti-inflammatory medicine; or even Tylenol—since physical and emotional pain
overlap, it turns out that Tylenol can reduce the pain of heartbreak."

The ending statement is:

"One message I take away from this is, ‘Hey, it’s not just early life that
counts,’ ” he says. “We have to choose our life well.” "

------
ars
The saddest "disease" ever: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism>

Babies died simply because they were not held enough.

------
jal278
I liked the discussion about "'silos' in health policy, meaning that we see
crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like
obesity or heart disease."

It seems like medicine needs to be less short-sighted and integrate loneliness
and nutrition and other non-medicinal factors into diagnoses and treatment.

~~~
GFischer
There was a top article recently on how personal visits for chronic patients
improves health A LOT:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/i...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/if-
this-was-a-pill-youd-do-anything-to-get-it/)

it's clearly linked to the problems of loneliness - if patients form a bond
with their nurse and know that someone cares, they're more likely to follow
through with treatment.

------
virtualwhys
and then there are the twinkle eyed ones that spend huge amounts of time alone
(hermits, monks/nuns on long term solo retreat). It probably has less to do
with being alone than feeling alone.

For lay people, however, living alone in the world goes against the grain;
hard not to feel like an odd ball.

Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-
ness: we're all alone together (quote from an old friend).

~~~
hosh
It _does_ have more to do with _feeling_ alone.

Hermits, monks, nuns, sages, sadhus, ascetics, cultivators, shamans, mind
travellers from all around the world of different wisdom traditions typically
have essentially the same practice. Each is looking into themselves to gain
insights about the world. This insight is at the core of everything:

    
    
        We live in an *illusion* that we are separate from each other.
    

This is at the core of the loneliness. To be intimate, to be connected, is to
realize that how we are _already_ connected.

When you know this, _it does not matter whether you are physically isolated or
not_.

This isn't something that special people called monks or nuns can do. This is
a capacity in each of us. That capacity is something we call love. Not
"romance". Love. Love that a child has for his parent, love that a mother and
father have for their child. Love among lovers and friends. Love for the
people in your community. Love for the strangers you don't know.

So of course, "living alone in the world goes against the grain." The grain is
to be connected. _Anyone_ , lay or not, who separates themselves find
themselves alone.

Separation comes in many forms. It isn't just physical. Being proud or ashamed
is separation. Being proud makes you "above" or "better" than someone. That's
separation. Being ashamed makes you want to hide away. That's separation.
Being so angry and hateful of someone that you want to destroy their standing,
status, credibility, resources, life -- yeah, that's a form of separation.

Being disgusted and averting your eyes from the homeless in the street is
separation. Being disturbed and fearful of the mentally ill -- that too is
separation. Being repulsed by the ugly and deformed, by the lepers and
unclean, yeah, that is separation.

Being special: heh, yeah, that's the very essence of separation.

We're not "alone together". In wanting to be special, to be unique, to have
our brand of personality, we want to carve out this little corner of "me". And
in the very doing so, we create distance.

So get in touch with yourself; get in touch with your family and friends.
Start with some affection, that's pretty easy :-)

~~~
guylhem
Best comment of this article IMHO. Posting this just to catch the reader eye
and maybe encourage 1 more person to read it.

~~~
hosh
:-)

------
anaon12
I'm probably entering the most lonely stage of my life at the moment, having
my 3rd alcohol related arrest has really pushed me further down the hole.

Despite all of my legal problems, I'm still holding down the same job, but I
feel at my age I've really done myself in. Obviously booze is a problem of
which I've completely eradicated from my life over the past 2 months. The
really sad part is I'm well adjusted otherwise and I graduated from a top CS
program. I've wanted to work abroad but I feel I'm trapped now by my past and
I'm really out of options to socialize on any meaningful level. I don't really
know what to do at this point. This article spelled out a life of doom for me.

For what its worth I'm 28 and have 2 duis and a public intox charge.

~~~
DenisM
1\. Your subjective view of your own situation is very negative - "done myself
in", "a life of doom" etc.

2\. At the same time your situation is objectively good - you have a good
profession and a good job, you're not complaining about health problems other
than alcohol dependency, and you kicked the alcohol for two months now. Even
if you went to jail you're out free now. The whole life is in front of you.

Given the obvious contradiction here, I suggest that you should not trust your
own judgement, and instead defer to someone else until your judgement is
repaired. This sort of discrepancy is indicative of anxiety-type disorder, the
kind that impairs your ability to evaluate your situation and makes everything
looks worse than it is. The best you can do is seek help from a professional
psychotherapist, and do exactly as they instruct you. Do not deviate, do not
"optimize", do not skip steps. Suspend all judgement and do exactly as you're
told. Use your logical side to overrule your emotional side and just follow
the program, because it's the right thing to do.

~~~
anaon12
Thanks for the reply. The PI charge can be expunged next year so really I'll
only have the 2 duis (one of which is ongoing but the nature of DUI laws its
pretty much going to end up a conviction). Even before the first sight of
legal trouble I was considering therapy but ive been afraid of being
subscribed medication that may disconnect me even further or the social
stigmatism of needing mental health help. Having your reply though has offered
a much needed outside opinion.

~~~
DenisM
Discuss it with therapist if you would prefer to reserve drugs as a last
resort, and try all the other, non-chemical things first, such as CBT. You
might even start by looking for a CBT-specializing therapist, as you are more
likely to find understanding from them.

------
passthesalt
I do get a good dose of intimacy from online conversations with closes
friends, and they do not even have to be in the same continent. In my country,
kids in their teens (maybe even 20s) can't imagine a world without the
internet (i.e. Facebook and Google). The internet is just that pervasive.

I'd really like to see a study on the effect online social networks have on
our collective mental health. My gut feel is that social networks are a
positive thing. I'm just happy that I will be able to maintain a certain level
of intimacy with friends when I'm older and less mobile.

------
bjourne
I wonder is anyone else feeling that the stigma of being alone is much worse
than actually being alone? Thing is, if you voluntarily spend your weekends
playing games, coding, walking in the nature or any other non-social activity
it reflects negatively upon you. I've spent a lot of holidays all by myself
doing what I enjoy, eating the holiday candy I like the most, and just
relaxing. From what I can tell, "normal" people would feel miserable spending
their time like that, so they assume that I too must feel miserable.

------
rthomas6
This caught my eye:

>In operations performed to relieve chronic pain, doctors have lesioned, or
disabled, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. After the surgery, the
patients report that they can still sense where the trouble comes from, but,
they add, it just doesn’t bother them anymore.

So there is a surgical procedure that removes the negative feelings of pain,
without removing the actual feeling? What are the downsides to this procedure?
I'm sure I must be missing something, but as described it sounds like
something some, or even a lot of adults without chronic pain would want to get
voluntarily. It seems perfect for people that need intense physical therapy in
order to walk. Also for people like elite military operatives that may have to
undergo extreme circumstances like torture. Would this surgery just make
people not care about torture? Also for athletes, who could now push
themselves to the physical limit due to now being able to endure great pain
without being bothered.

------
Alex3917
"Did God want us to die when we got stressed? The answer is no. What He wanted
is for us not to be alone. Or rather, natural selection favored people who
needed people."

These are both the same thing though. Essentially we're herd animals, and as
such we're designed to die if we aren't contributing to the herd. Probably so
that if we can't pass on our own genes we can at least increase the chances
that someone with similar genes can pass theirs along, by virtue of not
wasting resources.

~~~
bitwize
We're not herd animals -- more like band or pack animals. We have a more
sophisticated social structure with more complex roles than is implied by the
term "herd".

------
dschiptsov
Isolation, not voluntary loneliness. And all the harmful effects, it seems,
related to the stress and anxiety.

Voluntary loneliness, on the contrary, is beneficial, at least, to some yogis
and Himalayan saints.)

