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Thread: Why Loneliness May Be the Next Big Public-Health Issue

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    Why Loneliness May Be the Next Big Public-Health Issue

    http://time.com/3747784/loneliness-mortality/

    Loneliness kills. That’s the conclusion of a new study by Brigham Young University researchers who say they are sounding the alarm on what could be the next big public-health issue, on par with obesity and substance abuse.

    The subjective feeling of loneliness increases risk of death by 26%, according to the new study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Social isolation — or lacking social connection — and living alone were found to be even more devastating to a person’s health than feeling lonely, respectively increasing mortality risk by 29% and 32%.

    “This is something that we need to take seriously for our health,” says Brigham Young University researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, an author of the study. “This should become a public-health issue.”

    The researchers emphasized the difference between the subjective, self-reported feeling of loneliness and the objective state of being socially isolated. Both are potentially damaging, the study found. People who say they are alone but feel happy are at increased risk of death, as are those who have many social connections but say they are lonely. People who are both objectively isolated and subjectively lonely may be at the greatest risk of death, says Holt-Lunstad, though she notes that more data would be needed to know with certainty.

    “If we just tell people to interact with more people, that might solve the social-isolation issue, but it might not solve the loneliness issue,” she said. “I think we need to acknowledge that both of these components are important.”


    my junk is ugly

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    It's The Internets Fault

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    "The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness." Eric Hoffer

    That article gives me mixed feelings of loneliness and absurdity. I thought existentialism left with Camus and Sartre. Of course Samuel (avatar) was on to the mood too. My wife often tells people my husband could live alone when the topic of friends or companionship comes up. It may be I just enjoy the joys of quiet. Of course I'm also with Salinger, children are among my best friends, they know the simple joys of looking. Seems to me to be more pop psychology baloney, but then again there is truth that those who live in peaceful communities, busy, live longest.

    "I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere." Albert Camus, 'The Fall'

    "So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-hot pokers. Hell is - other people!" Sartre from 'No Exit'


    'Home Again, Home Again'

    "The children are back, the children are back—
    They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack;
    The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad,
    Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad.

    The city apartment is leaky and cold,
    The landlord lascivious, greedy and old—
    The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted,
    The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.

    The company caved, the boss went broke,
    The job and the love affair, all up in smoke.
    The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock—
    O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.

    And so they return with their piles of possessions,
    Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions,
    Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens,
    Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.

    Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother
    Don’t say a word, but they look at each other
    As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack.
    The children are back. The children are back."

    Marilyn L. Taylor

    Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, Oh, the irony!


    'Rain'

    "Toward evening, as the light failed
    and the pear tree at my window darkened,
    I put down my book and stood at the open door,
    the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
    a smell of wet clay in the wind.
    Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
    half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
    drummed against our tent, I heard
    for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
    drifting across that remote lake—
    a loneliness like no other,
    though what I heard as inconsolable
    may have been only the sound of something
    untamed and nameless
    singing itself to the wilderness around it
    and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
    and of good companions gone
    into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
    and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
    whether it was grief or joy or something other
    that surged against my heart
    and held me listening there so long and late."

    Peter Everwine


    Oh and make sure you support poets.
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    It's not the internet, it's the bigoted and hateful intolerance of far too many Americans that does it. I personally consider most of America a culture that, to repeat myself, is a culture that thrives on hatred, bigotry, and intolerance, regardless of what you hear.

    We got rabid feminists who hate men. We got rabid liberals who hate conservatives and white conservative Christians, We got rabid conservatives who hate liberals. We've got whites that hate blacks (and other minorities). We've got blacks (and other minorities) that hate whites. We've got Christians that hate atheists, science, and homosexuals. we've got homosexuals and atheists and science who hate Christians.

    Then we've got the Marxists and socialists who hate freedom and liberty and capitalism. Then we've got this, then we've got that and the other thing to boot. And to complicate matters, we've got the major news media using sensationalistic hyperbole that most Americans fall for in order to stir things up so they can make all kinds of money selling news.

    We've got the rabid political pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart who are only mouthpieces for their political party. And helping them is a huge party of political hacks that constantly repeat over and over again "my party is good the other party is bad". "Only FOX News is bad, MSNBC is good"

    And for most Americans, most Americans only care about themselves and their own. There is also a lot of apathy and ignorance roasting America in its juices.

    So it's really not the internet. While it isn't helping, it isn't the real problem.

    It is the culture.

    All this hate is hurting people. There is so much of it that it is extremely difficult to find people of real intelligence, dignity and grace that treat people with respect. So with all this screaming and yelling over people who have different opinions and beliefs, well, it's very hard to find people that you can get along with. You can't lash out because people don't like that and will trash and bash you for it, because most people don't care about cause and effect they just see the cause.

    So there really is only one thing you can do.

    And that is to just be alone.

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    Yeah, but even these haters you speak of could find other like minded haters to be friends with.

    Loneliness & being alone is due to a lack of personal connections with others, not some large scale, across the board thing.

    You could be a Klan member & still have close, satisfying, personal relationships with other Klan members.

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    we have lost our sense of community and common goals

    @Dragonborn Herald @JDubya

    Hate is too strong a word for what is happening today, if I were to hazard a reason I'd say it is lack of a civic, humanitarian education, along with a lack of simple historical education. Add tribalism, sectarian thinking, groupthink and ideological purity and the stew is complete. There is a particular irony to the fact most Americans have life better than any time in history and you would hardly know it. Doubt, fear, and paranoia control the minds and much of our media feeds it.

    Coincidentally the April Harper’s Magazine has a cover story, 'Going It Alone - The dignity and challenge of solitude' By Fenton Johnson

    Harper's is a great magazine, check this edition out. A few other interesting commentaries below.

    "All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." Blaise Pascal

    "The malaise starts at home. The Americans no longer trust their own model and no longer express willingness to "export" it. Inequality is growing. The family, important for raising children, is gradually being sidetracked; single parent children have less experience of living together with other people. Together these societal "earthquakes" annihilate coherence and commonality, thus undermining common purposes and consensus. Around the world the US model -- as the ultimate objective or a blueprint to be adopted albeit with adaptations and adjustments -- has lost its allure. The American way of life is still attractive, but neither the US political system nor the economic model evokes similar feelings." Joergen Oerstroem Moeller http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joerge...b_6867118.html



    "In tracing the thread of our species’ evolution, Wilson goes back to a central discovery in entomology. Bees and termites, along with ants, Wilson’s own specialty, are known as “eusocial” insects. The word refers to a “true” social condition: eusocial organisms are distinguished by cooperatively rearing their young across multiple generations. It is, in evolutionary terms, a recent phenomenon, first manifesting between 350 and 250 million years ago. Eusociality has independently developed on only twenty occasions — in insects, some shrimps, mole rats, and humans — but it has been a runaway success. For example, although there are only around 20,000 species of ants and termites among the million or more insect species that exist, those relatively few species compose more than half the body weight of all insects on earth. If eusociality is so successful, why has it arisen so infrequently? Many chance mutations are required, but the last step seems the greatest hurdle the building of a protective nest within which the young are raised, and from which foraging trips are launched. The campsite was humanity’s first nest, and the start of the shift to a meat eating diet around 2 million years ago might have been the trigger for its development: hunters must range far and wide in search of game, and females and infants find it hard to keep up." 'The evolution of a flawed species' By Tim Flannery, Review of 'The Meaning of Human Existence' by Edward O. Wilson Harper's Magazine December 2014

    Of course it could be that changes are too subtle and often repeated.

    "Such tendencies in American Life as isolationism and the extreme nationalism that usually goes with it, hatred of Europe and Europeans, racial, religious, and nativist phobias, resentment of big business, trade-unionism, intellectuals, the eastern seaboard and its culture - all these have been found not only in opposition to reform but also at times oddly combined with it. One of the most interesting and least studied aspects of American Life has been a frequent recurrence of the demand for reforms, many of them aimed at the remedy of genuine ills, combined with strong moral convictions and with a choice of hatred as a kind of creed." Richard Hofstadter circa 1955, 'The Age of Reform'
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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