Loneliness poses risks as deadly as smoking: surgeon general

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Loneliness poses risks as deadly as smoking: surgeon general

The U.S. surgeon general says loneliness poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually. Dr. Vivek Murthy's report issued Tuesday says about half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness. The surgeon general is...
apnews.com

 
Gyms, churches, bars / social clubs, senior centers, group nature walks, group dinners...............no need for anyone to really be lonely. Get out there and meet peeps.
 
If you want to start fishin for a good time... you got to start fishin by throwin in yer line!

 
Anybody who gets lonely these days and has an active life has not met enough assh*les. It only take one or two big ones to make a person get disgusted of most others.

Get a cat.
 

The AI revolution is going to make America's loneliness crisis even worse​

Americans are trapped in a loneliness epidemic. Across the country, people are having fewer social interactions, spending more time alone, and reporting fewer close friends. These trends aren't just a symptom of the COVID-19 pandemic — while the last few years may have accelerated the loneliness crisis, the shift toward a more solitary life has been happening for years.

A new report from the US surgeon general finds that social activities of all kinds have declined, and it compared the health impact of this increasing loneliness to smoking 12 cigarettes a day. My own research found that Americans are in the throes of a "friendship recession" with people reporting smaller social circles and fewer close friends. This rising tide of isolation is particularly acute among young people: The time that Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 spend with friends has declined considerably over the past two decades, according to the surgeon general's report, from an average of 2.5 hours a day to just 40 minutes.

Read the rest:

 

Loneliness in an A.I.-Driven World | Rachels Don't Run | The New Yorker Screening Room​

Aug 2, 2023
14:42

In Joanny Causse’s short film, a customer-support agent at an A.I. companionship service impersonates an artificial dream girl to chat with a caller for whom she’s developed feelings.
 

Loneliness Isn’t Just Bad for Your Health—It’s Deadly​

If you think canceling plans is always good self-care, you might want to think again. People who keep an active social calendar not only enjoy a better quality of life—they could also stave off an early trip to the grave.

Loneliness and social isolation were linked to an increased risk of death from any cause, according to new research. That includes missing out on seeing loved ones, not having weekly group activities like a book club, or just often feeling lonely.

“Just like we need to make time in our busy lives to be physically active, we need to make time in our busy lives to be socially active,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, director of the Social Connection & Health Lab at Brigham Young University, who wasn’t involved in the report.

More:

Loneliness Isn’t Just Bad for Your Health—It’s Deadly

People who report often feeling lonely or being socially isolated are at an increased risk of death from any cause, new research suggests.
www.wsj.com
 
Interesting take on aloneness.

From the link (you'll have to scroll down a little bit) :

Aloneness​

I’ve been thinking about aloneness recently. Well, I’ve been thinking about it my whole life. It’s difficult to remember a time where I didn’t feel alone or apart or “on my own.” And I’ve spent the majority of my adult life — from 17 onward — living mostly alone, going to bed alone, and waking up alone. Left to my own volition to somehow transmute that aloneness into forward momentum, “output,” (“content” ha ha) and positive habits.

Aloneness sucks. It’s insidious and becomes habitual. It’s rapacious. It saps the spirit. It twists a peaceful dude all truculent and paranoid. It renders decision making oddly cumbersome. It’s more difficult to feel elevated as a human when swaddled in aloneness. Self-worth plummets as aloneness rises.

Tokyo Walk, TBOT Cover, Aloneness — Roden newsletter issue 086

Notes on aloneness vs. solitude
craigmod.com
 

The case for inviting everyone to everything​

In a time when loneliness is more pervasive than ever, why not extend an invitation?

When a friend from college told Melissa Chan that he was coming to visit her in New York City, she was thrilled. It was 2018; she hadn’t seen him in four years, when they had studied abroad in Vienna together. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is a big deal. Let me throw you a party,’” Chan remembers. This friend didn’t know anyone in New York, but that didn’t matter. Chan invited a bunch of her friends, and told them all her usual encouragement to “just bring whoever.” Leading up to the party, her friend mentioned that he had chatted a lot with the two young people in his row on the flight over. “He was like, ‘Oh, is it weird if I invite them to the party?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, that’d be so fun.’”

And it was fun. Having two strangers who were totally unconnected from anyone, save for the serendipitous flight seating plan, made for a great icebreaker, and it sparked a lot of dynamic conversation. Although Chan didn’t keep in touch with the pair, she and her visiting friend remember that night fondly. It sort of encapsulated Chan’s general philosophy when it comes to parties and socializing: Be free and easy with your invitations. “When there’s more of a melting pot at an event, it’s just a more interesting environment and way more conducive to diverse conversations and making new friends,” she says.

More:

The case for inviting everyone to everything

In a time when loneliness is more pervasive than ever, why not extend an invitation?
www.vox.com
 
One could say the same for "Help from the government"...
 

Loneliness is a global epidemic. It's time to take it seriously.​

Dec 24, 2023
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy used to talk about loneliness as a public health crisis. Now he says it's an epidemic that urgently needs our attention. The World Health Organization agrees with him. Now as co-chair of its newly appointed Commission on Social Connections, Dr. Murthy has an even bigger platform from which to advocate for change, encouraging us to reach out and ask for help while also offering it to others who may need it. He joins The Excerpt to talk about why this problem is so persistent and what we can do to fix it.

13:33
 
searcher said:
Loneliness is a global epidemic. It's time to take it seriously.
Click to expand...
What we need is more NPC Social Justice Warriors, getting in my schitt for Pronoun Abuse.

Some moar transvestites coming onto the wrong sex, might help, too.

And, all the mediuh gaslighting. Nothing cheers me up like endless transparent propaganda, except maybe being surrounded by eager subjects repeating the Bullet Points like shibboleths.

Bottom line is, it's the Liberal Utopia that is isolating us from others.

It is what it is. You find a way to deal with it, or you take the gas pipe.
 
Well, that would be me now, took care of Mama until she went Home, wanted to buy my two sisters out of their part of the house but both said no, so now I’m sitting here in a mobile home park where I don’t kiw any of my neighbors and everyone I still know moved out of state or is far away.

R.
 
searcher said:
Loneliness is a global epidemic. It's time to take it seriously.
Click to expand...
Probably causes myocarditis and sudden death too...

Time to

A. Pack up and move to where your people are, and/or
B. Go to a food kitchen and volunteer to serve folks less fortunate than you.
C. Learn to dance! I'd start with a local 'Contra Dance' crowd. It's more fun than you can have with your clothes on. Find in your area.
D. Gravitate to a pickleball community and learn the game! It's an inviting crowd. Join a local club. They're EVERYWHERE.
 
^^^^^^^
Gyms, non-denominational churches, firehouse / church dinners, hobbie clubs - all good places to meet peeps.

If you need something to do to keep busy - free online courses are good. https://www.coursera.org/

The food kitchen is a good idea. Be surprised the interesting people you can meet in one.

@Ragnarok - I hope 2024 is a good year for you.
 
Goldhedge said:
Probably causes myocarditis and sudden death too...
Click to expand...

I don't know anything about this stuff, but in some cases lonely people have been known to off themselves. Maybe something to do with feeling life isn't worth living?
 

Being Alone vs Toxic Families: Which one is Worse​

Dec 27, 2023

9:53
 
Posting as a little food for thought.

A new study has found that children growing up in low-income families have fewer opportunities to make friends and to socially integrate at school. Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of Stockholm examined data from over 200 school classes in Sweden and reached this conclusion.

Newswise — Having friends at school is important for adolescents’ development and it shapes their social skills later in life. Teenagers who feel well integrated in their school class have better mental health and higher grades – which has a knock-on effect on their later careers.

Poorer youth have fewer friends.

School friendships crucial for teen development, impacting mental health, grades, and future careers.
www.newswise.com
 

America Is Getting Lonelier and More Indoorsy. That’s Not a Coincidence.​

My Brooklyn apartment is designed for sterility. The windows have screens to keep out bugs; I chose my indoor plants specifically because they don’t attract pests. While commuting to other, similarly aseptic indoor spaces—co-working offices, movie theaters, friends’ apartments—I’ll skirt around pigeons, avert my eyes from a gnarly rat, shudder at the odd scuttling cockroach. But once I’m back inside, the only living beings present (I hope, and at least as far as I know) are the ones I’ve chosen to interact with: namely, my partner and the low-maintenance snake plant on the windowsill.

My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease. But such disgust is part of a larger estrangement between humanity and the natural world. As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it. These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called “the vicious cycle of biophobia.”

More:

 
You live in Gnu Yuck, that is what your world now has to offer. Neo-Soviet accommodations; streets filled with the homeless, hotels filled with Guest DemocRats. A world where the Leftist social mores have destroyed the family, the church, various clubs around various non-political interests - leaving people alone and subject to Leftist mind-controlled, coming out of that sewer-conduit called "television."

And now whining about it on a Leftist mind-control conduit, called MSN.
 

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy: This is ‘one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness’​

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been sounding the alarm on the loneliness epidemic for more than a year.

In his 2023 report “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” Murthy wrote that loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. Young people, specifically, are reporting especially high rates of loneliness.

“Given the profound consequences of loneliness and isolation, we have an opportunity, and an obligation, to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis,” he wrote.

More:

 
So, what. They gonna assign some sort of transvestite freak to me, in a government-mandated Lonliness Remediation operation? Carnal relations required, if I'm to keep eligibility for Medicare/ACA/Foo-Stamms/whatever other miserable allotment I'm on, in a couple of years.

This smacks of Ayn Rand's scenario in We, The Living, where the protagonist's family was first, reduced to one room in what had been their own house; and then, ordered to accept a stranger as a "housemate."

These freaks disintegrated society - and are keeping majority white males, and others, from finding sympatico company. Now they're gonna create a GOOBERMINT POGROM to FIX what hell they've wrought.
 
If you need a cure for loneliness just go on you tube and watch all the court videos on divorce and child support or all the liberal tiki's Tok women who hate men or cant understand why they cant find a man that will spend all their money on them for nothing in return.
If you really want a good woman go to the Philippines and get a wife. They will stay forever.
 
Just don’t bring her back to the states.
 
Viking said:
Just don’t bring her back to the states.
Click to expand...
How true. True story: In the Navv, my first command, my LPO (Lead Petty Officer, civilian would be a foreman...a higher-up straw boss) was a careerist at Year 15. He was an E-6 - First Class Petty Officer. Up for CPO a number of times, but sadly, he looked like Barney Fife. That matters - the Navy calls it "Command Bearing." But he was a good guy, competent, he was easily gonna finish out his career.

But for his wife. Yeah, he got in when the Philippines were wide-open for the Navy. And he got his...you know the acronyms. I never met the wife, but not all of them looked like the bar whores we've seen in photos.

Anyway. He was about to re-enlist and get his final duty assignment. His wife ONLY knew California. She was happy there - there was a large Filipino community in San Diego; she had a job, she had a home, basically. Staying in California should have been no problem.

But the Navy, with its sadistic tendencies, seemed hellbent on moving him to the interior. He was down to a recruiting post in Lincoln, Nebraska, or a job at Great Lakes.

And, I later saw, it wasn't a shortage of vacancies. Shortly after he accepted the bad news, and took the family to Great Lakes Naval Training....I had a Midwestern recruit stand in front of me (I was a Personnelman; we handled things like transfers, separations, and the like). He SO wanted to either do the East Coast or Europe, and he learned that ONLY California would be open.

Now, granted, those two were not competing for the exact same billets; but it didn't seem likely that BOTH of them could NOT get what they so wanted. Unless you factor in the inherent sadism in military hive-minds.

But...to the original point...bringing in a foreign wife to the US, doesn't always work well
 

“The Anti-Social Century:” Inside America’s Epidemic of Solitude | Amanpour and Company​

Jan 17, 2025 #amanpourpbs

TikTok and other social media platforms have faced scrutiny from health experts for an increase in loneliness, particularly among teens. As U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy nears the end of his second term as the nation's top doctor, his "parting prescription" for the American people is to foster a stronger sense of community. Data from Murthy's department shows Americans are increasingly isolated from one another with each passing year. This phenomenon is the focus of Derek Thompson's latest piece for The Atlantic, "The Anti-Social Century." Thompson joins Michel Martin to discuss what can be done.

18:14
 
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