America faces a hidden epidemic of loneliness that may make us more vulnerable to the pandemic
“In the face of a global catastrophe, the impulse humans have to band together when bad things happen, our so-called disaster-convergence instinct, is now hemmed in by the number of people in our immediate household and the pixelated faces of a social circle however many far-flung miles away. The large-scale social media experiment of the past 15 years may have been priming us for just such a moment as this — when whole swathes of our lives would migrate online — but we also know that it’s an experiment that’s failed at replicating the type of social interactions we humans need to thrive.”
‘“When we feel insecure, our physiology essentially gets us ready to be hurt, because through the bulk of our evolutionary history when we weren’t feeling safe, we were likely to get bitten or speared by something.”’
“Loneliness, which has since been found to be a medical risk factor on par with smoking and obesity, may not feel like an active threat to us emotionally, Cole says, “but biologically, man, the memo is making its way down into our nervous system and our tissue and fertilizing chronic disease and undermining our antiviral defense. And at this particular time, neither of those seem like great results.”What this means is that those of us experiencing the loneliness of social isolation may actually be less equipped to fight off the coronavirus.”
[Akon’s Lonely plays quietly in the background...]
‘Sometimes, though, the body can be tricked. When Cole and his colleagues started looking for ways to combat the physical effects of loneliness, they didn’t find that positive emotions made a difference at all. But one thing did: “It was something called eudaimonic well-being, which is a sense of purpose and meaning, a sense of a commitment to some kind of self-transcendent goal greater than your own immediate self-gratification. People who have a lot of connection to some life purpose? Their biology looked great.” Even when researchers compared lonely people with purpose to social butterflies without it, purpose came out on top. In other words, it’s possible when we’re doing things to better our society, the body assumes there’s a society there to better. We’re technically alone, but it doesn’t feel that way.’
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