The Hidden Epidemic
61% of my generation deals with a condition that is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A condition that leads to an increased risk of heart disease and cancer, decreased resistance to infection, a decline in cognitive ability, and people with it are more likely to partake in substance abuse and domestic violence. That’s not to mention to anxiety and depression that accompany it
I’m talking about loneliness. The feeling of being unsatisfied with current relationships. The feeling of not feeling wanted in your community. Of not feeling needed, and not feeling that you can depend on someone.
I knew our nation had a problem with it. I had seen the occasional headline on Twitter or the nightly news, but I had no idea how bad it was and how it affected us. Then I spent the weekend reading a few studies from Harvard, The Scientific American, and a health insurance company called Cignac. I almost wish I didn’t.
I knew loneliness sucked. That led to depression and anxiety, serious problems that need to be addressed. But I didn’t know about the physical effects. That it can take 8-15 years off your life if it persists, especially if one lives a sedentary life.
According to the Harvard study conducted in October of last year and released in February of this one, 34% of Americans say they suffer from persistent loneliness. However, the most alarming part of that 34% was the fact that in the younger generation, my generation, almost ⅔ said that they dealt with loneliness. That’s ⅔ of the people I know dealing with a disease that if it persists, can take a tenth of your life away.
If I had to point any fingers at why my generation is so lonely, I think my biggest one would point towards social media. The act of perceiving others having a good time with friends while you aren’t can bring about feelings of rejection, feelings that are only exasperated by not receiving likes on posts or being tagged by others in the comments. There is a reason social media has been linked to the increase in mental health disorders.
There is also the pandemic to think about. The institutions that we find and make friends like school, college, and sports have largely remained shuttered. Mass media has taught us to distrusts, strangers, due to the possibility of them being infected with covid. Once you spend so much time isolating yourself, it’s hard to return to society.
Society might be the biggest reason. This is a bold claim to make, and one that I might need a series of posts to explain. We humans are not built for the globalist society that we have created. We were built for small-scale communities that depended on each other for survival. This new age of the internet and nation-states and social media is incredibly overwhelming, and we don’t like it.
Or as the Journal of Affective Disorders concluded in 2012. “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”
I’ll talk about society’s impact more another time though.
I wanted to end this article with thoughts on how to prevent loneliness, but it got a little too long so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave on a negative note. The second part of this article, on how to build community, will be available here tomorrow.
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