Humans need community. Every piece of our knowledge tells us this. Isolation and loneliness are deadly, like actually deadly. It’s hard to quantify such experiences, but researchers taking stabs posit that social isolation drags down a person’s mortality as much as alcoholism or smoking do. “A 32% increased risk of stroke,” particularly in people above fifty, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US. A Harvard study from the first year of COVID dispassionately reports, “Early mortality . . . depression, anxiety, heart disease, substance abuse, and domestic abuse”—these are, they say, “the potentially steep costs of loneliness.”
Heart disease? Stroke? A risk that rivals smoking and boozing?! As it turns out. Being alone is bad for you—and it’s not all about close family and friends. “Talking to strangers,” says Robert Waldinger, who leads the longest-running study on human happiness, at Harvard, “actually makes us happier. There’s good research on this.” (It’s true, there’s lots.) Even in the initial terrifying days of the pandemic, where few were counselling against physical distancing, the US National Institutes of Health warned of drastic health consequences in the elderly, brought on by “an acute, severe sense of social isolation and loneliness.” And on the other side of generations, the same for young people, among whom anxiety and depression in 2020 was at nearly twice the levels of the general population. In All about Love, bell hooks wrote that we make communities “to ensure human survival everywhere in the world . . . communities sustain life—not nuclear families, or the ‘couple,’ and certainly not the rugged individualist . . . even individuals who are raised in nuclear families usually experience it as merely a small unit within a larger unit of extended kin.” And in that article on that Harvard research above, the one dispassionately reporting early mortality and heart disease? The deck for that article begins so simply, almost AI-like in its awkward irrefutability: “Robust social network is key to easing pain.”
