Slashdot Mirror
How Social Isolation Is Killing Us (nymag.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from The New York Times: Social isolation is a growing epidemic (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- one that's increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they're lonely has
doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent. About one-third of Americans older than 65 now
live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in
poorer health -- especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and
depression -- are more likely to feel lonely. Those
without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters. A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted
sleep patterns, altered
immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of
stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent. Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age. Loneliness can
accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early:
Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as
obesity and smoking.
There are actually some people who are either happy or at least nonplussed to be alone. Not everyone feels a deep seated need to talk about the weather or hear about trivial personal problems. Not everyone who lives alone degenerates into a curled up ball and mentally wastes away. But the day health risks are determined on an individual basis from a large pool of facts is far, far away. People like the security blanket statements that sum up a complicated condition into one handy catch phrase or statistic. Much like stereotypes, while statistically this study may be correct in general it certainly does not apply to everyone equally.
Pretty much to be sociable you need a large group of people.
In the past this was based either around your extended family, region, race, religion, or national heritage. This was not always a good thing either at the micro or macro level, but it did represent a support network for some (but not all) members of a societal group.
Nowadays much of this has been lost, due to globalization, electronics, hetereogenized neighborhoods (especially new builds as evidenced in the US.) Neighborhoods for better or worse are often no longer established families and friends. As people have spread out, that previous sense of community has slowly dissolved. While there just as many people available today, fewer of them are willing to interact with people outside of their social norms, and since those social norms are spread more thinly across the local region, it becomes less likely that a particular person has an immediate support network to overcome that isolation.
As a personal example: When I was a kid, there were a half dozen kids around my age all living with a block or so of me. While there was a concern of child predators and abductions, by and large people still let their kids go outside, and kids by and large still snuck off to go have fun with friends (my parents were however one of the 'shut in' types, up until I was around 10 or so, at which point I was allowed to bike to school (mostly because my mom had better things to do than actually bother to take me to school or pick me up on time.) In addition to this there was at least one empty field per block (1/4 to 1/2 mile square) which usually lead to a congregation point for the kids. Fast forward 10-20 years and all those fields have been fenced in or built over. Most parents are more concerned about the appearance of their children's safety in regards to allowing them out in the neighborhood, and kids by and large would rather play videogames/watch tv/on a computer than go outside and do stuff, whether hanging out with friends, terrorizing neighbors, or finding field replacements to hang out in.
I'm sure you're going for the funny mod, and I hope you get it, but you're on the edge of insight, too. Superficial network-mediated social relationships are no substitute for the real thing, and human beings are extremely social animals. My joke on the topic (from many years ago) is that too much computer usage is not good for your mental health.
Slashdot is quite bad, but Facebook is vastly worse.
Could technology help solve these problems rather than make them worse? I think so, but it would require different economic models than are currently being used. In the worst-case example of Facebook, the primary metric driving their "success" has nothing to do with improving your social life or helping you find real friends (not to be confused with whatever Facebook means by their increasingly bizarre use of that word). Facebook just wants you to waste as much time as possible on their website.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
to make my debt affordable then something is very, very wrong with the economy.
You're right about the monetary system being used to balance things, but it's just a temporary patch on a broken system. People have come to expect (reasonable I'd say) improved quality of life. This generation is on track to the be first one American history to be worse off overall.
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That is denial.
Denial that social isolation is harming. Look, even in this thread there are so many people who are saying that they are happy alone.
More importantly, many magazines for women are pushing never ending message (never supported scientifically), that older women, after divorce are just better off.
Increase in mortality by an average of 30% would normally be declared an epidemic health hazard, on par with smoking and obesity.
Another fascinating fact is that probably a fifth of adults in USA are (or were) on antidepressants. Other studies have shown that having a partner, or a friend, to whom you can talk to, drastically reduces depression risk.
Finally, the ultimate statistical fact. In USA average life expectancy is 79.3 years (source: wiki). Costa Rica has life expectancy of 79.6 yrs, and Albania has 77.8, while Costa Rica spends one tenth of US healthcare spendings and Albania spends one thirtieth of US healthcare spendings?
Perhaps there is something wrong with US? Also, it is so difficult not to be suspicious that many purely american phenomena are known to the number crunchers, yet are allowed to stay the way the are intentionally.
A BMW is not enough, you also need to be charming, muscular and have a huge penis. But more money can always make up for your lacking qualities.
Inflation is good for the economy because it reduces the relative percentage of the GDP that must be devoted to debt service.
Not everyone borrows as much as they can. Ignoring significant parts of the economy while making blanket claims about the economy is not good for the economy.
What people like yourself don't understand is that the vast majority of money that exists in bank deposit accounts was not created by the government. It was created by banks, with debts credited as assets on the bank's balance sheet. All of that money that was created all came with a future interest obligation.
Quite simply, if you do not inflation not only do people get poorer, but everyone defaults on their debts.
Unless they don't owe enough debt for that to be relevant.
The government always controls the money supply. It does this by adjudicating debts only in the currency that it has the sole legal right to create and regulate. It does this by levying taxes. And, in a more complex system impossible for libertardians to understand, sovereign governments coordinate with one another to adjust exchange rates for mutually beneficial ends.
I see use of the term, "libertardians" here. Real classy that.
The huge problem with your entire post is that it treats debt as if there was only one side, the borrower. There however is also the lender. And everything about inflation that is good for the borrower is equally bad for the lender. That's because lending is a trade and inflation is directly adjusting the relative costs and benefits of the trade in a zero sum game.
That leads to two flaws in your argument. First, we still have lending despite this bias in favor of borrowers. What happens is lenders increase their interest rates (the costs of the loan) and the supposed advantages of inflation for the borrower go away.
Second, why should we favor the borrower over the lender? I'll note here that borrowers tend to be a lot less competent and disciplined than lenders. Encouraging them to borrow more doesn't seem a sane thing to do and there have been problems with excessive debt in every recession the US (to give a country I know a lot about) has had.
What's really going on here is that country-level governments tend to both have control of their money supply and borrow a lot. So inflation, particularly an increasing rate of inflation helps cut the cost of the debt they imprudently acquired as well as the liabilities they have promised. And due to the immense propaganda mechanisms at their control, they get to spin that as inflation being a good thing without significant opposition.
There are many aspects we can look at that created this mess, but one that seems to be overlooked here is the concept that people don't want to grow old anymore. Sadly, many find they can't afford to. Think the average Millennial is looking forward to retirement when they can barely afford to make ends meet? What's the point of growing old when you're going to be forced to blow your entire retirement nest egg on some major health issue that will inevitably crop up?
The constant threat of liability leading to lawsuits forces most of us to waste our incomes on countless forms of insurance. The social media lifestyles of the narcissistic elite are held high on an entertainment pedestal, and I wonder how watching that shit doesn't ultimately feed depression. Life is hard these days because it isn't getting any cheaper, and that chasm between the 99% and the 1% sure as hell isn't getting smaller, so don't assume Greed who helped create this mess is going to suddenly find compassion.
As if all that wasn't bad enough, here comes automation and AI to help shrink the human worth down to nothing.
It's sickening. Literally.