The Art of Being Alone (Farnam Street). Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. Here’s how we can change our perceptions by making and experiencing art.
Lonely? Short of Friends? Try Looking at It Differently (theguardian.com). You never see your friends at home alone in their pajamas, watching The X Factor, and feeling sorry for themselves.
This Is How To Make Friends As An Adult: 5 Secrets Backed By Research (bakadesuyo.com). You really may be alone. But you’re not alone in being alone. These days we’re all alone together. In 1985 most people said they had 3 close friends. In 2004 the most common number was zero.
A Solution for Loneliness (scientificamerican.com). Loneliness is rampant, and it’s killing us—literally. Anywhere from one quarter to one half of Americans feel lonely a lot of the time, which puts them at risk for developing a range of physical and mental illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and depression. This is a public health problem that needs to be addressed on a wide scale.
How to cope with loneliness (theguardian.com). This notion gets greeted with surprise – loneliness, a good thing? – but the surprising thing is that we ever imagined otherwise. Why would we have developed this response to isolation if it didn’t serve some purpose?
Loneliness will be the next great moneyspinner (theguardian.com). If you’ve got the money, you can now Rent-a-Friend, pay for cuddles, or dine with strangers. Our reaction to these services tends to vary, in keeping with how intimate they are – cuddle parties seem weirder than dinner parties – but the basic trade-off of cash for connection is the same in each case.
Loneliness Is Harmful to Our Nation’s Health (scientificamerican.com). Loneliness has been estimated to shorten a person’s life by 15 years, equivalent in impact to being obese or smoking 15 cigarettes per day. A recent study revealed a surprising association between loneliness and cancer mortality risk, pointing to the role loneliness plays in cancer’s course, including responsiveness to treatments.
The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness. (bostonglobe.com). Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right.
These charts show who you’ll spend your time with across your lifetime (qz.com). Hours spent in the company of children, friends, and extended family members all plateau by our mid-50s. And from the age of 40 until death, we spend an ever-increasing amount of time alone.
The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone (theschooloflife.com). The fear, or more often simply the phobia, of being alone is perhaps responsible for more unhappy relationships, more throttling of psychological development, more claustrophobia and more pent up misery than almost any other: it is – by any reckoning – one of the single greatest contributors to human misery and the driver of some of our weightiest and most unfortunate decisions.