It's a fascinating thesis. I wonder how much this idea could be applied to exercise? Our ancestors would never have needed to 'exercise' with necessarily active lifestyles. Though it is demonstrably good for oneself, and rarely does one have a craving for vigorous exercise
Came in here to say this, and how I have been thinking about it in my personal life.
It's similar, too, in that it is hard to go "from 0 to 60" on socializing, just as it is hard to go from being a couch potato to having an active lifestyle. That said, if you are an athlete, you start to crave exercise (and if you are a social butterfly, it is easy to notice when you get lonely). But many people aren't, and it is easy to get out of shape gradually and not notice it.
Also: it is also possible to have a lot of unfulfilling socializing. Zoom calls that leave you exhausted, and yet unfulfilled, for example, or social events full of people who aren't, y'know, really vibing with you. It is probably better than nothing, but it is also miserable and leaves you too tired for interactions that might be more nourishing. Which feels like it is also true with, for example, some types of physical activity.
I know I'm an exception. I'm 74 and have been running for fun for 53 years. I also swam, bicycled, did aerobics, and still resistance train. I actually like it. The fact that it's good for my health is a bonus.
I have a number of friends like me that I met being active. Some have had to cut back because of age related declines, but most of them still do some for of exercise.
I think it gets trained out of us? We have to sit in desks in school and get the "right" answers in structured environments. Nowadays parents put their kids in additional lessons and on sportsball teams as soon as they can toddle, or set them in front of a screen, dawn to dusk. We were thrown out of the house with the clear if undefined command "Go play outside!" so we did - in the woods, riding bikes, climbing trees, building forts, splashing in ditches, exploring houses under construction, etc. Doubt the authorities would smile on imaginative physical play like that these days.
Okay. This explains a lot. Time to put into practice the good idea I have been resisting: having people over regularly for dinner and conversation. In Vermont, winter can be terribly isolating. The urge to hibernate has the viscosity of honey: it pulls me away from people. You've described the mechanism well.
Going to dinner at a friends house where some people I didn’t know would be there used to be one of my favorite things to do. Since I moved from New Mexico to Wisconsin however, it never seems to happen. Partially my fault as I am reluctant to be a host. I am also older now. Maybe it’s a cultural difference (state wise not heritage). Not sure, but I do know I miss it.
IDK about Wisconsin, but there's a humorous "documentary" from the 70s or 80s about Minnesota culture that jokingly says you can't go to dinner at someone's house without eventually being pressured to stay overnight.
Hosting is the best! It can be super easy and gets easier the more you do it, I promise. I encourage you to take the plunge.
I did this a ton in my mid-late 20s in a new town, mixing dinner guests across work, former classmates, and a few family in the area. And again in my hmmm late 40s? Again a new place, mixing across various groups. And we did it for a while here (in early 60s) a few years ago but got out of the habit. I'm pushing my better half toward the idea & we've done some family dinners but haven't gotten a routine going yet.
Here are a few tips to make it a little easier:
* Don't sweat the menu. It's the company not the cuisine. If you're really hesitant, buy some main course yourself (Five-dollar chicken from Costco is always a hit) and assign easy/general sides that can also be storebought or pre-fab - salad in a bag, instant mashed potatoes. Pulling a dinner together once a month or every six weeks should be possible for almost anyone. Stretch meat with stews/gumbo in a crockpot or meatloaf; even beans and rice with good spices, maybe some cornbread, can be delicious & no one will leave hungry.
* Don't sweat the prep or cleanup. It's no good having a get-together if you're slaving over a hot stove or fussing over dirty dishes while everyone else is having fun over cocktails or after-dinner mints
* Mix it up. Invite at least one person you really like, and think of some connecting things across whoever else you invite. That's all the introduction most people need, e.g. Co-worker, meet neighbor, you two both love your big dogs. Cousin, meet church friend, ya'll are runners or skiers or Cubs fans or in book clubs...
* If. you are a single, do you have a good friend or nearby relative who would like to do this, too? By yourself can be easier than motivating someone else! But, if you're hesitant, teaming up could be a great way to reduce stress and expand the cross-cutting groups.
* I'm a big fan of intergenerational connections but discourage guests from bringing children unless I know the kids & their personalities fit -- sulky teens or screaming toddlers can complicate the vibe. Just my two-cents'.
* I also personally don't ask about or pander to 600 different dietary preferences. If someone has a life-threatening allergy, he or she needs to be a grown-up and tell me. Ideally tell me you can work around it. Remember - company not cuisine.
Had our first dinner, with a widow and a widower. Guido, the rambunctious Italian widower, thought I was matchmaking, and in the lead-up to the dinner I had to pull on the reins.
Lively conversation was had, but the widow went quiet in the thunderstorm that was this not-quite-boorish and kind of adorable guy. They tasted my homemade wines. Our kind of party, and I got a clean house out of it.
Wow, I love this great update! I'm so glad you took the plunge and it went well. It only gets easier. Maybe try 5 for an uneven number that won't give anyone the wrong idea ;) and yes, getting a clean house out of the experience is a cherry on top. Yay!
Personally I have a very social job but I find myself having a very difficult time socializing on a personal level. So I get lots of social interaction but very little of it is personal or "private" and I find I lack the ability to cope in a purely private social setting. I wonder if there's more granuality to socializing, different "food groups", as it were.
The thing I hated most about remote work & video "meetings" is obliteration of one-on-one chit-chat with specific people you like, not the entire workforce. Everything became The Group. You never run into anyone at the copier or in the kitchen. The kind of conversation I'd gladly have with a friendly colleague become Public Discourse or, worse, subject to the critique of managers and HR when a random comment might not have been Sufficiently Interculturally Sensitive. To the extent it is under my control, I will never have another video meeting in my life.
I don’t think the feedback is absent. It is too weak.
A living system cannot produce an intense experience for every small deviation. If every change in blood sugar, temperature, nutrition, fatigue, or social contact captured attention, the system would be flooded with signals. So a deviation can occur and produce feedback without producing enough feedback to drive action.
High blood sugar works this way. The deviation has already occurred and may persist for a long time, while the symptoms are fatigue, dizziness, or other mild changes. These signals do not capture attention, and a person cannot tell from one episode of dizziness that blood sugar is the problem.
Social contact may work the same way. People meet less and spend more time alone. The feedback is already there: boredom, low mood, irritability, or, as you felt during the pandemic, “everything feels bad and it will never feel better.” But these experiences are not strong enough to drive someone toward other people, nor do they tell them that reduced social contact is the problem.
So “social scurvy” reveals a problem: the deviation has occurred, and the feedback is there, but the feedback is too weak to capture attention, so the deviation continues.
Really excellent piece! I would say that though the feeling of loneliness may not be an epidemic, the ability to successfully 'go get a glass of orange juice' by going out to be with people has definitely declined in the modern world. It can take considerable effort, even when the craving is recognized.
I worked for the researcher who published the “15 cigarettes a day” stat. In her lab we specifically studied Social Isolation, and you did great at clarifying the distinction between that and the subjective experience of Loneliness.
This was terrific! Being a Swede living in Anerica, married for four decades, and an introvert by birth, I savour my time alone, reading and writing, but when I take Argentine tango lessons with my wife, meet my adult sons, get together with friends, another me steps up to the plate, happy and extrovert. 😎
I love that the graph of loneliness in high school students messes with the y-axis to make it look catastrophic, when in reality, it's a 0.15 point decrease over 35 years. If you display it relative to the whole range, it looks like a flat line. There may be some measurable difference there, but it also may be within the margin of error for measuring such stuff. That feels like a dishonest way of displaying the data.
Indeed, your last thought is key. The studies of "aloneness" can be objective; the studies of loneliness cannot, as they depend on self reporting. A person who is seriously lonely may not report it as such and an overly extroverted person may report loneliness in a crowded room. The error bound is huge and the 0.15 is well within it.
Great post. I wonder how much of the effects of being alone can be ascribed to positive feedback (or the absence of negative feedback)
When you're alone, or only interacting with people that share your genes or views, it's easy for positive feedback loops to develop that take people to weird, outlier places. When two copies of Claude talk to each other for a long time, they end up "spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor)
Hanging out with an ordinary group of people might naturally supply enough negative feedback that functions as a sort of shared immune system for bad ideas (or perhaps ideas with weak evidence), preventing any self-reinforcing cycles from taking root. It may also be why social media seems to have the opposite effect; because it is optimised to supply more positive feedback than negative feedback (because like, engagement)
If someone were to entertain some weak hunch, say, that UFOs were real; ridicule from your peers might provide an automatic immune-like response that stops it from going any further. But left, unchecked, who knows? Confirmation bias alone will have them seeing patterns and clues in no time. And once the algorithm railroads you towards an infinite amount of content and like-minded people that only reinforce your hunch in one direction, it's game over. There's no knowing how far those winds can carry someone.
Perhaps evolution came up with some optimal compromise where we're individual gullible but collectively skeptical that had us in a perfectly-fine equilibrium as long as we hung out in tribes of ~50 people...
I think the opposite of this can also be true. Sometimes with people you’re very close too, everything becomes negative. Adding in a random strangers perspective allows you to see that you’re not so far apart from you loved ones as you thought. Puts you back on the same team.
Well done, well said, thanks for writing all that!
Re: footnote 8, I was on a train yesterday and there were three people in front of me who talked, non-stop, and sometimes overlapping (two talking at once) for the entire two hour trip. I was ending 20 hours of international travel and tired and cranky and all I could think was "what on earth do they have to say this whole time!?" but what you wrote here makes sense. I still wanted to tell them to shut up; they were taking up public (audio) space without regard for cranky old ladies near them. They also filled the olfactory public space with perfumes so I was even more put-upon. But now I understand more about their need to fill space with trivial talk.
This hit differently for me because of what I do. I spend a lot of time one on one with people, and sometimes I think we underestimate how much simply having someone’s undivided attention matters. Fascinating read.
Also, maybe a weak social-stat has something to do with reproduction?
Pre-teen children are basically forced daily human interaction. The biological drive to have kids kinda negates a need for a social-stat, at least with the "inmates".
This was a very intriguing article, but my feedback is rather pedantic: I hit a mental speed bump every time there was a term like “food-stat” and I had to read it as “food thermostat” as opposed to “food statistic” (especially because games have acclimatized me to all kinds of unusual “stats”!) I think this is a case like helicopter where the word origin is helico-pter but all the new words riffing on it use -copter; the origin is thermo-stat but I’d have a much easier time reading food-ostat.
I think about my parents generation, born in the 1930s. Let's start with their home life. Typically, families lived in homes with 2 maybe 3 bedrooms. No one had their own room. You frequently had multiple generations or extended relatives living in the home. TV didn't exist for practical purposes until the late 50s so for any entertainment, you went out. They grew up in a neighborhood with taverns on almost every corner. Kids didn't stay in cause then they'd have to hang out with their family. It was simply much harder to be alone. No way to measure things back then but I have to believe anxiety was not much of an issue.
I was fifteen when those two farmers died in the slurry pit. I believe they were from the Schafer family, or related to them as it seemed over half of Monroeville was related to a Schafer. It was devastating to our small town. I also drove by their farm often and every time all I could think about was how they drowned in cow manure. What made it especially tragic was that there were warning signs for methane gas right on the building so they had to be aware of the danger.
It's a fascinating thesis. I wonder how much this idea could be applied to exercise? Our ancestors would never have needed to 'exercise' with necessarily active lifestyles. Though it is demonstrably good for oneself, and rarely does one have a craving for vigorous exercise
Came in here to say this, and how I have been thinking about it in my personal life.
It's similar, too, in that it is hard to go "from 0 to 60" on socializing, just as it is hard to go from being a couch potato to having an active lifestyle. That said, if you are an athlete, you start to crave exercise (and if you are a social butterfly, it is easy to notice when you get lonely). But many people aren't, and it is easy to get out of shape gradually and not notice it.
Also: it is also possible to have a lot of unfulfilling socializing. Zoom calls that leave you exhausted, and yet unfulfilled, for example, or social events full of people who aren't, y'know, really vibing with you. It is probably better than nothing, but it is also miserable and leaves you too tired for interactions that might be more nourishing. Which feels like it is also true with, for example, some types of physical activity.
I know I'm an exception. I'm 74 and have been running for fun for 53 years. I also swam, bicycled, did aerobics, and still resistance train. I actually like it. The fact that it's good for my health is a bonus.
I have a number of friends like me that I met being active. Some have had to cut back because of age related declines, but most of them still do some for of exercise.
Children do, though! They crave physical play and imaginative play, quite strongly. I guess we lose that as we enter adulthood.
I think it gets trained out of us? We have to sit in desks in school and get the "right" answers in structured environments. Nowadays parents put their kids in additional lessons and on sportsball teams as soon as they can toddle, or set them in front of a screen, dawn to dusk. We were thrown out of the house with the clear if undefined command "Go play outside!" so we did - in the woods, riding bikes, climbing trees, building forts, splashing in ditches, exploring houses under construction, etc. Doubt the authorities would smile on imaginative physical play like that these days.
Thats probably correct. I hurt my ankle a while back and couldnt run for a while, and got super moody and felt awful.
Okay. This explains a lot. Time to put into practice the good idea I have been resisting: having people over regularly for dinner and conversation. In Vermont, winter can be terribly isolating. The urge to hibernate has the viscosity of honey: it pulls me away from people. You've described the mechanism well.
Going to dinner at a friends house where some people I didn’t know would be there used to be one of my favorite things to do. Since I moved from New Mexico to Wisconsin however, it never seems to happen. Partially my fault as I am reluctant to be a host. I am also older now. Maybe it’s a cultural difference (state wise not heritage). Not sure, but I do know I miss it.
IDK about Wisconsin, but there's a humorous "documentary" from the 70s or 80s about Minnesota culture that jokingly says you can't go to dinner at someone's house without eventually being pressured to stay overnight.
Hosting is the best! It can be super easy and gets easier the more you do it, I promise. I encourage you to take the plunge.
I did this a ton in my mid-late 20s in a new town, mixing dinner guests across work, former classmates, and a few family in the area. And again in my hmmm late 40s? Again a new place, mixing across various groups. And we did it for a while here (in early 60s) a few years ago but got out of the habit. I'm pushing my better half toward the idea & we've done some family dinners but haven't gotten a routine going yet.
Here are a few tips to make it a little easier:
* Don't sweat the menu. It's the company not the cuisine. If you're really hesitant, buy some main course yourself (Five-dollar chicken from Costco is always a hit) and assign easy/general sides that can also be storebought or pre-fab - salad in a bag, instant mashed potatoes. Pulling a dinner together once a month or every six weeks should be possible for almost anyone. Stretch meat with stews/gumbo in a crockpot or meatloaf; even beans and rice with good spices, maybe some cornbread, can be delicious & no one will leave hungry.
* Don't sweat the prep or cleanup. It's no good having a get-together if you're slaving over a hot stove or fussing over dirty dishes while everyone else is having fun over cocktails or after-dinner mints
* Mix it up. Invite at least one person you really like, and think of some connecting things across whoever else you invite. That's all the introduction most people need, e.g. Co-worker, meet neighbor, you two both love your big dogs. Cousin, meet church friend, ya'll are runners or skiers or Cubs fans or in book clubs...
* If. you are a single, do you have a good friend or nearby relative who would like to do this, too? By yourself can be easier than motivating someone else! But, if you're hesitant, teaming up could be a great way to reduce stress and expand the cross-cutting groups.
* I'm a big fan of intergenerational connections but discourage guests from bringing children unless I know the kids & their personalities fit -- sulky teens or screaming toddlers can complicate the vibe. Just my two-cents'.
* I also personally don't ask about or pander to 600 different dietary preferences. If someone has a life-threatening allergy, he or she needs to be a grown-up and tell me. Ideally tell me you can work around it. Remember - company not cuisine.
Good luck!!
Had our first dinner, with a widow and a widower. Guido, the rambunctious Italian widower, thought I was matchmaking, and in the lead-up to the dinner I had to pull on the reins.
Lively conversation was had, but the widow went quiet in the thunderstorm that was this not-quite-boorish and kind of adorable guy. They tasted my homemade wines. Our kind of party, and I got a clean house out of it.
Wow, I love this great update! I'm so glad you took the plunge and it went well. It only gets easier. Maybe try 5 for an uneven number that won't give anyone the wrong idea ;) and yes, getting a clean house out of the experience is a cherry on top. Yay!
Excellent ideas. I love this.
Personally I have a very social job but I find myself having a very difficult time socializing on a personal level. So I get lots of social interaction but very little of it is personal or "private" and I find I lack the ability to cope in a purely private social setting. I wonder if there's more granuality to socializing, different "food groups", as it were.
I think this is definitely true!
The thing I hated most about remote work & video "meetings" is obliteration of one-on-one chit-chat with specific people you like, not the entire workforce. Everything became The Group. You never run into anyone at the copier or in the kitchen. The kind of conversation I'd gladly have with a friendly colleague become Public Discourse or, worse, subject to the critique of managers and HR when a random comment might not have been Sufficiently Interculturally Sensitive. To the extent it is under my control, I will never have another video meeting in my life.
I don’t think the feedback is absent. It is too weak.
A living system cannot produce an intense experience for every small deviation. If every change in blood sugar, temperature, nutrition, fatigue, or social contact captured attention, the system would be flooded with signals. So a deviation can occur and produce feedback without producing enough feedback to drive action.
High blood sugar works this way. The deviation has already occurred and may persist for a long time, while the symptoms are fatigue, dizziness, or other mild changes. These signals do not capture attention, and a person cannot tell from one episode of dizziness that blood sugar is the problem.
Social contact may work the same way. People meet less and spend more time alone. The feedback is already there: boredom, low mood, irritability, or, as you felt during the pandemic, “everything feels bad and it will never feel better.” But these experiences are not strong enough to drive someone toward other people, nor do they tell them that reduced social contact is the problem.
So “social scurvy” reveals a problem: the deviation has occurred, and the feedback is there, but the feedback is too weak to capture attention, so the deviation continues.
Really excellent piece! I would say that though the feeling of loneliness may not be an epidemic, the ability to successfully 'go get a glass of orange juice' by going out to be with people has definitely declined in the modern world. It can take considerable effort, even when the craving is recognized.
I worked for the researcher who published the “15 cigarettes a day” stat. In her lab we specifically studied Social Isolation, and you did great at clarifying the distinction between that and the subjective experience of Loneliness.
This was terrific! Being a Swede living in Anerica, married for four decades, and an introvert by birth, I savour my time alone, reading and writing, but when I take Argentine tango lessons with my wife, meet my adult sons, get together with friends, another me steps up to the plate, happy and extrovert. 😎
I love that the graph of loneliness in high school students messes with the y-axis to make it look catastrophic, when in reality, it's a 0.15 point decrease over 35 years. If you display it relative to the whole range, it looks like a flat line. There may be some measurable difference there, but it also may be within the margin of error for measuring such stuff. That feels like a dishonest way of displaying the data.
Indeed, your last thought is key. The studies of "aloneness" can be objective; the studies of loneliness cannot, as they depend on self reporting. A person who is seriously lonely may not report it as such and an overly extroverted person may report loneliness in a crowded room. The error bound is huge and the 0.15 is well within it.
Great post. I wonder how much of the effects of being alone can be ascribed to positive feedback (or the absence of negative feedback)
When you're alone, or only interacting with people that share your genes or views, it's easy for positive feedback loops to develop that take people to weird, outlier places. When two copies of Claude talk to each other for a long time, they end up "spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor)
Hanging out with an ordinary group of people might naturally supply enough negative feedback that functions as a sort of shared immune system for bad ideas (or perhaps ideas with weak evidence), preventing any self-reinforcing cycles from taking root. It may also be why social media seems to have the opposite effect; because it is optimised to supply more positive feedback than negative feedback (because like, engagement)
If someone were to entertain some weak hunch, say, that UFOs were real; ridicule from your peers might provide an automatic immune-like response that stops it from going any further. But left, unchecked, who knows? Confirmation bias alone will have them seeing patterns and clues in no time. And once the algorithm railroads you towards an infinite amount of content and like-minded people that only reinforce your hunch in one direction, it's game over. There's no knowing how far those winds can carry someone.
Perhaps evolution came up with some optimal compromise where we're individual gullible but collectively skeptical that had us in a perfectly-fine equilibrium as long as we hung out in tribes of ~50 people...
I think the opposite of this can also be true. Sometimes with people you’re very close too, everything becomes negative. Adding in a random strangers perspective allows you to see that you’re not so far apart from you loved ones as you thought. Puts you back on the same team.
Well done, well said, thanks for writing all that!
Re: footnote 8, I was on a train yesterday and there were three people in front of me who talked, non-stop, and sometimes overlapping (two talking at once) for the entire two hour trip. I was ending 20 hours of international travel and tired and cranky and all I could think was "what on earth do they have to say this whole time!?" but what you wrote here makes sense. I still wanted to tell them to shut up; they were taking up public (audio) space without regard for cranky old ladies near them. They also filled the olfactory public space with perfumes so I was even more put-upon. But now I understand more about their need to fill space with trivial talk.
This hit differently for me because of what I do. I spend a lot of time one on one with people, and sometimes I think we underestimate how much simply having someone’s undivided attention matters. Fascinating read.
Dude, I laughed so hard at the airplane meme.
Also, maybe a weak social-stat has something to do with reproduction?
Pre-teen children are basically forced daily human interaction. The biological drive to have kids kinda negates a need for a social-stat, at least with the "inmates".
This was a very intriguing article, but my feedback is rather pedantic: I hit a mental speed bump every time there was a term like “food-stat” and I had to read it as “food thermostat” as opposed to “food statistic” (especially because games have acclimatized me to all kinds of unusual “stats”!) I think this is a case like helicopter where the word origin is helico-pter but all the new words riffing on it use -copter; the origin is thermo-stat but I’d have a much easier time reading food-ostat.
I think about my parents generation, born in the 1930s. Let's start with their home life. Typically, families lived in homes with 2 maybe 3 bedrooms. No one had their own room. You frequently had multiple generations or extended relatives living in the home. TV didn't exist for practical purposes until the late 50s so for any entertainment, you went out. They grew up in a neighborhood with taverns on almost every corner. Kids didn't stay in cause then they'd have to hang out with their family. It was simply much harder to be alone. No way to measure things back then but I have to believe anxiety was not much of an issue.
I was fifteen when those two farmers died in the slurry pit. I believe they were from the Schafer family, or related to them as it seemed over half of Monroeville was related to a Schafer. It was devastating to our small town. I also drove by their farm often and every time all I could think about was how they drowned in cow manure. What made it especially tragic was that there were warning signs for methane gas right on the building so they had to be aware of the danger.
Such an amusing essay, thank you!