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 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.
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.
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
So I also have to intentionally force myself to drink water or I’ll get ‘unexplained’ headaches. But I absolutely do crave citrus from time to time; is this a real vitamin C craving? No idea, but I definitely want citrus at some times of year. And I equally have a social contact craving; I’m basically never lonely but if I haven’t had enough human in a while my subconscious will up and poke me saying ‘oi, go have more human.’
Basically I’m curious if you’ve anything to back up the assertion that humans don’t have a citrus or social contact trigger, or if this fab sounding explanation may be a bit ‘totally logical but overly generalized’?
- the examples you use to demonstrate that being around people quoir being around people is important for mental health seem to me to be wildly different circumstances in a huge number of important ways to the way that most people are actually spending time alone
-You claim that people have no thermostat for lack of socialization, but you only do this because you disagree that loneliness is tracking the important thing. Again, I think this is you believing that socialization is what's important as opposed to a sense of connection, but I don't think that you really make the argument for why we should believe this?
I would really like to see, for example, changes in a objective verifiable metrics of well-being associated with switching from work from office to work from home. If there is a mouse ball decline in those, I would also consider that to be moderately compelling evidence that spending time around other people simply for its own sake is a separate need to feeling connection with people the lack of which I believe is what causes feelings of loneliness.
I know everyone is down on the impact of the internet on mental health (which I don't really believe in), but surely one of the reasons why people prefer the internet so much to real life is because on the internet it is much much easier to find people you feel a sense of genuine connection with.
I assume someone has already done this study so if you are aware let me know because I would be curious to see the impact of internet use on well-being among
-neurodivergent children regular schools
-neurotypical children at regular schools
And
-neurodivergent children at at specialized STEM high schools (i.e where they're much more likely to be able to find people like them).
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 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.
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.
"The faulty assumption here is that older people have never been lonely and that younger people will remain lonely forever."
This is weakmanning of the highest order.
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
So I also have to intentionally force myself to drink water or I’ll get ‘unexplained’ headaches. But I absolutely do crave citrus from time to time; is this a real vitamin C craving? No idea, but I definitely want citrus at some times of year. And I equally have a social contact craving; I’m basically never lonely but if I haven’t had enough human in a while my subconscious will up and poke me saying ‘oi, go have more human.’
Basically I’m curious if you’ve anything to back up the assertion that humans don’t have a citrus or social contact trigger, or if this fab sounding explanation may be a bit ‘totally logical but overly generalized’?
I have a few issues with this post
- the examples you use to demonstrate that being around people quoir being around people is important for mental health seem to me to be wildly different circumstances in a huge number of important ways to the way that most people are actually spending time alone
-You claim that people have no thermostat for lack of socialization, but you only do this because you disagree that loneliness is tracking the important thing. Again, I think this is you believing that socialization is what's important as opposed to a sense of connection, but I don't think that you really make the argument for why we should believe this?
I would really like to see, for example, changes in a objective verifiable metrics of well-being associated with switching from work from office to work from home. If there is a mouse ball decline in those, I would also consider that to be moderately compelling evidence that spending time around other people simply for its own sake is a separate need to feeling connection with people the lack of which I believe is what causes feelings of loneliness.
I know everyone is down on the impact of the internet on mental health (which I don't really believe in), but surely one of the reasons why people prefer the internet so much to real life is because on the internet it is much much easier to find people you feel a sense of genuine connection with.
I assume someone has already done this study so if you are aware let me know because I would be curious to see the impact of internet use on well-being among
-neurodivergent children regular schools
-neurotypical children at regular schools
And
-neurodivergent children at at specialized STEM high schools (i.e where they're much more likely to be able to find people like them).