7 ms·

The Lethality of Loneliness

321 points by bitsai 13y ago

btipling 13y ago
In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't remember the specific studies or evidence, but it still resonates with me today.
- tokenizer 13y ago
  Interesting. This makes sense from a layman's reasoning perspective as well. People who spend an extreme amount of time with others don't spend enough with themselves and probably lose their identity. I guess my question is, what constitutes interaction? Does the brief conversations with my coworkers count? What about a phone call to my mother? Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in depth?
  - ElongatedTowel 13y ago
    I wonder how romantic relationships fit in. I don't have that many friends, but I have someone to talk to every day and I can be around my family. But not having been in a relationship for many years, or rather, not ever having been in one that could be called serious has started to occupy a lot of my thinking time. It's something I'm reminded of everyday, like it was a disease. It is often said that one has to be happy alone to be happy together. But might it be that even someone who is creating happiness for himself loses it because loneliness is its antagonist? I smile when I walk trough the rain, I laugh when I hear a joke, I cry when I watch a touching movie. Isn't that a sign of happiness? Why does it feel so worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I love?
    - hosh 13y ago
      > Why does it feel so worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I love? Oh man, the answer to that is mysterious and beautiful. Let's separate two things: romance and love. We think we want romance but we really want love. We think we need another person to love, but the truth is, Love Is. It's present wherever you are, whatever moment. It's just, we usually have our heads stuck up our asses and so we don't feel it. Then we wander blindly around the world looking for our lost love. Which then gets distorted by notions of romance. Or put it in another way The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along. -- Rumi
      - kmtrowbr 13y ago
        Something that touched me was: "Love is the evidence of the oneness of all things" ... how to say it, there really is only one thing, the universe, and the ego notions that we have of our separateness are an illusion. When you and your couple "become one" you're just like drops of water running together. Love is the good feeling of like rejoining with like. When you are in a couple, you still can be "couple lonely" -- you seek out other "couple friends" ... maybe have kids? You want more love, you want to continue joining together with other pieces of the universe.
  - mikecane 13y ago
    >>>Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in depth? I'd say depth matters more. It's not sufficient to just be seen. People want to be understood, or seen fundamentally. Related, the Principle of Psychological Visibility from Nathaniel Branden (fyi, I am not an Objectivist): http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8784 http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=...
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > People who spend an extreme amount of time with others don't spend enough with themselves and probably lose their identity. It's a bit more nuanced than that: there is a type of person who knows so many people that they really don't know any of them. Thus, it can be desperately lonely to be so well-connected, too: a lot of depression-suicide cases are from people who were major event organizers or well-known micro-celebrities who had completely failed to actually make friends. > I guess my question is, what constitutes interaction? Does the brief conversations with my coworkers count? What about a phone call to my mother? Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in depth? It doesn't have to be in person, but it does have to have depth or at least remind you of depth. If you and your mother are close, a phone call probably suffices. (Unless you're the type of person who thrives on physical contact, as I am.) If you never got along and the conversations are always tired retreads of "yes, I'm doing fine", then probably not.
  - hosh 13y ago
    It's not "interaction". It's presence of mind. Awareness. I've seen this happen a lot with ... non-pathological loneliness. I mean that, generally everyone is lonely in the way Fromm-Reichmann is saying, but because it at a socially-acceptable level, then it looks normal. For example, I've been at parties and places where friends "hang out". No one really talks about much. No one is really engaging in anything. The jokes people are saying are not there to connect with someone, and more to fill the air with something to say. This is in contrast with, say, you go to this party, and on an off chance, you start talking with someone. And it feels like a very different experience, like you are fully connecting. You're no longer waiting for the other person to shut up so you can say something. The conversation flows, but the content doesn't really matter. It could be a deep discussion about math or philosophy; it could be sharing some life stories; it could be swapping some of your wild, youthful adventures. You're not going to be able to measure presence of mind. But you know when you are present vs. when you are not.
- err_badprocrast 13y ago
  FTA: 'Loneliness “is not synonymous with being alone, nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness,” writes John Cacioppo, the leading psychologist on the subject. Cacioppo privileges the emotion over the social fact because—remarkably—he’s sure that it’s the feeling that wreaks havoc on the body and brain. Not everyone agrees with him, of course. Another school of thought insists that loneliness is a failure of social networks. The lonely get sicker than the non-lonely, because they don’t have people to take care of them; they don’t have social support.' From experience I definitely agree that having very little/no social interaction is not synonymous with loneliness. I'm curious whether the social interaction/suicide relation is correlation or causation.
  - hosh 13y ago
    Neither. This kind of loneliness has as much to do with rejecting oneself as it is being rejected by other people. Each of us have emotional wounds inside that are sensitive. We typically wrap layers and layers of personality, activities, and rationalizations to protect it. And if it gets through that, it triggers some protective emotional outbursts or behaviors. Or we shut down, like the woman in catatonia. It is usually painful enough that the mind does not want to be aware of it, and when hitting upon that, will naturally veer away from it. You can be fundamentally lonely in a crowd of millions. You can be the meditating sage in some isolated cave for years, because you know at the core you are not alone.
    - intellegacy 13y ago
      Insightful emotional intelligence you don't see often on HN. Where/how did you learn that?
      - hosh 13y ago
        I got my ass kicked several times by a goddess. ;-) Each time, I saw a lot of things about myself I didn't want to see. I got inundated with feelings I didn't want to feel. I've felt what love feels like, and I know it's there even in the most painful and horrible places. I know we're never truly alone or abandoned; I've wept for the people still wandering lost, not knowing what they seek is right there with them. I've learned how to meditate and have been practicing it for a while. This is all still an ongoing transformation. Feel free to email if you want details.
- loceng 13y ago
  It could be people who seek out socializing are trying to distract themselves or are seeking for something external when they're needing are internal skills to manage life and the internal issues (emotions, etc) they create.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Or being hyper-social puts way more pressure on you in the form of keeping up appearances and maintaining expectations.
  - hosh 13y ago
    Exactly! Generally speaking, the vast majority of people are actually insane. We're just insane in socially-acceptable, normalized ways. Looking into yourself is hard. It is the hardest thing you will ever do.
- 6ren 13y ago
  The Middle Way works for a lot of things (aka goldilocks, all things in moderation).
  - dsri 13y ago
    Everything in moderation.. except moderation.
    - tomsthumb 13y ago
      Including moderation.
  - tokenizer 13y ago
    Definitely seems to be the least dangerous/boring path.
- afterburner 13y ago
  For "too much" interaction, which way does the causality run though? These people could be attempting to compensate for feelings of loneliness or other unhappiness with more social interaction.
  - btipling 13y ago
    I remember anecdotes about increase in stress and social obligations, which makes sense I think. You can imagine maybe a failed business person with unwanted attention as in the case of Bernard Madoff son, or the story of exemplary high achieving students who unfortunately end their life. Such a case was in my local news recently in Albany, CA, and when I heard of her tragedy I thought of this then too.
    - Mz 13y ago
      I was STAR student, national merit scholarship winner, etc and also an abused child who attempted suicide at age 17, which was treated at school like I was an embarrassment and fuck-up rather than being met with concern. I walked away from the limelight and chose a quieter life. I am 47 and (obviously) still alive. Many years later, I also went through lengthy withdrawal from medication rather publically (online). Again, people were mostly assholes rather than supportive. If you are a "public" figure of some sort, the public is invested in you in a way that makes them feel entitled to an opinion and entitled to an explanation and entitled to butt in, but they do not genuinely care about you. It only compounds any problems you have.
      - DLwdTxdU6smHQA 13y ago
        Is there anything positive for you about being in the public with your story? If it were all negative, why continue with it? edit: this might sound judicial, which is not what i intend. What I want to say is: you do continue to be in the public - what is your motivation to do so?
        Mz 13y ago
        Yes, there have been positives and continue to be positives. I don't really think I owe you an explanation or justification for my participation here, assuming that is what you are refering to. I currently get a lot less attention (generally) than I used to. I am okay with that changing, but the circus that used to follow me around is substantially quieter. Could you clarify a) why you are asking and b) where this remark is really coming from since it does not sound to me like it is about just the specific statement I made above. Thanks.
- rokhayakebe 13y ago
  But can you not take any (or many) two different data sets that sort of relate and create such graphs? Social interaction and Suicide, Sex and Suicide, Education and Suicide, Work load and Suicide, XYZ and Suicide.
- enjo 13y ago
  Suicide is a very narrow thing, however. It's also not necessarily related to "loneliness". The article is (using research) making the argument that loneliness affects medical outcomes for people. Is there a causal link between loneliness as suicide? The little bit I've studied suggests suicide is more closely related to depression. The causes of which remain something of a medical mystery.
mikecane 13y ago
Back in the 1980s, PBS had a science program hosted by Jim Hartz (Wikipedia says it was Innovation). It had a program about how the lack of touch -- physical contact from others -- also affected health. Part of that program showed the same kind of monkey research mentioned in this article. I once had a transcript. Too bad the program isn't online for all to see.
- GFischer 13y ago
  My girlfriend (a psychologyst) is doing a postgraduate course on Attachment. Among a lot of material, she saw a lot of videos of monkey experiments, like Harlow's (mentioned in the article) and I saw some too :) . It's quite striking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI from the article "Harlow subjected newborn rhesus macaques to appalling isolation—months spent in cages in the company only of “surrogate mothers” made of wire with cartoonish monkey heads and bottles attached. Luckier monkeys had that and cloth-covered versions of the same thing to cuddle. (It is remarkable what a soft cloth can do to calm an anxious baby monkey down.) In the most extreme cases, the babies languished alone at the bottom of a V-shaped steel container. Cruel as these experiments were, Harlow proved that the absence of mothering destroyed the monkeys’ ability to mingle with other monkeys, though the “cloth mother” could mitigate the worst effects of isolation." the article goes on to show how there are different gene expressions amongst the differently-raised monkeys, and even posits that medication could help with the physical expressions of loneliness: "Cole can imagine giving people medications to treat loneliness, particularly when it exacerbates chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. These could be betablockers, which reduce the physical effects of stress; anti-inflammatory medicine; or even Tylenol—since physical and emotional pain overlap, it turns out that Tylenol can reduce the pain of heartbreak." The ending statement is: "One message I take away from this is, ‘Hey, it’s not just early life that counts,’ ” he says. “We have to choose our life well.” "
jal278 13y ago
I liked the discussion about "'silos' in health policy, meaning that we see crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like obesity or heart disease." It seems like medicine needs to be less short-sighted and integrate loneliness and nutrition and other non-medicinal factors into diagnoses and treatment.
- GFischer 13y ago
  There was a top article recently on how personal visits for chronic patients improves health A LOT: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/if-this-was-a-pill-youd-do-anything-to-get-it/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/i... it's clearly linked to the problems of loneliness - if patients form a bond with their nurse and know that someone cares, they're more likely to follow through with treatment.
xxchan 13y ago
> It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000 identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time. This figure held so steady across the pairs of twins—young or old, male or female, notwithstanding different upbringings—that researchers concluded that it had to reflect genetic, not environmental, influence. To understand what it means for a personality trait to have 48 percent heritability, consider that the influence of genes on a purely physical trait is 100 percent. Children get the color of their eyes from their parents, and that is that. But although genes may predispose children toward loneliness, they do not account for everything that makes them grow up lonely. Fifty-two percent of that comes from the world. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the math is wrong. Assume prior for being lonely is 50/50. Now, if 100% of twins reported that they are also lonely, this would be proof that loneliness is genetic. If it was 0%, it would imply some sadistic inverse relationship, but one that'd still be genetic. If it's 50%, the same as the prior, it means no relationship. 48% is pretty close.
- jacobolus 13y ago
  You’re misunderstanding “heritability”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods The study in question: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516 PDF: http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/longitudinalgenetic2007.pdf http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcre...
  - xxchan 13y ago
    I see, obviously the math is a bit more involved. I assumed those 8000 were identical twins who were separated at birth. Thank you
- tokenadult 13y ago
  The article's explanation of "heritability" of human behavioral traits is poor. For four years now, I've had regular in-person interaction with a "journal club" of researchers and graduate students who are deeply involved in the Minnesota Twin Study. I'm about to go out the door to an in-person meeting of a local nonprofit board, but let me post some links here (embedded in a FAQ file I keep on my personal computer), and invite you to look them up. (They are all peer-reviewed research links that are free to download, by leading researchers on human behavior genetics.) It is well known, on the one hand, that ALL human behavioral characteristics are heritable. (It is an abuse of language to say "heritable" in this context, but the abuse is conventional and standard in the field.) So we can agree with the professional literature that your tendency to vote for one political party rather than another is heritable. Your attribution of causes for human differences (e.g., human differences in IQ) is also heritable. Your opinion about regulation of the Internet is heritable. Everything about human behavior is heritable, including the tendency to loneliness mentioned in the interesting article submitted here. Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website. http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research. An interesting review article, Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers. "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science. "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isnӴ an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... is another interesting review article that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence: http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur... "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]." (The same would be expected of characteristics like loneliness.) Johnson, W., Penke, L., & Spinath, F. M. (2011). Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not. European Journal of Personality, 25(4), 287-294. DOI: 10.1002/per.835 http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_Heritability_rejoinder.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He... responds to psychologists' comments about their earlier review article on heritability. "Our target article was intended to provide background knowledge to psychologists and other social scientists on the subject of heritability. This statistic, in many ways so basic, is both extremely powerful in revealing the presence of genetic inﬂuence and very weak in providing much information beyond this. Many forms of measurement error, statistical artefact, violation of underlying assumptions, gene–environment interplay, epigenetic mechanisms and no doubt processes we have not yet even identiﬁed can contribute to the magnitudes of heritability estimates. If psychologists and other social scientists want to understand genetic involvement in behavioural traits, we believe that it is going to be necessary to distinguish among these possibilities to at least some degree. Heritability estimates alone are not going to help us do this." Turkheimer, E. (2011). Genetics and human agency (Commentary on Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137, 825-828. DOI: 10.1037/a0024306 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer_darnimrod%20comm%20(2011).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... reemphasizes the point that a heritability calculation tells us nothing about subject to environmental influences a human trait is. "That heritability depends on the population in which it is measured is one of the most frequently repeated caveats in the social sciences, but it is nevertheless often forgotten in the breach. (For example, it is nearly meaningless for Dar-Nimrod and Heine to note that 'heritability [of intelligence is] typically estimated to range from .50 to .85' [p. 805]. The heritability of intelligence isn’t anything, and even placing it in a range is misleading. Making a numerical point estimate of the heritability of intelligence is akin to saying, 'Social psychologists usually estimate the F ratio for the fundamental attribution error to be between 2.0 and 4.0.') The observation that genotypic variation accounts for 90% of the variation in height in the modern world depends on the variability of genotype and environment relevant to height. Among cloned animals with widely varying diets, body size is perfectly environmental with heritability of 0; in genetically variable animals raised in identical environments heritability is 1.0. This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand." The full text of the articles at the links, which in some cases focus on IQ and in other cases are more general, will give you more background in the methods and reasoning used by researchers on the topic of human behavioral genetics.
navs 13y ago
So what do you folks do to combat loneliness? I've tried meetup.com but the groups I joined haven't quite worked out for me. Outside of work acquaintances and classmates, I don't socialize.
- themstheones 13y ago
  You could try getting married and / or having children.
  - lotyrin 13y ago
    Most of the people I know with this problem have trouble even meeting people, which tends to be a prerequisite for making friends and forming relationships - let alone successful long-term ones that could become marriages.
    - navs 13y ago
      As is my case. it's hard enough just greeting someone let alone forming a lasting bond that eventuates into some situation allowing for intimacy.
      - jeremyjh 13y ago
        I recommend a fitness related hobby that will bring you into regular contact with people. Then yes, you have to do the hard work of talking to the humans. Start small - you aren't looking for your soul mate you just want to make small talk for 3 minutes.
      - Killah911 13y ago
        Dude, I'm assuming you're desi, in which case you may avail yourself of the aunti-network that always seems to be a matchmaking service on overdrive. I know quite a few geeks who, while having spent more time staring at a computer than bars, have had quite a bit of success with. Based on heuristic evidence, I've seen some happy families emerge for guys who may not otherwise have done so well if left to their own communication/social skills. I think there's actual statistical evidence which points to longer lasting marriage thru the somewhat more traditional method of desi matchmaking.
pond_lilly 13y ago
I am surprised that this study only mentioned pets very briefly in the end. Pets have been demonstrated to be a very good substitute for social interactions, in fact they can be less stressful than forcing interactions with other people just for the sake of being "social". I also found something else interesting in this article, the mention of someone being expelled from the tribe and how bad it is. Well, our modern social lives are nothing like a tribe. If it was, then all sociopaths/psychopaths would have been expelled because they cheat, lie, oppress the tribe and make its life miserable. But as we see in today's society is clearly not the case. Also surprisingly the article does not dwell much on extroversion/introversion which is very relevant, what is unbearable for an extravert, is not that bad for an introvert. Maybe the author of this article is an extrovert and is terrified of being alone, just like introverts are terrified of being locked in a room with 10 chatter boxes that never shut up. Think about people you are with. You might get married just to avoid loneliness, but if you do not love this person can you expect to escape loneliness and lack of intimacy? You can stay in touch with people you have nothing in common, but does it not make your loneliness even worse? When there is an elderly in a family and no one gives a hoot even though the family is around how is it not being lonely? It is not a quantity of interactions but quality, I am surprised the article fails to make this distinction.
virtualwhys 13y ago
and then there are the twinkle eyed ones that spend huge amounts of time alone (hermits, monks/nuns on long term solo retreat). It probably has less to do with being alone than feeling alone. For lay people, however, living alone in the world goes against the grain; hard not to feel like an odd ball. Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-ness: we're all alone together (quote from an old friend).
- pond_lilly 13y ago
  Very true. If a person is a hard core Buddhist he or she will never feel alone, because of the teaching of interconnectedness. Sure for a lay person going to amusement park and riding that ride alone would feel like crap, but you can go and swim in a pool instead or do some other stuff.
- WalterSear 13y ago
  >Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-ness: we're all alone together (quote from an old friend). I don't think this is the same thing. Some people are demonstrably more alone than others, such as closeted men during the AIDS epidemic.
  - virtualwhys 13y ago
    Agreed, but doesn't change the fact that we're all alone together. Even connected people, with friends, family, and lovers by their side...exit stage left alone. Loneliness is a layer thrown on top of fundamental alone-ness. Obviously life is more enjoyable when feeling connected, belonging and so on, but for many that's simply not in the cards. If everyone felt accepted and loved, would it be life? Sounds more like heaven.
    - stelonix 13y ago
      I believe you're missing the point: there are people who are way more lonely than the average person. From the article, I believe it is talking about people who are lonely and do not enjoy it (even if unconsciously).
leoh 13y ago
I thought the most profound thing mentioned in this article was that loneliness was about intimacy. Not necessarily physical intimacy, but social intimacy. This is exceedingly important subtlety. Too often we say things like "go be social, go hang out." You can "be social", but non-intimate relationships (relationships with people you don't trust, people who are cruel, people who aren't authentic) do not have good therapeutic value.
- hosh 13y ago
  Yep. Believe it or not, this is actually a key insight in meditative/contemplative practices.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- brandall10 13y ago
  The loneliest period of my life was during my clubbing days in my 20s. I was out doing something almost every night, had a few dozen people I called friends. Sometimes it was alot of fun, but it was ultimately draining... the connections were superficial at best. Moved away shortly after turning 26, stopped answering almost all calls and had little social interaction for about 6 mos. Then I got a dog and started meeting people again but slowly and in a completely different context. That was probably the most cathartic period in my life.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - alashley 13y ago
    I know what you mean. A friend of mine was saying he was heavily into the party scene in the years before he met his now fiancée. He said meeting her earlier would have saved him years of going out to clubs for the sake of not feeling lonely. And of course a lot of use feel like it is easier to meet someone when we don't have our walls up. But most connections made at a club are superficial at best like you said.
zupatol 13y ago
> At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix. This mobile app sounds like something that would be really easy to write.
- Fishkins 13y ago
  Even easier, they could probably just provide a list of items to enter in an existing todo/calendar app.
- Killah911 13y ago
  Some of us should probably reach out to them. It does sound like a fairly straight forward app. Might even be a good hackathon project or fun size project which doesn't necessarily need to have monetary rewards.
  - hosh 13y ago
    Then reach out. This is not solvable with technology.
- dreeves 13y ago
  There are a lot of apps that could be used this way. I think http://lift.do http://lift.do might work well for this. And I know of people using our own http://beeminder.com http://beeminder.com for things like this.
  - breakupapp 13y ago
    This is helpful.
- simantel 13y ago
  Isn't this exactly what Lift does?
- 13y ago
ars 13y ago
The saddest "disease" ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism Babies died simply because they were not held enough.
Alex3917 13y ago
"Did God want us to die when we got stressed? The answer is no. What He wanted is for us not to be alone. Or rather, natural selection favored people who needed people." These are both the same thing though. Essentially we're herd animals, and as such we're designed to die if we aren't contributing to the herd. Probably so that if we can't pass on our own genes we can at least increase the chances that someone with similar genes can pass theirs along, by virtue of not wasting resources.
- bitwize 13y ago
  We're not herd animals -- more like band or pack animals. We have a more sophisticated social structure with more complex roles than is implied by the term "herd".
Aardwolf 13y ago
I often select text in articles as a visual cue which line I'm reading. Why oh why does this site needs to pop up a "share" widget when selecting text? Websites are really popping these "share" things all over the place lately.
- brainburn 13y ago
  I'm with ya. Select, scroll, know where I was. Just disable javascript for this page. (in opera at least)
- qu4z-2 13y ago
  Maybe the websites are lonely?
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Use something like Evernote Clearly. It presents the content better and you will be able to select text without the widget popping up. http://evernote.com/clearly/ http://evernote.com/clearly/
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
anaon12 13y ago
I'm probably entering the most lonely stage of my life at the moment, having my 3rd alcohol related arrest has really pushed me further down the hole. Despite all of my legal problems, I'm still holding down the same job, but I feel at my age I've really done myself in. Obviously booze is a problem of which I've completely eradicated from my life over the past 2 months. The really sad part is I'm well adjusted otherwise and I graduated from a top CS program. I've wanted to work abroad but I feel I'm trapped now by my past and I'm really out of options to socialize on any meaningful level. I don't really know what to do at this point. This article spelled out a life of doom for me. For what its worth I'm 28 and have 2 duis and a public intox charge.
- Skoofoo 13y ago
  > I feel I'm trapped now by my past and I'm really out of options to socialize on any meaningful level. What's stopping you from socializing?
  - anaon12 13y ago
    I just feel as part of being close with someone they should know I've had some problems, and in my experience most people would write me off at that point as there are plenty of others out there who are free and clear.
    - Mz 13y ago
      I think you should reconsider that position. I don't know anyone who lacks baggage. It mostly varies by type and color. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on your issues. But, really, everyone has crap in their life of some sort, and they still need people. Of course, alone time can have its benefits, if you prefer that.
- DenisM 13y ago
  1. Your subjective view of your own situation is very negative - "done myself in", "a life of doom" etc. 2. At the same time your situation is objectively good - you have a good profession and a good job, you're not complaining about health problems other than alcohol dependency, and you kicked the alcohol for two months now. Even if you went to jail you're out free now. The whole life is in front of you. Given the obvious contradiction here, I suggest that you should not trust your own judgement, and instead defer to someone else until your judgement is repaired. This sort of discrepancy is indicative of anxiety-type disorder, the kind that impairs your ability to evaluate your situation and makes everything looks worse than it is. The best you can do is seek help from a professional psychotherapist, and do exactly as they instruct you. Do not deviate, do not "optimize", do not skip steps. Suspend all judgement and do exactly as you're told. Use your logical side to overrule your emotional side and just follow the program, because it's the right thing to do.
rza 13y ago
As a recent college-grad who'd moved to suburbia, I think the automobile-centric culture in America is what is killing intimacy. If you were not able to make close friends in college/early-life, than once you live on your own in the suburbs, it often feels impossible to get any sense of intimacy. Intimacy is built up with small moments, and when every interaction has to be a commute-laden ordeal, you lose the opportunity for spontaneous and random social interactions, making the process of building of relationships orders of magnitude slower.
- wybo 13y ago
  Had a somewhat similar experience (except that my (college) friends lived across the Atlantic). Ideally suburbia should become a thing of the past (and it might, with rising energy prices). But for now I'd say the best thing you could do is move back to the (inner) city (or back to uni for a post-grad). It may be a hassle but being unhappy is a drain as well. I can also highly recommend most European/UK cities, as their cores are where people actually live and thrive, rather than that odd mix of blitz corporate office guests and sniffling economic outcasts.
marshray 13y ago
I thought the part about gay men in-the-closet was interesting: > the closeted man must police every piece of information known about him, live in constant terror of exposure or blackmail, and impose sharp limits on intimacy, or at least friendship This phrase "police every piece of information known about him" would seem to apply to everyone who wishes to retain even a baseline level of online privacy in spite of the mega-entities seeking to acquire aggregate every possible scrap of online information. :-O
passthesalt 13y ago
I do get a good dose of intimacy from online conversations with closes friends, and they do not even have to be in the same continent. In my country, kids in their teens (maybe even 20s) can't imagine a world without the internet (i.e. Facebook and Google). The internet is just that pervasive. I'd really like to see a study on the effect online social networks have on our collective mental health. My gut feel is that social networks are a positive thing. I'm just happy that I will be able to maintain a certain level of intimacy with friends when I'm older and less mobile.
dschiptsov 13y ago
Isolation, not voluntary loneliness. And all the harmful effects, it seems, related to the stress and anxiety. Voluntary loneliness, on the contrary, is beneficial, at least, to some yogis and Himalayan saints.)
yason 13y ago
There's a difference between being lonely and being alone. With regard to the latter, it's one of the fundamental insights of human life to, at some point, realize that you've always been and you always will be alone on this planet. There's only one you that is unique and nobody, I say nobody at all, will somehow match you perfectly, or make you fullfilled, or complement you essentially somehow. The only thing you can rely on is to always have your own company so it's better to learn to be friends with yourself. But being lonely is another thing. Human beings aren't meant to be lonely. Heck, even most animals aren't meant to be that way. The worst kind of loneliness is the one that you experience among a group of people you call your friends. The loneliness may not be obvious until you find the first person who really becomes your friend. As for "combatting loneliness", I suggest don't. In the worst case you're not only lonely but you're lonely and failing your social goals. Learn to live with loneliness, if not for anything else but for the sake of if you ever must. When you're content, perhaps not entirely happy, but content with loneliness then it's much easier to approach people and make social contacts. That is because you have nothing to lose and you know you'll be just fine even if it doesn't work out. Starting from this context prevents you, out of desperation, from selling your soul for the company of people who don't make you feel good.
bjourne 13y ago
I wonder is anyone else feeling that the stigma of being alone is much worse than actually being alone? Thing is, if you voluntarily spend your weekends playing games, coding, walking in the nature or any other non-social activity it reflects negatively upon you. I've spent a lot of holidays all by myself doing what I enjoy, eating the holiday candy I like the most, and just relaxing. From what I can tell, "normal" people would feel miserable spending their time like that, so they assume that I too must feel miserable.
rthomas6 13y ago
This caught my eye: >In operations performed to relieve chronic pain, doctors have lesioned, or disabled, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. After the surgery, the patients report that they can still sense where the trouble comes from, but, they add, it just doesn’t bother them anymore. So there is a surgical procedure that removes the negative feelings of pain, without removing the actual feeling? What are the downsides to this procedure? I'm sure I must be missing something, but as described it sounds like something some, or even a lot of adults without chronic pain would want to get voluntarily. It seems perfect for people that need intense physical therapy in order to walk. Also for people like elite military operatives that may have to undergo extreme circumstances like torture. Would this surgery just make people not care about torture? Also for athletes, who could now push themselves to the physical limit due to now being able to endure great pain without being bothered.

321 points by bitsai 13y ago

In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't remember the specific studies or evidence, but it still resonates with me today.

tokenizer 13y ago
Interesting. This makes sense from a layman's reasoning perspective as well. People who spend an extreme amount of time with others don't spend enough with themselves and probably lose their identity. I guess my question is, what constitutes interaction? Does the brief conversations with my coworkers count? What about a phone call to my mother? Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in depth?
- ElongatedTowel 13y ago
  I wonder how romantic relationships fit in. I don't have that many friends, but I have someone to talk to every day and I can be around my family. But not having been in a relationship for many years, or rather, not ever having been in one that could be called serious has started to occupy a lot of my thinking time. It's something I'm reminded of everyday, like it was a disease. It is often said that one has to be happy alone to be happy together. But might it be that even someone who is creating happiness for himself loses it because loneliness is its antagonist? I smile when I walk trough the rain, I laugh when I hear a joke, I cry when I watch a touching movie. Isn't that a sign of happiness? Why does it feel so worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I love?
  - hosh 13y ago
    > Why does it feel so worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I love? Oh man, the answer to that is mysterious and beautiful. Let's separate two things: romance and love. We think we want romance but we really want love. We think we need another person to love, but the truth is, Love Is. It's present wherever you are, whatever moment. It's just, we usually have our heads stuck up our asses and so we don't feel it. Then we wander blindly around the world looking for our lost love. Which then gets distorted by notions of romance. Or put it in another way The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along. -- Rumi
    - kmtrowbr 13y ago
      Something that touched me was: "Love is the evidence of the oneness of all things" ... how to say it, there really is only one thing, the universe, and the ego notions that we have of our separateness are an illusion. When you and your couple "become one" you're just like drops of water running together. Love is the good feeling of like rejoining with like. When you are in a couple, you still can be "couple lonely" -- you seek out other "couple friends" ... maybe have kids? You want more love, you want to continue joining together with other pieces of the universe.
- mikecane 13y ago
  >>>Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in depth? I'd say depth matters more. It's not sufficient to just be seen. People want to be understood, or seen fundamentally. Related, the Principle of Psychological Visibility from Nathaniel Branden (fyi, I am not an Objectivist): http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8784 http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=...
- saraid216 13y ago
  > People who spend an extreme amount of time with others don't spend enough with themselves and probably lose their identity. It's a bit more nuanced than that: there is a type of person who knows so many people that they really don't know any of them. Thus, it can be desperately lonely to be so well-connected, too: a lot of depression-suicide cases are from people who were major event organizers or well-known micro-celebrities who had completely failed to actually make friends. > I guess my question is, what constitutes interaction? Does the brief conversations with my coworkers count? What about a phone call to my mother? Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in depth? It doesn't have to be in person, but it does have to have depth or at least remind you of depth. If you and your mother are close, a phone call probably suffices. (Unless you're the type of person who thrives on physical contact, as I am.) If you never got along and the conversations are always tired retreads of "yes, I'm doing fine", then probably not.
- hosh 13y ago
  It's not "interaction". It's presence of mind. Awareness. I've seen this happen a lot with ... non-pathological loneliness. I mean that, generally everyone is lonely in the way Fromm-Reichmann is saying, but because it at a socially-acceptable level, then it looks normal. For example, I've been at parties and places where friends "hang out". No one really talks about much. No one is really engaging in anything. The jokes people are saying are not there to connect with someone, and more to fill the air with something to say. This is in contrast with, say, you go to this party, and on an off chance, you start talking with someone. And it feels like a very different experience, like you are fully connecting. You're no longer waiting for the other person to shut up so you can say something. The conversation flows, but the content doesn't really matter. It could be a deep discussion about math or philosophy; it could be sharing some life stories; it could be swapping some of your wild, youthful adventures. You're not going to be able to measure presence of mind. But you know when you are present vs. when you are not.
err_badprocrast 13y ago
FTA: 'Loneliness “is not synonymous with being alone, nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness,” writes John Cacioppo, the leading psychologist on the subject. Cacioppo privileges the emotion over the social fact because—remarkably—he’s sure that it’s the feeling that wreaks havoc on the body and brain. Not everyone agrees with him, of course. Another school of thought insists that loneliness is a failure of social networks. The lonely get sicker than the non-lonely, because they don’t have people to take care of them; they don’t have social support.' From experience I definitely agree that having very little/no social interaction is not synonymous with loneliness. I'm curious whether the social interaction/suicide relation is correlation or causation.
- hosh 13y ago
  Neither. This kind of loneliness has as much to do with rejecting oneself as it is being rejected by other people. Each of us have emotional wounds inside that are sensitive. We typically wrap layers and layers of personality, activities, and rationalizations to protect it. And if it gets through that, it triggers some protective emotional outbursts or behaviors. Or we shut down, like the woman in catatonia. It is usually painful enough that the mind does not want to be aware of it, and when hitting upon that, will naturally veer away from it. You can be fundamentally lonely in a crowd of millions. You can be the meditating sage in some isolated cave for years, because you know at the core you are not alone.
  - intellegacy 13y ago
    Insightful emotional intelligence you don't see often on HN. Where/how did you learn that?
    - hosh 13y ago
      I got my ass kicked several times by a goddess. ;-) Each time, I saw a lot of things about myself I didn't want to see. I got inundated with feelings I didn't want to feel. I've felt what love feels like, and I know it's there even in the most painful and horrible places. I know we're never truly alone or abandoned; I've wept for the people still wandering lost, not knowing what they seek is right there with them. I've learned how to meditate and have been practicing it for a while. This is all still an ongoing transformation. Feel free to email if you want details.
loceng 13y ago
It could be people who seek out socializing are trying to distract themselves or are seeking for something external when they're needing are internal skills to manage life and the internal issues (emotions, etc) they create.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Or being hyper-social puts way more pressure on you in the form of keeping up appearances and maintaining expectations.
- hosh 13y ago
  Exactly! Generally speaking, the vast majority of people are actually insane. We're just insane in socially-acceptable, normalized ways. Looking into yourself is hard. It is the hardest thing you will ever do.
6ren 13y ago
The Middle Way works for a lot of things (aka goldilocks, all things in moderation).
- dsri 13y ago
  Everything in moderation.. except moderation.
  - tomsthumb 13y ago
    Including moderation.
- tokenizer 13y ago
  Definitely seems to be the least dangerous/boring path.
afterburner 13y ago
For "too much" interaction, which way does the causality run though? These people could be attempting to compensate for feelings of loneliness or other unhappiness with more social interaction.
- btipling 13y ago
  I remember anecdotes about increase in stress and social obligations, which makes sense I think. You can imagine maybe a failed business person with unwanted attention as in the case of Bernard Madoff son, or the story of exemplary high achieving students who unfortunately end their life. Such a case was in my local news recently in Albany, CA, and when I heard of her tragedy I thought of this then too.
  - Mz 13y ago
    I was STAR student, national merit scholarship winner, etc and also an abused child who attempted suicide at age 17, which was treated at school like I was an embarrassment and fuck-up rather than being met with concern. I walked away from the limelight and chose a quieter life. I am 47 and (obviously) still alive. Many years later, I also went through lengthy withdrawal from medication rather publically (online). Again, people were mostly assholes rather than supportive. If you are a "public" figure of some sort, the public is invested in you in a way that makes them feel entitled to an opinion and entitled to an explanation and entitled to butt in, but they do not genuinely care about you. It only compounds any problems you have.
    - DLwdTxdU6smHQA 13y ago
      Is there anything positive for you about being in the public with your story? If it were all negative, why continue with it? edit: this might sound judicial, which is not what i intend. What I want to say is: you do continue to be in the public - what is your motivation to do so?
      - Mz 13y ago
        Yes, there have been positives and continue to be positives. I don't really think I owe you an explanation or justification for my participation here, assuming that is what you are refering to. I currently get a lot less attention (generally) than I used to. I am okay with that changing, but the circus that used to follow me around is substantially quieter. Could you clarify a) why you are asking and b) where this remark is really coming from since it does not sound to me like it is about just the specific statement I made above. Thanks.
rokhayakebe 13y ago
But can you not take any (or many) two different data sets that sort of relate and create such graphs? Social interaction and Suicide, Sex and Suicide, Education and Suicide, Work load and Suicide, XYZ and Suicide.
enjo 13y ago
Suicide is a very narrow thing, however. It's also not necessarily related to "loneliness". The article is (using research) making the argument that loneliness affects medical outcomes for people. Is there a causal link between loneliness as suicide? The little bit I've studied suggests suicide is more closely related to depression. The causes of which remain something of a medical mystery.

mikecane 13y ago

Back in the 1980s, PBS had a science program hosted by Jim Hartz (Wikipedia says it was Innovation). It had a program about how the lack of touch -- physical contact from others -- also affected health. Part of that program showed the same kind of monkey research mentioned in this article. I once had a transcript. Too bad the program isn't online for all to see.

GFischer 13y ago
My girlfriend (a psychologyst) is doing a postgraduate course on Attachment. Among a lot of material, she saw a lot of videos of monkey experiments, like Harlow's (mentioned in the article) and I saw some too :) . It's quite striking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI from the article "Harlow subjected newborn rhesus macaques to appalling isolation—months spent in cages in the company only of “surrogate mothers” made of wire with cartoonish monkey heads and bottles attached. Luckier monkeys had that and cloth-covered versions of the same thing to cuddle. (It is remarkable what a soft cloth can do to calm an anxious baby monkey down.) In the most extreme cases, the babies languished alone at the bottom of a V-shaped steel container. Cruel as these experiments were, Harlow proved that the absence of mothering destroyed the monkeys’ ability to mingle with other monkeys, though the “cloth mother” could mitigate the worst effects of isolation." the article goes on to show how there are different gene expressions amongst the differently-raised monkeys, and even posits that medication could help with the physical expressions of loneliness: "Cole can imagine giving people medications to treat loneliness, particularly when it exacerbates chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. These could be betablockers, which reduce the physical effects of stress; anti-inflammatory medicine; or even Tylenol—since physical and emotional pain overlap, it turns out that Tylenol can reduce the pain of heartbreak." The ending statement is: "One message I take away from this is, ‘Hey, it’s not just early life that counts,’ ” he says. “We have to choose our life well.” "

jal278 13y ago

I liked the discussion about "'silos' in health policy, meaning that we see crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like obesity or heart disease." It seems like medicine needs to be less short-sighted and integrate loneliness and nutrition and other non-medicinal factors into diagnoses and treatment.

GFischer 13y ago
There was a top article recently on how personal visits for chronic patients improves health A LOT: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/if-this-was-a-pill-youd-do-anything-to-get-it/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/i... it's clearly linked to the problems of loneliness - if patients form a bond with their nurse and know that someone cares, they're more likely to follow through with treatment.

xxchan 13y ago

> It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000 identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time. This figure held so steady across the pairs of twins—young or old, male or female, notwithstanding different upbringings—that researchers concluded that it had to reflect genetic, not environmental, influence. To understand what it means for a personality trait to have 48 percent heritability, consider that the influence of genes on a purely physical trait is 100 percent. Children get the color of their eyes from their parents, and that is that. But although genes may predispose children toward loneliness, they do not account for everything that makes them grow up lonely. Fifty-two percent of that comes from the world. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the math is wrong. Assume prior for being lonely is 50/50. Now, if 100% of twins reported that they are also lonely, this would be proof that loneliness is genetic. If it was 0%, it would imply some sadistic inverse relationship, but one that'd still be genetic. If it's 50%, the same as the prior, it means no relationship. 48% is pretty close.

jacobolus 13y ago
You’re misunderstanding “heritability”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods The study in question: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516 PDF: http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/longitudinalgenetic2007.pdf http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcre...
- xxchan 13y ago
  I see, obviously the math is a bit more involved. I assumed those 8000 were identical twins who were separated at birth. Thank you
tokenadult 13y ago
The article's explanation of "heritability" of human behavioral traits is poor. For four years now, I've had regular in-person interaction with a "journal club" of researchers and graduate students who are deeply involved in the Minnesota Twin Study. I'm about to go out the door to an in-person meeting of a local nonprofit board, but let me post some links here (embedded in a FAQ file I keep on my personal computer), and invite you to look them up. (They are all peer-reviewed research links that are free to download, by leading researchers on human behavior genetics.) It is well known, on the one hand, that ALL human behavioral characteristics are heritable. (It is an abuse of language to say "heritable" in this context, but the abuse is conventional and standard in the field.) So we can agree with the professional literature that your tendency to vote for one political party rather than another is heritable. Your attribution of causes for human differences (e.g., human differences in IQ) is also heritable. Your opinion about regulation of the Internet is heritable. Everything about human behavior is heritable, including the tendency to loneliness mentioned in the interesting article submitted here. Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website. http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research. An interesting review article, Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers. "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science. "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isnӴ an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... is another interesting review article that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence: http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur... "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]." (The same would be expected of characteristics like loneliness.) Johnson, W., Penke, L., & Spinath, F. M. (2011). Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not. European Journal of Personality, 25(4), 287-294. DOI: 10.1002/per.835 http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_Heritability_rejoinder.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He... responds to psychologists' comments about their earlier review article on heritability. "Our target article was intended to provide background knowledge to psychologists and other social scientists on the subject of heritability. This statistic, in many ways so basic, is both extremely powerful in revealing the presence of genetic inﬂuence and very weak in providing much information beyond this. Many forms of measurement error, statistical artefact, violation of underlying assumptions, gene–environment interplay, epigenetic mechanisms and no doubt processes we have not yet even identiﬁed can contribute to the magnitudes of heritability estimates. If psychologists and other social scientists want to understand genetic involvement in behavioural traits, we believe that it is going to be necessary to distinguish among these possibilities to at least some degree. Heritability estimates alone are not going to help us do this." Turkheimer, E. (2011). Genetics and human agency (Commentary on Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137, 825-828. DOI: 10.1037/a0024306 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer_darnimrod%20comm%20(2011).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... reemphasizes the point that a heritability calculation tells us nothing about subject to environmental influences a human trait is. "That heritability depends on the population in which it is measured is one of the most frequently repeated caveats in the social sciences, but it is nevertheless often forgotten in the breach. (For example, it is nearly meaningless for Dar-Nimrod and Heine to note that 'heritability [of intelligence is] typically estimated to range from .50 to .85' [p. 805]. The heritability of intelligence isn’t anything, and even placing it in a range is misleading. Making a numerical point estimate of the heritability of intelligence is akin to saying, 'Social psychologists usually estimate the F ratio for the fundamental attribution error to be between 2.0 and 4.0.') The observation that genotypic variation accounts for 90% of the variation in height in the modern world depends on the variability of genotype and environment relevant to height. Among cloned animals with widely varying diets, body size is perfectly environmental with heritability of 0; in genetically variable animals raised in identical environments heritability is 1.0. This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand." The full text of the articles at the links, which in some cases focus on IQ and in other cases are more general, will give you more background in the methods and reasoning used by researchers on the topic of human behavioral genetics.

navs 13y ago

So what do you folks do to combat loneliness? I've tried meetup.com but the groups I joined haven't quite worked out for me. Outside of work acquaintances and classmates, I don't socialize.

themstheones 13y ago
You could try getting married and / or having children.
- lotyrin 13y ago
  Most of the people I know with this problem have trouble even meeting people, which tends to be a prerequisite for making friends and forming relationships - let alone successful long-term ones that could become marriages.
  - navs 13y ago
    As is my case. it's hard enough just greeting someone let alone forming a lasting bond that eventuates into some situation allowing for intimacy.
    - jeremyjh 13y ago
      I recommend a fitness related hobby that will bring you into regular contact with people. Then yes, you have to do the hard work of talking to the humans. Start small - you aren't looking for your soul mate you just want to make small talk for 3 minutes.
    - Killah911 13y ago
      Dude, I'm assuming you're desi, in which case you may avail yourself of the aunti-network that always seems to be a matchmaking service on overdrive. I know quite a few geeks who, while having spent more time staring at a computer than bars, have had quite a bit of success with. Based on heuristic evidence, I've seen some happy families emerge for guys who may not otherwise have done so well if left to their own communication/social skills. I think there's actual statistical evidence which points to longer lasting marriage thru the somewhat more traditional method of desi matchmaking.

pond_lilly 13y ago

I am surprised that this study only mentioned pets very briefly in the end. Pets have been demonstrated to be a very good substitute for social interactions, in fact they can be less stressful than forcing interactions with other people just for the sake of being "social". I also found something else interesting in this article, the mention of someone being expelled from the tribe and how bad it is. Well, our modern social lives are nothing like a tribe. If it was, then all sociopaths/psychopaths would have been expelled because they cheat, lie, oppress the tribe and make its life miserable. But as we see in today's society is clearly not the case. Also surprisingly the article does not dwell much on extroversion/introversion which is very relevant, what is unbearable for an extravert, is not that bad for an introvert. Maybe the author of this article is an extrovert and is terrified of being alone, just like introverts are terrified of being locked in a room with 10 chatter boxes that never shut up. Think about people you are with. You might get married just to avoid loneliness, but if you do not love this person can you expect to escape loneliness and lack of intimacy? You can stay in touch with people you have nothing in common, but does it not make your loneliness even worse? When there is an elderly in a family and no one gives a hoot even though the family is around how is it not being lonely? It is not a quantity of interactions but quality, I am surprised the article fails to make this distinction.

virtualwhys 13y ago

and then there are the twinkle eyed ones that spend huge amounts of time alone (hermits, monks/nuns on long term solo retreat). It probably has less to do with being alone than feeling alone. For lay people, however, living alone in the world goes against the grain; hard not to feel like an odd ball. Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-ness: we're all alone together (quote from an old friend).

pond_lilly 13y ago
Very true. If a person is a hard core Buddhist he or she will never feel alone, because of the teaching of interconnectedness. Sure for a lay person going to amusement park and riding that ride alone would feel like crap, but you can go and swim in a pool instead or do some other stuff.
WalterSear 13y ago
>Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-ness: we're all alone together (quote from an old friend). I don't think this is the same thing. Some people are demonstrably more alone than others, such as closeted men during the AIDS epidemic.
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  Agreed, but doesn't change the fact that we're all alone together. Even connected people, with friends, family, and lovers by their side...exit stage left alone. Loneliness is a layer thrown on top of fundamental alone-ness. Obviously life is more enjoyable when feeling connected, belonging and so on, but for many that's simply not in the cards. If everyone felt accepted and loved, would it be life? Sounds more like heaven.
  - stelonix 13y ago
    I believe you're missing the point: there are people who are way more lonely than the average person. From the article, I believe it is talking about people who are lonely and do not enjoy it (even if unconsciously).

leoh 13y ago

I thought the most profound thing mentioned in this article was that loneliness was about intimacy. Not necessarily physical intimacy, but social intimacy. This is exceedingly important subtlety. Too often we say things like "go be social, go hang out." You can "be social", but non-intimate relationships (relationships with people you don't trust, people who are cruel, people who aren't authentic) do not have good therapeutic value.

hosh 13y ago
Yep. Believe it or not, this is actually a key insight in meditative/contemplative practices.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
brandall10 13y ago
The loneliest period of my life was during my clubbing days in my 20s. I was out doing something almost every night, had a few dozen people I called friends. Sometimes it was alot of fun, but it was ultimately draining... the connections were superficial at best. Moved away shortly after turning 26, stopped answering almost all calls and had little social interaction for about 6 mos. Then I got a dog and started meeting people again but slowly and in a completely different context. That was probably the most cathartic period in my life.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- alashley 13y ago
  I know what you mean. A friend of mine was saying he was heavily into the party scene in the years before he met his now fiancée. He said meeting her earlier would have saved him years of going out to clubs for the sake of not feeling lonely. And of course a lot of use feel like it is easier to meet someone when we don't have our walls up. But most connections made at a club are superficial at best like you said.

zupatol 13y ago

> At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix. This mobile app sounds like something that would be really easy to write.

Fishkins 13y ago
Even easier, they could probably just provide a list of items to enter in an existing todo/calendar app.
Killah911 13y ago
Some of us should probably reach out to them. It does sound like a fairly straight forward app. Might even be a good hackathon project or fun size project which doesn't necessarily need to have monetary rewards.
- hosh 13y ago
  Then reach out. This is not solvable with technology.
dreeves 13y ago
There are a lot of apps that could be used this way. I think http://lift.do http://lift.do might work well for this. And I know of people using our own http://beeminder.com http://beeminder.com for things like this.
- breakupapp 13y ago
  This is helpful.
simantel 13y ago
Isn't this exactly what Lift does?
13y ago

ars 13y ago

The saddest "disease" ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism Babies died simply because they were not held enough.

Alex3917 13y ago

"Did God want us to die when we got stressed? The answer is no. What He wanted is for us not to be alone. Or rather, natural selection favored people who needed people." These are both the same thing though. Essentially we're herd animals, and as such we're designed to die if we aren't contributing to the herd. Probably so that if we can't pass on our own genes we can at least increase the chances that someone with similar genes can pass theirs along, by virtue of not wasting resources.

bitwize 13y ago
We're not herd animals -- more like band or pack animals. We have a more sophisticated social structure with more complex roles than is implied by the term "herd".

Aardwolf 13y ago

I often select text in articles as a visual cue which line I'm reading. Why oh why does this site needs to pop up a "share" widget when selecting text? Websites are really popping these "share" things all over the place lately.

brainburn 13y ago
I'm with ya. Select, scroll, know where I was. Just disable javascript for this page. (in opera at least)
qu4z-2 13y ago
Maybe the websites are lonely?
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Use something like Evernote Clearly. It presents the content better and you will be able to select text without the widget popping up. http://evernote.com/clearly/ http://evernote.com/clearly/

deleted 13y ago

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anaon12 13y ago

I'm probably entering the most lonely stage of my life at the moment, having my 3rd alcohol related arrest has really pushed me further down the hole. Despite all of my legal problems, I'm still holding down the same job, but I feel at my age I've really done myself in. Obviously booze is a problem of which I've completely eradicated from my life over the past 2 months. The really sad part is I'm well adjusted otherwise and I graduated from a top CS program. I've wanted to work abroad but I feel I'm trapped now by my past and I'm really out of options to socialize on any meaningful level. I don't really know what to do at this point. This article spelled out a life of doom for me. For what its worth I'm 28 and have 2 duis and a public intox charge.

Skoofoo 13y ago
> I feel I'm trapped now by my past and I'm really out of options to socialize on any meaningful level. What's stopping you from socializing?
- anaon12 13y ago
  I just feel as part of being close with someone they should know I've had some problems, and in my experience most people would write me off at that point as there are plenty of others out there who are free and clear.
  - Mz 13y ago
    I think you should reconsider that position. I don't know anyone who lacks baggage. It mostly varies by type and color. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on your issues. But, really, everyone has crap in their life of some sort, and they still need people. Of course, alone time can have its benefits, if you prefer that.
DenisM 13y ago
1. Your subjective view of your own situation is very negative - "done myself in", "a life of doom" etc. 2. At the same time your situation is objectively good - you have a good profession and a good job, you're not complaining about health problems other than alcohol dependency, and you kicked the alcohol for two months now. Even if you went to jail you're out free now. The whole life is in front of you. Given the obvious contradiction here, I suggest that you should not trust your own judgement, and instead defer to someone else until your judgement is repaired. This sort of discrepancy is indicative of anxiety-type disorder, the kind that impairs your ability to evaluate your situation and makes everything looks worse than it is. The best you can do is seek help from a professional psychotherapist, and do exactly as they instruct you. Do not deviate, do not "optimize", do not skip steps. Suspend all judgement and do exactly as you're told. Use your logical side to overrule your emotional side and just follow the program, because it's the right thing to do.

rza 13y ago

As a recent college-grad who'd moved to suburbia, I think the automobile-centric culture in America is what is killing intimacy. If you were not able to make close friends in college/early-life, than once you live on your own in the suburbs, it often feels impossible to get any sense of intimacy. Intimacy is built up with small moments, and when every interaction has to be a commute-laden ordeal, you lose the opportunity for spontaneous and random social interactions, making the process of building of relationships orders of magnitude slower.

wybo 13y ago
Had a somewhat similar experience (except that my (college) friends lived across the Atlantic). Ideally suburbia should become a thing of the past (and it might, with rising energy prices). But for now I'd say the best thing you could do is move back to the (inner) city (or back to uni for a post-grad). It may be a hassle but being unhappy is a drain as well. I can also highly recommend most European/UK cities, as their cores are where people actually live and thrive, rather than that odd mix of blitz corporate office guests and sniffling economic outcasts.

marshray 13y ago

I thought the part about gay men in-the-closet was interesting: > the closeted man must police every piece of information known about him, live in constant terror of exposure or blackmail, and impose sharp limits on intimacy, or at least friendship This phrase "police every piece of information known about him" would seem to apply to everyone who wishes to retain even a baseline level of online privacy in spite of the mega-entities seeking to acquire aggregate every possible scrap of online information. :-O

passthesalt 13y ago

I do get a good dose of intimacy from online conversations with closes friends, and they do not even have to be in the same continent. In my country, kids in their teens (maybe even 20s) can't imagine a world without the internet (i.e. Facebook and Google). The internet is just that pervasive. I'd really like to see a study on the effect online social networks have on our collective mental health. My gut feel is that social networks are a positive thing. I'm just happy that I will be able to maintain a certain level of intimacy with friends when I'm older and less mobile.

dschiptsov 13y ago

Isolation, not voluntary loneliness. And all the harmful effects, it seems, related to the stress and anxiety. Voluntary loneliness, on the contrary, is beneficial, at least, to some yogis and Himalayan saints.)

yason 13y ago

There's a difference between being lonely and being alone. With regard to the latter, it's one of the fundamental insights of human life to, at some point, realize that you've always been and you always will be alone on this planet. There's only one you that is unique and nobody, I say nobody at all, will somehow match you perfectly, or make you fullfilled, or complement you essentially somehow. The only thing you can rely on is to always have your own company so it's better to learn to be friends with yourself. But being lonely is another thing. Human beings aren't meant to be lonely. Heck, even most animals aren't meant to be that way. The worst kind of loneliness is the one that you experience among a group of people you call your friends. The loneliness may not be obvious until you find the first person who really becomes your friend. As for "combatting loneliness", I suggest don't. In the worst case you're not only lonely but you're lonely and failing your social goals. Learn to live with loneliness, if not for anything else but for the sake of if you ever must. When you're content, perhaps not entirely happy, but content with loneliness then it's much easier to approach people and make social contacts. That is because you have nothing to lose and you know you'll be just fine even if it doesn't work out. Starting from this context prevents you, out of desperation, from selling your soul for the company of people who don't make you feel good.

bjourne 13y ago

I wonder is anyone else feeling that the stigma of being alone is much worse than actually being alone? Thing is, if you voluntarily spend your weekends playing games, coding, walking in the nature or any other non-social activity it reflects negatively upon you. I've spent a lot of holidays all by myself doing what I enjoy, eating the holiday candy I like the most, and just relaxing. From what I can tell, "normal" people would feel miserable spending their time like that, so they assume that I too must feel miserable.

rthomas6 13y ago

This caught my eye: >In operations performed to relieve chronic pain, doctors have lesioned, or disabled, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. After the surgery, the patients report that they can still sense where the trouble comes from, but, they add, it just doesn’t bother them anymore. So there is a surgical procedure that removes the negative feelings of pain, without removing the actual feeling? What are the downsides to this procedure? I'm sure I must be missing something, but as described it sounds like something some, or even a lot of adults without chronic pain would want to get voluntarily. It seems perfect for people that need intense physical therapy in order to walk. Also for people like elite military operatives that may have to undergo extreme circumstances like torture. Would this surgery just make people not care about torture? Also for athletes, who could now push themselves to the physical limit due to now being able to endure great pain without being bothered.