Is it possible that loneliness is worse for you – and a harder habit to break – than smoking?

Maybe. The only way health and science experts could make the health crisis surrounding chronic loneliness more urgent would be to announce that loneliness makes Americans look fat, especially from behind.

The U.S. Surgeon General issued a report in 1964 making it clear to Americans that “cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.” In response, many smokers starting putting down their butts.

You know what’s been proven to contribute substantially to mortality from specific diseases and to the overall death rate in 2019? Loneliness. The figure most often reported is that chronic loneliness has the same effect as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So why, in response, aren’t more of us getting off our butts and running out to hug our neighbors?

Some of you will explain, calmly, that you value time alone and that this doesn’t apply to you. You’re entirely correct. Unlike chronic loneliness, a consciously chosen solitary life can be both satisfying and healthy.

Philosopher Paul Tillich made what I believe is the most concise distinction between loneliness and solitude when he wrote: “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”

Defining solitude? Think of Henry David Thoreau’s journal entry: “The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.” And consider Cheryl Strayed’s definition in “Wild”: “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

Unwilling loneliness, in contrast to solitude, is disorienting. Loneliness is where we cannot be who we really are. Instead, we lose perspective, lose our balance and no longer intuit where, precisely, the boundaries lie between the world and ourselves.

It’s as if we become unwitting mimes, slapping against invisible walls that are imperceptible to everyone else but impossible for us to shatter.

Defining loneliness? Think of Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding”: “The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.”

One of the oldest findings on loneliness involved children who were kept in an orphanage, without any adult touch or attention apart from being fed and kept clean. Their caretakers thought they were keeping the children from catching deadly infectious diseases but were surprised when the children died anyway. They lost the infants not to a familiar infection but from what became known as a “failure to thrive.”

Chronically lonely people at any age suffer from acute physical, psychological, intellectual and emotional deprivations.

The United Kingdom decided loneliness was serious enough to warrant a Commission on Loneliness.

“Epidemic” is not a word used lightly by those working in medicine, yet in 2017, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy deemed loneliness an epidemic, arguing that “we live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.”

For all our Facebooking and messaging, we are in greater need of “likes” than we’d imagined. Attachment theories aren’t metaphorical; human beings – actually, most higher mammals – need touch and closeness as much as we need sleep.

So let’s celebrate independence while understanding it doesn’t mean alienation. Our survival depends on offering and accepting tenderness, which is the world’s best offer to pass along a light.

 

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