Headline, October 19 2024/ ''' LONELINESS EPIDEMIC LONGIVITY ]* '''

''' LONELINESS EPIDEMIC 

LONGIVITY ]* '''

'' OUR BRAINS EVOLVED TO PRIORITIZE TOGETHERNESS '' - and conversely, to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it.

LONELINESS IS A COMPOUND or multidimensional emotion : it contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you.

COMPARED with other ailments of the mind, loneliness is a surprisingly modern concern :

Although large segments of the world have probably always been anxious, have always been depressed, have always been wrathful, they have not always been wrathful in the specific way contemporary experts understand the emotion today.

In the 1950s, a small cohort of American scientists began grappling, for the first time, with the causes and effects of this modern malady. Among them was David Reisman, a sociologist who framed the emotion as being inextricably entangled with absence.

A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss.

For the sake of convenience, most researchers still use the definition coined in the early 1980s by the social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau, who described loneliness as a '' discrepancy between one's desired and achieved levels of social relations.'' Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too.

In order to understand the current crisis, Weissbourd, who serves as the faculty director of Making Caring Commons - a Harvard School of Education project that collects and disseminates research on health and well-being - created a 66-question survey, which would be mailed to approximately 950 recipients around the United States.

With the exception of a couple straightforwardly phrased items, a majority of the queries devised by Weissbourd and the project's director of research and evaluation, Miliena Batanova, approached the issue elliptically from a variety of angles.

Several weeks later, the new results were sent back to Weissbourd. '' Frankly, I was knocked back,'' he told me.

'' People were obviously really, really suffering,'' and on a scale that dwarfed other findings on the topic. Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness.

Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their families cared about them at all.

Last year, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued a 71-page advisory warning of an American  '' epidemic of loneliness and isolation,'' with all the danger and classification implies. Murthy has estimated that a lack of social connections currently affects more Americans than, say, diabetes or obesity.

Together with a concurrent decision by the World Health Organization to make '' loneliness a '' global public health concern, '' the surgeon general's report has helped nudge the emotion into the same cultural position as that helped by depression in the era of '' Prozac Nation '' and anxiety in the early aughts; a celebrity condition to be unpacked in an apparently endless cascade of front-page articles and self-help books.

There are now hundreds of podcast episodes devoted to loneliness, as well as a raft of start-ups like  Belong Center, an anti-loneliness nonprofit organization.

Japan and Britain, where loneliness is as much a concern as it is in the United States, even have appointed ministers of loneliness - government officials tasked with plumbing the depths of the crisis and ameliorating it, whether through public awareness campaigns.

[ '' Your hobbies and interests are important'' ] or initiatives, like one in Britain, in which mail carriers were asked to check in with the elderly residents on their routes.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Epidemics, Societies and Awareness, continues. The World Students Society thanks Matthew Shaer.

With most respectful dedication to Grandparents, Parents, the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on !WOW! - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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