The Politics Of Loneliness 51:28

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How often does a Zen priest get asked to be on a politics podcast? I don't know. How many have you had so far? We've never had one before. Have you ever done a politics podcast before? No, no, never. I've never done, you know, this is so weird for me to be like, I'm a Harvard professor and I'm like, I have all these things that don't, I mean, they do fit together in my mind and I could, I'm happy to talk about that if you want, but, but it is an odd combination. And, and no, I've never been on a politics podcast.

And I'm thrilled to be on with you guys because I do have a lot of respect for what you do. Well, let's get to it then. First time for everything. Okay.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Today's episode is going to be a little different in that it's not really about politics, or at least not just politics. Shortly after I got back from break, I was catching up on the news and found an essay by the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the longest longitudinal survey of human life ever done.

The essay was titled, The Lifelong Power of Close Relationships, and it read, Close personal connections are significant enough that if we had to take all 85 years of the Harvard study and boil it down to a single principle for living, it would be this. Good relationships keep us healthier and happier, period. They conclude that these relationships are more important than exercise, diet, career, what have you.

As my editor Chad Matlin can tell you, I have been on a hobby horse for years about social isolation being one of the biggest problems I see facing the country and its politics. And so I sent Chad the essay and said, we should talk about this on the podcast. I think it really is about politics. To which he said, it's not, but do it anyway. So today we're talking to Robert Waldinger, the author of the new book, The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Great to be here. So you mentioned that this is your first time on a politics podcast. Do you see loneliness as a political problem? I see it as having huge political implications. And also there are policy decisions that get made every day that impact social isolation. So yes, I see it as having big connections to our political life.

Yeah. In fact, I have sort of been thinking about it in the two ways that you just described, which is one, as people become more disconnected from each other and society, does that change political behavior? I mean, do you have thoughts on specifically how isolation can change political behavior?

Yes. Isolation means we're more likely to stay in bubbles, particularly on the web. I mean, yes, there are people who are not using the internet, but the vast majority are. And the bubbles are very isolating. The bubbles don't expand our thinking. They don't expand our perspectives. They reinforce the same perspective. And that's different, as I understand it, from what happened in

in the many decades before where yes, there were media, but the echo chambers just couldn't exist without input in the same way that they exist now.

One kind of related thing is like does politics itself become a stand in for community in that people find their identity through a political party or a political association, but it's not like you're actually going to meetings of Democrats and Republicans or whatever political persuasion you may have on a regular basis. It feels like you're part of a group, but you don't have the actual benefits of close relationships and collaboration in many ways.

That's right. And actually, I read a book recently called Politics is for Power, which I find so interesting because he makes the argument that, in fact, for most of us, it's simply a spectator sport where we watch these arguments play out, these conflicts play out that we don't actually participate in.

that if we really participated in our communities, we would be going to meetings where they talked about developing more affordable housing or not. We would be going to meetings where they talked about repairing our sewer systems, right, and our bridges. And that when we do that, we actually realize, oh my gosh, we have to work together with people who have different perspectives because we've got to get this stuff done. Most of us just sit back and watch these dramas unfold and

and are manipulated by the dramas without any real substantial connection with the community.

The second piece of this that you mentioned, which is sort of regardless of where you come down on how loneliness can shape politics, and we're going to get more into this later. There's a question of whether or not policy can help make society feel less lonely. And then another question of like, whether it should, is it government's responsibility, politicians' responsibility to try to solve loneliness? I mean, do you have thoughts on ways that at the population level, government can try to solve the problem of loneliness?

Yes, at the societal, particularly community level, it can. We know that architecture makes a difference in loneliness. That if communities are constructed so that people have casual, frequent contact with each other, they strike up conversations. They make relationships. There's good research that shows that if you keep bumping into people, that's why the water cooler is important at work, the coffee machine.

If you keep bumping into people, you start having conversations and then some of them get deeper and some of them build friendships. So we can structure communities so that we stay isolated in our suburban homes and never see anybody on the streets. Or we can structure communities where there are a lot of places where we're out walking around meeting people.

Yeah, I think I mean, there are some politicians talking about this one in particular is Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut. And I want to talk a little bit more about his ideas, which get into, you know, regulating social media and this idea that local economies disintegrating during the era of globalization has contributed as well.

We're going to get to all of that, but I want to add some context to what we're really talking about here. So according to the American Perspectives Survey, more than a third of Americans reported experiencing serious loneliness in 2021.

COVID exacerbated this trend to be sure, but per the census's American Time Use Survey, the time that the average American spent with friends was already declining in the 20 teens, so before COVID, down 37% to just four hours a week from the start of the decade to the end. And people didn't replace that with family time, according to the census. They replaced it with time spent alone. What is going on here?

This trend has been going on at least since the 1950s. So Robert Putnam is a sociologist at Harvard who wrote a book that got a lot of press called Bowling Alone. And the title refers to what he saw, which is when he surveyed Americans starting in the 1950s and into the late 20th century,

What he found was that our investment in other people went down in successive years, that it began with a big drop-off in the 1950s,

probably coinciding with the introduction of television in the American home. We stopped going out. We stopped joining clubs like bowling leagues. We stopped going to houses of worship. We stopped inviting people over. Family dinners declined. Volunteering in the community declined. So all of those metrics of what he calls social capital decline.

Our investment in social capital went down. And when he went back in the early 2000s, all those metrics declined markedly again, probably having something to do with the advent of all the screens that we're so addicted to. But in addition, there are these cultural trends that keep us more isolated, where we don't prioritize things.

investing in other people in just the way that you were describing as you were quoting some of those survey results. I mean, so this is the American perspective survey, which is from the American Enterprise Institute. And then the other source is the census in your study, the longitudinal study that you did over 85 years and counting. Do you see a change in how people are relating to each other and how much time they're spending in these kinds of close relationships?

Yes. I mean, our people began in 1938. They were a group of Harvard College sophomores, a very privileged group, and a very underprivileged group of inner-city boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and most troubled families. So all those people, privileged and...

under-resourced folks. All of them were concerned about, what's my purpose in life? Who do I want to invest in? This was the generation that lived through the Depression. This was the generation for the Harvard guys who went to World War II, saw combat. We asked them, what got you through these big global crises like the Depression and the war?

Everybody to a person mentioned their relationships. It was the people back home who wrote me letters. It was my fellow soldiers in the depression. It was the neighbors who gathered together and pooled our meager resources. So everybody said relationships are what get us through the hard times that are always coming along in life. So

What we find is that the people of that generation knew that they needed each other. They had had visceral experience as young adults of needing each other a great deal to survive. It's unclear that we've had those experiences now in the same way.

To add some more data to our conversation here, the American Perspective Survey really gets into relationships between Americans today and found that the number of people reporting having no close friendships rose from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021. The number of people reporting having 10 or more close relationships fell from 33%, a third of all Americans, to just 13%. Now,

your survey I know from reading your book,

it tracks that original group of men from the 1930s, but then it also starts to incorporate their spouses and their children and so on. And so you're tracking a population that doesn't just have the social experiences of the pre 1950s, but also the social experiences of the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, where we've seen seemingly those relationships fall apart. Do you clock a difference in happiness?

We don't actually clock the difference in happiness, but we do keep track of well-being as people go through the life cycle. And we do look across generations. So we're trying to see, for example, do people in the second generation, the now baby boomer children of our 724 families, do they have happier marriages than their parents? It turns out, by and large, they do not.

But what we find is that levels of happiness do vary tremendously depending on how connected people are to others. What we found was that the people who were the happiest were the people who prioritized connections with people. So connections at work, connections at home, you know, investing in their communities, having friends over, all of that turned out to be sources of happiness.

hits of well-being for them and they would talk about it and they would talk about actively keeping up relationships. And the other thing we found, which we were surprised by, was that people didn't just stay happier when they had more connections, they stayed healthier. That they literally developed the diseases of aging less soon and they lived longer than the people who were more isolated.

The issue for us was we didn't believe it at first. Like we thought, well, how could more connections and warmer connections with other people make it less likely that you'd get coronary artery disease or make it less likely that you would get type 2 diabetes?

Other studies began to find the same thing. And as you know, you don't want to rely on any single study for your proof. You want to make sure other studies point in the same direction. And when that began to happen, we had confidence that this was real, this health benefit to relationships. And then we began to study it. In the last 10 years, we've been studying how this actually works.

Can we explain a little bit of how you got to this conclusion? I mean, what kinds of data were you collecting over that 85-year period? How much qualitative versus quantitative data? And then once you have what I would assume to be simply a massive amount of data, how do you, to quote a friend, find the signal in all of that noise?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that has been a lifelong endeavor for me. So here's what we did. When they came into the study, these young men, we did physical exams, lengthy psychological exams. Workers went to their homes, talked to their parents, elaborate notes on what was being served for dinner, on the disciplinary style of the parents. So all that.

And then questionnaires every two years, interviews every five years, getting their medical records from their doctors every five years. And then eventually we began to audio tape them. We began to videotape them.

When I came on we began to draw blood to analyze DNA and DNA methylation which I love because in 1938 when the study began DNA wasn't even imagined and here we were measuring genetic makeup. In addition, we put people into the functional MRI scanner, showed them happy images, sad images, and looked at the connectivity within their brains and

as they process different visual stimuli. We brought them into our lab, stressed them out deliberately with a well-established measure where you stress people out. I can tell you more about that. We just put on the news? No, well, no, you actually, you say to people,

You surprise them and say, we're going to ask you to give a speech five minutes from now. So you have five minutes to prepare a speech and you're going to give this speech in front of four judges who you can't see. You're going to give it online and the judges are in the next room. And then after you do that,

We're going to ask you to subtract 17 from the number 2,000 over and over again. And every time you make a mistake, we stop you. And we tell you it's a very easy task. It turns out it's a very hard arithmetic task. And reliably, people get super stressed out. Their blood pressure goes up. Their heart rate goes up. We measure heart rate, blood pressure, heart rate variability. And we watch how people calm down.

And all of that is meant to look at stress, stress response, return to equilibrium after a stressor. Those are different windows on this whole domain of well-being that we're talking about. So that's the geeky way of looking at it. Then, you know, to your question,

How do we sort through all those data? And how do we sort through the noise, the messiness of missing data and incomplete questionnaires and all of that? And there's a lot of good material on how you work with missing data in a longitudinal sample, how you create latent variables when you're looking at

Different questions that we asked in 1958 from those we asked in 1972. There are many ways that we use newly developed statistical methods to try to sort out the signal from the noise.

You know, we're 538, so we never accept data at face value here. So to ask a skeptical question, you write, the people who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest mentally and physically at age 80.

Are there compounding factors like perhaps having more resources puts less of a strain on marriages or allows you to spend more time with people that you care about? I have no idea if that's actually true, but how do you try to get down to the root of all of this? Because it's a pretty big claim to be like, worry more about your personal relationships than whether you're exercising 30 minutes a day or eating vegetables or whether or not you're eating red meat or smoking or what, right? So how do you really get to the bottom of that?

Yeah. Well, first, let me just jump in here and say, Galen, that we don't say it's more important to take care of your relationships than to take care of your health. Our data do not show that. So taking care of your health is huge. It's the big elephant in the room when we look at predicting morbidity and mortality as people go through the life cycle. So

Taking care of your health is central. But then you're asking this important question when there's so many things that influence your life between age 50 and age 80, for example. How can we begin to say that relationships are important compared to these other things? And so what we do is we use these methods that include controlling for what we call third variables. So

What if it is really social class that's driving this and not your relationships? That social class predicts premature aging, premature illness and death. So we control for those things as best we can. We pick the variables that we think are also likely to influence this. And when you control for those variables, which your audience I'm sure knows, it means leveling the playing field.

So let's pretend that everybody has the same social class and then is there still a signal when we look at their relationships? And the answer is yes. And when we control for social class and income and baseline health at age 50. So all of those things, we throw them into the equation when we do this kind of analysis. What is a close relationship as the study defines it?

We define it in different ways. So close relationships, first of all, are in the eye of the beholder. Do I feel close to this person? Yes or no? And we ask, you know, by degrees. And we also ask, what do you get from this relationship? So some relationships give us fun. Some are our confidants. Some are our rides to doctor's appointments. There's so many things we get. So we ask about that.

We also studied what we call security of attachment to other people. Very familiar with that. Yeah, yeah, okay. I mean, you should still get into it. Our audience hasn't necessarily been on this journey along with me. Okay, let me get into this because this is really cool.

So there was a British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, who noticed that in fact, you know, ducklings imprint on their mothers and they follow them. And baby animals need to hang on to that caregiver for survival. And then he said, wait, the human animal is dependent on a caregiver for years, for decades, for survival, right?

So how do we do that? How do we as babies imprint on our caregivers? And what he noticed when you, and actually this has been the subject of numerous rigorous studies, how do babies and children imprint on their caregivers?

And what he noticed is there are particular patterns of making sure you can keep your caregiver around because your survival depends on it. So if we're securely attached, we can cry when our parent leaves and get happy when they come back and be pretty secure that they're going to be around when we need them. If we have a caregiver who is able,

unreliable, who's gone for too long, you know, when you're a year old and leaves us desperate and panicky, that imprints on us a sense that we can't rely on a caregiver. If we have a caregiver who says, "Please don't cling to me, don't hold on to me, that makes me anxious," we get the message that we have to pretend that that caregiver is not important to us. So we act as though relationships don't matter and this happens

Before we have words, and you can literally put babies into experimental situations where they will demonstrate these patterns. Okay, what we believe is that as we go through life, we start doing the same thing with our lovers, with our friends. And so what we think happens is that if we're lucky, we have models of secure attachment that say, you know, people can be relied on.

people and people will help me. They will love me and they'll help me when I need them. If we're lucky. Some of us aren't that lucky and our models of attachment are insecure. What we think is that everybody needs one person in the world who they can count on when they are in trouble. And we asked that. We asked our people at one point,

Who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? List everybody. And many people could list quite a number of people. Some people couldn't list another human being. And some of those people were married and they couldn't list another person who they could call when they were in trouble. So that's my short spiel on attachment. And sort of what constitutes a close relationship as the study considers it.

Why is this so important biologically? Like, why are we as human beings designed to experience loneliness in such severe sort of unhealthy, unhappy ways? The theory is that we evolved that way. The idea being that human beings evolved to pass on their genes, right? That's the goal of evolution. So...

What we found, we're pretty sure in earlier societies, was that people who banded together were safer. They could ward off threats more easily, more effectively. And that meant if you were safer, you were more likely to pass on your genes. So we selected four people who wanted to band together, who more naturally did that. What that meant too was that isolation was a stressor. If you were alone on the savannah,

Your heart rate went up, your blood pressure went up. It needed to because you needed to face challenges alone. And we think that that predisposition to social connection has stayed with us in terms of evolution and development of social proclivities.

So even if you know that you can order seamless, you can call the police, you can rely on all different aspects of society to back you up as an individual person. If you're alone, regardless of knowing that mentally, you will feel insecure and be looking for threats and be anxious regardless. Yes.

So studies, for example, studies show us that people who are alone sleep less soundly. Their sleep architecture is different than people who have other people in their dwelling place and certainly sleeping next to them. That matters. It's not everything and it doesn't predict ill health, but what we know is that the experience of being alone has physiologic consequences.

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All right. So I think we've gotten squarely into what our listeners might recognize as the self-help territory, which is not bad. I think there are still political undertones and consequences to everything we're talking about here. But let's get back to the direct connection to politics.

So to quote you, you write, we know who developed alcoholism and who is in recovery. We know who voted for Reagan, who voted for Nixon, who voted for John Kennedy. In fact, before his records were acquired by the Kennedy Library, we knew who Kennedy voted for because he was one of our participants. So which is to say he was a sophomore at Harvard when the study began. And somehow all along you tracked the same questions that you asked everyone else, which is fascinating. Yeah.

Were you able, since you asked participants about their political leanings and whom they voted for, were you able to come to conclusions about what kinds of aspects, other than maybe the obvious, like we know race and education and things like that determine political behavior, but the types of things that would make someone more likely to be a Democrat or a Republican or any other political persuasion? You're going to hate my answer.

We haven't done those analyses. We have the data. I know, I know. We have the data, but we haven't done those analyses. So if there is a researcher out there who wants to look at our data, we love collaborating. You know, we would do that. People who have research background and can take this and really run with it, we're eager for those kinds of analyses. One of the wonderful things about having 85 years of data is that you have more than you could ever analyze.

So we need collaborators. Touche. So I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent here and then ask you what you think. I should note that this idea that social isolation and...

political behavior are connected is not new territory at all. I think one of the best known writers about the relationship is Hannah Arendt, who survived the Holocaust and spent her career trying to understand why it happened. And in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that those experiencing, quote, isolation and lack of normal social relationships, it is through surrendering their individual selves to ideology that they rediscover their purpose and self-respect.

Recently, there's been much more quantitative research done on the topic. And here I'll quote an article by the author Brad Stolberg looking at some of the research. So a 2020 study published in the journal Group Processing and Intergroup Relations found that social exclusion is a leading factor behind radical

A study published in the journal Political Psychology found that weak social belonging is associated with increased probability to vote for populist parties.

How does all of that research jibe with what you observed on the individual level or across just the study population over the 85 years? I can speak about this from our study and from some other studies of people who, interestingly, who returned from World War II. What we found was that people returning from World War II became politically more moderate.

often a little less conservative, but much less likely to tend toward extremist views. Because there's something about the melting pot of being with people very different from yourself, needing to rely on those people, and seeing the destructiveness of extremism that made many people come back, most people, less prone to extremism.

And so what we think is so dangerous about our current climate is that the isolation, the weak social engagement makes us more prone to these extremist views. Whereas connecting with each other and realizing, oh, that person who holds such different political views, that's also kind of a decent person who worries about some of the same things, their kids and making a living, that that tempering

of these extremist views can't happen when we're more isolated. And that's what we saw in our study. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go overboard here. As people who listen to this podcast know, there are lots of different motivating factors behind political behavior and loneliness or feeling a strong sense of community isn't the only one, even though I think this research is important. Well, I was going to say, too, that the experience of shame...

is a huge driver of some of this, it seems. Like if you think about it, being shamed, you know, where you feel like you are defective because of what someone else has said to you, often in front of others, is so toxic, it is so scarring, that when you feel that, you are much more likely to withdraw and then to be susceptible to people saying, we love you, come join our mortality.

more extreme angry group. So I just want to say that, that there's a psychological cost to shaming other people that's real and has long-term effects.

Yeah, I'm sort of curious, like close relationships are so important, but can it also be close relationships that socialize you into extreme or destructive behavior? What if your close friends want to violently protest globalization or storm the Capitol? Or like what if your close friends want to use heroin? You are absolutely right. You know, Nick Christakis does this great research about social contagion.

And that's what he studies. He studies all these ways in which behaviors are contagious, that they're normalized in the group that we find ourselves with. I'm thinking of a documentary that you may know of called "White Right." It was by a Pakistani filmmaker, and she went and interviewed many people in the white supremacist movement, some of the people who were in Charlottesville during the demonstration.

And you see her interviewing these men and they get to know her, she gets to know them, and they begin to say, "Oh my gosh, no, you're not one of those people who we object to." It's very touching and poignant that what you have is that when there is more familiar contact, when you break down these barriers and just get to know somebody, this stuff falls away.

But the question is, how do we engineer that? How do we engineer that as a society so we stop being isolated enough to be susceptible to the hate mongers? Well, what's the answer? Well, you know, there are people who have advocated national service, not national military service necessarily, but a national service where we are put together with people from very different backgrounds.

and given a common goal that has meaning to everybody. You know, it could be building homes. It could be feeding the hungry. It could be so many things to relieve suffering in the world. But the idea would be that if we serve alongside people who are very different from us and we have to rely on each other,

a whole lot of the false divisions that get stirred up in our minds fall away. And we say, "Oh, this is a good person who's helping me out here."

I want to go back to a bit of the root of all of this before we talk more about solutions. Because you mentioned earlier on social media. The conflict there is that the idea of social media is that we're all more connected than we've ever been. You can easily keep in touch with friends that you haven't seen in 15 years in a way because you can see what they're up to. You can reach out to them easily. It's not hard to find them. And in some ways, we're all one big massive online community. But

But it sounds like you're saying at the same time that all of that has happened, we actually don't feel any more connectedness. We feel less connected to our communities. Why?

Well, partly because many of us use social media passively, meaning we scroll through other people's curated lives, you know, on Instagram, on Facebook, where, you know, I don't post the pictures of the mornings when I'm hungover or the mornings when I feel like my life sucks. Well, you don't, but no, I'm kidding. Yeah, right. But, you know, but we don't do that. I mean, actually, one of my millennial kids has done that, but we... What does a Zen priest look like hungover?

He looks like he's saying, I know I shouldn't do that and I'm going to resolve, I'm going to set my intention not to do that again. Yeah.

I will say that, you know, I'm an old guy. So hungover means having two drinks instead of one. It's really embarrassing. But that's my life now. But what I wanted to say was that if we use social media passively and we scroll through other people's curated lives, it creates a sense that other people have it all figured out and we don't. It creates a sense of missing out and often a sense of isolation.

If we use social media more actively, the research shows that we can increase well-being by being more connected, by connecting with elementary school friends that we start having coffee with on Zoom, right? But one of the things you asked about is really important, which is why does it leave us less connected? And one of the reasons we know is that social media feels less safe. So one of the things that happens is

is that people don't have to see the consequences of their behavior in another person's eyes, for example. You just don't have to do that. So you can be nasty to someone, say really hurtful things, and then click off. And you don't have to live with the consequences. And so kids can bully each other. People can be hateful toward each other and not have to really see the hurt that they've inflicted.

That's where in-person interaction ideally allows us to feel the empathy that we would naturally feel for other human beings and therefore be more likely to rein it in. That's the danger of social media. Actually, I see it in the academic world. And I'll just say this because academically, if somebody took issue with a paper that I published

right in a fancy journal and they wrote a letter saying these guys are full of it their data analysis is wrong and and it was curated by yeah it did happen and in actually one of the fanciest journals and the editor of the journal did what you do which is he curated a debate between us in print it was very respectful we made really important research points they had good points i think we had good points

Everybody was having a respectful dialogue that hopefully moved the field farther.

Other academics had now started trolling each other online where there is no mediation, right? There's no editor saying, look, guys, you got to behave and be respectful in the way you talk to each other. And so careers, academic careers have been ruined through online trolling by other academics. And that, you know, so think about it. If we're doing that as dowdy academic professors, think about what's happening in the rest of the internet, right?

Hey, hey, Dowdy might be a little too harsh. Yeah, so we're talking about the kind of like isolation of cancel culture. You know, as I mentioned earlier, Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut has taken up this issue and he actually wrote about it for the Bulwark in an article titled

the politics of loneliness. And he blames a lot of this on social media, but he also says that the decline in churches, sports teams, civic clubs, labor unions, and business organizations is also to blame. And Chris Murphy is a Democrat, I should say.

In fact, in some ways, he blames neoliberalism and globalization and this idea that when you sort of like flatten all the barriers and, you know, ship jobs overseas and carve out the downtown of communities and things like that, that you actually destroy the social fabric too and create a lot of loneliness. That's right. That's right. Because we're not taking care of each other.

We leave people in these bombed out communities alone. I found this kind of funny. I don't have the background to say whether or not this is a strong conclusion, but I found in preparing to talk to you an article from the British Psychological Society, the title of which is, quote, Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness.

Which, you know, I found that interesting in and of itself. So Chris Murphy's solution here is one, regulate social media, which Congress has talked about a lot. And I think the idea is like limiting ages and there's also content moderation and things like that.

You know, in some ways, it seems like the root of the problem comes a lot earlier because people are going to social media because they're lonely in the first place. Like, I don't spend a lot of time on social media when I'm with friends. I spend time on social media when I'm alone. And so if you kind of solve the aloneness piece first, then maybe the social media piece becomes less important.

Well, I want to say, no, I absolutely agree, but it's also a two-way street. What we know about screens is that they are specifically designed to capture and hold our attention because there's money to be made the more you capture and the longer you hold the attention, right? So it's also that I can't look away from my phone. My wife and I go down to the kitchen in the morning and she's on her email and I'm looking at the newsfeed and we are not talking to each other.

And the problem is that I'm as susceptible as anybody to this capturing of my attention. So it's a two-way street. You're right. We need to be more intentional in how we behave. But also the design of the screens is something that is dangerous because the path of least resistance is towards screens and away from interpersonal interaction. Mm-hmm.

And so that's the social media portion. Chris Murphy goes on to say that the local community portion is

is in some ways solved by invigorating local economies. But I mean, we shouldn't kid ourselves here. There are lots of places in America where the economy is thriving and there are dense urban centers. I'm in New York City right now. If this idea holds true, and if the solution is sort of reinvigorate downtown areas, what have you, I mean, are urban people less lonely than rural people? Did you find any evidence of that in your study?

We didn't have rural people by and large in our study. We have a few people who moved to rural areas. A forgotten man, come on. I know, I know. But if you start in 1938 in the city of Boston, it's not rural, right? So that's what we have. But what you're pointing to is important. There is a great deal more loneliness in rural areas as I understand it. And probably the best place to look for this is

is the Gallup Organization. They do some pretty good surveys and they talk about these deaths of despair. And there's a great deal of worry about rural communities in this regard. But urban communities, you know, the Blue Zones work talks about how we structure our communities and ways that we can structure

Urban centers, particularly, so that we interact more with each other rather than stay in our little cubicles. And work. There's a lot of emphasis on work connectivity now. Vivek Murthy has made that a priority as Surgeon General. Loneliness at work, which is huge. So that's another area where CEOs can lead the way to less loneliness.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like the elephant in the room here in some ways is also COVID. Like the data that I mentioned of increased time spent alone during the 20 teens. I mean, it kind of just goes off the charts once COVID hits and people are working from home. And now there is this sort of conflict over whether or not people will go back to the office and whatnot. I mean,

the reason behind forcing social isolation during COVID was to not spread the virus. But have we created a situation where there's a lot of knock-on effects that we weren't necessarily prepared for? I think we accelerated the situation rather than creating it. The model we were using was there since the Industrial Revolution, where you left your home, you went to a workplace, you worked, you came back home.

But I used to sit in my research office at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and I would be all by myself doing my statistical analyses and maybe talking with colleagues on the phone or by email. I would email my assistant who was down the hall because it was easier for us to just go back and forth with details. And I sat there and it occurred to me before COVID, it occurred to me,

I could be doing this at home. I don't need to be commuting every day for 45 minutes each way to downtown Boston. So I think what has happened is that we accidentally, COVID, accelerated a trend that was beginning to happen. And that it's not something that was inevitable, but it certainly got a boost from the pandemic.

I mean, I've asked this in a couple different ways now, but how do you fix it? I think you don't fix it. I think you evolve, right? So some people are never going to go back to the office. Many jobs are going to be remote. How then do we maintain social connections if we're remote? My son just got his first job out of business school with a company that has no physical existence. It is completely virtual.

So then how does he structure a life where he is not socially isolated in his Chicago one bedroom apartment? And he's having to work on that. And I think we're all going to have to think more and more about that in these new styles of working together. And so there's the level of government thinking about this, policymakers, business executives, community leaders.

thinking about this. We've mentioned a couple of different ways trying to... We haven't even mentioned aspects of civil life like religion. Who knows if there's any way that becomes reinvigorated and people become more involved in faith-based community. We've talked about reinvigorating local economies.

Of course, a lot of what your book addresses is the things that we can do as individuals. And so to sort of end things on a happy note, what are the decisions that we can make, the patterns that we can develop that will help us feel more socially connected, feel like we have close relationships, feel like we have community? Yeah. We talk in the book about what we call social fitness, and we coined that term just to make it analogous to physical fitness.

The idea being that it's a practice. You know, if you work out today, you don't come home and say, good, I'm done. I never have to do that again. You know that it's an ongoing practice. What we find in our study is that people with perfectly good relationships with friends and families saw those relationships wither away from neglect. That if they're not attended to, it's like muscles that get weaker if you don't use them.

What people can do with the relationships we already have is think to yourself, who do I miss? Who do I want to connect with? And I would say when you finish listening to this podcast right now, take out your phone, think of that person, send them a text or an email saying, thinking of you, just wanted to say hello. That's all you have to do. And if you do that, if you did that every day for a week,

I guarantee you, you will get positive things back and there will be ripple effects. Not every time, but many times people will be thrilled that you took the initiative. So what we say is take small steps. They don't have to be big steps, small steps.

reinvigorate and keep going your current relationships. And then the other thing we can do, let's say you want to make some new relationships because you don't feel like you have enough in your life. We find that frequent casual contact with the same people is the place that relationships most often start. So what does that mean? That means

Find something you enjoy or you are passionate about and do it alongside other people. So it could be bowling, you know, join a bowling league. It could be a gardening club or, you know, pickleball. It could be anything, right? It could be volunteering to work to prevent climate change. It could be volunteering in a food pantry. Any of those things where you care about what you're doing and

Then you find yourself next to people who care about the same thing. That gives you a place to start conversations if you're not a person who feels comfortable starting conversations with strangers. You have something to talk about. And if you go back again and again and you see those same people, some of those people, a few of those people, will start talking to you in deeper, more lengthy ways, and a few of those will develop into friendships.

Yeah, no, that's great advice. I'll say for my part, this is going to sound super lame, but I have hated remote work from day one and starting to go to coffee shops is one of the best ways to just, even if you're not really talking to other people, you say a couple of words to strangers existing in society, wearing real clothing, not just sweatsuits.

makes a big difference. So I'll just put that out there. Well, and talking to strangers actually makes us happier. There's good research on this. Well, fantastic. Then I should be the happiest person on earth. I love talking to people. Well, you seem pretty good at it, actually, given what we're doing right now. Well, thank you. I'm flattered. Any parting words before I let you go?

Just the other thing that this isolation is not abnormal. And so if you are isolated, it's easy to feel like you're an outlier. You are so not an outlier and that there really are

steps that you can take of the kind we're talking about that can ease that isolation. But it means being proactive. And so what I want to say is don't despair. We have many life histories in our study of people who thought it was never going to get better for them. And it did, often when they least expected it. All right. Well, let's leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is a pleasure.

Robert Waldinger is the author of the book, The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. My name is Galen Droop. Tony Chow is in the control room and Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or wherever you get your podcasts. Or tell someone about us. Tell the new friend that you make at the coffee shop or at the bowling league.

Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.