George Monbiot: The age of loneliness is killing us

[ellenrr]

We have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. We have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us?CMP=fb_gu

[The2ndWheel]

1. One of the reasons why sports are as popular as they are

No different than a book club, or anything like that. A sense of camaraderie.

The civilized, mass society, sedentary life where you can pretty easily get through a day not needing anyone else for anything, is new. Humans are still better adapted to a more human scale world, as opposed to a world of mass production and humans having to now fit a reality increasingly built for our technology. Even if you do need help for something, it's probably easier just to pay someone whom you've never met, and probably won't meet again, for the help, than to ask someone you might know. We're all busy doing our own thing.

[ellenrr]

2. why churches are popular too. They provide companionship and ritual,

both of which I think humans need.

[jtuck004]

3. Only 3 replies?

"Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone."

Never ceases to amaze me about how we absolutely stink at dealing with the things that are most likely to hurt us.

It is also the area in which the least investment could provide, perhaps, the greatest return in preventative health care.

Maybe explains part of why some folks, political polar opposites, still eat holiday dinners together,even with big heaping platters of vitriol on the table.

Otherwise the loneliness might be unbearable for someone.

[ellenrr]

4. true for some people not for everyone

not all of us crave human companionship.
I for example don't like the human species very much.
And I find most individual humans - besides being unconcerned about any life but human life - to be rather stupid.
Stupid not just in the sense that they live in a time when the fate of the species will be determined by the physical changes in the world brought about by humans--
but also in the sense that they do not use logic and reasoning.

I crave companionship of people who are interested in the issues like the end of the human race by climate change, or the extinction of species, or evolution, or biodiversity or other topics. But people like this are hard to find in my small burg, I have a couple/ a few folk I hang out with. Whom I learn from and share with and move forward with and look at the world with and try to figure things out with.

but humanity in general -- no, it is a self-centered stupid species.