Individual Excellence: Part I-B-5: Grouped People

18 May 2024

This blog is one of a chain from an in-process book entitled, Individual Excellence: The 4Ps of a Well-Spirited Life.  What follows is the next passage from Grouped People, the first of four sections.   

PART I-B: Grouped People

Loneliness Kills

Themes frequently circle back to Aristotle.  This one’s no different.  At the beginning of Politics (I.2.1252a25), he stated that, “…there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other” (Barnes, 1995, p. 1986).  Aristotle was writing of men and women, but within a page stated that humans, by nature, are political [social] animals. 

He did not mean by “political animals” that we necessarily engage in the fractious, self-serving, virtue-signaling pantomime that presently passes for Canadian politics.  Aristotle meant that we gather and cooperate because we need one another.  That was stated above in Table I.3, Dimensions of the Soul, Dimension #15: connection.  As was also previously stated, the opposite of addiction is not always seen as sobriety; the opposite of addiction can be viewed as connection.  I haven’t found any comments from Aristotle on addiction, but there are hundreds of references directed at our necessarily social nature.

Much more recently, the Surgeon General of the U.S.A. released a stark summary of the impact of loneliness:

"When I first took office as Surgeon General in 2014, I didn’t view loneliness as a public health concern. But that was before I embarked on a cross-country listening tour, where I heard stories from my fellow Americans that surprised me.

People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant. Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word “lonely,” time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, from every corner of the country, would tell me, “I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,” or “if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”

It was a lightbulb moment for me: social disconnection was far more common than I had realized.

In the scientific literature, I found confirmation of what I was hearing.  In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness.  And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.

Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.  The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished."  (Murthy, 2023, p. 4).

A few facts jump out of this statement.  First, 50% of Americans were lonely prior to the pandemic.  I see people in my practice, mostly young men, who have not yet overcome the effects of COVID-19.  To provide some chronological context on that, “Polls conducted in 1972 showed that roughly 45% of Americans felt they could reliably trust other Americans; however, that proportion shrank to roughly 30% in 2016” (Murthy, 2023, p. 13).  

The next highlight concerns impact.  Murthy stated that the impact of loneliness is individual and societal, taking us right back to Aristotle’s comments in ancient Greece i.e., connection is integral, it’s in our bones.  And the medical impact is in our organs including the brain, the circulatory systems, the heart, and the domino effect of those organs on depression, anxiety, and premature death.  As above, loneliness kills. 

Social disconnection, frequently discussed in our recovery groups, has the same impact as smoking three-quarters of a package of cigarettes per day.  Naturally, because human beings create and work in schools, civic organizations, and workplaces, our engagement, productivity, and performance are slipping downward everywhere humans go.  That’s a bleak statement reflecting a bleak reality which I’m guessing many readers of this sentence have witnessed, felt, and experienced. 

If it is true that most readers are already aware of our crisis of disconnection, that fact, alone, fosters inferences. 

1. The ensuing solitude must be powerful enough to prevent corrective actions otherwise corrective actions would be happening.
2. Solitude creates a sense of isolation so pervasive as to lock lonely individuals into stagnant aloneness i.e., it is self-perpetuating.
3. If either of the above inferences is true, social disconnection has the entropic power to foster social chaos i.e., an apparently spontaneous disarray in which afflicted individuals believe other individuals are so unalike and hostile that death-inducing loneliness becomes the single apparent healthy option.

Before rejecting this as wild conjecture, let’s return to an idea previously introduced.  This is advice from the late psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony Clare, on succeeding in life.

“Next, be a leaf on a tree.  You have to be both an individual—you have to have a sense that you are unique and you matter—and at the same time you need to be connected to a bigger organism, a family, a community.” Speaking of the difference between those involved in WWII--and others--he offered this:

"Among those who fought in the Second World War there was a comradeship.  People who might otherwise have found it difficult to socialise were thrown in together.  They had no choice.  And there was a shared philosophy, a common purpose.  The basic fighting man felt he was doing something worthwhile.  That was why the 1939-45 war was so different from Vietnam, or even the Gulf wars.  And those engaged in the war were testing themselves.  That seems to be rather important.  Happy people are rarely sitting around.  They are usually involved in some ongoing interchange with life" (Both quotes, Brandreth, 2021, pp. 432, 147).

What we’re seeing, in nothing less than an 80-page report from the Surgeon General, of the largest Western, and most prosperous country in the world, tells us that as many as half of us have lost our trees.  The second quote offers elaboration on the first.  Per Dr. Clare, common purpose and an “ongoing interchange with life” are integral parts of full leafdom or eudaimonic integration within community. 

In terms of the inferences, above, the most supportive data is provided by the Surgeon General’s statistics between 1972-2016.  In those 44 years the sense that one American could reliably trust one of his fellow Americans slid from under half (45%) to under one third (30%).  Averaged, that’s one-third of a percentage point of trust per year or 1% every three years.  How many more years need this trend continue before open hostility is common? 

To be continued next week.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the bcc’d emailing list.

References

Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1995). The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation.  Princeton University Press.

Brandreth, G. (2021). Philip: The Final Portrait. Coronet.

Murthy, V. H. (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.  United States Public Health Service.