Technology is killing us
the new science of loneliness
Not surprisingly, another study has confirmed that Facebook causes depression, low-self esteem, possibly narcissism and also that these negative affects are directly proportional to Facebook use.
Meanwhile, although the average adult has over 300 Facebook friends within easy contact, surveys consistently show that with each subsequent generation, Americans are less trusting of others and have less close friends and family members with whom to confide in.
In fact, as Szalavitz and Perry write in Born For Love, “On nearly all measures of social life — from the frequency of dinner parties or dining out with friends to the number of friends and confidants we have to our closeness with our families — Americans tend to have fewer and lower-quality interactions with one another than our parents and grandparents did.”
How does the same technology that connects billions of people all over the world simultaneously leave everyone feeling more depressed and isolated?
The current innovation of loneliness stems from that fact that when it comes to feelings of connection and social isolation, what matters is not the number of friends or time spent with others, but a person’s subjective sense of deep emotional connection and resonance with others.
Unfortunately, the ubiquitous like button, sharing of photos and status updates fail to create any real and lasting connection with other human beings.
This social isolation — particularly in time that is supposed to be the age of connection — is clearly bad, but is it really killing us?
In a word, yes.
It’s worse than you think it is
The link between physical health and social connection all started with Berkman and Syme’s landmark 1979 study which found that men and women with few social and community ties had more than twice the mortality risk than their socially connected brethren. A decade later, a meta analysis of similar studies by House, Landis and Umberson declared that social isolation can be as bad as obesity, lack of exercise and smoking (two pack a day, mind you), in terms of illness and early death.
Social connection plays such an integral role in our health that social pain— such as exclusion, ridicule or shame—is processed in the same parts of the brain as physical pain. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense, as being separate from the tribe meant the difference between life and death. Just as the pain of putting your hand on the stove motivates you to immediately remove it, social pain quickly motivates you to connect with others.
The need to remain socially connected is hardwired into our brains from birth until death. Simple isolation is inherently traumatizing to a young child who needs primary caretakers to survive. After marital separation, ex-spouses experience lower immune systems, more doctor visits and health problems, and increased mortality rates than their married counterparts.
As such, researchers no longer see the brain as an isolated computer in a person’s head but instead as an embodied process heavily reliant on interactions with other human beings to function properly. Survival of our species has always depended on the caring and empathy of others, resulting in what social scientists call survival of the kindest.
Together these findings reflect one of the greatest shifts in our scientific understanding of health since the discovery of germs: mental well-being, emotional resilience, physical health and social connection are deeply and undeniably intertwined.
Wired in
Evolution has wired us to be social beings with social brains, which is why we spend so much time on social networks. In fact, recent studies suggest that our Default Mode Network — the place our brain goes when its not focused on anything in particular — strongly overlaps with social cognition. This explains why a majority of conversations are simply gossip (aka social information) and also why when left alone for a few minutes we inevitably reach for our phone to see what everybody is up to.
As Psychologist Matthew Lieberman points out in Social, social connection is one of the best predictors of happiness and well-being. Surprisingly, increasing wealth has a weak correlation with happiness, partly because attaining great wealth usually involves social sacrifices, from working longer hours to traveling for business meetings.
So while a writer at Salon wondered aloud if robot orgasms will make actual sex obsolete, the latest research answers the question with an unequivocal NO. Humans do not have sex just because it feels good; sex also allows us to connect with another human being on a deeply intimate level, something a robot will never be able to do.
Which brings us back to the Internet Paradox, where becoming more connected via the Internet actually makes us feel more isolated as human beings. The problem lies not in Internet or Facebook use per se, but when such technology actually replaces real world communication and interaction.
What matters to our well-being is not being connected but actually feeling connected. Feeling is inherently an embodied process, one that involves the touch, warmth, smile, laughter, and eye contact of another human being, something technology will never be able to fulfill.
What to do
So if you go to the doctor complaining about headaches, depression or stomach ulcers, they may need to write you a prescription to “close the laptop, invite three friends to dinner and call your mother.”
Ultimately the responsibility to connect with others lies on us. Unfortunately this requires a bit more work than pressing a few buttons on a screen.
