If you take the “I” out of Illness and replace it with “We” you get Wellness:
The power of community using blockchain
We all saw Surgeon General Murthy on May 2, 2023, finally calling Loneliness a health crisis.
His tardy advice is simple: reach out to a friend or a relative every day and talk to them, even for 15 minutes, answer the phone when a friend calls, avoid distractions while out with friends or family, volunteer and call 988 (911 for mental health) for help.
It’s hard not to make fun of these rudimentary and naive recommendations.
After all, it is estimated that 15% of Americans (up from 3% in 1990) have ZERO friends and family, and those who do — good luck with a 15-minute chat…
- Young people don’t call each other, and encouraging older people to use the phone more opens them up to phone scams. Telling people to answer the phone sounds very boomer-ish,
- And call 988? WTH is that? (see Dr. Owen Scott Muir, MD’s excellent post here).
Merely recognizing the importance of community and telling people to be more social (what most of Murthy’s advice boils down to) isn’t enough. What’s needed is social engineering, incentivizing people to be social.
So as a decades-long pain specialist who has seen how mental, physical and financial pain has driven people into isolation,
I want to offer a more serious, systemic and social-driven set of recommendations, (and yes, it involves blockchain):
1- Join virtual communities. Not one, and not instead of a real-life one, but in addition.
2- Once you have joined, make it a DAO. Our ability to cooperate has seriously eroded and DAOs offer a transparent, mission-driven environment, with clear how-to-work-together rules.
3- Contribute to building a fair and understandable governance and voting culture in the DAO, which engages all members and gives each one a voice.
4- Make sure the DAO has a token. Rewarding activities that strengthen the DAO, while discouraging bad behavior is social contract 101.
Finally, remember this isolation epidemic is multifactorial.
There is a fundamental individualism culture, as opposed to Ubuntu in Africa (I am because of who we are), or the indigenous American Pacha (meaning: multitudes),
but there is also learned helplessness and hopelessness causing suicide, homicide and drug overdoses, all wrapped in a cloak of social virtuality.
So beyond deep breathing, mindfulness and eating fiber, let’s seriously engage in social engineering, empowered by decentralized, distributed technologies.
This IMHO is the path to deal with isolation in 2023:
-creating decentralized organizations (DAOs), communities (DeCom), societies (DeSoc), cities, islands and Network States,
so that finally we can start taking the “I” out of illness and replace it with “We”.
This content is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute trading advice.
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