Article content continued

Imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed and self-centred, and is associated with a 26 per cent increase in the risk of premature mortality

“Nearly 30 million Americans live alone, many not out of preference,” said Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. In Canada, the proportion of the population living in one-person households has quadrupled over the past three generations in Canada to 28 per cent in 2016, from seven per cent in 1951.

Life expectancy is growing, fertility rates are falling and the population is aging. We’re marrying later and having fewer children, if any at all. Technology means we can do almost all we need to do from home without physically interacting with a single human soul, and a chronic lack of connectedness, of being on the social periphery, can be seriously harmful, even deadly.

Studies suggest loneliness is more detrimental to health than obesity, physical inactivity or polluted air. Chronic loneliness, and not the transient kind that comes with a significant life disruption, such as moving cities for work, or the death of a partner, has been linked with an increased risk of developing or dying from coronary artery disease, stroke, elevated blood pressure, dementia and depressed immunity.

A study published in May found lonely people have shorter telomeres, which are found at the end of chromosomes, like the tip of a shoelace. Telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides, and shorter telomeres are considered a sign of accelerated aging. Loneliness and isolation have been linked to mental health problems — depression and anxiety — even in other social species, like rats.

Loneliness has also been blamed for helping fuel the opioid crisis, political upheaval and lone shooters. Lonely people “turn to angry politics” when they have a void to fill, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in The New York Times. The man accused of killing 22 people at a popular Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, last weekend was an “extreme loner,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Still, loneliness, in and of itself, isn’t a disease, but a feeling, a discrepancy, as the Cacioppos have described it, between our “preferred and actual social relationships.” Feeling alone isn’t the same as being alone. And being alone doesn’t mean feeling alone. People can feel lonely in a crowd, coupled or uncoupled.

“Loneliness is a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation; an emotional lack that concerns a person’s place in the world,” cultural historian Dr. Fay Bound Alberti wrote in the journal, Emotion Review.

Yet despite its prevalence, people don’t often talk about loneliness. “It’s the psychological equivalent to being a loser in life, or a weak person,” John Cacioppo, who spent decades studying loneliness before his sudden death last year, said in a 2013 TED Talk. Denying loneliness, he told his audience, is like denying we feel hunger or thirst.