An important new look at loneliness
by Mira and Charles on December 3rd, 2009There is some new research out on loneliness (and here’s another take on this research) that I think is going to cause a lot of confusion and pain. But that’s only because it’s been misunderstood. If we understand this new research the right way, I think we’ll find it brings help and hope to a lot of us.
The new research says that loneliness is contagious, surprisingly so. If your friend is lonely, it increases the odds that you’ll feel lonely. Loneliness is so contagious that if your friend’s friend is lonely, it’ll increase the odds of your feeling lonely.
At least that is what the research seems to say. But let’s dig deeper.
First of all, the size effects are small. Loneliness may be contagious, but only in the sense that there is a small but measurable increase in loneliness as you move out through a lonely person’s social network.
But even so, this still leaves out something far more important. All strong emotional states are contagious. Happiness is contagious too. Energy is contagious. Generosity is contagious.
What’s going on here? Well, it turns out that emotional states are normally distributed, even though we talk about them as if people fell into one of two piles. So we talk about happy and unhappy people, when in fact, as with intelligence, most people are in the middle, with fewer and fewer people as you move out to either end of the scale. There are comparatively few really unhappy or really happy people compared to people in the middle who are more of a mixture of happiness and unhappiness. And in the same way, there are comparatively few really lonely or really not lonely people (what IS the opposite of “lonely” anyway?), and most of us are somewhere in between.
And since those of us in the middle are more mixed in our emotions, we are vulnerable from either end: lonely people will make us feel more lonely, gregarious people will make us feel more connected.
So of all things, the last thing we need to do is shun lonely people for fear we’ll catch their cooties. Instead, let’s just all try to understand that loneliness can be self reinforcing, cutting lonely people off from contact with gregarious people who might exert a contagion of their own. This means that people who feel better connected to others need to reach out more to people who might be feeling lonely, and that we all need to be careful not to shun the lonely but to seek out those who are not lonely.
In other words, our motto should be: Let’s share more of the good stuff.
And by the way, how lonely is lonely?
Well, it turns out that the average person is lonely 48 days a year. To me that means that a lot of us label ourselves as lonely when we are really average. Just think: what with all the ways we have to connect with people, at work, through texting and emails and phone calls, church or synagogue, neighborhood, and so on, we still manage to feel lonely almost one day a week.
Now think about it. On that one day a week when you’re feeling lonely, I’ll bet you are looking at other people going about their lives and thinking, “Look at them, going places and doing things. I’ll bet they’re not lonely.” So you compare yourself to them and you feel even more lonely.
But you should think about is this way: if you get into an elevator with six other people, one of you is probably feeling lonely. Now what are you going to do? Let your imagining that they’re not feeling lonely make you feel more lonely? Or are you going to smile and say Hi, and hope that the non-loneliness that you project will be contagious and make someone else feel less lonely?
The answer is clear. Let’s use the contagion of good things to make the world a better place.
Now if you’re feeling, “Yeah, but I need a boost,” then of course the perfect book is The Emotional Energy Factor, which is filled with ideas custom tailored to you that will boost your emotional energy.
