We’ve gotten older, and our friends have long moved away. Perhaps our spouse has passed away. Our adult children are busy with their lives and children, and when we call, we feel like we are ‘bothering’ them. We realized it’s fairly common to get through entire days without meaningful conversations with anyone: the longest conversation we had today was with the food delivery guy dropping off our takeout. How did it get this way?
For one thing, we might have taken for granted we would always have a social circle around us. But with the natural attrition of friends caused by friends moving away, close friendships becoming less close, and retirement ushering in a loss of social contacts, we found our social circle shrunk to the point that the only conversations we’ve heard lately are on TV.
The seriousness of maintaining a social circle became evident to me many years ago when my grandmother asked me and my sister to help her make some phone calls. (These were still the days of rotary phones, LOL, but my grandma’s eyesight had deteriorated to the point that she was unsure which digits she was dialing.) It was an unusual request in any case: my grandmother tended to busy herself with cooking, housekeeping, and listening to gossip disseminated by my mom. But for some reason that particular day she had had the idea of getting in touch with old friends she hadn’t spoken to lately. In retrospect, it seems evident she was lonely and would have enjoyed chatting about ‘the old days’ with her buddies. We grandkids dutifully dialled up the numbers she supplied and hung around expecting to hear our grandmother laughing and gossiping. Instead, we listened as one call after another was met with confusion: “Who? Who is this? Oh yes, Ms. B. How’re you doing? Good, good. Harry? Harry? No, he’s dead. I’m sorry: you didn’t know? No, he passed away, what is it? Five years? Pneumonia.”
By the time she finished her calls, she was ashen. To her shock, every single friend she’d called had passed away. Every single one.
It was not just hard on her that she’d lost these particular special people in her life. She also had no means to replace them. She rarely left the house. She had no hobbies. She had spent her entire life taking care of others and had not developed her own interests. At the end of the day, perhaps she wasn’t horribly unhappy with grandkids to look after and a daughter to boss around? But she had no peers to connect to. No one with whom to reminisce about the ‘good old days’.
Isolation and loneliness don’t seem to be good for us. Social scientists state that humans are social beings: we have evolved to live in groups and work collectively. In olden times, getting cut off from one’s ‘tribe’ was likely lethal: being part of a group could mean access to more food, protection from predators, and help if injured. We might not live on a savannah now, but those basic tenets still hold.
Some may argue (and correctly) that being alone does not equate to loneliness. For example, one can be lonely though supposedly surrounded with support – and conversely – one can lack social connections but not feel particularly lonely. That said, researchers conducting a famous decades-long research study on cardiac outcomes (the Framingham study) easily deduced that risk factors such as smoking or bad diets would lead to poorer cardiac outcomes as their subjects aged. But evaluation of the data led to additional revelations: loneliness also seemed to significantly increase the risk of dementia and adverse cardiac events. Further studies have supported this line of thinking - suggesting that social isolation and poor social support tend to be correlated with unpleasant cardiac outcomes.
It may that we are starting to get the message about the importance of social connection. In 2014, a fast food restaurant with a strict time limit on seating found itself on the receiving end of unpleasant headlines after trying to evict elderly patrons it felt overstayed their welcome. Apparently local elderly Korean pensioners had developed a habit of congregating in the restaurant, creating a kind of informal social club – but drawing the ire of the restaurant which felt they hoarded seats that could have been available to other customers. The kerfuffle hit the news – with an outpouring of sympathy directed to the pensioners – and the restaurant largely backing down.
A similar outcry erupted in the UK when citizens over 75 (who had previously had access to free TV licenses) were unceremoniously stripped of their access to live TV. Observers pointed out that the cost of a TV license was prohibitive to those on fixed incomes – and that the access was particularly cherished by this older group. For many of them, TV represented a window to the outside world – a world their limited mobility made difficult to access otherwise. Others pointed out that the background chatter of a TV provided a respite from loneliness.
Even governments have gotten wise to dangers of social isolation. In 2018, the UK appointed a “Minister of Loneliness” tasked to strategize ways to support the isolated elderly. Suggestions included creating community groups and developing social spaces that encouraged social interaction.
That said, perhaps one way to reduce the risk of social interaction is to nip it in the bud before it becomes entrenched? In her book When Strangers Meet: How People You Don’t Know Can Transform You author Kio Stark champions the concept of making small talk with strangers. She suggests it humanizes us and makes feel less fearful and suspicious. She may have a point: John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago researcher, suggests loneliness is not only contagious (the friends of lonely people on the fringes of social networks seem to eventually become lonely too) but tends to amplify over time. Lonely people tend to become suspicious, which leads to them isolating further, which tends to make them more lonely, and so on.
One possibility could be that we sometimes also tend to expect other people to do the social work. Perhaps we are the ones who wait for our friends to call instead of reaching out ourselves – till eventually the calls drop off. Or perhaps a husband always had his wife send out the Christmas cards or reach out to family and friends – then she passed away, and he realized he didn’t even know the phone numbers or addresses of their contacts.
In any case, whatever the cause, it’s pretty clear that staying socially connected doesn’t just help us emotionally – but staves off bad health outcomes as well. So stay vigilant about maintaining your social connections – and reach out to that friend you haven’t heard from lately. Who knows? Perhaps they’re feeling lonely too!