Building H #82: Can't Make No Connection

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has elevated the issue of social connection to a top public health priority. Research in recent years has demonstrated the strong role that social connection plays as a protective factor against many diseases, while, at the same time, surveys of Americans show an increasing trend of loneliness. As Murthy cites in his recent New York Times opinion piece, We Have Become a Lonely Nation. It's Time to Fix That, “at any moment, about one out of every two Americans is experiencing measurable levels of loneliness.” Murthy goes on to summarize the consequences:

“When people are socially disconnected, their risk of anxiety and depression increases. So does their risk of heart disease (29 percent), dementia (50 percent), and stroke (32 percent). The increased risk of premature death associated with social disconnection is comparable to smoking daily — and may be even greater than the risk associated with obesity.”

Murthy unveiled a call to action on social connection, with a formal advisory and a website. The advisory covers the science behind social connection and its implications for health and well-being and lays out a national strategy, based on six pillars, ranging from strengthening social infrastructure in local communities to cultivating a “culture of connection.” The social infrastructure pillar highlights the roles of physical space, built environment features like parks and services like public transportation. A pillar on “reforming the digital environment” notes both the positive and negative influences that “technology” can have on social relationships. Calling out these environmental influences, Murthy hints at the deep structural issues that have led us to this crisis in social connection. 

These structural issues are at the heart of a recent podcast interview Ezra Kelin conducted with Sheila Liming, author of the book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. In his intro to the interview, Klein nails it:

“There’s been this effort to get us to take loneliness seriously. And so you get a lot of conversation about loneliness as a malady, as a public health problem, a look at its neuroscience, what it does to our bodies. But it’s also an outcome. It is the result of a structure. It is imposed, in some ways, by culture. We make choices as a society about what we value. We chase our jobs. We live far from our families. We move away from our friends. We spread out into suburbs and into single-family homes set back behind fences and lawns. We sprawl out with automobiles. We design for atomization and isolation. And so no wonder we get lonely.”

Liming gets into the issues of time and space– the ever shrinking amount of time we seem to have to just be with people – with no set agenda – the diminishment of public spaces and the spreading out of Americans into the suburbs. Reinforcing these developments is the increasing shift to digital services that frequently obviate the need for human interaction. The musician David Byrne pointed out this trend in an excellent 2017 article, Eliminating the Human, in which he mused:

“I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction…The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously. Judging by the evidence, that conclusion seems inescapable.”

Byrne goes on to note that the frictionless, efficient world brought about by technologies ranging from delivery apps, to streaming music, to driverless cars has many advantages, but that we, um, might want to think about the direction they’re taking us – after all, “there are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen.” Byrne was prescient and the developments he cites precede the additional challenges brought about by the trend of remote work (see Building H #77: What Comes After WFH?).

Put these structural trends together and we’re at a point where most people no longer get a sufficient amount of healthy social interaction from the flow of everyday life. Sheila Liming, in her conversation with Ezra Klein, puts it this way:

“So I’m thinking of it in the book as a kind of social musculature that we have to expose ourselves to these sort of repeated scenarios with relative frequency, just like exercise, in order to keep those muscles active and in order to prevent them from effectively atrophying.”

So we’ve arrived at a point, much in the way that “exercise” is an artificial (but increasingly necessary) construct created to compensate for the lack of natural physical activity in our lifestyles, where we might need to develop the social equivalent of exercise routines. (Hat tip to Steven Crane for this observation.) We will undoubtedly see a bevy of social connection apps and social-connection-as-a-service companies in response – as we should – but we also need to address the structural issues that create conditions driving the loneliness epidemic. As Surgeon General Murthy notes, “[rebuilding social connection] will require reorienting ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to prioritize human connection and healthy relationships.” The key word in that statement isprioritize. It means valuing the importance of social connection to our societyabove other goals– and then expressing that priority across policies, across public investments, and across the products and services that shape the patterns of our everyday life. 

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