Some people are alone most of the day or live alone somewhere out in the desert, and they might be okay with this. Being alone is not the same as feeling lonely. Loneliness is feeling one has fewer meaningful social connections than one might like to have.
For some people, this might mean they have one meaningful connection and they are fine. For others, it might mean they need 10. It’s really different from person to person. [...]
We depend on others to feel secure. When we feel lonely, we feel like there’s a permanent threat. It might not be a real threat, but we perceive things as threatening.
So what this amounts to when we’re in a normal, neutral social situation, we’re more likely to interpret the other person as being threatening. Someone might look at us in a neutral way, and the lonely person will think, "This person doesn’t like me." [...]
What’s interesting is that before old age, we found differences over adulthood.
Around 30, there are elevated levels of loneliness, and then again at age 50. Or, to frame it another way, there’s a dip in loneliness around age 40, and then again around age 65 to 70. [...]
The pattern seems to be specific to Western countries. We’re doing some analyses with American data, and we find a pretty similar pattern. We find that in old age, loneliness goes way up, but there are also elevated levels earlier in life. Those results tell us probably it’s generalizable. (But this is not even submitted for publication yet.)
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