A mountain of research has linked loneliness to an increased risk of dementia, depression, anxiety, heart disease, stroke and early death.
Loneliness is officially a health emergency in California’s San Mateo County, which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and includes part of Silicon Valley.
The county’s Board of Supervisors passed a resolution on Tuesday that declared loneliness a public health crisis and pledged to explore measures that promote social connection in the community.
It’s the first county in the U.S. to make such a declaration.
Quick random tangent. I feel like churches were a great social gathering place. Now so many are leaving religion, or at least churches behind. The sense of community is dying and it’s hard to build a physical social network anymore.
Edit: I guess I should have been more clear, I am not religious and stopped going to church around 14 when my parents stopped forcing me to go so over 20 years ago now. But in my lifetime that was a huge social gathering place. Movie theaters are dead here, there are no roller rinks or anything like that. It’s just sitting in bars or coffee shops but even there many people rightfully like to stick to themselves with headphones on instead of chatting with strangers.
I just used churches as an example as in my life I saw their utility for meeting a community of people.
I would argue it not the loss of Church’s by themselves, but their loss without a good replacement. You can’t go anywhere in America and gather without paying. There’s no place to just…exist. Even Churches usually required dues.
Anybody who wants to get mad about this, look up the sociology concept of third place.
Here’s a great ~10 minute video from Not Just Bikes on YouTube about third places and how current city planing trends promote social isolation.
This concept and this video are so fantastic. Goes to show how broken N America is, I’ve been around the block a few times and never really had a chance to stop at a local…
