NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Not To Die From Loneliness.

Isolation is deadly. So why aren’t we doing anything about it?

For starters, there’s a stigma against admitting loneliness, especially for men, and there’s a whole other taboo against openly wanting to make new friends.

We celebrate lifelong friendships and treat the friends we make earlier in life as more legitimate than the ones who come later. The early friendships are filled with inside jokes, funny stories of crazy nights and that thing that happened that one time that still no one can believe. We know all the background stories, each other’s full biographies. It’s deep, there’s no doubt about it.

It’s also nearly impossible to maintain. The group of friends who hung out until sunrise most weekends in their early 20s will have a hard time keeping it going into their 30s and 40s.

Most friendships end up getting relegated to social media. We like each other’s pictures as a way of staying in touch, but don’t actually make an effort to get together. We fight off screen time inside our families but don’t realize we have friends whose lives we only learn about on Facebook.

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