외로움의 전염병: 현대의 사회적, 생물학적 위기

### 외로움의 전염병: 현대 사회의 딜레마
* 😔 인류 역사상 가장 연결된 시대에 살고 있지만, **영국 18~34세 인구의 60%, 미국 인구의 46%가 정기적으로 외로움을 경험**하는 등 전례 없이 많은 사람들이 고립감을 느끼고 있는 것으로 나타났습니다.
* 🧠 외로움은 배고픔과 같은 생물학적 기능으로, 조상들의 집단 생활에서 생존에 필수적이었던 **사회적 연결**을 보장하기 위해 진화한 것입니다.
* 🏙 외로움의 유행은 **르네상스 후기부터 시작**되어 **산업혁명을 거치면서 가속화**되었으며, 현대 사회가 공동체보다 개인주의와 이동성을 우선시하면서 계속 악화되고 있습니다.
* 만성적인 외로움은 건강에 매우 해롭고, 노화를 촉진하며, 면역 체계를 약화시키고, **하루에 한 갑의 담배를 피우는 것만큼 치명적**일 수 있습니다.
* 🔄 외로움이 만성화되면 뇌는 자기 보호 모드로 전환되어 **사회적 상호작용에서 적대감을 감지**하고 자신을 보호하기 위해 더욱 자기 중심적으로 변합니다.
* 🔄 외로움은 종종 **부정적인 감정과 해석이 고립을 강화하는 악순환**으로 이어져 탈출을 점점 더 어렵게 만듭니다.
* 🔍 외로움을 극복하기 위해 개인은 **부정적인 사고 패턴, 타인의 의도에 대한 가정, 고립을 지속시키는 행동**을 인식하고 이에 도전하는 것이 좋습니다.
* 🌍 이 글은 외로움을 개인의 문제가 아닌 더 많은 관심과 지원이 필요한 **공중 보건 위기**로 바라보는 사회적 관점의 전환을 촉구하며 마무리합니다.

현대의 전염병인 만성 외로움은 인간의 생물학과 사회적 변화에서 비롯되어 건강과 관계에 영향을 미칩니다.

Everybody feels lonely from time to time. When we have no one to sit next to at lunch, when we move to a new city, or when nobody has time for us at the weekend. But over the last few decades, this occasional feeling has become chronic for millions. In the UK, 60% of 18 to 34-year-olds say they often feel lonely. In the US, 46% of the entire population feel lonely regularly. We are living in the most connected time in human history, and yet, an unprecedented number of us feel isolated. Being lonely and being alone are not the same thing. You can be filled with bliss by yourself and hate every second surrounded by friends. Loneliness is a purely subjective, individual experience. If you feel lonely, you are lonely. A common stereotype is that loneliness only happens to people who don't know how to talk to people or how to behave around others. But population-based studies have shown that social skills make practically no difference for adults when it comes to social connections.

Loneliness can affect everybody. Money, fame, power, beauty, social skills, a great personality— nothing can protect you against loneliness, because it's part of your biology. Loneliness is a bodily function, like hunger. Hunger make you pay attention to your physical needs; loneliness makes you pay attention to your social needs. Your body cares about your social needs, because millions of years ago, it was a great indicator of how likely you were to survive. Natural selection rewarded our ancestors for collaboration, and for forming connections with each other. Our brains grew and became more and more fine-tuned to recognize what others thought and felt, and to form and sustain social bonds. Being social became part of our biology. You were born into groups of 50 to 150 people, which you usually stayed with for the rest of your life. Getting enough calories, staying safe and warm, or caring for offspring was practically impossible alone. Being together meant survival, being alone meant death. So it was crucial that you got along with others.

For your ancestors, the most dangerous threat to survival was not being eaten by a lion, but not getting the social vibe of your group and being excluded. To avoid that, your body came up with social pain. Pain of this kind is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection, a sort of early warning system to make sure you stop behavior that would isolate you. Your ancestors who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to change their behavior when they got rejected, and thus stayed in the tribe, while those who did not got kicked out and most likely died. That's why rejections hurt, and even more so, why loneliness is so painful. These mechanisms for keeping us connected worked great for most of our history, until humans began building a new world for themselves. The loneliness epidemic we see today really only started in the late Renaissance. Western culture began to focus on the individual. Intellectuals moved away from the collectivism of the Middle Ages, while the young Protestant theology stressed individual responsibility.

This trend accelerated during the Industrial Revolution. People left their villages and fields to enter factories. Communities that had existed for hundreds of years began to dissolve, while cities grew. As our world rapidly became modern, this trend sped up more and more. Today, we move vast distances for new jobs, love, and education, and leave our social net behind. We meet fewer people in person, and we meet them less often than in the past. In the US, the mean number of close friends dropped from 3 in 1985 to 2 in 2011. Most people stumble into chronic loneliness by accident. You reach adulthood and become busy with work, university, romance, kids, and Netflix. There's just not enough time. The most convenient and easy thing to sacrifice is time with friends. Until you wake up one day and you realise that you feel isolated, that you yearn for close relationships. But it's hard to find close relationships as adults, and so, loneliness can become chronic.

While humans feel pretty great about things like iPhones and spaceships, our bodies and minds are fundamentally the same they were 50,000 years ago. We are still biologically fine-tuned to being with each other. Large scale studies have shown that the stress that comes from chronic loneliness is among the most unhealthy things we can experience as humans. It makes you age quicker, it makes cancer deadlier, Alzheimer's advance faster, your immune system weaker. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity and as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. The most dangerous thing about it is that once it becomes chronic, it can become self-sustaining. Physical and social pain use common mechanisms in your brain; both feel like a threat, and so social pain leads to immediate and defensive behavior when it's inflicted on you. When loneliness becomes chronic, your brain goes into self-preservation mode; it starts to see danger and hostility everywhere. But that's not all; some studies found that when you're lonely, your brain is much more receptive and alert to social signals.

while at the same time it gets worse at gets worse at interpreting them correctly. You pay more attention to others but you understand them less. The part of you brain that recognises faces get out of tune and becomes more likely to categorise neutral faces as hostile, which makes it distrustful of others. Loneliness make you assume the worst about others intentions towards you because of this perceived hostile world. You can become more self-centred to protect yourself, which can make you appear more cold, unfriendly, and socially awkward than you really are. If loneliness has become a strong presence in your life, the first thing you can do is to try to recognise vicious cycle you may be trapped in. It usually goes something like this: an initial feeling of isolation leads to feelings of tension and sadness, which makes you focus you attention selectively on negative interactions with others. This makes your thoughts about yourself and others more negative, which then changes your behaviour. You begin to avoid social interaction, which leads to more feelings of isolation. This cycle becomes more severe and harder to escape each time.

loneliness make you sit far away from others in class. Not answer the phone when friends call. Decline invitations until the invitations stop. Each and every one of us has a story about ourselves. And if your story becomes that people exclude you, others pick up on that. And so the outside world can become the way you feel about it. This is often a slow creeping process that takes years and can end in depression and a mental state that can prevent connections even if you yearn for them. The first thing you can do to escape it is to accept that loneliness is a totally normal feeling and nothing to be ashamed of. Literally everybody feels lonely at some point in their life. It's a universal human experience. You can't eliminate or ignore a feeling until it goes away magically. But you can accept that you feel it and get rid of its cause. You can self-examine what you focus your attention on and check if you are selectively focusing on negative things. Was this interaction with a colleague rarely negative or was it really mutual or even positive? What was the actual content of an interaction?

what did the other person say? Did they say something bad, or did you add extra meaning to their words? Maybe the other person was not really reacting negatively, but just short on time. Then, are your thoughts about the world assuming the worst about others' intentions? Do you enter a social situation and have already decided how it will go? Do you assume others don't want you around? Are you trying to avoid being hurt and not risking opening up? And if so, can you try to give others the benefit of the doubt? Can you just assume that they're not against you? Can you risk being open and vulnerable again? And lastly, your behavior. Are you avoiding opportunities to be around others? Are you looking for opportunities to decline invitations, or are you pushing away others preemptively to protect yourself? Are you acting as if you are getting attacked? Are you really looking for new connections, or have you become complacent with your situation? Of course, every person in each situation is unique and different, and just introspection alone might not be enough.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: If you feel unable to solve your situation alone by yourself, please try to reach out and get professional help. It's not a sign of weakness, but of courage. However, we look at loneliness as a purely individual problem that needs solving to create happiness, or as a public health crisis. It is something that deserves more attention. Humans have built a world that is nothing short of amazing, and yet not of the shiny things we have made is able to satisfy or substitute our fundamental and biological need for connection. Most animals get what they need from their physical surroundings; we get what we need from each other, and we need to build our artificial human world based on that. (giggling)

Loneliness

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

외로움은 영국과 미국에서 높은 유병률을 보이며 수백만 명에게 만성화되었습니다.

외로움은 순전히 주관적인 경험이기 때문에 사회적 기술은 성인의 사회적 관계에 거의 영향을 미치지 않습니다.

외로움은 우리 조상들이 생존을 위해 협력하고 사회적 유대를 형성한 것에 대한 보상을 받았기 때문에 외로움은 진화에 뿌리를 둔 생물학적 기능입니다.

사회적 고통의 진화와 외로움의 전염병

사회적 고통은 거부에 대한 진화적 적응으로서 조상들에게 고립을 막기 위한 경고 시스템으로 작용했습니다.

외로움의 유행은 르네상스 후기부터 시작되어 산업혁명을 거치면서 가속화되었으며, 근대화로 인해 공동체가 해체되고 대면 교류가 감소하면서 더욱 가속화되었습니다.

오늘날에는 사람들이 바쁜 일상 속에서 친밀한 관계를 유지하는 데 어려움을 겪으면서 사회적 관계보다 개인적 추구를 우선시하는 경향으로 인해 만성 외로움이 크게 증가하고 있습니다.

외로움이 인간의 몸과 마음에 미치는 영향

- 만성적인 외로움은 건강에 심각한 영향을 미쳐 신체를 더 빨리 노화시키고 면역 체계를 약화시키며 질병을 더 치명적으로 만듭니다.

- 외로움은 비만보다 두 배 더 치명적일 뿐만 아니라 하루에 한 갑의 담배를 피우는 것만큼 치명적입니다.

- 이는 자기 영속적인 순환으로 이어져 뇌가 모든 곳에서 위험을 보게 되고, 타인에 대한 불신과 사회적 상호작용에 부정적인 영향을 미칩니다.

외로움 극복하기: 연결과 치유로 가는 길

외로움은 부끄러워하지 않고 해결할 수 있는 흔하고 정상적인 감정입니다.

다른 사람과의 상호작용에 대한 부정적인 생각을 스스로 점검하고 도전하는 것이 중요합니다.

사람들에게 의심의 여지를 주고, 위험을 무릅쓰고 개방적이고 취약한 태도를 취하며, 적극적으로 관계를 추구함으로써 외로움에서 벗어나 의미 있는 관계로 나아갈 수 있습니다.

외로움은 개인적, 사회적 차원에서 모두 심각한 문제이므로 더 많은 관심이 필요합니다.

현대 사회의 놀라운 발전에도 불구하고 연결에 대한 인간의 근본적인 욕구는 여전히 충족되지 않고 있습니다.

인간의 행복은 서로 연결하는 능력과 깊은 관련이 있으며, 이는 우리 사회에서 이를 우선시하는 것이 중요하다는 점을 강조합니다.