Don Martin

The Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic in 2023, but Britain has had an organization devoted to understanding and combating loneliness for many years, so has Japan, so have many countries around the world.

The US is actually late.

to the conversation and treating it as the mental and physical health crisis that it is, because it is actually a health crisis.

In fact, what's wild is that loneliness exacerbates early death, early mortality from all causes.

If you are lonely, you are much more likely to die from all causes.

It's killing us sooner.

It's not only a mental health issue, but it's a physical health issue.

And it impacts everything from like bad knees to IBS to cardiovascular failure and all points in between.

It's wild how like...

big loneliness gets and how quickly it gets that way.

But yeah, it's everywhere.

It's an everyone problem.

It's like I said, it's something that's baked into our DNA to feel lonely.

And the US is actually late to the conversation and treating it like the crisis that it is.

Yeah, absolutely.

That was a big early aha moment for me was that we evolved loneliness for a purpose and it's trying to keep us alive.

It's trying to keep us connected to other people.

The problem is, especially in the modern day, we view other people as a source of fear.

We are afraid of people, especially if they are not like us.

If they are the racial other, the sexual other, we're dealing at the immigrant other.