America's loneliness epidemic: A systemic risk to organizations
Last night I read the &quot;Happiness&quot; chapter (no. 18) from Steven Pinker&#x27;s fine book, <i>Enlightenment Now</i>, where he reviews data on loneliness in the US students (among two dozen other graphs in the first twenty chapters).<p>Pinker implies social critics abuse the words &quot;epidemic&quot; and &quot;crisis&quot;.<p>After reviewing the downwards-sloping graph (plotted from 1978-2011) and more data, Pinker writes:<p>[quote]
Modern life, then, has not crushed our minds and bodies, turned us into atomized machines suffering from toxic levels of emptiness and isolation, or set us drifting apart without human contact or emotion. How did this misconception arise? Partly it came out of the social critic&#x27;s standard formula for sowing panic: Here&#x27;s an anecdote, therefore it&#x27;s a trend, therefore it&#x27;s a crisis. But partly came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but more in co-workers. They are less likely to have large numbers of friends but also less likely to <i>want</i> a large number of friends. But just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social.
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