Rule #4: Prioritize friendship & connection

Health

Dec 28

You no longer need your friends and neighbors, strictly speaking.

Given sufficient wealth and internet connectivity, you can have anything you desire delivered to your home. Your trip to the market can be omitted in favor of grocery delivery, a visit to the library speedily obviated by your Kindle, your work obligations handled quickly and without unnecessary banter over Zoom.

Similarly, first-world infrastructure has banished mundane physical tasks from our lives — the driveway will be plowed, the landscaping done, the power lines kept in operating condition, the new garage built, the heat endlessly available via municipal gas lines, all without ever relying on the goodwill or sheer horsepower of your neighbors.

Where you used to depend on proximity, cooperation, and co-dependence to get the things you needed, you can now rely on technology, capitalism, and modernity – and in doing so, you eliminate the connections and deep friendships that begin as casual or needs-based social contact.

At the same time, you eliminate a key source of mental health, the companionship and joy that come as you rely on others to help you celebrate life’s victories and overcome its setbacks.

Less abstractly, you become lonely — a condition associated with a massive increase in all-cause mortality. Among all genders, the Hazard Ratio between loneliness and death from all causes is an astonishing 1.22, equivalent to a 22% higher risk of death in any given timeframe among those who are lonely versus those who are not.

This is not a typo; the absence of friendship and connection literally kills (and it seems, strictly speaking, that we may need our friends and neighbors after all).