BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The feeling of not mattering, of going through a whole day without anyone really seeing you, sits closer to the surface than most people let on. Jennifer Breheny Wallace has spent years studying this. In her new book Mattering, she frames it as a gap: the distance between how […]
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Loneliness and India are probably not two things one would connect in relation to each other. Putting the sheer size of the country’s population aside, our country’s culture hinges on the community and people acting as a collective rather than an individualistic mindset. India is the country where your neighbours know exactly what you had […]
By Aneri Pattani, KFF Health news
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”
Nearly every Tuesday for a decade, Steve Siple attended a bar trivia night with friends in Birmingham, Alabama. After moving to North Carolina, he developed a new ritual — joining other Charlotte locals on Saturdays to…
A Dutch supermarket chain created slow checkout lanes specifically for people who aren't in a rush and want to have a conversation.
The post Dutch grocery store add slow lane for elderly customers who want to chat appeared first on Upworthy.
Do these tools portend a bright new age or civilizational collapse? We hash it out, with minimal help from the robots and a lot more help from a leader of a D.C. think tank helping to create policies that keep these powerful tools in their place.
Are we cooked?
Why do people in America smoke so much marijuana? One answer is that life is boring or ugly, but another is that trauma from early life sets people back by a few decades and they stay stoned in order to deal with the confusion. Science tells us now how marijuana intensifies abuse experiences: The results […]
A novel that speaks to our time. Julius Caesar Klein is a character for our era: “He wanted to find value in the chaos he’d surrounded himself with… “…solitude had done something to him, and he knew it… “Simply trying to process in his head the craziness of the world situation made the solitude […]
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In all honesty, the numbers do not fully support the panic that seems to be spreading over the “male loneliness epidemic”. When researchers look at loneliness rates across the lifespan, men and women report similar levels of isolation. A 2019 meta-analysis of nearly 400,000 people found no meaningful difference […]
The post Men, loneliness, and the friendship…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY’S EDITORIAL TEAM Something has shifted over the past three decades in how Americans relate to each other. In 1990, about three percent of Americans said they had no close friends. Today, that number sits somewhere between 12 and 20 percent, depending on who you ask. Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of […]
The post Speed friending: one cafe’s answer to America’s growing…
In the words of beloved writer Maya Angelou, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Few things create that feeling faster than showing up for someone who needs it. That’s the magic of volunteering: it’s one of the simplest ways to make a real, tangible impact in someone else’s life — and…
The leading men of this year's Oscar films aren't climbing ladders or running boardrooms. They're quitting, slacking off, and searching for meaning anywhere but on the job — reflecting a…
Reclaiming agency in our mediatized world requires giving some up
Public health is affected not only by the obvious factors – diseases, lifestyle-related health problems, injuries and heredity – but also by developments that tend to remain outside the daily sight, and one of them is loneliness, especially among seniors, writes USA Today. Longevity expert Ken Stern says that when he writes a weekly advice […]
The post The hidden side of the US public health…
Every commuter on every train in every city is running the same miscalculation. They assume sitting in silence will be more pleasant than talking to the person next to them. They are wrong, and psychologists have been proving it for over a decade. — Read the rest
The post Research keeps proving we should talk to strangers more appeared first on Boing Boing.
It’s three o’clock on a cold Budapest afternoon, and the sun is already dropping low on the horizon as 64-year-old Györgyi Petik Kis briskly makes her way to the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library. A beautiful neo-baroque palace, the building is home to the Hungarian capital’s largest public collection of books....
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There’s a reason why Central Perk hangs seem so aspirational.
Join Blakelands Lodge Care Home’s Chatty Café in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire. Enjoy free refreshments, activities, and companionship every Tuesday.
Making and nurturing friends—especially in midlife—is more important than you may realize.
One of those sidewalk interviewers once asked a slew of 20-somethings if they feared anything more than being alone with their own thoughts. Every single person responded with a resounding, terrified “No!” before one man, after chewing on it for a moment, replied: “Bears.” Fear of loneliness — which goes by a surprising number of […]
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