I was listening to a podcast of Dr. Phil on Dave Rubin’s show while I was shopping earlier.
If you follow Dave, you know that he’s in the middle of his “Off the Grid August”, but he pre-records segments for his team to air.
Dr. Phil was talking about the loneliness epidemic. He basically said, “The group with the highest degree of loneliness is young people, and the group with the second highest degree of loneliness is the elderly.”
I thought, “And the group with the third highest degree of loneliness is the people in the middle. And, well, that’s it really. There was just those three.”
No matter how connected to each other a society gets, there’s always going to be a group that is, statistically, more lonely than the others. That’s kind of how statistics work.
I think we need something more along the lines of comparative statistics, maybe the number of people who say they’re sort of lonely, very lonely, extremely lonely, or whatever for that to really hit the mark, Dr. Phil, sir. Bonus points if you have numbers from other time period to show that people are growing more lonely because of social media, which was the direction he was going.
It could be that I’m being overly critical. I’d ask my wife, but she passed away and so now I’m speaking into the void on the internet, so I can’t be sure.
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