There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy

We’re living through an epidemic of loneliness and everybody knows it, except for one small group: people who have actually looked at the data.

Much of what appears to be a loneliness epidemic is, in fact, a well-intentioned misunderstanding.

许多看似孤独的流行病实际上是一种善意的误解。

However, there is a real epidemic out there—one that is far stranger and more sinister.

然而，确实存在一种流行病——一种更加陌生、更加险恶的流行病。

I’ll get to its causes and cures in a moment, but first:

我稍后会介绍其原因和治疗方法，但首先：

When people think they’re documenting a concerning trend, they often get a little loosey-goosey with the facts.

当人们认为自己正在记录一个令人担忧的趋势时，他们常常会对事实感到有点模糊。

I don’t think anyone does this on purpose—no one is getting rich selling anti-loneliness pills (yet).

我认为没有人是故意这样做的——（目前为止）还没有人通过销售抗孤独药而致富。

But it means that claims about the loneliness epidemic are often tainted by two statistical sins that tend to go undetected.

但这意味着有关孤独感流行的说法常常受到两种统计错误的影响，而这些错误往往未被发现。

First, someone will present one actual data point showing how many people feel lonely today, they’ll imply a data point from the past where people were less lonely, and then they’ll conclude, based on the trendline that they just made up, that something very bad has happened.

For example, in this paper , researchers find that 76% of adults in California and 78% of adults in the Chinese province of Anhui are lonely, and then they ask why this “unprecedented worldwide rise in loneliness” has occurred.

But we only know how these folks are feeling today—we have no idea what they would have said if we asked them yesterday, or a year ago, or ten years ago.

但我们只知道这些人今天的感受——我们不知道如果我们昨天、一年前、十年前问他们，他们会说什么。

It’s possible they’ve always been this lonely.

他们可能一直都这么孤独。

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The second bit of malfeasance is concluding that you’ve discovered a trend in loneliness when you’ve simply divided up the results by age, like this:

When you see a graph like that, it’s almost impossible not to rush to conclusions—these poor young people, sucked away from their friends by the black holes of YouTube and Instagram!

The faulty assumption here is that older people have never been lonely and that younger people will remain lonely forever.

这里的错误假设是，老年人从未感到孤独，而年轻人将永远保持孤独。

We don’t know if this is an age effect (maybe every generation grows out of its youthful loneliness) or a cohort effect (maybe kids these days, unlike their parents and grandparents, are doomed to lifetimes of loneliness).

One way to separate these effects is to compare today’s kids to yesterday’s kids.

区分这些影响的一种方法是将今天的孩子与昨天的孩子进行比较。

And when you do that, you see declines, not increases:

当你这样做时，你会看到下降，而不是增加：

More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at.

We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.

That doesn’t mean everything is fine.

There is, in fact, another epidemic lurking next door...

事实上，隔壁还潜伏着另一种流行病……

Although the data does not show that people are more lonely, it does show that people are more alone .

虽然数据并没有表明人们更加孤独，但确实表明人们更加孤独。

( Derek Thompson has made this point particularly well .) In the US, time spent with friends on the weekends has fallen by half in the past 20 years.

（德里克·汤普森（Derek Thompson）在这一点上说得特别好。）在美国，过去 20 年来，周末与朋友共度的时间减少了一半。

According to the American Time Use Survey, pals are out and solitude is in :

根据美国时间利用调查，朋友外出，独处：

This is mainly a recession in hanging out—most of the increase in alone time has come from people spending less time with folks outside their households 2 :

That 2022 time point could be a pandemic hangover, but time spent with non-household members was already dropping long before covid appeared.

2022 年的时间点可能是大流行的后遗症，但早在新冠病毒出现之前，与非家庭成员相处的时间就已经在减少。

Indeed, from 1998 to 2018, people who live by themselves started spending much more time alone overall:

事实上，从 1998 年到 2018 年，独居者开始花更多的独处时间：

We’ve got a puzzle here.

People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to.

人们比以往任何时候都更加孤独，但他们并没有感到比以前更孤独。

So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?

No, it’s not fine.

不，这不太好。

Isolated people are more likely to get depressed , suffer a heart attack or a stroke , develop dementia , and catch a cold ; they straight-up die sooner .

与世隔绝的人更容易感到抑郁、心脏病或中风、痴呆和感冒。 they straight-up die sooner .

(The “loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day” meme is a bit dubious, but it’s also not crazy .) Those findings all come from correlational studies, but when you inflict isolation on someone instead, you quickly see some massive and concerning effects.

Prisoners in solitary confinement often sink into a stupor , their thoughts become obsessive and delusional, and they get agitated and irritable.

(I’ve heard many people complain of similar but milder things happening to their elderly parents who live alone.)

（我听到很多人抱怨他们独居的年迈父母也遇到了类似但温和的事情。）

Here’s one extreme case that’s instructive: when a Spanish woman went into a cave alone for 500 days , to both set a record and prove a point, she turned loopy.

She ended up flirting with her GoPro cameras, hallucinating the sound of shamans beating drums, and accusing her electrical equipment of poisoning her with sound waves.

“There is no past, there is no future,” she later told a reporter.

“没有过去，也没有未来，”她后来告诉记者。

“Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.”

“一切都是现在的，一切都是不久前的，一切都是残酷而奇怪的。”

Remember 2017, when everybody was making slime at home?

还记得 2017 年，当时每个人都在家里制作粘液吗？

Remember how the coolest slimes were the ones that are liquid when undisturbed, but turn solid when you squeeze or poke them?

还记得最酷的史莱姆是那些在不受干扰时是液体的史莱姆吗，但当你挤压或戳它们时就会变成固体？

The human mind is kind of like that slime: it only has shape when prodded and pushed by the presence of other people.

人类的思想有点像粘液：只有在其他人的存在的刺激和推动下，它才会具有形状。

When left to its own devices, it turns to ooze.

当它自行其是时，它就会变成软泥。

And that sticky, shapeless substance provides the perfect Petri dish for all of our current pathologies.

这种粘稠、无形的物质为我们当前所有的病症提供了完美的培养皿。

The penchant for voting for extremists, the hyperfixation on gambling away your life savings on sports and crypto, the dream of perpetual gooning —these are the disordered desires of a mind that’s been liquified by solitude.

对投票给极端分子的嗜好，对在体育和加密货币上赌上毕生积蓄的过度痴迷，对永恒的追求的梦想——这些都是被孤独所液化的心灵的无序欲望。

Too much alone time is clearly bad for us, but it doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it should.

太多的独处时间显然对我们不利，但它似乎并没有给我们带来应有的困扰。

So the real mystery of the loneliness epidemic is: where is it ?

所以孤独流行的真正谜团是：它在哪里？

Why are we all sitting alone in our houses and slowly melting into puddles of slime, like the “this is fine” meme dog , but without the fire?

To answer that question, we need to understand another modern malady.

要回答这个问题，我们需要了解另一种现代弊病。

Namely, scurvy .

即坏血病。

If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you’ll start to feel tired and weak, your joints will hurt, your legs will swell, you’ll get spots on your skin, your teeth with fall out, you’ll feel grumpy all the time (understandably), and eventually, you’ll die.

All of this can be prevented with a few tablespoons of lemon juice, but people suffering from scurvy do not develop a hankering for citrus.

所有这些都可以通过几汤匙柠檬汁来预防，但患有坏血病的人不会对柑橘产生渴望。

They will suffer and wither and collapse and never even ask for a grapefruit.

他们会受苦、枯萎、崩溃，甚至永远不会要一个葡萄柚。

So not only are we unable to synthesize vitamin C ourselves—making us one of the few unlucky mammals who can’t—we are also apparently unable to desire vitamin C.

因此，我们不仅无法自己合成维生素 C（使我们成为少数不能合成维生素 C 的不幸哺乳动物之一），而且我们显然也无法渴望维生素 C。

This seems like a rather odd design flaw.

If evolution didn’t endow us with a vitamin C dispenser, why couldn’t it at least endow us with a vitamin C detector and desire-er?

如果进化没有赋予我们维生素 C 分配器，为什么它不能至少赋予我们维生素 C 探测器和渴望器呢？

It’s easier to make sense of this when you think in terms of cybernetic psychology .

当你从控制论心理学的角度思考时，更容易理解这一点。

I’ve written about this theory before (review here , expansion here ), but here’s a quick recap:

我之前写过这个理论（在这里回顾，在这里扩展），但这里有一个快速回顾：

Imagine the mind as a big stack of thermostats.

In addition to regulating temperature, these thermostats try to keep all sorts of mission-critical variables at the correct levels—we’ve got a food-stat to make sure we don’t starve, a sleep-stat to make sure we get enough rest, a pain-stat to protect the body from damage, and so on.

Whenever one of these control systems—the general term for various -stats—detects that its target variable is out of whack, it tries to restore balance.

每当这些控制系统之一（各种统计数据的总称）检测到其目标变量出现异常时，它就会尝试恢复平衡。

When you haven’t eaten enough, for example, the food-stat starts sending you messages like “burritos sure are yummy” until you finally put food in your mouth.

例如，当你吃得不够多时，食物统计数据就会开始向你发送“墨西哥卷饼确实很好吃”之类的信息，直到你最终把食物放进嘴里。

And once you’re full, the food-stat tries to stop you from bursting your stomach by sending you messages like “NEVER MIND BURRITOS ARE GROSS”.

一旦你吃饱了，食物统计就会向你发送“别介意墨西哥卷饼太恶心了”之类的信息，试图阻止你撑破肚子。

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Our control systems have been good enough to keep us alive for several hundred thousand years.

我们的控制系统足够好，足以让我们生存数十万年。

But they can go haywire when we subject them to modern environments for which they did not evolve, and that’s exactly what happens in the case of scurvy.

但当我们将它们置于它们不适应的现代环境中时，它们可能会变得失控，而这正是坏血病所发生的情况。

We don’t know exactly how our food-stat functions, but there’s a good chance it contains subsystems that look out for particular macronutrients : a carb-stat, perhaps, or a protein-stat, sugar-stat, salt-stat, and so on.

我们不知道我们的食物统计数据到底是如何运作的，但它很可能包含寻找特定大量营养素的子系统：也许是碳水化合物统计数据，或者蛋白质统计数据、糖统计数据、盐统计数据等等。

Whatever those subsystems are, they’re enough to make us eat an omnivorous diet that provides sufficient vitamin C, which happens to appear in lots of different foods, like chickpeas, potatoes, cauliflower, and polar bear meat (yes, really ).

无论这些子系统是什么，它们都足以让我们吃提供足够维生素 C 的杂食性饮食，而维生素 C 恰好出现在许多不同的食物中，如鹰嘴豆、土豆、花椰菜和北极熊肉（是的，确实如此）。

That’s why scurvy doesn’t seem to have been a big problem for our ancestors.

这就是为什么坏血病对于我们的祖先来说似乎并不是一个大问题。

Although there are a few ancient accounts of sicknesses that sound kind of like scurvy, and there were unmistakable cases during military campaigns when the food situation turned dire, scurvy didn’t really hit the scene until the 1500s, when we figured out how to build boats big and tough enough to spend months at sea, with nary a glass of MinuteMaid in sight.

尽管有一些古老的说法听起来有点像坏血病，而且在军事行动期间，当粮食形势变得严峻时，坏血病才真正出现，直到 1500 年代，当时我们弄清楚了如何建造足够大和坚固的船只，可以在海上度过数月，而且看不到一杯美汁源。

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You can see where I’m going with this: we are not living through an epidemic of loneliness.

你可以明白我的意思：我们并没有生活在孤独的流行之中。

We are living through an epidemic of social scurvy .

我们正在经历社会坏血病的流行。

Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation.

社会剥夺看起来很像维生素 C 剥夺。

In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it.

在这两种情况下，人类都可能在没有意识到的情况下缺乏必要的输入。

In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence.

在这两种情况下，他们都会因为它的缺失而受苦，而不希望它的存在。

And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.

在这两种情况下，这可能是因为我们在一个不需要这种欲望的环境中进化。

Of course, humans don’t completely lack the capacity to desire companionship the way we lack the capacity to desire vitamin C.

当然，人类并不完全缺乏渴望陪伴的能力，就像我们缺乏渴望维生素 C 的能力一样。

We do get lonely; we just don’t get lonely enough .

我们确实会感到孤独；我们只是还不够孤独。

Compared to, say, our food-stats, our social-stats are rather anemic.

与我们的食品统计数据相比，我们的社会统计数据相当贫乏。

When people starve, they’ll become obsessed with food ; they’ll fantasize about opening restaurants and going hog wild at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and these desires will only increase until the person either eats or dies.

当人们挨饿时，他们就会对食物着迷；他们会幻想开一家餐馆，尽情享用自助餐，这些欲望只会增加，直到这个人要么吃饱，要么死去。

When someone starves socially, however, they don’t develop an overwhelming desire to go to a rave.

然而，当一个人社交匮乏时，他们不会产生强烈的去狂欢的欲望。

They do not daydream about all the lovely chit-chat they’ll have when they’re allowed to see their friends again, nor do they concoct elaborate plans for their next birthday party.

他们不会幻想当他们被允许再次见到朋友时他们会进行的所有可爱的闲聊，他们也不会为下一次生日聚会制定精心的计划。

They may feel lonely, they may report a sense of longing, but mostly, they’ll just wither.

他们可能会感到孤独，他们可能会表达一种渴望感，但大多数情况下，他们只会枯萎。

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I know this feeling—or really, this lack of feeling—because I have suffered from it myself.

我知道这种感觉——或者说，这种缺乏感觉的感觉——因为我自己也曾受过这种感觉。

When I started to feel very bad during the pandemic, the signal I got from my brain was not “hey maybe we should spend more time with other people”.

当我在大流行期间开始感觉非常糟糕时，我从大脑收到的信号不是“嘿，也许我们应该花更多时间与其他人在一起”。

It was more like, “hey everything feels bad and it will never feel better”.

更像是，“嘿，一切都感觉很糟糕，而且永远不会感觉更好”。

When I described this feeling to my friend Chelsea, who happens to be a clinical psychologist, she asked, “Do you think it’s because the pandemic has taken away all the things you enjoyed, like improv and being around other people?”

“No,” I said.

“不，”我说。

“It must be some other thing.” And I meant it!

“一定是别的什么东西。”我是认真的！

It didn’t feel like I was lacking in friendship, although clearly I was.

我并不觉得自己缺乏友谊，尽管很明显我确实缺乏友谊。

My rinky-dink social-stat was unable to connect the dots between my social isolation and my mental desolation.

我的社交统计数据无法将我的社交孤立和我的精神荒凉联系起来。

The hallmark of a strong control system is that it resists perturbations.

强大的控制系统的标志是它能够抵抗扰动。

If you pilfer everything out of my fridge and pantry, my food-stat will send me scrambling to the Chipotle down the street.

如果你偷走了我冰箱和食品储藏室里的所有东西，我的食物统计数据会让我争先恐后地去街上的 Chipotle 餐厅。

And if the Chipotle is closed, I’ll resort to the Qdoba next door.

如果 Chipotle 关门了，我就会去隔壁的 Qdoba。

Our social-stats do not seem to display this property.

我们的社会统计数据似乎没有显示这一属性。

According to a recent paper , people who got shifted to remote work in the past few years spent more time alone compared to people who stayed in-person—meaning they did not seek out additional ways to make up for their newfound alone time.

It’s as if, upon encountering the closed Chipotle, they just went home hungry instead.

就好像，当他们遇到关门的Chipotle时，他们就饿着肚子回家了。

One rather dastardly study documented this phenomenon in real time.

一项相当卑鄙的研究实时记录了这种现象。

Researchers deprived participants of either food or social contact for ten hours, and asked them over and over again, “Hey, you hungry/lonely yet?” Both food cravings and social cravings increased over the course of the day, but food cravings increased much more quickly, more severely, and more uniformly:

Researchers deprived participants of either food or social contact for ten hours, and asked them over and over again, “Hey, you hungry/lonely yet?”在一天中，对食物的渴望和对社交的渴望都在增加，但对食物的渴望增加得更快、更严重、更均匀：

By the end of the study, 10% of participants reported social cravings that were no higher than when they started ten hours ago.

研究结束时，10% 的参与者表示，他们的社交渴望并不比十小时前开始时高。

I picture these participants as Giles Corey , the guy who was crushed to death for refusing to enter a plea during the Salem witch trials, but instead of saying “more weight”, they’re saying “more solitude”.

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It makes sense that our social-stats would be a bit feeble.

我们的社会统计数据有点薄弱，这是有道理的。

Just as our default diet probably staved off scurvy most of the time, our default desire to stay alive probably fended off most of our solitude.

正如我们默认的饮食习惯在大多数时候可以避免坏血病一样，我们默认的求生欲望也可能可以避免我们的大部分孤独。

If our ancestors wanted food, shelter, warmth, protection, etc., they needed to be around other people.

如果我们的祖先想要食物、住所、温暖、保护等，他们就需要和其他人在一起。

No hunter-gatherer had the option of working from home, DoorDash-ing some Thai food for dinner, and spending the evenings watching Survivor .

没有哪个狩猎采集者可以选择在家工作，在门上吃一些泰国菜当晚餐，然后在晚上看《幸存者》。

This is certainly true when we look at the traditional societies that remain; there, people spend much less time alone.

当我们观察仍然存在的传统社会时，这确实是事实。在那里，人们独处的时间要少得多。

One analysis of the Tsimane people of Bolivia found that they’re by themselves for an average of 2.4 daylight hours .

对玻利维亚提斯曼人的一项分析发现，他们平均有 2.4 个小时独处。

7 (In the US today, that number is more like 5.5 hours .) Western anthropologists often report that the hunter-gatherers they study spend a remarkable amount of time in conversation with one another, from the !Kung of the Kalahari to the Tseltal of Mexico to the BaYaka of the Congo Basin .

Here’s the geographer Jared Diamond on his indigenous colleagues:

以下是地理学家贾里德·戴蒙德 (Jared Diamond) 对其土著同事的评价：

Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans.

自从我第一次去新几内亚旅行，我就对新几内亚人相互交谈的时间比我们美国人和欧洲人多得多感到印象深刻。

They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom.

They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking.

他们不只是用谈话来打发一天的时间：他们时不时会在晚上醒来并继续说话。

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In an environment like that, there is little need to develop a robust social-stat.

在这样的环境中，几乎没有必要建立健全的社会统计体系。

And so, now that we don’t have to spend all of our time with each other just to survive, we simply...spend less time with each other.

所以，现在我们不必为了生存而花费所有的时间在一起，我们只是……花更少的时间在一起。

It would almost be easier if excessive solitude made our teeth fall out like scurvy does; at least then we would do something about it.

如果过度的孤独使我们的牙齿像坏血病一样脱落，那就容易多了。至少那时我们会为此做点什么。

So what should we do about it?

那么我们应该怎么办呢？

We actually have a good example of how to compensate for a semi-defective drive, namely, our sense of thirst.

实际上，我们有一个很好的例子来说明如何补偿半有缺陷的驱动力，即我们的口渴感。

Human hydro-stats can be laughably bad.

人体的流体统计数据可能糟糕得可笑。

Case in point: I used to get terrible headaches as a kid, and after several doctor’s appointments and failed medications, my parents realized that I just...wasn’t drinking liquids.

They plonked a big glass down on the counter and told me to fill it and down it several times a day, which I’ve done ever since.

他们把一个大玻璃杯重重地放在柜台上，让我每天倒好几次，从那以后我就一直这样做。

My headaches didn’t go away entirely, but they did get less frequent and severe.

我的头痛并没有完全消失，但确实变得不那么频繁和严重了。

I’m not alone here—see r/HydroHomies , a Reddit community dedicated to encouraging each other to drink more water.

我并不孤单，请参阅 r/HydroHomies，这是一个致力于鼓励彼此多喝水的 Reddit 社区。

Or see this excellent post by Julia M.

或者参见 Julia M 的这篇优秀文章。

Rosedale where she says that whenever she feels “like a cold dog turd lying halfway on the sidewalk in front of a run-down Burger King” it almost always “resolves with n-many glasses of water for some n ≥ 1”.

Yes, the “drink eight glasses of water a day” dictum is of shaky origins , but it points at something true, which is that it’s easy for humans to get dehydrated if they aren’t careful.

9 We need a smidgen of conscious effort to make up for our slightly lazy hydro-stats, an occasional reminder to drink, a gentle push from wholesome hydration memes like this:

We need a similar intervention for our social-stats.

我们需要对我们的社会统计数据进行类似的干预。

We need periodic PSAs that modern life can leave you chronically people-deficient.

我们需要定期的公益广告，以免现代生活让你长期缺乏人才。

We need to be pushed toward one another slightly more than we want to be.

我们需要比我们想要的稍微多一点的相互推动。

Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another.

They are wrong.

他们错了。

Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want.

一定的独处是必要的，也是有益的，但过多的独处则是毒药，而默认情况下，过多的独处正是我们大多数人想要的。

If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.

如果我们让自己拥有它，我们最终会得到果冻作为大脑。

It’s tough to target these interventions because we know a lot less about our social-stats than we do about our food-stats and hydro-stats.

很难针对性地采取这些干预措施，因为我们对社会统计数据的了解远少于对食品统计数据和水文统计数据的了解。

We don’t know what the Surgeon General’s Daily Recommended Intake of Friendship should be, or how it might vary from person to person.

我们不知道卫生局局长每日推荐的友谊摄入量应该是多少，也不知道它因人而异。

We don’t know what our social-stats are actually targeting—is it words spoken, whites of eyes seen, or some other, hyper-dimensional construct that would make no sense to our conscious minds?

And we don’t know how those critical social nutrients actually make it into the system.

我们不知道这些重要的社会营养素实际上是如何进入系统的。

Why is it hard to leave an all-you-can-eat buffet feeling hungry, but easy to leave a party feeling lonely?

为什么吃完自助餐后很难感到饥饿，但离开派对时却很容易感到孤独？

Fortunately, we do know three things.

幸运的是，我们确实知道三件事。

First, whatever it is that keeps our minds from slime-ifying, you can’t get all of it from remote interactions.

首先，无论是什么让我们的思维不被粘液化，你都无法从远程交互中获得所有这些。

During the pandemic, I had plenty of Zooms, plenty of texting and phone calls and Call of Duty with the dudes, and I still got social scurvy.

在大流行期间，我进行了大量的 Zoom、大量的短信、电话以及与朋友们一起玩《使命召唤》，但我仍然患有社交坏血病。

To achieve healthy levels of social stimulation, you need face time, not just FaceTime.

为了达到健康的社交刺激水平，您需要面对面的时间，而不仅仅是 FaceTime。

Second, we know that you can’t get your social nourishment from intimates alone.

其次，我们知道你无法仅从亲密的人那里获得社交滋养。

If complete social isolation is like smoking unfiltered cigarettes, then only talking to the folks in your household is like vaping—better, but not good for you.

A healthy social diet means occasionally conversing with people who share neither your genes nor your mailing address.

健康的社交饮食意味着偶尔与那些既不分享你的基因也不分享你的邮寄地址的人交谈。

And third, we know that although people are unreasonably negative about their social interactions, we can at least partially counteract this bias.

Over and over again, studies find that people think that their past conversations went worse than they actually did and that future conversations will go worse than they actually do.

But when you just make people talk to each other, they end up having a nice time and feeling more confident about their conversational abilities .

That suggests the best prescription for an inadequate social-stat is a bit of brute force.

这表明解决社会统计不足的最佳方法是使用一点蛮力。

Just as you must sometimes drink even when you’re not thirsty, you must sometimes hang out even when you’re not lonely.

就像有时即使不渴也必须喝水一样，有时即使不孤独也必须出去玩。

As Kurt Vonnegut put it in a commencement address in 1978 :

正如库尔特·冯内古特 (Kurt Vonnegut) 在 1978 年的毕业典礼致辞中所说：

I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life.

我建议这里的每个人都加入各种组织，无论多么荒谬，只是为了让更多的人进入他或她的生活。

It does not matter much if all the other members are morons.

即使其他成员都是白痴也没关系。

Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.

任何种类的亲戚的数量都是我们所需要的。

I know why we’re so willing to opt out of hanging out—I mean, have you seen people?

我知道为什么我们如此愿意选择不出去玩——我的意思是，你见过人吗？

Do you know what they’re capable of?

你知道他们有什么能力吗？

Every hurt, every heartbreak and letdown you’ve ever had, you best believe there’s a homo sapiens on the other side of it.

你所经历的每一次伤害、每一次心碎和失望，你最好相信在它的另一边有一个智人。

There is no safe level of exposure to our species.

与我们物种的接触没有安全水平。

So why not keep them at bay if you can?

那么，如果可以的话，为什么不阻止他们呢？

I suppose because the things that make you crazy are the only things you’ll ever truly love .

我想是因为那些让你疯狂的事情是你唯一真正热爱的事情。

We evolved to tangle with each other, and we shrivel up and die if we don’t.

我们进化到互相纠缠，如果不纠缠，我们就会枯萎死亡。

Hell is other people?

别人是地狱吗？

No way man.

没办法，伙计。

Hell is when your teeth fall out because nobody was there to remind you to eat an orange.

地狱就是当你的牙齿因为没有人提醒你吃橙子而脱落时。

Experimental History is like Giles Corey crying out “MORE POSTS”

实验历史就像贾尔斯·科里大喊“更多帖子”

Once people have invented a concerning trend, they often feel free to invent its causes as well.

一旦人们发明了一种令人担忧的趋势，他们通常也会随意地发明其原因。

For instance, this Weill Cornell page on the loneliness epidemic claims that people feel more lonely today because they’re more likely to move to new places—for college, retirement, etc. But this is untrue.

As I wrote in a previous post , people are less likely to move today than they were in past decades.

正如我在上一篇文章中所写，与过去几十年相比，今天人们搬家的可能性较小。

This is only measuring the proportion of time that people could conceivably choose to spend with someone else.

这只是衡量人们可以选择与他人共度时光的比例。

So it doesn’t include time spent sleeping, obviously, but it also doesn’t include time spent working.

因此，显然，它不包括睡眠时间，但也不包括工作时间。

The author says the American Time Use Survey didn’t start asking people about time spent with others at work until 2010 anyway, and regardless, there were apparently no change in time spent alone at work between 2010 and 2019.

So the increase in aloneness from 2003 to 2019 really does seem to be a matter of people choosing to be alone, or at the very least, being put in a state of solitude and not choosing to get themselves out of it.

因此，从 2003 年到 2019 年，孤独感的增加确实似乎是人们选择孤独的问题，或者至少是人们被置于孤独的状态而不是选择摆脱它。

The cybernetic model of psychology says that we get hits of happiness for re-aligning our control systems, and the bigger the correction, the greater the pleasure.

心理学的控制论模型表明，我们通过重新调整我们的控制系统而获得幸福感，并且调整越大，快乐就越大。

That may be why asphyxiation is so often preceded by the word “erotic”, but I leave this as a matter for future research.

这可能就是为什么窒息经常在“色情”一词之前出现，但我将其留待未来研究。

Here’s another example.

这是另一个例子。

All humans have an air-stat that causes them to freak out if they can’t breathe.

所有人类都有一个空气调节装置，如果他们无法呼吸，他们就会惊慌失措。

The air-stat is one of the strongest control systems around—if someone’s squeezing your throat or you’ve been underwater for too long, every neuron you’ve got will be trying to figure out how to get a gulp of air.

空气调节器是最强大的控制系统之一——如果有人掐住你的喉咙或者你在水下呆了太久，你的每个神经元都会试图找出如何吸入一口空气。

But it turns out that the air-stat is much more sensitive to the amount of carbon dioxide in the lungs than it is to the amount of oxygen.

但事实证明，空气调节器对肺部二氧化碳含量比对氧气含量更敏感。

Historically, this was a fine proxy—if you’re not clearing your CO2, then something is clearly going wrong.

Recently, however, humans have invented ways to fiddle with the mix of gases around us, allowing us to adjust the level of oxygen without affecting the level of carbon dioxide.

然而，最近，人类发明了一些方法来调整我们周围的气体混合物，使我们能够在不影响二氧化碳水平的情况下调整氧气水平。

For instance, processing plants use liquid nitrogen to flash-freeze meat, and if that nitrogen leaks out, it’ll turn into gas that can displace the oxygen in the room.

例如，加工厂使用液氮来快速冷冻肉类，如果氮气泄漏，它会变成气体，取代房间里的氧气。

Because we are not as sensitive to insufficient oxygen levels or to excess nitrogen levels—the atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen anyway—if you find yourself in this situation, you might become disoriented, fall unconscious, asphyxiate, and die, all without your air-stat sounding the alarm.

因为我们对氧气含量不足或氮气含量过高不太敏感（无论如何，大气中的氮气含量约为 78%），如果您发现自己处于这种情况，您可能会迷失方向、失去知觉、窒息并死亡，所有这些都不会在您的空气调节器发出警报的情况下发生。

That’s what happened in Georgia in 2021: six workers died at a poultry processing plant when a freezer malfunctioned and started spewing nitrogen gas.

这就是 2021 年佐治亚州发生的事情：一家家禽加工厂的冷冻机发生故障并开始喷出氮气，导致六名工人死亡。

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires workplaces like these to deploy oxygen detectors precisely because humans do not come with those detectors preinstalled.

职业安全与健康管理局要求此类工作场所部署氧气探测器，因为人类并没有预先安装这些探测器。

I’m familiar with this because a similar accident happened right outside my town shortly before I was born.

我对此很熟悉，因为在我出生前不久，在我镇外也发生过类似的事故。

A farmer entered a manure pit to try to clear a clog, but the methane fumes were so strong that he collapsed from a lack of oxygen.

His brother came to rescue him and also collapsed.

Sadly, both died .

不幸的是，两人都去世了。

My parents would tell me this story whenever we drove past the farm, and it’s stuck with me ever since.

每当我们开车经过农场时，我的父母都会告诉我这个故事，从那时起，这个故事就一直萦绕在我的心头。

You might wonder: isn’t this just a matter of introversion vs. extraversion?

您可能会想：这不就是内向与外向的问题吗？

Is the problem just that everyone needs to be a bit more extraverted?

问题只是每个人都需要变得更外向一点吗？

This is a reasonable hypothesis, but it mixes up two distinct concepts.

In cybernetic psychology, people’s thermostats differ not only in their set points —the target level that each control system is trying to maintain—but also in their sensitivities , which is how quickly and vigorously those systems will fight to restore balance when things go out of whack.

在控制论心理学中，人们的恒温器不仅在设定点（每个控制系统试图维持的目标水平）上有所不同，而且在敏感性上也有所不同，即当事情出现问题时，这些系统将如何迅速而有力地恢复平衡。

A big beefy dude needs to eat more food to stay alive than a petite old lady does (different set points), but they could feel equally hungry when they don’t get their respective amounts of necessary nutrition (same sensitivities).

一个大块头的家伙比一个娇小的老太太需要吃更多的食物才能生存（不同的设定点），但当他们没有获得各自所需的营养量时（相同的敏感性），他们可能会感到同样饥饿。

If you turn down the sensitivities on their food-stats, both of them could end up equally malnourished, even if the beefy guy is eating more than the old lady.

如果你降低他们食物统计数据的敏感度，他们两个最终都可能同样营养不良，即使那个强壮的家伙比老太太吃得更多。

The same thing could happen socially.

同样的事情也可能发生在社交领域。

Extraverts may need more social “nutrition” than introverts do—that’s the difference in set points.

外向的人可能比内向的人需要更多的社交“营养”——这就是设定点的差异。

But if their control systems aren’t sensitive enough—that is, if they don’t respond strongly enough when they fail to reach their set point—both of them could end up socially malnourished, even if the extravert is spending more time with other people overall.

但如果他们的控制系统不够敏感，也就是说，如果他们在未能达到设定点时反应不够强烈，那么即使外向者总体上花更多时间与其他人相处，他们最终也可能会出现社交营养不良。

This study probably over estimated the increase in social craving simply by reminding participants that there was something to crave.

And we have no idea if people would have acted on their cravings if they had the chance.

Lots of people have to be coaxed into attending a party, but very few people have to be coaxed into eating dinner.

In fact, millions of people will pay for GLP-1 drugs that they hope will help them resist eating dinner.

In this case, “alone” means not within three meters of anyone else and not actively in conversation.

This comes from an unpublished analysis and the data is restricted so I can’t double-check it directly, but it does seem plausible from the parts of the data they’ve made public.

这是来自未发表的分析，并且数据受到限制，因此我无法直接对其进行仔细检查，但从他们公开的部分数据来看，这似乎确实合理。

Why would our water-intake control systems leave us slightly high and dry?

I have a few guesses:

我有几个猜测：

Our evolutionary ancestors did not have constant and easy access to safe drinking water, so they needed to be able to endure some amount of dehydration without their hydro-stats freaking out .

我们的进化祖先无法持续且轻松地获得安全饮用水，因此他们需要能够忍受一定程度的脱水，而不会导致水力状态崩溃。

Prehistoric foods probably contained more water than modern foods do (not a lot of crackers and Cheerios in the hunter-gatherer diet).

So the food-stat was shouldering some of the hydro-stat’s burden.

Ancient humans consumed much less salt than we do today ; their hydro-stats never had to contend with a tube of Pringles.

It's a fascinating thesis.

这是一篇引人入胜的论文。

I wonder how much this idea could be applied to exercise?

Our ancestors would never have needed to 'exercise' with necessarily active lifestyles.

Though it is demonstrably good for oneself, and rarely does one have a craving for vigorous exercise

虽然这显然对自己有好处，但很少有人渴望剧烈运动

Okay.

好的。

This explains a lot.

这解释了很多。

Time to put into practice the good idea I have been resisting: having people over regularly for dinner and conversation.

是时候把我一直抵制的好主意付诸实践了：定期邀请人们过来吃饭和交谈。

In Vermont, winter can be terribly isolating.

在佛蒙特州，冬天可能会非常与世隔绝。

The urge to hibernate has the viscosity of honey: it pulls me away from people.

想要冬眠的冲动就像蜂蜜一样粘稠：它让我远离人群。

You've described the mechanism well.

您已经很好地描述了该机制。