Loneliness
Groucho Marx mustache, Cacioppo is a trim 58-year-old,who spent his childhood moving from state to state. His father started small businesses in Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, Iowa and Indiana, always taking his family with him. “I got very used to getting to know and figuring out new people,” says Cacioppo. “Luckily I was a decent athlete so I had an entrée into a social world.” His childhood wanderings, he says, led him to his career of studying humans as social species.For the past three decades John T. Cacioppo has studied human isolation and connection. In his recent book, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, coauthored with William Patrick, he arrives at what he believes is a startling conclusion: Humans are inherently unselfish, or at least they need to be for their health and the perpetuation of their genes. His theory is proven, he contends, by the existence of the inverse of social connectedness: loneliness.
Loneliness is one’s own “perceived social isolation,” according to Cacioppo. Feeling isolated is more powerful than actually being isolated.
But loneliness is not all bad. For most of us, it’s usually just a brief trigger that lets us know that we have to change. In fact Cacioppo argues that the world needs folks who easily slip into feelings of loneliness, because they are spurred on by the trigger to act vigorously. “These people are the joiners and the volunteers in society,” he says.
Cacioppo also offers a few reasons for human’s loneliness. One is that we have become more mobile. Another is that we are living longer, resulting in more people in assisted-living facilities .Technology may be another isolator,for example,the internet nowdays shun people from chat face to face.
A last Cacioppo outlines some steps that the chronically lonely can take, like volunteering and creating and maintaining social loops. He is in the beginning stages of developing a therapy for chronic loneliness, a joint project with fellow University of Chicago psychologist Louise C. Hawkley
