Living longer, only to die of loneliness?

The Oxford Dictionary made “selfie” the word of the year this year, in recognition of, well, self-recognition. Thus, for a few days at least, Canada's news feeds were able to look away from the twin headlights of Rob Ford and Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy, and glimpse the current shiny thing: our obsession with ourselves.

What technology makes possible, people make cultural. In just one year, we are told, the word “selfie” — the act of using cell phones to take arms-length pictures of ourselves to share with a largely uncaring world — has increased in usage by 17,000 per cent.

Wouldn't you like copyright licencing power on something like that?

I don't believe that the explosion of selfies posted on boards around the world is evidence society is becoming yet more self-obsessed. I think we reached the psychological limits of that some time ago.

Rather, I think it might be evidence of something quite the opposite. Maybe the phenomenon is just billions of people putting their digital faces into the universe calling: is anyone out there?

I was cruising the news postings Sunday, in part using the hours before the football game could begin. (Let nothing healthy occur on Grey Cup Sunday.) On the recent postings that came up on my tablet was one story, then another elsewhere, unrelated, and again others — all mentioning the latest new health threat: loneliness.

In an age where we celebrate the advances that help us live longer, healthier, more active lives, it seems we're always finding new ways to kill ourselves early.

One story cited a study suggesting that being lonely has the same health effects on a person as being a heavy smoker. Most of the stories I saw were in the context of baby boomers — many of them divorced or widowed — leaving their work lives in droves to suddenly become alone.

Doomed to eventually wither in long-term care facilities, communities of people with nothing to connect them other than their own infirmities. I guess, posting pictures of themselves as they die.

Searching deeper, it's easy to find a multitude of studies and reports that treat the phenomenon of loneliness much more seriously. It seems a generation that perfected selfishness (because they could not invent it), faces its own undoing because it never bothered to connect that much to others.

Church and social club attendance are both in fast decline. Outside of a competitive and stressful professional life is . . . not much, for very many. People report close personal connections to ever fewer numbers of others, and do not realize the lack until late in life.

Work has become stressful enough in our fast-paced world. But for people who do not seek out and nurture personal ties with other people in an outside environment, retirement produces ample stresses of its own.

The reactions within our bodies to the drop in personal interactions with other people are the same, or worse, than the daily grind of employment.

Here's a shopping list of what happens to people who become lonely as they age: higher blood pressure, higher incidence of heart disease, more (and longer) hospital stays, higher use of prescription medications, reduced cognitive function, lower levels of physical fitness.

Of the 20-60 per cent of people aged 50 and up (the rate increased as people got older) who self-reported as being lonely to a study in Manitoba, a high proportion of them also reported having as many as four chronic diseases.

The report did not answer the chicken-and-egg question: did having diabetes, heart disease, Crohn's disease or other ailments set the stage for people becoming very lonely, or did their loneliness make them sick?

Correlation is not cause, but the correlation apparently shocked the people doing the study.

Other news reports were a lot more graphic: being lonely, not being able to connect, bond and interact with others, will kill you. In California, there's even a clinic where people can go to receive a good, long hug from a volunteer.

Workers at long-term care facilities have long reported residents as being starved for affection, even for the touch of another person.

We are social creatures, after all. That goes beyond the time when we clear out our desks and have one last slice of cake with the people at the office.

Boomers who took great care to plan their finances and set goals for retirement need also to look around and build a community of friends.

Just an observation I found, before heading out to a friend's home where we were invited to watch the mass bonding of Saskatchewan Roughrider fans in Regina.