A Lifetime of Social Ties Adds Up to Healthy Aging

Obligatory link https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Gee thanks Science, you see now why people prefer Stupidity over you?

Let's look at something else which wasn't controlled for at all: doing physical activities.

People who, for example, run every week or bike every week often do so because they have a group of friends who also does that, and doing such a physical activity also builds friendships better than not doing such activities.

Perhaps exercising is both correlated with health and with building groups of friends.

Or perhaps exercising is correlated with being attractive, and being attractive is correlated with building social connections.

... I guess what I'm trying to say here is that this study shows correlation only, and there are so many confounding factors I consider it pretty tenuous.

So not too much of a surprise there.

Edit: still valuable to do research even to confirm whatever seems to follow logically. Not trying to discredit that!

I've never been to AA, but I'm told it's the cues that get you, and I do admit the memories of beers + guitar hero or other such nonsense from old days is exactly what I want every time I open a beer.

It's like that old rat experiment, where they gave them cocaine or heroine laced water + regular water, and they always preferred the the drugs, until there was a rich social life / environment, at which point they rarely did.

Socializing is powerful stuff if you can find enough time to build up enough trust to just have a heap of fun for a few hours. I swear a side-splitting laugh fest adds years to your life. When is the last time you laughed so hard with friends you couldn't breathe?

The causation is obviously in the other direction: Healthy people socialize more.

Proposing the inverted causation, without even examining the alternative is ridiculous. This is just trash science.

Having a correlational result and using it to pretend that one has to cause the other with absolutely no mechanism is not science, it is reading tea leaves.

A healthy person has more opportunities and more abilities to engage in social activities. The less healthy a person becomes the rarer those opportunities become. Basically every single health condition, especially the most common ones like obesity, make it harder for people to engage in social activity.

The alternative explanation is pretty simple and does not require some magical mechanism whereby social interactions are somehow causing your body to age slower.

The upside is that I've been suicidal since I was 15 so if Johnny Reaper comes in the form of loneliness cancer I'll have been done a subtle favor.

Also it's just an aside but God isn't real.

I just have absolutely zero friends or interactions with people who aren’t my wife and kids. Haven’t for probably 15 years now. I work remotely and 99% of the people I work with are offshore so very little overlap in work times. So the occasional teams message on a group channel is it. No friends or even acquaintances. I occasionally find myself craving the little notification icon on X to let me know some stranger liked my post. I recognize that this is not optimal.

The gym is essentially my hobby but max interaction is the occasional fist bump or head nod. I spend 90 minutes there 6 days a week.

Its to the point where other people aren’t even real to me anymore, I can go literally months without a real life conversation.

Not complaining but it does worry me from the longevity aspect

The few that come to mind are laughter, stress, exercise, and cognitive engagement.

It might be interesting to see if diet changes as a result of social ties as well. We can make an educated guess that stronger social ties means less time eating alone.

Surely it isn't just the social ties themselves.

Obligatory "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

What I suspect is common WRT these studies is lonely people become self-destructive, reaching for stuff like alcohol and/or comfort eating, i.e. harmful substitutes for relationships they miss.

But I don't really have those issues. I can be super content spending most time solitary with regular impersonal interactions at cafes and grocery stores. Just having a modicum of peaceful sharing of space with others tops up my socializing needs, beyond that it's fast into diminishing returns territory.

- extremely introverted person who never developed a dependence on others for self-worth and/or happiness

"Healthy systemic accumulated damage" is therefore a more honest way to put it, exposing it as completely ridiculous.

Thank goodness that longevity efforts have now become well established biotech and pharma goals around the world.