How Loneliness Hurts
We’ve spent over a century worshiping individualism, whether it’s the power of solitary geniuses like Einstein and Darwin or the plainly self-interested economic man. “We have moved from ‘all for one and one for all’ to ‘what’s good for me is good for society,’” University of Chicago neuroscientist John Cacioppo said to a packed house at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. But humans aren’t all selfish brutes, Cacioppo argued, and the proof may lie in how lonely we feel. For Cacioppo, loneliness isn’t merely an “aversive condition with no redeeming features,” …
