Saturday, December 13, 2008

Wanted: Another lonely gene

Everyone has known loneliness to a certain extend. Sometimes you can shake it off easily, sometimes it takes you a while to bounce back. Is our loneliness due to our personal choices, contact avoidance and simple inadequacy? According to this CNN report, maybe not. I have not read the reports from which this story was sourced, so cannot determine whether the numbers speak the truth.

But what struck me most was the last quote by John Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago's Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. "It's really having one good relationship is all that it takes," Cacioppo said. "Spending all your time online getting 4,000 friends on Facebook is not useful. The number is not where connection occurs."

In a world where everyone is frantic to be famous, do they actually want to hear this?

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