- 20 Facts about Senior Isolation That Will Stun You, Senior Living Blog 2017
- Social isolation, loneliness, and all-cause mortality in older men and women, PNAS 2013
The abstract of the latter of those two in particular deserves to be quoted at length because it gives a good flavor of what I'm seeing (emphasis added):
We found that mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (hazard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model. Both social isolation and loneliness were associated with increased mortality. … Although both isolation and loneliness impair quality of life and well-being, efforts to reduce isolation are likely to be more relevant to mortality…Social relationships are central to human well-being and are critically involved in the maintenance of health (1, 2). Social isolation is an objective and quantifiable reflection of reduced social network size and paucity of social contact. It is a particular problem at older ages, when decreasing economic resources, mobility impairment, and the death of contemporaries conspire to limit social contacts. Socially isolated individuals are at increased risk for the development of cardiovascular disease (3), infectious illness (4), cognitive deterioration (5), and mortality (6⇓⇓–9). Social isolation also has been associated with elevated blood pressure, C-reactive protein, and fibrinogen (10, 11) and with heightened inflammatory and metabolic responses to stress (12, 13)… Loneliness itself has been linked with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality (15⇓⇓–18), elevated blood pressure and cortisol (19⇓–21), heightened inflammatory responses to stress (22, 23), and modifications in transcriptional pathways linked with glucocorticoid and inflammatory processes (24).
While I was working my way through the stack of reading materials I recalled having read through something vaguely similar back in 2004 or 2005. That was before I officially "retired." At that time -- a time when I was firmly cradled in the arms of a variety of robust networks related to work, family, community, marriage, college coevals, neighborhoods and some other non-digital social stuff -- my reaction to the idea of social isolation in retirement might have been like some unthinking people's reaction to the homeless, you know something like: "it's their fault" or "I'm glad that will never be me" or maybe "they should just get a job or something" or in the case of retirement isolation itself "that only happens to super old people" (and there, my friends, is the cliched "gun on a table" that one might find in a screenplay). Poor, sweet, simple, innocent, naive, dumb little me. I really had no idea what was coming just a few years down the road.
Maybe this kind of thing is too personal for a blog post on a ret-fin blog. I don't know. Maybe. On the other hand, in order to honor the idea behind my "hindsight" series which is to (a) report honestly about things I wish I'd done differently now that I have 10 years of early retirement hindsight, and (b) offer a smidgen of helpful insight to anyone in or about to be in the same boat.......I think I'll proceed. Also this is a sister topic to my last hindsight post Hindsight 10: meaning, purpose, and identity except here we are shining a light into some of the darker cracks in the foundation on which Hindsight 10 sits. Also, I'll note that in some ways, these soft topics are as or more important than the quant stuff. The quant stuff falls into that necessary-not-sufficient category of retirement navigation topics. Interesting, of course. But not nearly sufficient at all.
The plot turn in the screenplay of my own story comes when I was convinced to move from my rooted 50-year northern homeland in Minnesota to the social jungle of what we call South Florida, a foreign country within a country. This unexpected and undesired move was precipitated -- I have now come to understand after 10 years of introspection along with a little help from some direct eyewitness testimony -- by a towering act of malicious bad faith (welcome to Florida! known to the federalies as the fraud capital of North America; this may explain some of the mis-projected animus I sometimes unfairly point at my new home state). But come I did and leave I won't (yet). My kids are here. Whatever the proximal reason, it doesn't really matter. Mostly I threw my veiled story in for dramatic effect although I will say the force of it did affect my desire to fix anything for a couple years. But any reason or story would have achieved the same thing: breaking many of the rooted networks I mentioned above. Then throw in a divorce, a financial crisis and a decision to not re-enter the waged workforce (i.e., retire) in order to maintain continuity of care for young children during a difficult time and you have the beginnings of a compounding perfect storm of fractured social networks. Then, to heap insult onto injury, let's say that one were to additionally make a semi-conscious decision (I'll own up to this part of the problem) to not repair the damage while also outsourcing one's social networks to the women one dates after a divorce. Watch, then, what happens when the last of them walks away 10 years into retirement... Let's pick a metaphor or quip to describe this. Maybe frog in a pot? Or perhaps Buffet's quip about knowing who's swimming naked when the tide goes out (me, if it's not obvious). Or how about using mine above: I'm now the homeless guy with some other dude pointing at me saying "I'm glad that's not me."
Ok, so this is all true but maybe a little melodramatic or exaggerated. Also I am still young and this is easily repairable stuff...if I don't wait too long. There are now even apps for this kind of situation. But all this does set me up for a "hindsight" which is simply that I substantially underestimated or underappreciated the importance of non-digital social connectedness in a new place in an early retirement. The real-life social institutions that bind us -- friends, family, marriage, church, neighborhoods, associative groups, work -- are kind of a big deal and with not too much hyperbole, we can now say that their absence can kill. Or at least wound. I should have known better. The takeaway? Cherish existing relationships, repair the flawed ones, build new ones in a continuous process, and maybe walk from the toxic ones and start over. Volunteer. Work. Participate. Reach out. I'm sure there's more. This is what I now work on when not blogging retirement finance which is a nice enough activity but clearly not much of an associative one.
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Some other random numbers pulled from un-cited sources:
- Roughly three out of 10
- In 2011, people living alone comprised 28% of all households in the United States, compared with 17% in 1970
- The proportion of Americans who said they had no one to talk to about important matters increased from 10% in 1985 to 25% in 2004
- Between 1996 and 2012, the proportion of people
aged 45–64 y who lived alone in
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