White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How Loneliness Became a Pandemic and What You Can Do

by Leave a Comment

You don’t have to be sitting by yourself on an island to be lonely. Loneliness is everywhere.

Studies from universities, governments and public health groups find that the world is in the grip of a loneliness pandemic. More than half the U.S. population is said to be suffering from loneliness. It is classified globally as a mental health problem.

Paradoxically, the studies place most of the blame on our interconnected society and social media: If we communicate electronically, we isolate ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic also increased our social isolation, and working from home accelerated the trend.

I would suggest that we have been drifting toward loneliness for a long time. Years ago, I wrote about what I called the “box culture.”

In the box culture, people live in a box (apartment), ride down in a box (elevator), get into a box with wheels (car), drive to a stack of boxes (building), ride up in a box (elevator), enter another box (office), and stare into a box (computer).

That, I believe, led to greater isolation. No common dwelling; no common transportation, like a bus or train; and little common work habitat.

The phrase “my space” began to be part of the conversational language. A social networking service named Myspace was launched in 2003.

Email and texting gave isolation a boost even before COVID-19 gave it a massive steroid shot. Now we might be inhabiting “my isolated space.”

Adding to this world of paradox is perhaps the biggest paradox of all — the death of the telephone for the purpose it was invented: talking.

Not only has the telephone declined to near-oblivion as a way of talking to others, but it has also become something of a burden. I find that when I suggest a telephone call, the recipients want to set a time.

When did setting times for calls creep into our lives? It wrings the pleasure out of the telephone, which was always a spontaneous instrument.

When Irving Berlin wrote the song “All Alone by the Telephone” in 1924, he didn’t envisage that people would make appointments to talk.

We have robbed ourselves of the glorious spontaneity, or heartbreak, of the telephone. I have always thought of it as the instrument that can transmute life’s leaden metal into gold unexpectedly, as Omar Khayyam wrote, or as a ray of sunshine you didn’t expect to break through the fog, as Noel Coward wrote. Even just the laughter of an old friend can break out the sunlight on a dismal day.

I can’t catch the laughter in a text. Email is fine for a joke, but it fails where the telephone succeeds: catching the sublimity of laughter, the warmth of love.

Another source of isolation has been the conversion from shopping — the operative part of that word is “shop” — to online buying, a different experience. Or rather, another way of removing the warmth of human interchange from the transaction.

If you are among the legions of the lonely, I would like to suggest, aside from the highly recommended places people meet, like volunteering at a charity or an amateur theater group, going to a pub or to church, do something radical: Speak to a stranger.

My wife and I became friends with two people and their families because I spoke to a stranger in a hotel in Washington, and we spoke to one at a concert in Rhode Island.

We have friends who met while standing in line at an ATM and married not long after. Weight Watchers, when they held meetings, was recommended among the cognoscenti as a place to meet people.

These suggestions may sound trivial, but they are the commerce of life, some of which we have shelved in favor of electronic communications.

In particular, I feel for those who are shut-in by disease and suffer terrible loneliness. They are the loneliest of the lonely.

For many years, I have written and broadcast about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It is a terrible disease whose victims have no energy, get no refreshment from sleep, and suffer a plethora of pain, usually for life.

Electronics may have robbed us of much human contact and caused a pandemic of loneliness, but not for those sentenced to loneliness by disease.

New Year’s Resolutions Are Bad — Slough Off Instead

by Leave a Comment

A remarkable autobiography by Anthony Inglis, the English conductor and musicologist, is titled, “Sit Down, Stop Waving Your Arms About!” Quite so.

This admonition occurred while Inglis was conducting a musical. Someone sitting in the front row tapped him on the shoulder and told him to sit down and stop waving his arms about.

My admonition to you for the new year is to sit down and stop stressing yourself.

We are plagued with the idea of stress, and yet we start the new year with resolutions. We order a raft of these stress-making endeavors.

Want a stress-free new year? Stop your New Year’s resolutions right now.

Do you need to tell yourself that you will stay on your diet? No. You won’t anyway.

Do you need to set a goal of going to the gym five times a week? No. You won’t get to Planet Fitness more than once or twice, in the whole year.

So, your desk looks like a dump, leave it alone. You will promise yourself that for the first time ever you will get organized in 2026. You won’t. So why get stressed about it?

You have promised yourself that this year you are going to improve your mind and read 20 great books. You won’t. Best case, you will flip through a James Patterson thriller or a Danielle Steel romance. Maybe the detective novel you purchased at an airport will make it to your nightstand, alongside the classic you plan to read when you get around to it. That is never, so get rid of that reproving volume. Give it to charity. You will shed stress and feel good at the same time by doing that.

Sloth clothed as virtue is so, so stress-relieving.

Put aside the stress of resolutions in the new year and relax into a year of self-indulgence.

If a work colleague comes over to you and starts talking about productivity, cross your arms, sit down and, if your system allows, break wind.

Approach work as a card-carrying slough-off. In the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be the “workers’ paradise,” workers used to say, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Good on them.

If striving is pointless, stop striving. Give it a rest.

I suggest there is a terrible national lack of malaise. At every turn, we are urged to learn more, work harder and innovate, innovate, innovate. You don’t need innovation to have a second helping, open a beer or take the day off.

You may need to be a little innovative, explaining why you aren’t at work. But that isn’t so hard: Claim a mental health day. Particularly if you are well and fit enough to enjoy it at the beach, at a movie theater or snuggled down into your bed.

If people are telling you to “lean in” and “try harder or the Chinese will get ahead,” go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and wonder at the number of dishes which can be prepared almost instantly — none of which you would cook. Then conclude that the Chinese have already won and stop stressing.

Think back to when we stressed mightily about the Japanese and the Germans beating us at everything. Then enjoy a suffusing, warm gladness when you realize that all that leaning in and trying harder hasn’t helped them beat us. Maybe we should have a national academy for failing upward.

Lloyd Kelly, a fine artist and a friend, teaches Tai Chi in Louisville, Kentucky, particularly in one of the city’s hospitals. He advises his students — some of whom are in wheelchairs — to stay within their comfort level, “to give just 70%.”

There is something beautiful about that admonishment at a time when people are stressed out and society is mindlessly urging you to struggle, to achieve, to conquer.

Here, then, is a resolution you can keep: I am only going to give a 70% effort. That way, perchance, you will have a great new year by default.

The AI Tsunami Is Approaching Shore; Jobs at Big Risk

by Leave a Comment

The Big One is coming, and it isn’t an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world’s norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.

Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13% since the widespread adoption of AI.

Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.

Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.

But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer’s Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?

Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.

AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.

Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”

Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.

Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.

The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.

Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — like in the next year.

Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.

Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.

Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.

By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.

These aren’t speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.

As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia recently to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn’t hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.

The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday’s issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.

A Disease That Cries Out for Research as Many Suffer Silently

by 5 Comments

Photo: Tom Camenzind, an ME/CFS patient, photographed at his home in San Ramon, Calif. / Credit: Linda Gasparello

All diseases are cruel, but some have a refined brutality all their own. One such is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). It is a monster, often hidden in plain sight; the suffering it inflicts is limitless.

Tom Camenzind is a handsome young man who should be in the joyous throes of youth. A popular and gifted student at Stanford University, Tom was clearing the hurdles of academia with ease and grace. In January of his sophomore year, he caught a cold on campus. ME walked through some door, and stole his promising life.

Today Tom lies conscious but prone in his parents’ home in San Ramon, Calif. He is totally paralyzed and can only communicate with his parents, Mark and Dorothy, by pressure from his fingers on sensors. He cannot tolerate everyday sounds, light or touch.

When the sensor-activated bell sounds, Tom’s parents come rushing to his side. Mark is an engineer and Dorothy is a physician, and the strain of their son’s affliction on them is palpable. Tom cannot do anything, anything whatsoever, for himself. At 23 years old, he is on the threshold of life, but he cannot cross it. He breathes and thinks, but he cannot live his life.

Recently, I filmed the Camenzinds for a special edition of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly program that I produce and host for PBS and other broadcast outlets. It was made in conjunction with the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, a Los Angeles-based charity.

Tom’s agony, and that of 1 million in America and 17 million around the world, predominantly women, cries out in terrible, silent eloquence for a national research effort with international cooperation on ME/CFS – so that those who suffer, like Tom, can dare to hope.

Tom’s paralysis is extreme, but others suffer daily with extreme fatigue, headaches, muscle pain, dysphasia and light and sound intolerance. Normal work is impossible, as is maintaining ordinary family life. Precious few ME/CFS patients make a full recovery. My files contain letters from sufferers who beg for death. Suicide is common.

Yet the United States has never put the effort — read dollars — into ME/CFS that it deserves, that it needs, that one would expect. Previous administrations have spent a paltry $5 million a year on research on the disease. While that amount was due to rise to $15 million, there is no guarantee it will under the Trump administration. The Office of Management and Budget has proposed deep cuts in funding for the National Institutes of Health, the research agency.

Even the diagnosis of the disease is a challenge. There are no conventional biomarkers that can be found in body fluids. One certain but clumsy way of diagnosing it is by asking patients who are ambulatory to walk on a treadmill. If they collapse for one or more days, the diagnosis is positive.

Many suffer for years and cannot find a doctor who knows anything about the disease. The disease is not part of the curriculum in medical schools.

Most patients see many doctors and get many wrong diagnoses before they find a specialist – if they find one at all. Most states have no specialists.

For patients, costs are huge and help is slight. Lovers drift away, spouses give up, children are often thought to be lazy and are criticized by parents, siblings and teachers. Schools are baffled when active kids fall apart from ME.

Over the years, there have been efforts by private charities, like the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, to fund the research gap. But still missing is the government, the big foundations and Big Pharma.

Sadly, ME has no celebrity champions. AIDS had Elizabeth Taylor, Muscular Dystrophy has Jerry Lewis and Parkinson’s Disease has Michael J. Fox.

For Tom to come back to his life one day, money and research are needed now. Oh, so needed.

 

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.