Loneliness

I have been listening to episodes of a podcast called The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. She is a professor at Yale and teaches a class on happiness there. The podcast is really interesting because she looks at the science of happiness. One thing she mentions is that loneliness can be as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. That just gobsmacked me, but it also makes a lot of sense. The deep, empty loneliness that I have felt in the last few weeks has been...well, I do not even have the words to describe it. But what this really got me to thinking about is what is being done to people in nursing homes and assisted living centers in the name of protecting them from COVID-19. These people have been isolated from their families and loved ones for more than six months. The people that love them haven't been able to hug them or spend face-to-face time with them for over six months. I suspect that in the long run, we are going to learn that the loneliness and isolation was much more detrimental to their health in the long run than the virus was. Hopefully, I am wrong about that.