In The Age of Sleepless Digital Presence, I Yearn for the Simplicities of Human Touch.I was struck by this post from Humans of New York while he was in Pakistan in August, 2015. Her words echoed in my mind. "Because wanting to be independent doesn't mean I want to be alone." In our current state of always connectedness, we are more lonely than ever before. The mind is designed to engaged with the world [1]. When given a state of "disengaged mind", where we are able to be with just our thoughts and nothing else, some people chose to receive mild electric shock than be with their own mind. We are social creatures, hardwired to survive in social settings. We are social creatures, hardwired to survive in group and goes into depression after being alone for an amount of time[2]. We are more lonely than ever in this digital age and loneliness is now regarded to be as deadly as other diseases[3]. We spend so much of our time surrounded by people but engaged by our phones. Lori Cheek, architect turned entrepreneur at cheekd, was lamenting about the same problem moving from her small town to New York City as an architect. She met husband one day on a trip to Maine; all because she had to turn off her smartphone because there just wasn't any cell signal in New Hampton. When she looked up, there is this gorgeous man standing there right beside her[4]. So let's put down our phones for a while. Look around us. Look at people. Greet them. Smile. Just smile. You never know who might end up in your orbit... Greet them. Smile. Just smile. You never know who might end up in your orbit... Citations: [1] Wilson, T.D., Reinhard, D.A., Westgate, E.C., Gilbert, D.T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C.L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345, 75-77 [2] Shoemaker N. (2015, n.a) Some Scientists Believe Loneliness is Becoming an Epidemic. Retrieved 24 Sept 2015, from http://bigthink.com/ [3] Monbiot G., (2014, Oct 14), The age of loneliness is killing us. The Guardian. Retrieved 25 Sept 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/ [4] Hickins M., (2014, June 10) TED Talks About Human Connections. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 24 Sept 2015, from http://blogs.wsj.com/ This post was published on www.executivelifestyle.sg as I'm lonely even though I'm surrounded by social everything
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