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It’s a good video, I like Kurzgesagt a lot. It does strike me though, loneliness is a social problem relating to where and how we live. It is not so easy to solve.

In a village, everyone draws water from the well. So the well becomes a central meeting point, where interaction happens. When you supply all the homes with running water, that interaction vanishes. It’s a piece of the social life of the village that disappears.

So if our modern way of living has removed a lot of social interactions, how do we go about putting those back into our lives? Here in the Netherlands there is a trend towards putting “neighbourhood homes” into suburbs. These are a kind of community centres, but the question then becomes, how do you motivate people to go there? Subsidised cups of coffee, pool tables, painting lessons, and so on only go so far.

You see a lot of older people in community centres here, those who have retired. They have time, while young people are in education and the middle aged are at work.

Evolution "designed" humans to live in small bands of hunter/gatherers. We stepped out of that world when we started agriculture and animal husbandry. Ever since so many of our problems are problems created by our solutions to previous problems. Horses help us carry more and be more productive allowing us to better feed ourselves > horse manure piles up in cities at city block scales > automobiles solve that problem > now we have unwalkable cities and CO2 pollution.

I'm happy moving forward and keeping with the "solve the next problem" type of mentality. Off the top of my head (so it may be off) in the 1900s something like 1/3 of children died before 5, now its around 1%. A more productive, specialized world allows some of us to give art, writing, spirituality, science to the rest of the world rather than 95% of us focusing on food, shelter and security.

The Harvard study of adult development has been going on for over 80 years and they've found that the best predictor of well being and longevity is the quality of our relationships. For all the talk of tracking our biometrics or getting chemicals out of food this is a major factor that hasn't gotten enough attention. People are starting to talk more about it lately. It gets framed more as a loneliness epidemic.

This is 6 years old, and its only getting worse.

Today my YouTube feed gave me this…

It is a chat between Mike Corey, a YouTuber whose goal it is to show people that travel is nothing to be afraid of, and Mpisi, the medicine man and tribal elder of the Ndebele tribe in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa, and it gave me some food for thought.

Basically Mpisi tells that city life is full of chemicals, in the food, in the clothing, and in the environment. He thinks people are far happier in villages, where people are hospitable and friendly. He finds that in the city everybody is alone, just one, and that there is no hospitality. He thinks money should be invested in goats or chickens, so that it can grow.

We have a lot of comforts in modern life — hot and cold running water, showers, toilets, electric light, refrigerators, washing machines — all sorts of labour saving devices, so that we can spend our days surfing the internet and watching wise YouTube videos. These are things you wouldn’t have living the tribal life in Southern Zimbabwe.

Yet I think Mpisi is not far wrong when he says the problems of modern life have to do with connectedness, with being open to our fellow humans and to the animals.

Great Insight, tips and skilful means everyone Many thanks!

There is no negative BUT we can lighten our Way to Banana-Nirvana as the minions do.

When we enter the Buddhist stream we can:

1. Go against the flow and get swept away anyway
2. Go with the flow and end up further along on the far shore
3. Stop crossing, being cross orientated and forgetting, shore, stream and both sides are The Way