This isn’t exactly news…

Experts: Loneliness Just as Bad for You as Smoking

We’re sure your eight cats are wonderful company, but it might be time to get out more. Join a club. Take a class. Do it for your health.

According to researchers at the University of Chicago, isolating yourself from human contact triggers all sorts of terrible bodily responses, including upping your blood pressure, releasing a stress hormone called cortisol (which, p.s., makes you fat), and makes you a prime candidate for Alzheimer’s Disease. It’ll also probably mess with your sleep habits, ding your immune system, and make you depressed.

In fact, said John Cacioppo, who revealed the research findings at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the overall health difference between a lonely person and a popular person was akin to that between a smoker and a non-smoker.

Swell.  But this isn’t news.  Science has known for quite some time now that being alone deducts years off your life, the same way smoking or drinking too much does.  But the lonely are humanity’s cast-offs. Nobody gives a flying fuck about us.  Until one of us goes off the deep end. 

Save for the occasional misanthrope, most of us aren’t isolated from the world of the living by choice.  We’re alone for a variety of reasons, most of which I have a hunch, have to do with many, many failed attempts at romance, and the resultant fear and self-doubt that comes of it.  The more you fail, the more you begin to see yourself, deep down inside, as unworthy of companionship.

And friends who sit on chances for you to meet someone who might be a good match until that chance is stone dead, like it didn’t really matter all that much to them so it shouldn’t matter to you either, and then tell you its your own damn fault for not having a lover anyway, don’t help that negative self image much.  Yes…I’m talking about you Mr. L.  Oh…and also the ones who tell you you’re too ugly to be boyfriend material.

After a while, you get used to feeling the years being shaved off your life, and vanishing down a dark hole.  After a while, you find yourself wishing the end comes sooner, rather then later…

So even if you don’t smoke, drink, or overeat, you might want to at least join Facebook, or you may as well have been doing shots of Jaeger before breakfast…

I’d as soon drop a cinder block on my head as drink Jagermeister.  German eiswein is lovely, just lovely…if they serve drinks in Paradise then they’re serving German eiswein…but swear to God German liquor is just plain evil. 

But I can see how trying to live all by yourself is like trying to exist on a diet of Jagermeister.  Yes.  Yes…that’s what it’s like.  In fact…I’ll bet a lot of lonely people do literally just that.