Fifteen Cigarettes a Day

The more connected the infrastructure, the more alone the individual. I’ve thought about this enough times, late enough at night, to know it’s not just a think-piece observation—it’s something I’ve actually felt, with the Wi-Fi on and the phone fully charged and the city making its usual sounds four floors below.

Some nights it goes like this: pizza from the place downstairs, a bottle of wine, something extra if the timing is right, and then back upstairs in a hoodie that hasn’t been washed in too long, settling in for the hours between midnight and four. Netflix. YouTube. Porn. You get through the night. You don’t think too hard about what "getting through" means.

AsapSCIENCE made a short video asking whether loneliness can literally kill you—why it evolved, why you can feel it surrounded by people who are supposedly your friends, what it does to your cortisol levels and cardiovascular system over time. The answer is yes, more or less, eventually. Chronic loneliness is apparently as bad for your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, which is the kind of statistic designed to frighten people who have already decided they don’t care.

What I find more interesting than the health data is the distinction between being alone and feeling lonely—you can have one without the other in either direction, which most people know from experience but rarely say out loud. The city is extremely good at providing the second without the first. Social media is not a community; it’s a row of personal billboards, bright and empty behind the glass.

I watched the video twice. Then something else. Then the sky started getting lighter.