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I find it fun that alcohol increases DNA methylation, but we find now that having a rich social life decreases it. If you need any other reason to see the societal fitness of societal lubricants. I've cut way back into "maybe one once in a while" territory, but I also have regular social interactions with exactly two toddlers and one wife and that's about it.

I've never been to AA, but I'm told it's the cues that get you, and I do admit the memories of beers + guitar hero or other such nonsense from old days is exactly what I want every time I open a beer.

It's like that old rat experiment, where they gave them cocaine or heroine laced water + regular water, and they always preferred the the drugs, until there was a rich social life / environment, at which point they rarely did.

Socializing is powerful stuff if you can find enough time to build up enough trust to just have a heap of fun for a few hours. I swear a side-splitting laugh fest adds years to your life. When is the last time you laughed so hard with friends you couldn't breathe?

It’s not the cues that get you. That is an idea promoted largely by treatment centers and the rehab industry, who need to be able to plausibly claim they are teaching their customers how to avoid relapse. I’m a recovered alcoholic and I can assure you, my “cue” for drinking was being alive and awake at the same time.

Your reaction is a sane and normal one: you remember a good time, and you have some inkling to recreate it. Certainly. And to most people that makes sense. But alcoholics are different from most people, and their understanding that is an essential first step to recovery.

Most folks aren't alcoholics. Maybe they did some beer shotgunning in college, but stopped. Heck, I've known folks that came out of combat, hooked on opiates, and quit.

If you are one, though, there's nothing gonna keep you from the drink, except total abstinence, and some kind of structure (AA, NA, Church, Martial Arts, etc.).

I'm a recovering addict (over 45 years), and participate in Fellowship. Gives me tremendous socialization.

Alcohol reduces inhibition but the real trick to lower your social inhibition is just practice.

It's not really complex, it's like anything else you'd study - mindful, focused practice; pay attention to details; iterate.

> When is the last time you laughed so hard with friends you couldn't breathe?

2 weeks ago in Oaxaca with some friends. We were at dinner and one (a guy) mentioned the Mormon purity defying practice of soaking which sparked confusion from the other (a girl). So he explained it in Mandarin so the others in the restaurant wouldn’t understand. It’s not a language I speak but watching her face told me everything I needed to know.

I never really do the full belly-laugh thing with friends or family. 90% of the time I'm alone in a room, seeing something funny on a screen.
I wish I had friends, but I also wish I had a Ferrari, the latter one might be reachable within my lifetime if I work hard for it.

Wait, with a budget of €100 000 I could actually get some second-hand old shitty Ferrari. That's... surprisingly affordable. I mean buying this shit right now would be highly irresponsible, but I can see myself potentially buying one in far future.

I just checked Lamborghini Murciélago, the dream sportscar of my childhood, and it goes for like €300 000. Hmmm... that's like, a lot of money for what is basically a toy, but if I really really really wanted that, it would be achievable within my lifetime without completely ruining me financially.

https://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/details.html?id=432670758...

Look at this shit, it's beautiful. €260 000. Not now and not tomorrow, but totally achievable as a lifetime goal.

What a day to be alive. Having a luxury sportscar is more realistic than having friends. Send immaterial help.

that old rat experiment is considered bunkum now
I often feel like that my inflammatory illness is related to the fact that I lost all my friends in my 20's and came from a dysfunctional family.

The upside is that I've been suicidal since I was 15 so if Johnny Reaper comes in the form of loneliness cancer I'll have been done a subtle favor.

Also it's just an aside but God isn't real.

Living life alone makes your life shorter, but it sucks enough that it'll feel a lot longer anyway, so it balances out!
That's really interesting because I also started getting my inflammatory illness after losing all my friends.
Do scientists just randomly publish obvious nonsense now?

The causation is obviously in the other direction: Healthy people socialize more.

Proposing the inverted causation, without even examining the alternative is ridiculous. This is just trash science.

Having a correlational result and using it to pretend that one has to cause the other with absolutely no mechanism is not science, it is reading tea leaves.

A healthy person has more opportunities and more abilities to engage in social activities. The less healthy a person becomes the rarer those opportunities become. Basically every single health condition, especially the most common ones like obesity, make it harder for people to engage in social activity.

The alternative explanation is pretty simple and does not require some magical mechanism whereby social interactions are somehow causing your body to age slower.

Introverts probably socialise less because they find it more tiresome or find fewer opportunities they would enjoy. Would they fall under "unhealthy"?
Exactly right. I doubt we can get to causation unless we conduct proper long term experiment instead of just looking at correlations and assuming causation goes one way.

The study says social bonds are associated with lower inflammation. It's well documented that inflammation causes anxiety and depression. How does this affect one's social activity? Negatively, the mechanism is very clear - you don't socialize if you are depressed and anxious. And somehow they assume the reverse casual relationship without explaining the mechanism for it.

I wonder what fraction of people today have literally no friends (perhaps this could be examined using a questionnaire and points system to determine who counts as a real friend vs mere acquaintance). The number of people with "zero" must surely be rising, especially among the young.
I think it's more about the concept of mental isolation than some magic hard number of "friends" (whatever way you define it). You can have 100 close friends that you regularly talk to and hang out with in your free time and still have noone to talk to regarding certain issues. Speeking from a military/PTSD perspective, a single person who you might not even share that much with but who you can talk to about a particularly traumatic thing might be worth more than all close friends and family in the world. Because they will never understand what you really feel like since none of them have experienced it.
As someone in this group, I think there are a surprising number of middle aged people without any friends. If you move or lose your friend group (or never had one) it seems harder than ever to find friends.
It also depends on what exactly you count as “real friends”. If you set the standard just a little bit high, many people only have their family, or not even that. And you can have friends and still feel alone.
My only real „friend” is my wife.

Over years I lost contact to all the ppl I considered friends.

I dont have time to nurture long distance relationships.

After studies we all moved away 200-300km from each other.

I have a lot of „pals” or „gaming friends”. But those ppl wont show up 4am at night to pick you up from a street fight.

I’m missing „meaningful” connections. Its easy to find ppl who dont care.

a lot of people have friends but we only “interact” via a screen!
This is my main concern. At 46 i’m in excellent physical condition, do well financially and am incredibly lucky to have the wife and kids that I do. I really want to live for another 200 years.

I just have absolutely zero friends or interactions with people who aren’t my wife and kids. Haven’t for probably 15 years now. I work remotely and 99% of the people I work with are offshore so very little overlap in work times. So the occasional teams message on a group channel is it. No friends or even acquaintances. I occasionally find myself craving the little notification icon on X to let me know some stranger liked my post. I recognize that this is not optimal.

The gym is essentially my hobby but max interaction is the occasional fist bump or head nod. I spend 90 minutes there 6 days a week.

Its to the point where other people aren’t even real to me anymore, I can go literally months without a real life conversation.

Not complaining but it does worry me from the longevity aspect

Definitely tougher to make and maintain friend relationships at this age. Most of my group comes from church but think about other social settings or clubs that might provide opportunities to make connections.

The other suggestion is to not worry about who initiates what. I make it a habit of reaching out to people and don’t mind if I am the one doing so the majority of the time. It is so easy, for me at least, to fall into the trap of keeping track to make sure the people “care enough”.

Hope that helps and hopefully my entirely unasked for advice wasn’t inappropriate. Only responding because I am a similar age and struggled with the same.

Humans are social animals, and if I’m being pretty reductionist this paper states “being social is healthy for social animals. Being healthy means longer life spans”.

So not too much of a surprise there.

Edit: still valuable to do research even to confirm whatever seems to follow logically. Not trying to discredit that!

I am neither social nor an animal. What exactly is the mechanism of action, what is it about going to church or whatever that decreases this nasty interleukin-6? And how can carried out most minimally, or made into pills?
Well of course. When you feel you belong you don’t stress as much.
"there were no significant associations with short-term stress markers like cortisol or catecholamines."
What I sometimes wonder about these studies is whether we have established causation. Is it that socializing makes people healthier or do healthy people socialize more?
My friends are objectively bad for my health vs. how well I take care of myself without their influences.

What I suspect is common WRT these studies is lonely people become self-destructive, reaching for stuff like alcohol and/or comfort eating, i.e. harmful substitutes for relationships they miss.

But I don't really have those issues. I can be super content spending most time solitary with regular impersonal interactions at cafes and grocery stores. Just having a modicum of peaceful sharing of space with others tops up my socializing needs, beyond that it's fast into diminishing returns territory.

- extremely introverted person who never developed a dependence on others for self-worth and/or happiness

From reading this it seems to me there is a wide gap between what happens at the molecular level and the social level, and they are very eager to jump it?
Anecdotally I agree with the message, but the research looks weak indeed.

A simple snapshot assessment and some scoring of an individual's (entire, self-reported!) social life is too simplistic. The measurements would have to be performed throughout the life of each participant with sufficiently high frequency.

Social ties correlate with all kinds of beneficial traits, outcomes and privileges, in a very complex and bidirectional causal relation: sociable people have much better economic and career prospects, healthy middle class people have the opportunity, time and resources to engage in social activities, raising a family is a high energy activity not everybody can afford that basically "generates" a substantial web of social links, which in turn support the person in their gray years, and so on and so forth.

So the finding here is that healthy, wealthy people with a support network age just like healthy, wealthy people with a support network.

from a certain perspective, they've found that if I tell you nothing more about a person than their lab test results on some biomarkers, you can make a better-than-random educated guess about how much social connection they have in their lives.

that's kind of interesting, though very far from the causal claims in the university press release.

> Covariates. All models adjusted for ... age, sex, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and log-transformed current household income.

Let's look at something else which wasn't controlled for at all: doing physical activities.

People who, for example, run every week or bike every week often do so because they have a group of friends who also does that, and doing such a physical activity also builds friendships better than not doing such activities.

Perhaps exercising is both correlated with health and with building groups of friends.

Or perhaps exercising is correlated with being attractive, and being attractive is correlated with building social connections.

... I guess what I'm trying to say here is that this study shows correlation only, and there are so many confounding factors I consider it pretty tenuous.

Aging is systematic accumulating damage.

"Healthy systemic accumulated damage" is therefore a more honest way to put it, exposing it as completely ridiculous.

Thank goodness that longevity efforts have now become well established biotech and pharma goals around the world.

I like to remind myself that, in biology, all the arrows are two-way
There's no such thing as "healthy aging". Aging is deterioration. It's unhealthy by its very nature.
Probably why women outlive men. Also wars, and hypergamy.
They need to cancel out the whole human civilisation as a confounding factor in order to conclude something useful. Linking genetic and social factors is something I cannot decide to laugh or amaze.
“healthy aging” is an oxymoron.
I wish these studies would dive deeper into the mechanisms that prompt healthy aging, rather than just saying "social ties".

The few that come to mind are laughter, stress, exercise, and cognitive engagement.

It might be interesting to see if diet changes as a result of social ties as well. We can make an educated guess that stronger social ties means less time eating alone.

Surely it isn't just the social ties themselves.

Is correlated with*
Does this mean I should encourage my beautiful young wife to join the local stitch and bitch?

Obligatory "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

Holy crap there is a boat load of spurious correlation here.

Obligatory link https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Does social media presence also count?
Even if your social ties are drinking buddies?
"If nobody needs you to be alive you will die faster"

Gee thanks Science, you see now why people prefer Stupidity over you?