lonely
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The More Well-Read You Are the Less Lonely You’ll Be, Study Says You Can Hang Out With All Your Books, Loser

Photo: Viktor_Gladkov (Getty Images)

Even though we’re more connected than ever through smartphones and social media, it’s no secret that people feel lonelier than ever. It’s almost like the more we’re connected virtually by technology, the less we feel a real connection to other people. Obviously, this has been exasperated by many of us moving to working from home and missing out on the social aspect of working in an office. You might think that the only way to get over loneliness is to surround yourself with people who care about you, but that’s not completely true. In fact, a new study suggests that being more well-read can make you less lonely.

The study was done by researchers in both California and Italy and, in the simplest terms, they found that the more wisdom a person has, the less lonely they’ll feel. We’ve heard of escaping into a good book, but we never realized that spending an afternoon alone reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would actually make us not miss our office mates.

According to Dilip Jeste, MD, senior associate dean for the Center of Healthy Aging and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine, “People with higher scores on a measure of wisdom were less lonely and vice versa.”

So, next time you’re feeling bummed because your only interaction with the outside world is through FaceTime and Zoom meetings, scroll through Wikipedia. According to researchers, you’ll completely forget about the dark, dull ache of looking into the bleak face of never-ending loneliness.

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