Twelve months. One aging writer. A stubborn attempt to make more friends.
I write, talk and advise about social connection for a living. But it’s gradually dawned upon me that I’ve become a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of guy when it comes to social connection. With my only child off to college this year, and friends retiring and leaving town, it is a time for me at age 63 to do something about it. This is my messy, real-time attempt to live socially for the year – one dinner, one class, one stranger at a time.
the premise
theory is easy. tuesday night is hard.
My most recent book, Healthy to 100: How Strong Social Ties Lead to Long Lives (Hatchette 2025), lays out the evolving case for the relationship between social connection and aging. I’m great at citing the statistic: (according to research from Julianne Holt-Lunstad at BYU, being lonely is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But I’m not so good at calling someone up and asking them to get a drink, and I’ve never been much of a joiner. So this year, no theory without practice.
YOLiS Updates
a few entries
August 3
The Year of Living Socially doesn’t formally start until September 2nd , but I’ve been getting in social shape, by doing things that I haven’t done in decades and by talking to people who I’ve never talked to before. My journey of discovery has already started: at trivia night, I discovered that I am not nearly as smart as I thought I was, and I discovered at a boxing class that a three-minute round with a heavy bag basically lasts an eternity. I started clinging to the heavy bag for support about 70 seconds in, like a punch-drunk fighter, except no one had punched me.
August 10
It’s just a little over three weeks until we drop off Ask Ken Jr. at college, so I am beginning to doomscroll for advice on empty nesting. There is a lot to read, perhaps because so many of us go through it. Life transitions are often periods of elevated risk for loneliness and social isolation, though, to shed my “woe is me” perspective for the moment, the data suggests that other transitions (like widowhood and retirement) can be much more challenging. Everyone’s experience is different, but one of the common challenges is when the transitions come in pairs (say retirement and empty nesting) as that suggests the potential loss of multiple support networks.