Loneliness carries the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
It raises your risk of heart disease by 29%.
Stroke: 32% higher.
Dementia: 50% higher.
We spend billions fighting cancer, heart disease, and obesity.
We spend almost nothing fighting the thing that's quietly as deadly as all of them.
Taylor Swift says Toy Story 5 is her favourite Toy Story. Now I have to rank them (not including 5, haven't seen it yet):
1. Toy Story 2 (The Godfather Part II of animated movies)
2. Toy Story 1
3. Toy Story 3
4. Toy Story 4
Drop yours
Research on anonymity shows people disclose more to strangers than to those who know them. Without shared history, there's no version of yourself to protect.
I've seen this. In conversations where someone felt genuinely unknown, they said things I don't think they'd said before.
The desire for a clean slate is often just the desire to finally tell the truth.
There's a theory that identity is just a story we keep revising — integrating the past, imagining the future, trying to make it all cohere. A psychologist who spent his career on this described it as the narrative we construct to explain how we became who we are.
But stories accumulate. And somewhere in the accumulation, the actual person can get buried.
The clean slate fantasy isn't destruction. It's authorship.