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.
Shortly before 3am on June 4, 1993, a mechanic at Miami airport looked in the wheel well of a DC-8 cargo jet from Bogotá. He saw the body of a teenager, curled in a ball, wearing only a t-shirt and shorts and frozen like an "ice cube."
The first paramedic pronounced him dead. The second found a weak pulse.
Somehow he had just survived 5 hours at 35,000 feet without heat or air pressure.
This should have killed him three different ways.
A🧵& blog post on how he survived.
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The median income for a Canadian is $42,600 CAD a year. I have absolutely no clue how a person survives in the modern world on this kind of income. It is incomprehensible to me.