 Many of you have written to me to ask me to give an example of cognitive dissonance and its resolution, and I'm going to do so in a minute. Today's video is going to deal with two very difficult issues. Number one, should mental health practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, should they recommend suicide to a mentally ill patient? Should they assist such a patient in committing suicide? Should suicide be part of the conversation? One option on the menu, a possible resolution away out, or is suicide illegitimate, utterly beyond the pale? Question number one, question number two. When people come to us and say they're unhappy, should we impose on them the ideology of socializing? Should we serve as mental health practitioners? Should we serve as socialization agents? Should we tell people the only way to be happy is to have friends, to interact with other people, to socialize? To go out, to have fun with others, to trust others, to confide in them, to share, to some extent to vent? Should we tell people this? Is there really a strong connection between socializing and happiness? And if there is, is it a universal rule? So these are the two topics of today's video, and of course both of them are connected to depression. And we're going to discuss depression to start with. But before we do this, my name is Sam Vak Nin. Now isn't this a simple family name? It's like two syllables, Vak, Nin, Vak, Nin, a little like the tinted ablation of a demented bell. But well over, hold your breath, well over 98% of you can't get my name right. Valkin, Vankin, Vadkin, only two out of every 100, only two get my name right. And this is despite the fact that my name is all over the place on my YouTube channel and my website. It's very easy to get it right. So why don't you get it right? You don't get it right because of cognitive dissonance. Here I am helping you, according to some of you saving your lives, changing your lives at the very least. Here I am providing you with information, with insights. Here I am making your lives better. But on the other hand, I'm a narcissist, a hate figure. So how to reconcile the two? Here's a narcissist, a psychopathic narcissist, which is the worst guy, malignant narcissist. Who is a hate figure and a demon and I don't know what else, a monster, and he's helping you. Now this creates dissonance. This is exactly, this is an example, a perfect example of a cognitive dissonance. Cognition number one, this guy is bad. This guy is evil. Cognition number two, this guy is helping me. This guy is saving my life. This guy is changing everything. This guy is great. How do you put the two together? The only way to do this, one way to do this is to get my name wrong. If you misspelled my name or get it completely wrong, it's as if the person you are thinking is not me. The person you owe your life to is not Vaknin, it's Vadkin or Vulkin. The person you should be grateful to is not Vaknin, it's Vankin. It's an amazing example of resolving cognitive dissonance by falsifying reality, impairing reality testing, and then displacement. The first thing you do, you get my name wrong and then you displace your positive emotions towards that other guy with the wrong name. Not towards me, with the right name and the personality of a psychopathic narcissist. Get it? Amazing. Simply amazing. Okay, Shoshanim, Chmadmadim and so on and so forth. We start with depression. Depression has been classified for a very long time now as a mood disorder. However, I beg to differ. I don't think it's a mood disorder. I think depression is a cognitive distortion. A cognitive distortion is a way of perceiving reality wrongly. Cognitive distortion, as the name implies, distort reality, impair reality testing. In the case of depression, the mechanism involved in falsifying reality is catastrophizing. The person, the depressed person, the person with depression develops helplessness and hopelessness. And the hopelessness derives from a scenario of everything is going to be bad, everything is doomed, everything is gloom, nothing is ever going to be as it used to be or nothing is ever going to be good. This is known as catastrophizing and it's a mental pathology. Catastrophizing is a pathological mechanism and we deal with catastrophizing in cognitive behavior therapy. But depression is a cognitive distortion. It's a filter. It's a glass darkly. It's a filter through which we misperceive reality, extrapolating the negative elements in our existence. Add infinitum to extremes, add extremis and minimizing the positive elements to the point of vanishing, actually overlooking the positive elements. So depression is all the hallmarks of cognitive distortion. Now mind you, cognitive distortions are sometimes positive adaptations. For example, when the baby says goodbye to mommy, when the baby separates from mother and starts to explore the world, the infant develops grandiosity. To separate from mother and then to venture out into the unknown, into this huge globe with these giants known as adults at the age of two or 18 months, you need to be seriously deranged. You need to be grandiose. So infants around the age of 18 months develop grandiosity. This grandiosity, which is a cognitive distortion, the baby believes in itself to be omnipotent or powerful. The baby says, I can take on the world. I'm a hero. I'm the greatest of all. I'm godlike. Of course, the baby doesn't use these words, unless the baby is very gifted the way I have been. So the baby develops grandiosity. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion, but in this particular case, this infantile cognitive distortion is a positive adaptation, because it allows the child to separate from mommy and to take on the world, to explore it and gradually to develop object relations and become an adult, individuate, create an individual personality. So cognitive distortions are not always bad. If you're an inmate in Auschwitz, depression is a positive adaptation. It is still a cognitive distortion, because being depressed in Auschwitz is the same as saying the Nazis will never be defeated. Auschwitz is forever, which of course we know to have been counterfactual. The Nazis have been defeated. Auschwitz has been liberated, but depression within the context of being an inmate in Auschwitz is a cognitive distortion, and yet it's a positive adaptation. It allows you to survive, because having hope in Auschwitz would have been a seriously bad move. Hope in Auschwitz would have led to reckless behavior, constant frustration, and ultimately aggression, which would have resulted in execution. So depression kept the inmate within narrow behavioral confines and limits. Depression, this cognitive distortion in Auschwitz caused the inmate to channel the inmate's behavior in a way that would not endanger the inmate's life. So depression is not a mood disorder. It's a cognitive distortion. Sometimes it has its merits. We tend to give currently, in current psychological practice, I'm not a therapist and I'm not a psychiatrist. So when I say we, I mean mental health practitioners. I just don't want to repeat this phrase, ad nauseam. Mental health practitioners tend to give today two pieces of advice. Number one, if you feel hopeless, suicide is an option. It's legitimate. You should consider it. You can consider it. I'm going to help you. I'm going to facilitate it. I'm going to assist you in committing suicide. I'm kidding you're not. This is the current trend. But suicide is never a legitimate course of action when it comes to mental health. You see, it's a spoiler. I'm telling you what I'm about to say. I am dead set against suicide as a solution. I cannot conceive of a single situation where suicide is a solution when we deal with mental health. Physical health is something completely different. Euthanasia, physical health, physical terminal illnesses. Euthanasia should be a legitimate option, but never in mental health for reasons I will discuss soon. Number two, the second piece of advice that we give today, I mean mental health practitioners give today, all over the place, is the key to happiness, the key to contentment, the key to functioning, the key to mental health is socializing. You need to socialize and if you don't socialize, something is wrong with you. You should be treated. You should be medicated. You should be coached. You should be something. Well, that is manifestly untrue. People who socialize, people with social networks, constant touch with others, the ability to confide, close friends, these people are much happier than other people. That happens to be a fact. We will discuss it a bit later. However, socializing is not always a solution. Depending on your period, the period in your life depends on your circumstances, depends on your environment. Socializing is not always the solution. Socializing in prison, for example, is a seriously bad idea. Trust me, personal experience. Additionally, socializing is not for everyone. If you're a schizoid, like me, socializing is serious torture. I am the happiest when I'm by myself. The longer the period I'm all alone, the happier I am. People make me uneasy. I am stressed. I'm anxious. I hate the feeling of being with other people. This is an excruciating torture for me to spend time with other people. Small talk kills me when there's a need to discuss more serious issues. I lecture. I never dialogue. I'm not built to be with people. I have strong schizoid elements. And so do many other people. So the advice you should socialize is not universal and should not be presented as universal. And yet, in the mental health profession nowadays, both these pieces of advice are trundled about as if they were God-given. And that's a serious mistake. Suicide. Let's start with suicide. Let me be clear. As far as mental health goes, suicide is the enemy. The main obligation of a mental health practitioner of all kinds, psychiatrists, coaches, therapies, counselors like me, I'm a counselor. The main obligation, the main duty, the main goal of a mental health practitioner is to prevent suicide and avert suicide and fight off suicide and banish the thought of suicide and present alternatives to suicide. This is the main focus. This is the raison d'etre. That's the reason for the existence of mental health disciplines. What is it all about? It's all about prolonging life in a way where the patient or the client flourishes and thrives. How can suicide enter into this? Before I proceed, I refer you to the literature in the description. A good friend of mine, Afshalom El-Itsur, at the time he was in Bar-Ilan University, and another guy called Haim Omer from the Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University. They published a seminal piece of work titled, What would you say to the person on the roof? A Suicide Prevention Text. It was published in Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior on Volume 31 in the year 2000. It's an amazing text and the authors say, the purpose of this anti-suicide text is to provide potential helpers, professional and lay, with clear guidelines for communicating with a declared suicidal person, particularly in real times. When time is crucial and the act cannot be physically prevented, the text may also have a preventative effect when diffused to the white public as an anonymous address to potential suicide. I recommend that you somehow get a copy of this text. It's amazing. Now, let us enlarge the scope of the conversation a bit. Let's acquire some kind of philosophical dimension. There has been an ongoing trend, which started in proper medicine, legalizing clinician assistance in a patient's death. The term is Medical Assistance in Dime, made MAID. Physician Assistance Suicide, not to mince words. So it started with, OK, if someone is very critically and terminally ill, their life quality is horrible, they are suffering, they are tortured daily and by the minute. There's no hope whatsoever, no known medicine or procedure currently extant or available or about to become available within the lifespan or the longevity, the remaining time of the patient. Well, in this case, the patient should be given the option to choose suicide. And one could argue that the clinician is more an ethical obligation to assist the suicide, for example, to render it painless. So it started in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands and Switzerland was Physician Assistance Suicide there and spread to Canada. And today Physician Assistance Suicide in terminal stages of physical illnesses, which are irremediable, in other words, is not cured, is pretty common actually all over the world. In many places, even where Physician Assistance Suicide is illegal, doctors turn a blind eye and they let the patient expire. Or in cahoots and collaboration with the family, they disconnect the patient from life support systems. This is common practice. But then a very worrying trend started to occur. In several places, and again it started in Belgium and the Netherlands. In several cases, Physician Facilitated Suicide for Psychiatric Conditions is now becoming a norm, a reprehensible norm. In a minute, I will explain why you think so. Patients are provided with medications and lethal injections. And these patients, nothing is wrong with their bodies. They have psychiatric conditions. This is legalized actually in Belgium and Netherlands. And Canada is now on the verge of legalizing it. In Canada, Physician Assistance Suicide is legal since 2016. But now they're going to expand it and they're going to add serious mental illness as an eligible category where the physician could assist the patient to commit suicide. What is a serious mental illness? Only God knows. Homosexuality used to be a mental illness in 1973. It was listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Men. Homosexuality. Schizophrenia used to be thought of as a mental illness. Now we know it's a brain disorder. Autism was attributed to refrigerated mothers, bed mothering. Now we know it's Bushetism, neurological disorder. The field is in flux. Our knowledge is transformed all the time. Our understanding of diseases like tuberculosis or cancer is not philosophically fundamentally different to what we knew 100 years ago. We know a lot more about the molecular mechanisms and pathways. We know a lot more obviously. But the outward symptoms and manifestations of cancer in the year 1923 were the same like in 2023. It's not the case with mental illnesses. Our understanding of mental illness and particular mental illnesses is transformed by the year, sometimes by the week. And transformed from the core, fundamentally. So serious mental illness cannot be defined or captured with any accuracy at any given moment. And we are at a huge risk of mislabelling specific mental health conditions as serious mental illness. And serious mental illness which is actually we're going to discover nearly physiological or bodily. For example, bipolar disorder, bipolar disorder. Today we know that bipolar disorder is a physiological condition. And so the Canadian government planned to make serious mental illness an eligible category in March 2023. Luckily there was an announcement and they deferred their decision to March 2024. But this decision should never be made. It's wrong. The government said that the one year extension would, I quote, provide additional time to prepare for the safe and consistent assessment and provision of made. In all cases, including where the person's sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness. It will also allow time for the government of Canada to fully consider the final report of this and that. This is unmitigated nonsense. Unmitigated nonsense. There is no mental health practitioner or professional alive or dead. Who could, with any certainty, even minimal, design or assign a mental health condition to a hopeless category. In other words, there's no mental health practitioners who can declare that a mental health condition is hopeless. All mental health conditions are intermittent. Exactly like cancer. They have remission periods. All mental health conditions. Many mental health conditions dissipate and disappear altogether. For example, borderline personality disorder with age. Mental health conditions can be treated in a variety of ways and treatment modalities and vectors. Many of them are reclassified as bodily and physiological conditions. And I think what I'm trying to say is this classical medicine, conventional medicine is probably 4,000 years old. Psychiatry is less than 100 years old. What am I talking about? It's 50 years old. It's an infant discipline. Infant discipline populated by infants. Professional infants. Infants not in the psychological sense. Infants in terms of knowledge. We know nothing about the brain. Close to nothing. And we know nothing about the processes, biochemical, electrical. In the brain, in the intestines, which are somehow connected to the brain, we are finding out. In the spine, which is connected to the brain, we are finding out. We are finding out things every single day. We are not in a state of knowledge to make such a decision that a mental health condition is hopeless. And therefore suicide is a reasonable option. We are not, we don't have sufficient knowledge to say this. It will take another few hundred years before we will be in the position to say anything of the sort. Think of medicine 2000 years ago and medicine today. Psychiatry is where medicine used to be in the times of Galen 2000 years ago. Treatment, treatment, refractory conditions. Treatments, patients with treatment, refractory conditions. These are conditions which are resistant to treatment. These people, these patients, they go from one clinical trial to another. This psychotherapy, this medication, this and that. Electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation. I mean you name it. And they keep trying. They keep trying because they have hope. Hope sustains them. This becomes the meaning and essence and purpose of their lives to find some relief if not cure. And yes, there are treatment, refractory conditions, conditions that are not amenable to treatment. And yes, there are patients with such conditions. It's all very true. But to offer them death as a treatment modality that defies everything that I have come to learn about mental health. This is a betrayal and abrogation of the most basic duty of any mental health practitioner. And that includes coaches and counselors who are not licensed. When a psychiatrist tells you your only option is suicide or even when a psychiatrist tells you it's okay to consider suicide. This creates dissonance. The psychiatrist, exactly like a mother, should be a secure base. Psychiatrists should provide you with a sense of containment, of holding, of safety. The clinic, the therapy should be a safe space, not a source of terror, not a death threat. You know, most mental illness, which is the outcome of the environment, environmental or relational mental illness such as certain personality disorders. Most of it is the outcome of conflicting signals by parental figures. I love you, I hate you. I love you, but I'm going to torture you. I love you, but I'm going to kill you. I love you only if you perform. These conflicting signals create mental illness. So if a mentally ill person comes to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist says, yeah, suicide is one of the options. Killing you would be a solution that creates dissonance, which then triggers early childhood conflicts, the very root and source of the mental illness. It aggravates the patient's condition. It renders it more treatment refractory. Where is the line? Where is the line? How does one decide whether this particular patient is hopeless? No treatment is going to work. There's no point in trying anything else. Who could make this decision? In medicine, the decision is clear because we have a gigantic body of knowledge. We know what works and what doesn't work and what will never work. That's not the case in mental illness. Not the case. Never is the case because the field is evolving. Medicine as a field is evolving technologically. There are new medical technologies, but there's little new fundamental medical knowledge. What is going on today in the field of medicine is fine tuning, refinements or discovering underlying mechanisms and pathways that lead to outcomes that were known before. As far as the phenomenology of medicine, we have almost 100% knowledge. As far as the what, what is happening, what is about to happen, we have almost 100% knowledge. As far as the why, why things are happening, we're still learning. When it comes to psychology and psychiatry, as far as the what is happening, we have about 20% knowledge. And as far as why, we have 1% knowledge. It's a young field. It is grandiose. It is hubristic to claim that anyone, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists or committee of these people can have sufficient knowledge to render a decision who would react to treatment and who wouldn't. And what treatment, by the way? Every single day there's a new approach, new theory, new score, new treatment. Physician assisted suicide for psychiatric conditions is, in my opinion, murder. It's murder. It's murder because suicide is intimately linked to depression. Depression is a cognitive distortion. The patient believes that he would be better off dead than alive. The patient believes that her nearest and dearest would be better off if she were dead. The world would be a better place if she were dead. These are catastrophizing cognitive distortions and we have the tools. We have very powerful tools to deal with cognitive distortions and to reverse them. Automatic negative thoughts and others. This is part of the illness. The chain is catastrophizing cognitive distortion, depression, suicide. That's a chain and we can break this chain. Today, mental health practitioners are lazy, indolent, self-indulgent and avaricious. You get a pill. Who wants to talk to the patient? It's too burdensome. Too boring. Just give him a pill. Just give him a pill and that's it. And the next stage is going to be, who wants to talk to a patient? It's too burdensome, it's too boring and pills cost money. Let's just advise the patient to commit suicide. It'll solve everyone's problem, wouldn't it? I can envision a future, very near future where physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists would be remunerated. They will get money for getting rid of patients via suicide. They will charge. Physician assisted suicide, 500 Canadian dollars. I can see the price list in the making as we speak. This is a very terrifying and serious development. There are also issues of racial bias, asymmetrical effects on the poor versus the rich. Competence of people with serious mental illness. I mean there's a conundrum here, isn't it? There's a paradox. If someone has a serious mental illness, is he in the position to decide whether to commit suicide or not? Isn't there an insanity defense here somewhere? Shouldn't we say, well, this guy or this girl, they're not in the condition to make such decisions, life and death decisions? Or is it comfortable and convenient to pretend otherwise? They can't make decisions about their money, they can't make decisions about their family. But they can make decisions whether to live or die. Mental illness, anyhow, is stigmatized. And patients avoid treatment because they don't want to be labelled. They worry about the consequences of getting care. Today being labelled mentally ill means you can't get a job. People gok at you, people mock you and ridicule you, manipulate you and so on and so forth. And so, in this recent piece by Diana Miller, Diana Miller is the co-author of Committed, The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care. She's assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. And she wrote this piece, as I said, titled As Psychiatrists. Do we offer hope or do we offer death? And in her piece, she quotes someone and I think it would behove us to listen. Susan Kalish, she's a doctor, a geriatric and palliative care physician in Boston. She does favour the availability of facilitated suicide, facilitated death. She actually, in favour of this kind of practice, she says in the piece that she's in favour of expanding acceptance of and access to medical aid in dying patients who choose to exercise autonomy over their dying process. For those who remain with irremediable suffering, despite provision of optimal palliative care. But she says, many countries have lowered the threshold way too far. She says it is complicated and harmful to the general issue of medical aid in dying. I think rendering suicide a legitimate option in the case of mental health is not okay. It's not okay because mental illness is not like physical illness. Mental illness is intermittent. Mental illness is reversible. Mental illness is a new concept. It's 150 years old or if we go very, very far 300 years old. It's an infant. The profession is in its infancy. We keep getting things wrong all the time. We keep classifying and reclassifying and declassifying. We keep labelling things, mental illness, which later are considered normal practices. We keep saying that some conditions are very serious and then we medicate them and they go away. Psychotic disorders, for example, bipolar disorder, depression itself to some extent. Although we got it wrong with many antidepressants, to some extent, anxiety disorders. Many things used to be untreatable. Only a few years ago, a few decades ago. And they're not anymore. We need, when a patient comes or a client comes, all hopeless and helpless and fearful. And contemplates, this patient or client contemplates suicide as a realistic way out. We need to fight back. We need to refuse to listen. We need to decline. And we need to equip the patient or the client with all the tools at our disposal. From the fields of psychology and philosophy and religion and culture and society and history. All the tools, most recent research, discoveries, treatment modalities. All the tools. We need to fight tooth and nail to prevent suicide. Because if we don't do this, what the heck are we good for? What is all this bullshit profession if it cannot prevent suicide? What are we here for? Feel good factor? Pretend knowledge where there's none? Facilitate the pseudoscience known as psychology? What is this show of reality TV pretensions to science? We have a humane mission to keep people alive so that they can be happy, which leads me to the next issue. And that is the issue of happiness and how we place happiness in a straight jacket with a single prescription. Universal, good for everyone. And if this prescription doesn't fit you, nothing's wrong with the prescription. Something is wrong with you and you need to take care of your mental health, of course, at the going rate. So there was a study on, there's a study still is, a study on happiness. The Harvard study of adult development. This is by far the most comprehensive study ever conducted. It has been following its participants for their entire adult lives. The study started in Boston in 1938 and has already covered three generations. Grandparents, parents and children. These children are now considered baby boomers. So more than 2000 people have been followed for 85 years of longitudinal study. There's nothing remotely close to this. This is by far the biggest study we have. Maurizio Weingarten, MD, wrote an article titled Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness, again in the literature in the description. And he mentions that in January, Robert Wildinger, the current director of the study, published a book titled The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, co-authored with the study's associate director, Mark Schutz. So they were following this huge population of 2000 people for eight decades, their descendants and offspring and grandchildren and so on and so forth. And they analyzed the factors most correlated with well-being and with happiness. And they came up with a series of factors. They discovered that the happiest participants had two major factors in common throughout the 85 years of the study. Number one, they took care of their own health. And number two, they built loving relationships with others. Now, being in good health, eating well, exercising, exposing yourself to the sun, taking supplements if needed, etc., etc. We all know that if you're not healthy, if you're sick, you're not happy. So reverse the sentence. If you're healthy, you're happy. My grandma could have told them that and saved them a lot of money. The second factor was that good relationships were the most significant predictor of both health, health and happiness during aging. In other words, if you just take care of your body and of your health, but your social life is lacking or you don't have any meaningful connections with friends, family, and so on, your health will not survive, it will not stand ground, your health will deteriorate. The condition for health and happiness combined is meaningful relationship, good relationship with others, loving relationship, significant relationship with others. So there are physiological mechanisms that translate social fitness, social skills, socializing as an activity, social being embedded in social networks. There are physiological transmission mechanisms, physiological vectors that connect these to your health. Your health, your happiness, your longevity, your well-being all depend on being firmly embedded in a social environment. But not only any social environment, but the social environment where you keep getting positive feedback, you can share with, you can confide in, you can obtain support and succor, affection, compassion, empathy, and so on, and so forth. This is a very specific profile of a social environment. What about professional success? What about career? No. Professional success, career, money, do not guarantee happiness. They are gratifying in the short term, but they do not generate long-term happiness. And this is also something my grandmother could have told you. Alas, she's dead, so I have to refer to the Harvard study. The study revealed that the happiest people were not isolated. They had valued relationships. They fostered and engendered relationships, and then they invested in their relationships. This was somewhat correlated with level of education, cultural awareness, and so on, and income, level of income. Because these people tended to have healthier habits, they had access to healthcare, and strangely they tended to have more functional social networking, social fitness skills. Loneliness creates challenges and stress. And if you don't have anyone to talk to, anyone to confide in, anyone you convent to, I mean, you're in trouble in this sense according to this study. Loneliness is the greatest predictor of both unhappiness and shortened longevity and bed health. It's not quite clear whether loneliness itself is the cause, or whether when you're lonely, you develop habits such as drinking or drugs, doing drugs. Which affect your health. It's not quite clear what leads to what. But somehow there's a correlation, a very strong correlation. However, a caveat here, this is not for everyone. People with schizoid personality disorder, or people with schizoid personality organization, myself, for example, we are extremely unhappy when we are with other people. I, when I'm with other people, I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm unhappy, I can't wait to get away. My happiness increases exponentially. The longer I'm all alone, and when I say all alone, I mean all alone. Like when I don't travel, I don't talk to anyone, I don't meet anyone, I don't chat with anyone, I don't correspond with anyone. I'm incommunicado, if I'm incommunicado for a day, I'm happy, if I'm incommunicado for a week, I'm seven times happier. If I'm incommunicado for a year, I'm 365 times happier. There's no limit to my happiness. It is directly correlated with the amount of time I'm all alone in solitary, self-imposed solitary confinement. So, in this sense, I have a schizoid personality organization. And so we cannot generalize this. I think many, many people have grown used to loneliness, developed a habit of loneliness, especially after the pandemic. But the pandemic was just a tip of a iceberg. People were becoming more and more lonely since the 1980s. And they passed on their loneliness to their offspring and children. Loneliness may be the new normal. And so these people who have been lonely for 10 years or 5 years or 2 decades or all their lives, these people would find socializing a very stressful activity. They would become annoyed and irritated. Having to talk to other people, having to spend time with other people would be perceived as an imposition, as a burden, as an obligation or a duty, the equivalent of going to work in the old days. So I wouldn't generalize. I wouldn't generalize. Waldinger recommends to assess how to foster strengthened and broadened relationships. He calls these maintaining social connections. It's like physical fitness. Let's call it social fitness, which requires constant practice. So friendships, relationships, commitment is investment. Investment on a daily basis. Commitment has to be maintained via regular investment. If you don't maintain the commitment, it fizzles out. A phone call, a single sentence via WhatsApp, this is maintenance. If you participate in activities that bring you joy, encourage camaraderie and friendship, sports, hobbies, volunteer work, whatever, this broadens the relationships network and enhances its depth. In short, experiences, common experiences are the glue that holds relationships together, providing these common experiences are uplifting, joyful, or and or meaningful. Happiness is not a constant. Happiness is not a constant. Life is about difficulties, about losses, about challenges. We need to develop resilience. Social fitness is about social skills, but also about perseverance, about tenacity. So it's not true that you can attain a condition of happiness and then it's like a plateau. It's not like that. You have to work daily at being happy. It's hard work. It's a full-time job. And life throws at you all kinds of curveballs, some of them are negative and some of them are positive. Things happen, new experiences, surprises, the least expected and suddenly you're faced with the distinct possibility of being happy. And of course the opposite also happens, tragedies. So you need to be on your toes. You need to be on your toes. You need to cultivate your relationships as buffers, defenses, firewalls against the exigencies, vicissitudes and ups and downs of life. To become healthier, to achieve happiness, to overcome challenges and difficult moments, you need to be surrounded by people. This applies to the majority of population, but we need not make it a general principle, universal principle, it's not. There's a sizable minority who react adversely to the presence of other people. And this minority is growing by the day because loneliness is a muscle. Use it or lose it and people are using it more and more. People are becoming habituated to loneliness. I think socializing would be considered abnormal by the end of this century. Totally abnormal because we will have alternatives like the metaverse and so on and so forth. It's out of fashion and individual psychology shapes itself to positively adapt to the external environment. And if the external environment imposes on you loneliness, if it incentivizes you to be lonely, if it rewards you for being lonely, then your brain neuroplastically will reshape itself and loneliness will make you happy. So I think this study reflects the past. The youngest people in this study are actually baby boomers. It reflects the past. I think the future is happiness through loneliness and self-sufficiency. Now it sounds ominous to baby boomers like me, but you know, Generation Z would find it normal. Generation Z would consider socializing, slimy, smarmy and pretty disgusting, revolting. I have to meet someone, revolting, they're sweating, they're smelly, they talk so much. Why can't I stay with my metaverse and never ever see a human face? That's the face of the future.