>As this article and book say "loneliness kills", but what does that mean for those of us who want to live long and healthy lives? Do we need to start scheduling social time alongside gym time?
No, we need to stop scheduling things and embrace a less forced, more natural, community-centric, living.
I think your vision of things is the ideal, but it also isn't always practical. If you live a 30 minute drive (or more) away from everyone you know, and service-workers / fellow consumers (people at the grocery store, etc) are anonymous to you, scheduled interaction may be your only interaction.
Of course, that also speaks to a profound failure of urban design and a desolate hellscape. Human-scale communities where you're a 10-30 minute _walk_ from your friends make this sort of less-forced living much easier.
> service-workers / fellow consumers (people at the grocery store, etc) are anonymous to you
But they don't have to be anonymous to you, that's also a rather new and urban development: The expectation that nobody should "bother" anybody else unless they already know them or have some business reason to do so.
In smaller communities, everybody knew most of their "service-workers" even outside of their service function, that wasn't something out of the ordinary it was pretty much normal.
I agree, but for whatever reason I've only gotten to know people in different settings. I am familiar enough with the person in the corner shop, but not so much with the supermarket or department store. I wonder why that is (perhaps because I generally get the same person at the corner shop?)
No, we need to stop scheduling things and embrace a less forced, more natural, community-centric, living.