Great article and glad I finally found time to read it. I'd noticed it yesterday and wanted to.

I love your emphasis on physical health that is an outgrowth of community support, and would like to add an emphasis on the psychological challenges and rewards for people how particularly struggle with this.

As someone with a social anxiety disorder, it has been very hard for me all my life to be able to socialize. It is exhausting. Yet I still need community interaction just like anyone else.

Children who grow up with social anxiety tend to avoid play time with other children, preferring to read books or engage in solitary play. I suppose these days they have all sorts of gadgets as well. It is all so much easier to engage with than real people.

And the longer this goes on, the more the social skills of those children fall behind those of their peers. So the pain of rejection when one does try to interact just gets worse and worse over time.

Many in this situation wind up becoming anti-social, actually hating other people. It's because they hate the painful experiences they always have, because they don't know how to fit into a community, because learning it was too painful and they didn't get enough support growing up to get them to learn it anyway.

Those who don't become anti-social, typically become depressed and even suicidal. Imagine moving through the world being really terrible at getting the one thing you need most. Every cry for love being met with rejection, because you don't know how to do it the right way.

So articles like these are important, in case maybe they lead people to replace rejection with compassion sometimes. If we can all stop a moment and think, "well maybe this person is just really bad at connecting, but still could use some kindness from me," then I think we'll start seeing many opportunities to do these simple little things like saying a warm hello to a person walking past with their head down. Or offering a flower to a stranger standing in line with a blank look on his or her face. Or just noticing that they are there, and that as a human they need to be loved.