literally weren’t safe if they were sleeping apart from the tribe. You know nobody’s got your back—so your brain won’t let you go into full sleep mode. Measuring these “micro-awakenings” is a good way of measuring loneliness. So John’s team wired up the Hutterites, to see how many of them they experienced each night. It turned out they had barely any.15 “What we found was that the community showed the lowest level of loneliness that I’d seen anywhere in the world,” John explained to me. “It really stunned me.” This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death.
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