> If you don't know where to start, a Church is a great place to start.

Please only do this if you believe (or are willing to explore or at least quickly reject and leave) what the church is teaching.

I've come around to the idea of Church as a community building utility, third space sort of thing, but the religious aspect does not appeal to me at all so that's not an option to me. I'm not going to go surround myself with people that I disagree with on such a fundamental philosophical level and call that my community

As community organizations I think Churches seem at least somewhat decent. If only we could keep the community stuff without the religious stuff.

I dunno. I think we need (free / community funded) third spaces to make a big comeback. Where do people even go to meet anyone now?

I have a counselor suggesting I go try out tech conferences and meetups, but those have always felt like career building activities to me, not social activities. It's not the same at all.

A church in that sense is basically just a (social) club. There are many, many other options for social clubs that don't come with the religious baggage.

While I personally agree with you, there are plenty of "churches" with a focus that seems to be almost or more focused on networking than prayer and worship. Not recommending it, especially not over a real church (if there's an ideology that vibes with you), but they are a thing.

I feel like I can't put enough disclaimers on this though: actively searching for a community/identity/place to fit-in is a pretty vulnerable place to be and there are organizations (e.g. cults) that actively take advantage of that.

[moved from child comment]

Keep it simple and boil it down to the big categories: for example, physical health, mental health, social health. Don't try to do it all at once, if you can touch one category each day great. If you can touch every category every day even better.

The good thing is that most healthy activities feel good to do, so they're self-perpetuating. They don't give the instant shot of dopamine as unhealthy activities but they do give you something. Furthermore, they feed into each other. Doing one habit makes the resistance to starting another less.

The article isn't really suggesting anything new, just something that perhaps have forgotten/neglected/never learned.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs listed physical and social health, among other things, as prequisites for a happy healthy life in 1943.

Like most things, 80-20 rule probably applies.

> It was satisfaction in their relationships, particularly in their marriages, that was the best predictor of a happy and healthy life.

Good marriages is probably the 80. If you nailed that you've won.

Seriously, it was all so much easier when they all happened as a natural course of the day back in the day not even a few decades ago. Now you have to specifically schedule all these things because we have gotten rid of a lot of the fixtures that made this happen automatically in the course of a day.

> Nothing is enough.

Words to live by!

Have relationships, walk, sleep, eat food. It's all actually quite relaxing and enjoyable stuff, nothing to stress over.

No your not. There is no proof that this is true. Have they even confirmed the stress hormones? "what we think happens is that the body stays in a kind of low-level fight-or-flight mode, and that means that there are higher levels of circulating stress hormones and higher levels of inflammation" shows tells me they have not but this would be an easy thing to measure. I argue that having friends can cause more stressful having to listen to all their aches and pains, pick them up, etc. The reason for the higher mortality rate may be when accidents happen, nobody is there to call 911 and you're dead or perhaps you take on all work by yourself(roofing, concrete, etc). I'm in the same boat but I am too busy to worry about loneliness.