In objective outcome space you are either healthy (socially, nutritionally) or you are not.
Being desirous of the good outcome is step one to having a CHANCE of having one. If you somehow numb yourself to the possibility/desire, you are guaranteed the actual bad outcome.
Even in subjective space, I think people actually feel better pursuing a good outcome even if they don't succeed, vs numbing themselves and pretending everything is fine as is.
There's no such thing as "objective mental health". There's no test you can perform on a person to know if they're mentally well that doesn't involve asking them about it. If a person has no or little need for company, and has no or little company, how is that unhealthy? Who determines what an appropriate level of sociability is? I would have thought each person determines that for themselves, but you seem to disagree.
Humans are overwhelmingly social creatures by nature and virtually every study of happiness shows a correlation to healthy relationships in your life. There are exceptions of course, including people who have had traumatic experiences/abuse/PTSD/mental health issues that cause these relationships to be damaging until the underlying issue is resolved.
Humans are also very, very bad at knowing what makes them happy. If a healthy person tells me they have one friend they see once a month and no other social outlets and they wouldn't want anything else, 99% of the time I'm going to assume they don't know themselves well enough to know that more relationships than that would make them happy.
> Humans are overwhelmingly social creatures by nature and virtually every study of happiness shows a correlation to healthy relationships in your life.
Do these studies actually show that there aren't people who, for lack of a better word, are non-responders? Imagine if 95% of people require relationships to be happy and 5% don't. I would expect most studies to show the correlation exists, but it doesn't mean that 5% doesn't exist. What kind of upper bound do these studies provide here?
> virtually every study of happiness shows a correlation to healthy relationships in your life
These studies never make sense because there's no way to objectively measure happiness, especially not in a way where you can compare two people's self-reported levels of "happiness". The word happiness itself is already is an over-loaded term that everyone has their own definition of. (At best you can measure proxy outcomes like measuring health based on relationships, but there are so many confounding variables it's hard to narrow it down.)
In objective outcome space you are either healthy (socially, nutritionally) or you are not.
Being desirous of the good outcome is step one to having a CHANCE of having one. If you somehow numb yourself to the possibility/desire, you are guaranteed the actual bad outcome.
Even in subjective space, I think people actually feel better pursuing a good outcome even if they don't succeed, vs numbing themselves and pretending everything is fine as is.