Key points

As we age, social frailty can be just as damaging as physical frailty, but it's far less talked about.

We vastly underestimate how much social connectedness affects illness and death.

While AI may be frightening, it also offers a new tool for helping to improve quality of life.

We’re all getting older. Maybe those we surround ourselves with are slowing down a bit, tiring more easily, or taking longer to bounce back from a fall. While we usually call this physical frailty, there's another kind of frailty that's just as damaging and far less talked about: social frailty.

Social frailty is when the threads connecting us to other people start to fray, threatening to disappear. National Geographic ’s Bethany Brookshire looked into research showing that social frailty might b

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