This is a linkpost for http://particularvirtue.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-build-community-full-of-lonely.html
I have massively decreased my social time following my noticing the productive people I am trying to emulate instead get a specific high value density social instead of buckets of exploration social.
I am not sure if fixing lonely is something I want to encourage people to work on instead of the hard problems.
Distinctly social strikes me as reading a newspaper. You can do it every day until you die. Compared to publishing a proof and leaving a legacy in the body of knowledge that we call humanity.
I am not saying ignore social, I am saying remember it's place in the total irrelevance of life's features
If being social means having small talk than it doesn't help with your hard problems but various forms of social interaction do help.
In many fields networking is essential to success. Many people in this community might be more successful if they had better social skills and that requires practice.