There’s no where to go, and everything is expensive. Pay people more, give them more time off, have city sponsored block parties. You can’t make someone more active, but otherwise healthy and well-rounded people don’t need much incentive to leave the house and take a walk.

After that, have a wellbeing crew that checks on and helps out those that are still avoiding socialization.

But the pearl clutching around wages and vacation means the local governments will do nothing. Any measure implemented without massive societal overhaul will only be a band-aid.

Also, you and I read studies like this, and think “we need to help people.” But if you flip the perspective to who paid for the study, it becomes “we need healthy workers to feed into the meatgrinder.” The goal of the study isn’t altruistic, its to make sure the owners have a healthy livestock pool, which means the bare minimum will be done, or preferably nothing because we may be able to work around it.

Since we’re on the topic of timing the job market, isn’t now the best time to get into CS? In 4 to 8 years, there’ll be another hiring rush to straighten the LLM mess out, combined with retirements…