MANILA, Philippines — I came  across a definition of happiness the other day which I had never heard before, but I think is applicable to all of us. It was from the “father of modern psychology,” Sigmund Freud. And he explained that what is fundamental to happiness is the ability to love and work, to be able to invest in something other than yourself.

Creative work, I have always found, gives one a sense of fulfillment that mitigates against loneliness. You may be alone but you feel happy because you are creating something outside of yourself: It can be a poem, a play, an article, or even a simple sentence in a letter to a friend. But the creation provides a sense of fulfillment in that you have produced something for the edification of other people.

Today, more and more young people, sitting alone in front of a computer screen, feel connected with the outside world by the social networks Facebook and Twitter, through which they exchange ideas with many people they may never actually meet. It is a virtual world of daily human-to-human contact.

And its uses are only now becoming apparent. A major one is medical information. More and more doctors are using the Internet to discuss and prescribe on-line, without actually seeing their patient in their offices. If they need to know blood pressure and pulse rate, the patient who has the equipment can take his own blood pressure and pulse, and report the findings directly to the doctor, on-line.

The applications to the practice of medicine are profound. Specialists and general practitioners can confer on-line. Hospital staff can provide on-line reports of a patient’s progress to the doctors who are attending the patient, and save them time-consuming trips to the hospital.

The negative side of all of this is, of course, person-to-person contact. Patients are often reassured by the physical presence of a doctor, or by the touch of his hand as he checks your pulse rate. But for people in remote and faraway places, who previously lacked personal care, the Internet is a Godsend. And whoever attends them can confer with specialists and treat the patient accordingly, without their ever making the trip to the office or the hospital.

With these modern technological devices available, no one needs to feel lonely or isolated in the inter-connected world we now live in.