Each morning, tens of millions of Americans get out of bed and move a yard or three to their desk. They then sit in front of their computer, working from home, eating breakfast and lunch while staring at their screen. After work, few head to happy hour with colleagues but eat at home again and watch Netflix or something else on a screen. Whole days can pass without talking to someone in person.
People in the United States are, data shows, very lonely. It’s gotten so bad that the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says Americans are suffering from a “loneliness epidemic.” They have fewer friends than they used to: In 1990, only 3 percent said they didn’t have a close friend; by 2021, 12 percent said they didn’t. And Americans don’t just have fewer friends; they spend less time interacting with other people altogether. Today, most give only about 34 minutes a day to genuine human connections.
When people have no one to turn to, they’re more likely to experience anxiety and depression. The risk of stroke increases by 32 percent; the risk of heart disease, by 29 percent; and dementia, by 50 percent. Literally, loneliness kills.
What’s going on?
Milena Batanova is the director of research and evaluation for the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Program. Batanova says Americans are spending more and more time on their own partly because they want to: When you ask commuters if they’d like to talk with other people on their way to work, they mostly decline—even though there’s good evidence that they like it when they try it. But this kind of voluntary withdrawal from social life, Batanova says, can slip into involuntary isolation over time, as people convince themselves that they can’t handle—or don’t really want—social interactions.
And helping people out of loneliness can be hard. In part, that’s because they tend to think of loneliness as a single thing: a lack of human connection. Even public-health officials tend to think this. But Batanova says it’s more a cluster of experiences. It’s not just about how much time you spend with other people or how many friends you have; it’s also about having a sense of belonging to a collective and feeling you have a purpose in life. But because loneliness isn’t a single problem, there isn’t a single solution for it …
Gustav Jönsson: What patterns are you seeing with loneliness in America?
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