Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic so Hard to Cure?

This sentiment, too, colors many of the various proposed policy fixes, like Britain’s mail-carrier plan or the 2023 guidance from Murthy, who suggests near the end of his advisory that lonely individuals “reach out to a friend or family member” and that parents encourage their children to participate in structured, in-person activities “such as volunteering, sports, community activities and mentorship programs.” One implication is that shrinking the gap between realized and desired social relations, and thus conclusively ending the loneliness epidemic, will merely be a matter of recreating, in some sort of updated form, the types of community alive in an older era.

Unfortunately, history rarely works that way. “One big problem I have with the current rhetoric around loneliness is that we treat it as if it’s permanently going in only one direction,” Klinenberg told me. “It’s not. It’s a more interesting phenomenon than that” — and more nuanced. When loneliness gripped the Western world during the Industrial Revolution, everyone didn’t suddenly retreat to their ancestral villages; the radio didn’t make us permanently lonely. We built new communities in the city, far from our families; we used radio to expand our world and to talk to people on the other side of the country. We adapted. And as hard as it may be to accept, the path out of loneliness in 2024 lies almost certainly via a similar route — forward, forward.

There are signs that a similar mass evolution is already underway. Take the smartphone, a device that gets a lot of blame for our lack of physical connection and that has simultaneously led to other, but no less meaningful, forms of togetherness. “I wrote an entire book about online dating, and to give you one example, I know as much as anyone about how much it can suck to be on Tinder,” Klinenberg says. “I also know the internet is the main way people meet their spouses these days. I think about cases of people who have rare diseases and are able to share information and get better care and feel connected because the internet allows them to do so. I think about trans kids, who are at risk of distress because they feel so rejected and alone in some families and are now able to talk to people like them — to get messages that affirm them.”

None of which is to say we won’t still need physical togetherness — only that there may be less of it, and the physical togetherness that does persist may look different than it did for our ancestors. Ninety-six thousand Taylor Swift fans singing in sync, the thunder of a crowded football stadium and then a gazillion internet threads in which the attendees relive and post photos and remember the euphoria of their shared experience. A romance that exists partly in the real world and partly online, and in which emotional closeness is not diminished but enhanced by a steady stream of the sort of soul-baring disclosures that social media apps can facilitate.

There may be bumps, hurdles and obstacles, but as is the case with Cacioppo and Hawkley’s evolutionary theory, those bumps could be part of the learning process, the adaptation process. Part of the drive that forces us together.

Squint, and you can see it: a scenario in which the loneliness crisis today is really a mass period of acclimatization. It’s a bridge, an evolutionary step, during which we make our peace with certain trade-offs and realities — that in 2024, we’re not all going to race to rejoin the local grange. That we’re not all going back to church or temple or the mosque. That our kids may grow up far from their grandparents and aunts and uncles — far from the towns where we were raised. That the workplace will remain diffuse, tethered by Zoom meetings and the occasional in-person happy hour. That we may often see friends more on FaceTime than we do in real life. And most important, that despite it all, we’ll find one another again.

Max Guther is a Berlin-based illustrator known for his hyperreal isometric 3-D style, often using an unfamiliar perspective from above.