The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

It's a bit paradoxical. I have a tech company and most staff want to come to the office 1 day a week. Getting them to come is very tough. Many of my staff and friends don't want to have kids, make no effort to find a partner and find all sorts of excuses. Netflix, the internet and these things are part of the problem, but I have no clue what the solution is. There is only one way to not be lonely - be with people who care about you. That requires an investment of time and of your emotions - something many people seem unable or unwilling to do. You have to get out into the world and invest in others.

We are victims of our own comfort. It&#x27;s easier to stay home in our filter bubbles unchallenged. People don&#x27;t know how to socialize these days, it&#x27;s easier to flick idly through facebook. Awkward conversations with strangers don&#x27;t happen anymore, because the second a familiar conversation with the bartender ends, everyone reaches into their pockets and retreats back into their digital security blankets. Try having a conversation with someone, and count how many seconds it takes for them to pull out their phone, and instead of correcting them on it, just talk babble and watch as they scroll. There is no <i>intent</i> in the scroll, it is just idle time and a slow drip of stimulus to the frontal lobes.<p>It also doesn&#x27;t help that every news broadcast and TV show is somehow furthering agendas that divide us, or polarize topics into idealogical tribal warfare.

Severe chronic pain is how I&#x27;d describe the loneliness I&#x27;ve experienced during the pandemic. Im alone 80-90% of any given day and it&#x27;s by far the most painful experience I&#x27;ve ever had, even with strategies to actively manage it (I work at coffee shops, attend church, and am very active in a sporting community)<p>The social backdrop of life is family and community, that&#x27;s what you come home too. I divorced just before the lockdowns started and have no family in my city. I don&#x27;t believe in extrovert&#x2F;introverts and spent several years developing my social skills so I do meet people quite easily and have a good group of friends. But even the best friend groups as a working adult can&#x27;t replace community band family life.<p>I have two points of reflection:<p>1. Every decision we make corporately as a society seems to weaken or impede family and community life. From how we build our cities to how we respond to pandemics. I have no solution other than try and buck the trend.<p>2. I offer my sympathies to anyone else feeling lonely. I hope we can persevere and eventually find meaningful social lives filled with loved ones.

My general opinion as a young adult is that both the design of our cities and suburbs (making general hanging out a huge chore) and the past two years which have forced many people to be anti social have been devastating. The most social times for me are always when my friends are easily accessible through walking.<p>These days getting people to come over is so difficult and the lack of good public transit options make a 3 mile distance a ridiculous endeavor. Combine that with the stress of the past two years and public policy that continues to fail on a global level over this (when will it end) even my more extraverted friends have become anti social. It&#x27;s hard to get out of that rut when you&#x27;re in it. I&#x27;ve made do with the understanding that I&#x27;ll have to push myself to hang out with people to the point of burning out in order to forge strong friendships but it&#x27;s not ideal.

Loneliness isn&#x27;t a problem. It&#x27;s a necessary unpleasant state that promotes social activity akin to sleep pressure that forces you to sleep. The problem is that people are addicted to social simulacra (via social media) rather than actual social activity and so only accomplish temporary relief from the feeling of loneliness while retaining the state of loneliness (like binge drinking coffee instead of actually sleeping).<p>Regardless of the hype, social media is a poor substitute to physical human interaction and is more anti-social than it seems. I&#x27;m sorry, but Internet friends you&#x27;ve never met aren&#x27;t your friends. They won&#x27;t support you in the ways that really matter, they won&#x27;t know you as you are rather than how you portray yourself. Internet communities have the capacity to broker relationships but those relationships have to flourish outside of those communities to endure.<p>Loneliness is good. It forces you to do the unpleasant, inconvenient and potentially risky act of actually getting to know someone and include them in your life. People need to allow themselves to feel it so they can act on it and truly relieve it instead of wallowing in digital emotion machines that simulate human interactions.

The loneliness crisis is what I have been wondering about lately amongst the greater push (especially within tech circles) to 100% work-from-home arrangements. Personally, although I enjoy WFH once or twice a week, I know that for me I must go in the other three days or else I do start feeling chronically lonely - even though I live with my wife and another flatmate.<p>One thing that I worry about is that one side effect of being lonely, as noted in this report, can be depression: and this depression can lead you to isolate yourself further, only increasing the loneliness.<p>That said, I have another friend working for a web developer who only began full WFH during the pandemic, and now says they&#x27;ll never go back. They&#x27;ve told me that they don&#x27;t feel lonely at all. Different strokes for different folks.

The long 2020 lock-downs taught me the importance of having a regular amount of social interactions, even at workplace. I have fairly limited social life. I actually reached a state where I felt my brain doesn&#x27;t fire, like a car barely starting. Now I value any social life much more. I see it as nutrition.

I often come back to this quote by Vivek Murthy, former and current Surgeon General of the United States: &quot;During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.&quot;[0] Always strikes me that the issue was so noticeable even four years ago.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vivekmurthy.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;work-and-the-loneliness-epidemic-harvard-business-review" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vivekmurthy.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;work-and-the-lon...</a>

One of the things I blame is the decline of youth culture. When I was in high school and college (late 90s - early 2000s) we had all these youth &quot;scenes&quot; like goths, ravers, gen-X style hippies, garage band scenes, hip hop, underground punk, and so on.<p>The standard formula was music plus style plus some kind of group bonding activity like dancing, playing music, going outside, etc. Drugs were pretty often involved too, but not always and even in drug-heavy scenes like raves there was a sizable &quot;straight edge&quot; faction.<p>This was basically how all the young people who were not &quot;jocks&quot; or into other official activities (of which there is a limited selection) would meet one another and socialize.<p>Maybe I just don&#x27;t know, but this stuff really seems dead. I&#x27;ve spent some time digging out of curiosity and I&#x27;ve never found a hint of anything similar today. It seems like it all moved online into social media and now instead of dancing all night in warehouses or going camping to hear a band people just stare at phones and have their brains sucked out by &quot;engagement&quot; (addiction) maximizing algorithms.<p>So social media seems like one thing that killed it, but I also think police crackdowns motivated by standard issue drug war freakouts were a factor too. (Irony: the replacement, algorithmically curated social media, is much more addictive than a lot of the drugs I remember people doing back then.)<p>So now there&#x27;s the people who are into the mainstream standard stuff and... what? Social media? 4chan?<p>I shudder to think of who I would be without rave culture in late high school and college. I&#x27;d probably be dead of suicide or one of these hate-ridden incels or pajama Nazi CHUD types. I&#x27;d put my money on suicide.<p>Edit: my philosophy with my kids is that screen time is okay as long as their lives are full of a lot of other things. I don&#x27;t think screens are the problem per se. I was also into hacker stuff when I was a kid and spent a lot of time in front of screens. The problem is the <i>absence</i> of enriching social activities, not the presence of a screen. I do selectively ban certain things though, like YouTube, that are particularly toxic.

&gt; I have a tech company and most staff want to come to the office 1 day a week. Getting them to come is very tough.<p>I’ve never felt more lonely in my life than working in an office full of people, and I know that’s a sentiment shared by most of my friends. I don’t think working in an office is the major factor in this.

Transitioning from a college internship to my first job, I had an excellent boss&#x2F;mentor who explained the importance of my first salary. Studies proved a clear correlation between first salary and overall earning potential; obviously, workers will gain experience, change roles, and may make dramatic changes over their working life, but that first step in the professional world made a clear impression.<p>Based on these stats, I wonder if loneliness and social connection has a similar &quot;first step&quot; between 18-25. This is the time people establish habits that they maintain for their entire lives. Does an early accumulation of &quot;social currency&quot; (for lack of a better term) mitigate loneliness-linked misfortune?

Maybe that&#x27;s the point.<p>We are being fed propaganda that is clearly designed to divide us.<p>And the lonely individual is the ultimate easily-conquered unit.

Humans were designed to live in extended families and tribes, our entire lives with the same, close population. Hermitage is a rare, unnatural lifestyle, historically reserved for the few dedicated to spiritual quests, not the masses.

One of thing that is obvious to me is the bizarre cultural norm that, in the US, people are expected to move away from home at the age of 18 and then relocate more-or-less permanently far away from family and childhood friends.<p>To my American friends this seems totally normal, and suggesting something different is ridiculed.<p>An obvious consequence of this is that American adults have 3 or 4 &quot;social fabric ruptures&quot; as they grow up:<p>1. When they turn 18 they move far from home to go to college temporarily. They develop a new group of friends, at the expense of being far from family &amp; home.<p>2. When they turn 22 they move to Big City for a job. Probably _not_ where their parents live, and almost certainly not where their college friends live.<p>3. There&#x27;s another (optional) move to Different Big City in late 20s<p>4. Finally they marry and in their early 30s they move to Suburb (leaving their Big City friends behind).<p>The result of this is an absolutely frayed social fabric. Not only do people leave their friends behind <i>just</i> as they start to develop deep friendships, they do so in an environment where building <i>new</i> friendships is harder (because they keep getting older).<p>If one wanted to design a system that maximized unhappiness, it would be pretty close to this! <i>Of course</i> Americans are lonely! They keep leaving their family and friends behind!<p>There&#x27;s two reasons for this, imho.<p>Firstly, the cultural norm of &quot;the real college experience&quot; requiring dorms, facilities, football stadiums, etc. Being a commuter student in the USA is weird at best at most colleges, and certainly the good ones.<p>Secondly (and perhaps most importantly), is a set of policies (transit, zoning) that make the places where old people&#x2F;families want to live different from the places young people want to live. This results in the 30-something move to the suburbs, but it also results in the 18-something move to the city or ~disneyland~ college campus: <i>of course</i> you don&#x27;t want to be a commuter student if your parents live in the suburbs: there&#x27;s nothing to do! You can&#x27;t drink, you can&#x27;t party, you can&#x27;t <i>do</i> anything.<p>This social norm has a whole other series of consequences besides just loneliness. Financially:<p>- It&#x27;s inefficient at best and ruinous at worst: Not only is sleep-away college expensive, it also creates a rat race between schools for bigger&#x2F;better facilities resulting in runaway costs.<p>- Young adults entering the workforce don&#x27;t live at home, which means they don&#x27;t create a savings cushion to help them buy their first home in their late 20s (compounded with college debt due to the point above)<p>- Families with kids often end up far from grandparents&#x2F;family&#x2F;trusted friends, further increasing the financial &quot;overhead&quot; of just <i>living</i>.

I think choice is a big part of the problem.<p>We have too much choice about the people that we have in our lives and the basis of our interactions with those people. We&#x27;re much more reactive than we like to admit - therefore having people in our lives who cause us discontent or even trouble can actually be a very good thing (within reasonable limits). However, once we have the choice (freedom of movement, a world of connected people just like ourselves, no dependence on &quot;local&quot; community) we naturally choose to exclude those people. We&#x27;re engaging with or waiting on an ideal and painless social group.<p>It&#x27;s somewhat analogous to being able to always choose what to listen to or what to watch. You never get any surprises. You are rarely challenged. The stimuli are weak.

What&#x27;s striking to me is that it also deepened the supply of assholes. One would think that after one year under effective house arrest people would be happy to see others and be nicer to each other, but the opposite is true.

Anyone else find dating to be different in the pandemic ... like it&#x27;s harder to connect with people then before?<p>Dating was never real easy for me, but wow since Dec 2020 to now ive went on 20 to 30 dates to new friend meetups (bumble bff) and really nothing materialized. I&#x27;ve even started talking about it with recent dates (since Sept) and meetups cause they bring it up themselves.<p>I thought it was my age which is a factor for sure but those expressing the same sentiment are 15 to 20 years younger then myself. I&#x27;m in my mid 40s. Even though we express the same struggle no connection is made (IDK).

I had a hunch going in that the authors would fail to break down how much more lonely the poor have been compared to the wealthy.<p>Sadly, I was correct. They really didn&#x27;t mention wealth or inequality once.<p>Class pervades every aspect of America&#x27;s problems so deeply that it&#x27;s almost invisible, but that is no excuse to ignore it. Especially when we&#x27;re talking about Harvard research, and especially when we&#x27;re talking about a pandemic that has dramatically exacerbated wealth inequality while extremely disproportionately affecting the poor and minorities.

The pandemic <i>public policy reaction</i> has deepened an epidemic of loneliness.<p>ftfy.

I came here to post my thoughts, but I agree with everything mentioned.<p>Here in baltimore it&#x27;s about fear of being a victim of violence.

you only get what you give. No matter how perfectly designed your city is or your status as homeowner&#x2F;renter you&#x27;re going to have to actually walk up to someone and say &quot;hello&quot;.<p>I feel like a lot of people want companionship pushed to them in the same way an app pushes data.

The loneliness crisis is tough because it can make someone feel like there&#x27;s something wrong with just them. Walking the streets on a weekend night, all you see is groups of friends at sold out restaurants, people on dates, events, etc.

How do they define loneliness? A lot of people are alone but content. Also the older I get the harder it becomes to maintain friendships. People move on socially, financially and geographically.

&gt; The report is based on an online survey of approximately 950 Americans in October 2020. Because of certain data limitations, the data should be considered preliminary. More information is available in the report’s methodology section.<p>- what&#x27;s the baseline? How many people feel lonely on a good day? How has it changed since then?<p>- &quot;online survey&quot; is there a selection bias skewed towards those that are more inclined to identify as lonely?<p>- how does this correlate to how many young adults have a SO &#x2F; are married?

Society sucks. Everything we do ends up only making conditions worse, perhaps its time for a radical new way of living.

I&#x27;m a young GenZ adult. Just woke up and got depressed seeing this headline because it reinforces what I&#x27;ve experienced &amp; felt. Loneliness is inherent to the human body and soul (unless perhaps we get Neuralink or AI friends someday). I am deeply sad over all the social fantasies I never had and probably never will now that I&#x27;m a working adult.

Volunteer. Join a group. Hang out at a hackerspace. Enrol in adult ed.

It says in the abstract that this data is preliminary, and the size of the sample was 950 American adults. I don’t think we can take much away from this study, except that it deserves further investigation.

I&#x27;m okay with people having their own bedroom, but not their own kitchen and living room.<p>I will never understand why it&#x27;s okay to live in places where is possible to have no human contact for weeks.<p>Individualism sucks, and that was brought to us by the war on communism.

people are married to work, get their gratification from porn and buying things<p>downside: no one to talk to

Looking at the key recommendations, there appears to be a policy aspect playing into this as well. If you feel lonely, consider this at the polls - Who is advocating for social infrastructure and having a commitment to more than ourselves, including those who are vulnerable?<p>On the flip side, be wary of those pushing personal liberty above all else and those who are trying to damage public health campaigns and institutions like health care and education.