The Myth of a Loneliness Epidemic
No one would blame you for thinking that we’re in the midst of an unprecedented global loneliness emergency. The United Kingdom and Japan have named “loneliness ministers” to tackle the problem. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a pressing public-health concern, and then-President Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory warning about an “epidemic of loneliness.” American commentators have painted a bleak portrait of a nation collapsing into ever more distant and despairing silos. And polls do suggest that a lot of people are lonely—some of the time, at least.
But a close look at the data indicates that loneliness may not be any worse now than it has been for much of history. It’s tough to track: Not many surveys look at the trends over time, and those that do don’t date back very far. Some measure the time that people spend alone or the number of close friends they have, but these metrics are proxies for isolation, which isn’t the same as loneliness (as my colleague Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month) and doesn’t always predict it. Comparing social habits across historical periods is tricky, too, because the context—what friendship means to people, what emotional needs they have, how much fulfillment they expect their relationships to give them—keeps shifting. A 2022 review of research on changes in loneliness concluded that existing studies “are inconsistent and therefore do not support sweeping claims of a global loneliness epidemic.”
The greatest difficulty with measuring loneliness—and deciding how much to focus on ending it—may be that we don’t really know what loneliness is. Different people, researchers told me, seem to mean different things when they say they’re lonely: Some want more time with friends; some yearn to be seen for who they are; some feel disconnected from a collective identity or sense of purpose. What those experiences tell us about society’s ills—or whether they tell any coherent story at all—remains unclear. And if nations are going to devote precious resources to solving loneliness, they should know what it is they’re trying to fix.
