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.        

This is not America’s first loneliness panic. For much of the country’s history, concern about loneliness has cycled through the national conversation, Claude S. Fischer, a UC Berkeley sociologist, told me. Often, those fears have been spurred by urbanization or technological development: In Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a 1929 examination of Muncie, Indiana, two sociologists suggested that the telephone was keeping people from visiting their neighbors. Vance Packard’s 1972 book, A Nation of Strangers, described a country fractured by people traveling for jobs. Throughout the 20th century, writers and researchers worried about loneliness induced by the introduction of radio, of TV, of cars; now they fret about smartphones. The warnings sometimes have merit, but they also align with a popular kind of folk wisdom, Fischer said: “That once upon a time there was a lot of tight-knit community and everybody was happy and social relations were, quote, unquote, authentic.”

[Read: Why you should want to be alone]

That golden period may never have existed. Social interaction has changed; that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gotten worse. In preindustrial farming communities, people usually had to depend on whoever was around them—mostly family or neighbors—for support. That lack of choice was perhaps comforting but also “very restrictive,” Fay Bound Alberti, a historian of emotions and the author of A Biography of Loneliness, told me. After more people started moving to cities, it became common to make friends who provide distinct benefits—what Keith Hampton, a Michigan State University sociologist, calls “specialized” relationships. Pure friendship, the kind of relationship that’s just about having fun and bonding, blossomed. In fact, the greater cultural value now placed on friendship, Fischer has written, might be one reason people are so worried about loneliness; perhaps we expect deeper fulfillment from our friends than we once did.

Of course, the worry could be warranted this time. From all the distressing headlines, you’d probably think so. But the story of loneliness in contemporary America isn’t so straightforward.

Many of those alarming articles, for starters, cite studies whose results have since been called into question. One 2006 paper reviewed findings from two decades of the General Social Survey, a national poll that asks people about, among other questions, those with whom they discuss “important matters”—and found that from 1985 to 2004, the number of names that participants listed shrank by about a third. Even more shocking, the percentage of respondents who listed zero confidants nearly tripled. But several researchers have highlighted methodological flaws, including errors in coding cases and possible interviewer and respondent fatigue (the later in the survey this question was asked, the more likely interviewers or subjects were to skip it, and the 2004 version posed it near the end).

Hampton told me, too, that the average person might well have fewer people with whom they discuss all kinds of “important matters”; rather, they talk about specific issues with specific people. In one study, he asked about particular topics—with whom, for instance, participants discussed their career, or their health, or their “happiness and life goals”—and found that “almost everyone gets a near-full range of social support,” he told me. In 2011, one of the 2006 study’s authors published a “reexamination” of that initial paper, finding that “social isolation has not become more prevalent.” Other oft-cited socializing studies have suffered from similar oversights.

In recent years, some seemingly solid studies have suggested that Americans are spending more time alone. According to the American Time Use Survey, leisure time spent with other people declined by more than 20 percent from 2003 to 2023. Yet it’s worth noting that the poll considered only the time people spent with others in person. It doesn’t account for the virtual connections that are crucial for so many: those with disabilities; older adults; ostracized queer teens; recent immigrants alone in a new country; anyone who enjoys texting random thoughts to family group chats or old friends throughout the day, or who likes to keep in touch with far-away loved ones. When a book club decides to meet on Zoom because more members can attend, Fischer pointed out, the result is interaction among more people. Even if you think that time spent physically together is superior, discounting remote hangs entirely might give you a picture of American life that sounds more profoundly isolated than it is.        

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Perhaps most important, measuring isolation isn’t a good way to track loneliness. Someone with lots of unsatisfying friendships, or in an unhappy marriage, could easily be lonelier than, say, an introvert who lives alone and has a few close confidants. Some polls do ask participants to report how lonely they feel, or use a measure called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which asks subjects to rate, for instance, how often they feel excluded, or how often it seems as if “people are around you but not with you.” But according to Fischer, that scale is used in experiments with small samples more often than it is employed systematically in large-scale longitudinal studies meant to track trends over time. And comparing data from various polls taken at disparate points in history isn’t a good solution, because each might use entirely different questions, scales, or thresholds at which someone is considered lonely.

Of course, given the dearth of reliable data, it’s also difficult to argue with certainty that loneliness hasn’t gotten worse. Findings vary depending on what period you’re looking at and what population you’re talking about. Young adults, as I’ve written, do seem to be reporting more loneliness than in the past. That might be related to something as prosaic as housing costs, which have driven many people to move in with their parents—and away from where their friends live. But even the coronavirus pandemic didn’t seem to spur a clear increase in reported loneliness, perhaps because hunkering down in early 2020 felt like being part of a communal experience, or because so many started reaching out to loved ones virtually. People are resilient. And in general, across groups and over time, the “idea that there is evidence of large-scale upheaval,” Hampton said, “is really not supported by any kind of data.”

It’s hard to square a finding like that with all the dire warnings—warnings that have become so common as to feel unimpeachable. Thompson argued in his Atlantic cover story that the lack of a loneliness surge suggests that Americans have become so comfortable in their solitude that they’re no longer feeling an instinct to seek out social time. That’s possible. It’s also possible that many Americans are getting the social time they need—and that the ways they interact are, as always, simply evolving.       

If substantial numbers of people report feeling lonely, that’s a problem regardless of how rates stack up against those from other points in time. Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me he was alarmed by the results of a survey of 1,500 American adults he conducted last year: 21 percent of respondents said that in the past 30 days, they’d felt lonely either frequently or almost all of the time. “There are a lot of people who are suffering,” he told me. “We have to do something about it.”

The trouble is that it’s not clear exactly what needs to be addressed. Weissbourd’s survey took the extra step of asking participants why they’re lonely and got all kinds of answers. Some people described an existential loneliness: They don’t feel connected to their country, or they don’t feel that their place in the world is important. Some said they can’t be their authentic self with others. Some said they don’t feel good about who they are. “Are people looking for a name for a sort of amorphous stew of feelings they’re having right now?” Weissbourd wondered. Or perhaps they’re experiencing depression or anxiety, both conditions alongside which loneliness commonly occurs, he noted. Fischer mentioned that after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11, researchers recorded spikes in reported loneliness—even though these events were unlikely to suddenly reduce people’s social ties. Maybe the respondents were just expressing distress.

[Read: How much alone time do kids need?]

This might all seem like splitting hairs, but it is possible—essential, even—to be precise about shaggy concepts. Take happiness, Fischer said: Researchers have studied what people mean when they say they’re happy or unhappy, how the wording of the question can affect survey answers, and the conditions under which people are likely to answer one way or the other; those empirical inquiries have led us to a deeper understanding of a sprawling, multifaceted experience. Given the cultural moment that loneliness is having, Fischer told me he wouldn’t be surprised if we have many more studies—and hopefully more nuanced ones—to draw on in 10 years. But for now, we don’t. We have no idea whether the loneliness of a high-school student feeling excluded is the same as the loneliness felt by a 30-year-old lacking a sense of purpose, or a 50-year-old in a bad marriage, or an 85-year-old recent widower.  

Pulling apart these varied hardships might matter a great deal for finding tailored solutions. If people aren’t seeing their friends often enough, maybe we need more social infrastructure so they can easily meet pals in public spaces. If Americans are hungering for a collective sense of meaning, Weissbourd told me, the best approach might be to get people involved in volunteer opportunities. For those who socialize plenty but still feel alone—well, some of them might benefit from more solitude, to take a breather and reflect on who and what gives them real fulfillment.

More than one of these challenges can be taken seriously at once, but the time and resources required to tackle all of them are limited: Only so many policy initiatives can be dreamed up, fought for, and funded. Loneliness might even be the wrong priority altogether. Fischer pointed out that the country has other, very real public-health issues that need attention: preparing for the next pandemic, addressing gun violence, reversing the shortening of the average American lifespan. None of that is to say that our social lives are perfect; as patterns of socializing shift, something is almost always lost. But when it comes to identifying what’s ailing the nation, “loneliness” may no longer be a sufficient answer.

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