TL;DR
People are not lonelier than they used to be, they are just alone far more of the time, and a mind left on its own turns to slime because it only takes shape when other people prod it.
Everyone since the pandemic has been saying we are living through an epidemic of loneliness. Anyone who actually looks at the data finds something else. Someone takes one number from today, imagines a line stretching back into the past, and declares the trend alarming — target first, arrow afterwards.
What the data never said
One survey finds 76% of adults in California are lonely. But what would those same people have said ten years ago? Possibly exactly the same thing.
The other trick is slicing the results by age: young people are the loneliest, so phones and social media must be draining them dry. Yet nobody knows whether this is an age effect — everyone is lonely when young, and grows out of it — or a cohort effect, with this generation doomed for life. Compare today's teenagers with teenagers thirty years ago and loneliness has actually fallen.
What is rising is not loneliness. It is aloneness.
Alone, and oddly fine with it
Americans spend half as much weekend time with friends as they did twenty years ago. Between 1998 and 2018, people living by themselves spent steadily more time alone. The slide began long before covid.
The trouble is that people do not mind solitude nearly as much as they should. In one study, participants were deprived of either food or social contact for ten hours. Food cravings shot up fast and uniformly; social cravings rose raggedly, and by the end one in ten reported wanting company no more than when they started.
This is scurvy. Someone short of vitamin C does not suddenly crave oranges. They simply weaken, and their teeth loosen. Sailors drifted for months at sea and nobody asked for a lemon.
Administer the orange juice by force
For our ancestors, staying alive meant staying near other people, so the brain never bothered to build a sensitive social thermostat. Now that we live in single rooms, order dinner in and work from home, solitude is easy, and that sluggish switch never sounds the alarm.
It damages us anyway. Chronically isolated people are more likely to get depressed, suffer strokes and dementia, and die younger. Prisoners in solitary confinement sink into a stupor. A Spanish woman who spent 500 days alone in a cave began flirting with her cameras, hearing shamans drum, and accusing her equipment of poisoning her with sound waves.
So the fix takes a bit of brute force, like making yourself drink water: sometimes you are not thirsty and drink anyway, sometimes you are not lonely and go out anyway. Video calls are not enough, and neither is talking only to the people you live with. As for the dose — nobody knows the daily recommended intake of friendship.
In one line: hell is not other people. Hell is when nobody reminds you to eat an orange and your teeth fall out.
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