How to Fight Loneliness: Social Isolation Is Impacting our Culture and Politics
...our growing epidemic of loneliness is killing us and leading some to want to kill rather than love their neighbors.
By Jim Miller
How to fight loneliness? I have thought about this a lot during and in the wake of the pandemic as we have moved from the necessary separation, to slow the spread of disease, and to what, for many, has become prolonged isolation and atomization. I see it in my students and colleagues at the college where I work who seem to have forgotten the value of genuine social interaction versus the virtual variety.
More broadly, psychologists like Jean Twenge at San Diego State University have documented how too much screen time may be increasing depression and suicide amongst teens. Something, it appears, has gone deeply wrong.
Back in January, I wrote a column for this space about an insightful Guardian article by Anton Cebalo who asked whether America was suffering a “social recession.” Cebalo observes that, “We have no clear, comparative basis on which to judge what will emerge from the growing number of people who feel lost, lonely or invisible.” He goes on to note the increase in friendlessness, distrust, and profound alienation and ponders how losing the ties that bind us might be deeply corrosive to our civic life.
Now, just a few months later, the US Surgeon General has issued a stark warning about the mental and physical impacts of this American epidemic of loneliness. As the Guardian piece on his statement puts it:
There’s an ailment linked to increased heart attacks, depression, diabetes, crime and premature death in the US, and it’s affecting people no matter where they live or who they are: loneliness.
The US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, released an advisory on loneliness and isolation on Tuesday and urged people and public officials to treat the matter with the same urgency as other serious conditions such as obesity or drug abuse as it continues to surge, affecting about half of the people living in the US.
“Right now, millions of people are telling us through their stories and statistics that their tank is running on empty when it comes to social connection,” he said.
Echoing Cebalo, the Surgeon General’s advisory underscores the rise of friendlessness and the erosion of trust. As we interact with each other far less frequently in community settings from churches to grocery stores, there are profound social consequences.
It is, Murthy reminds us, “hard to hate people up close.” But when the institutions that previously brought us together no longer do, it makes us, as he puts it, “less civically engaged” and more vulnerable to divisive forces that lead to dehumanization.
In sum, our growing epidemic of loneliness is killing us and leading some to want to kill rather than love their neighbors. I have argued in this space that the rebuilding of community is perhaps the most important thing progressives can do to support a humane, democratic agenda that empowers people and helps sustain us. The beloved community is the antidote to the lonely crowd that breeds the kind of misdirected rage that ails us.
Absent that, I am reminded of the melancholic and menacing lines of the Wilco song, “How to Fight Loneliness”: “How to Fight Loneliness?/Smile all the time/Shine your teeth till meaningless/Sharpen them with lies.”