The myth of the loneliness epidemic | Hacker News Reader

The myth of the loneliness epidemic

asteriskmag.com

48 pointsLuc56 comments

This article seems to a lot of fluff, but one thing I generally dislike in arguments is pulling some historical period, quoting similar complaints from that time, and using this to imply that because a problem has existed before it's the norm.

History has had many ups and down, and instead of saying that anything is "normal", you should ask if those periods really were downturns that needed solutions.

Societies have always had issues, but that doesn't mean that the issues we have right now are not something to be addressed.

Agree.

Right out of the gate, "When it comes to friendship, this isn’t the first time that authorities have cried wolf."

Not a great analogy since ultimately in the fable there did appear a wolf.

Parable notwithstanding, your comment is a critique of the standard usage of the expression "cried wolf". To cry wolf specifically means to sound a [false] alarm when there isn't a need for it.

Raising a false alarm doesn’t mean the underlying issue isn’t there.

It just means the cause of the alarm is unrelated to the issue.

Sure, but people don't split hairs this hard in everyday conversation. Everyone will knoe what you mean when you say someone "cried wolf," it means they raised an alarm about nothing.

Since we're splitting the hairs already, all what the metaphor says is that false positives are bad for the system.

You're right on this. The problem is that in real life it's sometimes harmful to have false positives (putting innocent people in prison) and sometimes you should side with caution and accept some false positives to make sure you identify the problems (better postpone a space launch if something might be bad until you've verified it's actually ok).

If you can't think for yourself, your only option is to always use one of these modes.

A 2021 US census found that the average American spent 2 hours 45 minutes with their friends per week. A decade before that it was 6.5. It's probably been replaced by online interaction, but it is online interaction that feels so lonely.

Were it not for online interactions, I'd be disconnected from 90% of my friends 99% of the time, and would likely have fewer friends.

Perhaps you'd make local friends, and a found family.

Not only I first met my wife online, I proposed her online. We originally lived thousands of miles away, and had near zero probability to physically meet by chance.

We're together for more than quarter of a century.

The data says otherwise. It says the lack of online interaction would spur you and your friends to meet up more in person, or for you to seek out friends that you could see in person. You can't take just one part of 'if this didn't exist' and assume nothing else would change.

Just what I wanted to say as well, but I guess people really are bad at making counterfactual judgements.

Indeed. This is especially the case for men who seem to have abandoned the concept of creating clubs and other male spaces to hang out, and instead of fixing that problem have merely gotten very jealous of the small communities that HAVE built spaces and clubs to the point of vindictiveness.

No kids, the "Fresh and Fit" podcast is not a replacement for what we used to have. Spending hours crying about how women are the worst is just not a productive, pro-social, or beneficial use of your time. Real life doesn't prioritize hate so much, but on the internet, hate is so much more effective at driving engagement, it's the only thing available without immense effort.

> The data says otherwise.

Cite the data. I imagine it does not support your certainty that this individual would react in the way you describe. Even in the absence of any other information you can probably only claim to know with some probability less than 1.

I’m not just being pedantic here. This is a gross misapplication of the results of a study. It also ignores the extra knowledge he has about himself.

How can you possibly know -- if (as seems likely) in your entire adult life, you've never known a world not mediated by online interactions?

Do you think that in the pre-internet world, people had 90 percent less contact with their friends than they do now?

Enough of my adult life occurred during the time when significant chunks of population, often the overwhelming majority, were offline. I could very well compare. Somebody's reachability online, or at least via email or fidonet messages, radically improved the chances of continued contact and regular face-to-face meetings, whether it originated offline or online. The world not mediated by online connectivity was radically narrower. It required physical proximity (usually the same neighborhod, sometimes the same city), and exchanging phone numbers, an approximation of "online", was crucial for most longer-term relationships.

We can also compare with our parents and the amount of friends they have and meet. They don't know how to use the internet enough and are not used to treat internet friends as friends, so they are a very good control group. How much time they spend with friends, beyond the rare birthday parties? How often do they call each other? Or the famous "going to church" argument - church which is once a week and takes 2 hours where most of it you don't interact with anybody just sit and listen. Plus after a certain age most of their old friends are gone and that loneliness hits hard because there's no replacement process.

This is exactly the kind of claim the article should've rebutted, if it's a myth. If they can't (because it's true) that makes it seem like there is a loneliness epidemic.

This article pokes holes and casts doubt on a concept of a loneliness epidemic, just to conclude, "Americans have been repeatedly warned about loneliness and about the loss of friendship. The alarms, of course, may not always be false. History might prove the 2010s to be one of those times where there was some reason for concern — at least about young men." And then "...because false alarms come with a price, particularly in diverting our attention from other, less amorphous matters, such as economic dislocations, violence, and real epidemics."

If you put the bottom line up front, the rest of the article doesn't support that conclusion. It doesn't address the resources that we're spending on loneliness, or what's a better use of those resources.

There's another swing and a miss for the conclusion a little earlier too. "If there has been increasing chatter about loneliness, then, it has been more the result of higher expectations and greater self-reflection — especially among the chattering classes — rather than greater isolation."

So people aren't more lonely, they just feel more lonely. But that's not true loneliness. Again, you could write an interesting article on that, but this article isn't.

This article ultimately comes off as a call to inaction because the alternative is believing there's a loneliness epidemic and being tempted to do something about it.

Have people even actually spend any serious amount of any resource on it?

I only see people talking.

How do you even "fix" loneliness? If you don't know that, you can't allocate resources. Plenty of research studies have been done on loneliness to find a silver bullet.

For most people, it's not like there aren't opportunities to meet people and talk to people. It's well understood that no matter how many people you get exposed to for a period of time, meaningful relationships can't be forced.

Plenty of lonely people in big cities going to social events.

Yes, I do agree that not knowing how one can solve it is a huge contributor to nobody trying to solve it.

But the entire article is complaining that we should stop trying to solve it so we can go do something more important. So, the entire article is high-order bullshit.

Just this bit:

> For most people, it's not like there aren't opportunities to meet people and talk to people.

I believe this is very wrong.

    > “modern technologies have made friendship, romance, and social connection look easier than ever, and therefore the absence of such relationships has become all the harder to bear.”

Has it? One could say that technology has increased the chance of incidence, but it has also increased fragmentation. So Tinder might create a "social connection", but one that is probably weaker than had you met through friends or met through a common activity or met while hiking the same trail or met through work.

Making the incidence of connection easier does not equate to having deeper connections as technology has created -- to extents -- more silos, more fragmentation.

I don't know a single person who is using dating apps and is happier for it. Occasionally people get lucky, but that definitely is not the rule. I know this because I attend lots of meetups and speed dating events. There is a bias there but, even outside those circles, dating apps have an astonishingly poor reputation. If anything, their use probably correlated with generalized unhappiness and a lack of fulfillment.

Granted, I don't think dating apps are the very root of the problem, but they have certainly done a lot to damage how people get together.

As far as technology allowing people to make friends, I sometimes see that happen, but I think friend-making technologies are more of a response to a symptom than an actual enhancement of human friendship dynamics.

From what I have observed, many people today are hesitant to establish friendships, accept others despite minor differences, and make an effort to maintain a friendship, or even just allyship. Modern life is so comfortable and easy, even for many of those not in the upper eschelons of society, that people are constantly weighing the pros and cons of interacting with other people. When merely staying at home is so comfortable, people are always deciding whether to just stay home and be tittilated by home entertainment and a fridge full of food. In other words, when life is too good, human interaction is treated more and more like a transaction.

Many people also don't know how to make connections in adulthood even when they are using assistive technologies. I was talking to a fellow Meetup.com organizer yesterday, and he told he thought it was remarkable how almost nobody seems to trade contact info at the end of an event despite everything having gone rather well. I myself didn't discover the magic of simply asking to exchange numbers until I was in my 30s. While very few people make the initiation, virtually everyone is willing to give out a number. No one has ever told me no, besides women I tried to ask out in my early 20s.

So yes, I think you are right that even if tech facilitated more interactions (which I am still skeptical of), that doesn't mean the majority of those interactions are leading to anything. The fact the author of this paper cites romance as being made easier by tech makes me very suspicious as to whether they know what they're talking about.

I am lucky enough to have met my wife through Church as it gives me access to a large network and community events I can attend but I can't even imagine attempting to find her through a dating app, it would be probably impossible for us to match.

So many people are struggling and in part I think it's due to having access to unlimited entertainment at our fingertips.. going out and meeting people is difficult, it takes effort and doesn't always work.. it's much easier to just stay home and watch Netflix or play video games or scroll on social media. Looking back, the trend accelerated when "smart phones" became a thing, before that, I recall people going out more often and streets were always bursting with social activities.

Of course I wish I could preach "going to Church" as a solution, but it's not realistic, not everyone shares the same beliefs, yet I know the community aspect of it would be a net positive for many people.

I hope the secular world can bring back their 3rd places without the religious aspect of it somehow.

I can accept the loneliness epidemic of today may not be unique to this time period in Western civ, but that doesn't discount the need to address it.

> The short term, however, may be different. After decades of insubstantial change — all those alarms notwithstanding — a few indicators point to a genuine drop in numbers of friends, or activity with friends in the 2010s

Seems a bit like cherry-picking to say 'the short term' when it covers a decade and a half of data, including the current period which is spurring the latest concern. This period directly contradicts the title and as a parent I can definitely see this issue is real, at least for my extremely limited sample size. Maybe a better title should have been 'The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic is Finally Coming True"

Here's the trouble with this article. I fear this problem will only get worse. In the first paragraph, various authors are quoted from the 20th century. Except for Putnam and a few of those after, I've never heard of any of them. Yes, it is clear that the idea of a loneliness epidemic is not new, but simply because it was mentioned and/or identified in the past, without more context around the citations (there have always been "fringe" authors, even the Greeks had them), it is not convincing that it was a mainstream problem before e.g. Putnam and others.

A similar article at The Atlantic from September by Olga Khazan: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/loneliness...

I think both articles make some good points, esp outside the topic of loneliness. We are defining the role of 'friend' differently now than we did in decades past, as well as the activity of friending. Historically, most of us might have defined someone as a friend if we spoke with them only once a year to spend a day fishing or a weekend visiting their town. Now we connect with dozens of people much more frequently but much more briefly. We actually count our number of friends and publicize that number as if it a longer list were an accomplishment unto itself. That's new.

We also seem more resistant now to dedicating a larger chunk of time to share with another person, and probably do so much more rarely with multiple others. Maybe that's because it's so much easier now to schedule our days more densely than ever before, and tuck nuclear family and various chores into smaller slots now. Regardless, I think friendship is likely to be less less spontaneous and less casual now than in decades past.

This article reads like a sophisticatedly typeset data dump commandeered by the author's academic cachet.

The author's original blog posts look more interesting to me and appear to be less skewed towards whatever the interests of Asterisk are.

https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/an-epi...

https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/2023/09/27/an-epi...

My impression of his original thoughts after a cursory glance is that he isn't denying the phenomenon as much as he is questioning whether "loneliness" is the right thing to focus on. And that sounds like something worth considering.

It seems all that he does is question. The closest he gets to proposing an alternative solution is in his first post you linked, "One caution is that, like talk of suicide, public talk of loneliness can spur more of it, as more people engage in what psychologists call 'rumination.'"

It's an interesting, threatening line of thinking after decades of mental health awareness campaigns.

What else would he consider a social contagion? Will we stop feeling lonely if we stop talking about how lonely we are, or is the cat out of the bag? How could we coordinate whether addressing future mental health issues will help or hurt?

The author of this article is a 76-year-old single institution career academic who's feel for the world is apparently constrained to academic journals, articles written by academics and legacy media, and a communiqué from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (which just so happens to cite the author as a reference throughout it).

I say this and juxtapose it against my previous comment where I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt because the Asterisk article was so bad I couldn't get through it and the sentence above was my initial reaction to it, which to some may come across like an ad hominem attack.

But I think the fact that this man has spent over half his life in the social sciences contributes to his inability to comprehend a human experience that emanates from the spirit (loneliness, social dispossession) and is not as easily expressed in data as what he thinks is more important in comparison (gun control, education reform, health reform, etc) and are more readily quantifiable.

The act of questioning loneliness in relationship to other factors is interesting, I do think agree with you that his applied line of thinking is dangerous and dehumanizing.

In fact, I think the kind of dehumanization that occurs when the human experience is comprehended through graphs, charts, numbers, polls and surveys, control groups, institutionalized methodologies and ontologies and obscure Greek letters in two-column PDFs has a lot to do with what the author is in doubt over.

Asterisk is usually pretty good, but this article seems like an exception.

The title is the only mention of the word myth?

It seems to me a great deal of the article remains shallow and im unconvinced. Pointing out there's been social scares many decades ago, decades apart, and trying to conflate this to being a hoax doesnt jive with me.

I think social media is HELPING the social crisis. Certainly not causing. The crisis predates social media. covid only exacerbated.

The actual problem derives heavily from very popular government policies that had the unintended consequences of greatly reducing in person social interaction.

The people who ignored government, they are still happy and not lonely. Everyone else well I recommend betterhelp for mental health problems.

Seems the article is about discounting the issue simply by redefining the word "friend".

>Seems the article is about discounting the issue simply by redefining the word "friend".

I noticed the same.

>relative, client, neighbor, fellow platoon member, whatever

The author doesnt think clients or neighbours can be friends? That's just straight up doing it wrong.

A platoon member who isnt a friend? is that even possible?

The primary "Loneliness" epidemic that gets talked about today is basically just the mainstreamification of incel/4chan talking points. "Loneliness" is really trying to figure out why young men/women aren't dating, partying, doing drugs, etc.

This article explicitly targets only "friends", rather than what the media is actually talking about today.

I wouldn’t say that downward trends in young people dating which can be judged by many consensus summary statistics ranging from a collapsing demographic pyramid to surveys of relationship satisfaction to condom sales to percentage of the population that self-reports as virgins well into adulthood is a “4chan talking point”. It probably gets talked about on 4chan, but it gets talked about in much more mainstream settings as well.

In places like South Korea the collapsing population is such an extreme crisis that the government gets involved very aggressively as a matter of long-term economic policy and national security.

The South Korean government doesn't seem to be doing much about misogyny. Until they get serious about that, a lot of young women are just going to opt out. The same applies to many other developed countries, to a lesser extent.

Misogyny, like any form of large scale hate and persecution is strictly bad, and it's strictly good when society decreases it. Not being Korean myself I'm not well-positioned to comment on the current status quo or what the government could be doing about it there.

In America we've made enormous progress on institutionalized misogyny even if it's a bit of an embarrassment that it's taken so long. Women didn't even have the franchise at a federal level until 1920, losing to the Emirate of Afghanistan by a year. And we've had some reversals on reproductive rights recently, it's not a monotone improvement.

But broadly by most any metric you care to choose from college graduation rates to life expectancy to likelihood to be incarcerated to likelihood to commit suicide: women are doing better than men on a lot of really important things.

I don't mean to imply that there isn't a capital-P Patriarchy: there is.

The meme that is destroying this conversation is in considering any man a patriarch, when almost by definition a vanishing minority of men are. An old white guy who is the CEO of a big company or holds public office? Probably almost certainly a patriarch, probably almost certainly enjoys absurd privilege at the expense of others.

But a typical white guy in 2024? He can't even take care of himself in a system that has no use for him. He's in no position to oppress anyone.

> The primary "Loneliness" epidemic that gets talked about today is basically just the mainstreamification of incel/4chan talking points.

That's just one angle. There's also the angle where watching other people live great lives online—however illusory such perception is—makes us feel more pessimistic about our own lives and contentedness. There's also the angle of disappearing third places. There's also the angle a relentlessly commodified society is alienating. There's also the angle that watching millions of people die from a preventable illness makes us feel like less of a society. There's also the angle of the disappearance of community structures like Church from modern life causes this perception of loneliness. There's the angle that cultural pluralism causes us to perceive ourselves as more atomized than we are. Etc etc. Discussions on the topic are clearly far, far more varied than just those had by bitter young misogynists.

Do not take my observation of this as an endorsement of any of the above points, please.

> The primary "Loneliness" epidemic that gets talked about today is basically just the mainstreamification of incel/4chan talking points.

How is associating an idea with some tiny subculture a worthwhile comment on its merits? Is the implication that social scientists and statisticians claiming a loneliness epidemic on the payroll of big incel? Or is the implication that if you want to discuss the fact that people are becoming more isolated, it means you're an incel?

> "Loneliness" is really trying to figure out why young men/women aren't dating, partying, doing drugs, etc.

These are indicators. Nobody (except the party supply industry or the alcohol industry) is talking about people not partying for the sake of the parties, or not doing drugs for the sake of the drugs. They're talking about it because lonely people are unhealthier and less happy.

Inceldom, along with most of the recent rise in extremism, is a negative, damaging manifestation of a complex process of social disintegration that is quite real. One can acknowledge the it without approving of its consequences.

The title of this article really irks me. Calling something a myth/conspiracy to downplay something very real is not only condescending it makes you lack empathy and self-awareness.

The overwhelming digital connectivity and urbanization will naturally give rise to loneliness as humans have long evolved to be social. We are actually seeing deurbanization taking for the first time in East Asia and young moving away from urban centres for the countryside.

All this modernization that ultimately comes at the cost of human connectivity and community and I don't like the choice of words the author uses to push their idea

I think some of it is people just refuse to go outside and do things. There's plenty of opportunities if you want! But the world isn't going to come to you.

How does moving to the country help fix loneliness? That sounds counterintuitive. Proximity to people should provide more chances for social interaction, not fewer.

yeah, i was with that comment until that point. i find it very hard to naturally meet or run across people in the suburbs, though i suppose in smaller rural areas if you are engaged in the community in some way you'd likely see the same people over and over and that could perhaps build your sense of community.

i don't know that the increasing online-ification (or whatever) of the world really has a stronger impact in the city. if anything, as i start to push away from things being online, i find that i'm able to walk or public transit to a place that i can get basically anything i want, and over the past decade or so i've met people through bars, through restaurants, through volunteering, and through other activities around town. i run across people in the street all the time, because they're not in cars - so i have impromptu conversations with friends, neighbors and folks i know from local businesses randomly on street corners. this is a set of benefits that basically necessitates urban density.

i agree that it feels like a city naturally offers you more opportunities to find your tribe offline. if you like music, there are lots of bands and shows. if you're an artist, there are probably others working in the same medium around you. if you like food, you have restaurants to explore. if you like drinks, there's bars. i've been to many rural towns where the community seems to revolve primarily around a singular institution (very often a church) with the folks who aren't part of it trying to make do on the fringes or building smaller support networks.

I mean we have suicide statistics.

People are literally killing themselves.

Edit: I reached comment limit, but I want to respond to the "correlation/causation" response:

I get what you are saying from pure statistics, but the basic premise is that "loneliness" ... don't get me started on how you define that aside from the usual bullshit social sciences survey crap ... isn't a problem.

But is it a stretch to take this sentence:

"modern life, struggles with meaning, increased competition, mental health issues, stubbornness against seeking help, access to deadly weapons/knowledge"

isn't all basically saying "loneliness"?

And by people killing themselves, I mean men, because also this article is possibly/probably doing the almost-all-female psychology male blindness thing.

Humans are social creatures and need social interaction and connection, but men aren't social connection developers, especially in the Land of the Stoic Cowboy.

Loneliness the concept is IMO deeply semantically intertwined with loss of meaning, economic disenfranchisement, maintenance of sanity, feeling trust in society to get help, paranoia/clinging to weapons for surrogate psychological defense.

The scary thing is that the suicide rate increase in old men has basically stabilized, instead suicide growth is in YOUNG MEN, which are critical to the demographic / GDP / economic performance of the US, especially if we are entering a period of deglobalization and increased nearshore manufacturing.

Depends on the time horizon you choose. If you look at US stats, we're only 1.5 suicides per 100000 people above a previous post-WWII peak in the early 80s. Suicide rates in the first half of the 20th century were downright apocalyptic by modern standards, sometimes reaching 22 per 100000 before sharply declining post-WWII. If you want to look outside the US, Japan used to(~2000-~2010) hover at ~20 suicides per 100000, compared to our current all-time high of 14.

The increase is significant, but I wouldn't call it definitive proof of an urgent crisis.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/suicide

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...

I don't think "all-time" means what you think it means...

That's fair. It's more of a post-WWII peak. I've edited the post.

If you roll in deaths from substance abuse (particularly opioids) and other “deaths of despair” the figures are a bit more striking. Zoom in on one a few gigantic demographic blocks and they become more striking still.

One would hope that people are feeling less desperate today than a period of time that includes two world wars and a Great Depression, that’s a really low bar for what many claim is a great time to be alive.

Clear-cut suicide is incredibly difficult to pull off psychologically and represents the tip of the iceberg. Look at depression, addiction, overdose, homelessness, extremism.

It's supposedly the greatest time to be alive (as opposed to war times), but an increasing proportion of people are voting against that with their lives. And the damage of that accrues in those left behind, in families and communities.

Correlation, not causation. The logic you used is the reason the SpuriousCorrelations website exists.

Palo Alto (adjacent to Sanford University) was host to clusters of suicides that appeared epidemiological and were studied by national researchers. [1] The pressures of modern life, struggles with meaning, increased competition, mental health issues, stubbornness against seeking help, access to deadly weapons/knowledge, etc. are all confounding issues.

[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2016/07/21/cdc-releases-preliminar...

> Correlation, not causation. The logic you used is the reason the SpuriousCorrelations website exists.

To declare that a correlation is spurious with no evidence is far worse than saying that a correlation might indicate a relationship. Even saying something is a confounding issue implies there's a relationship to be confounded (not that Palo Alto is typical of anywhere.)

And "the pressures of modern life," "struggles with meaning," generic "mental health issues," and "stubbornness against seeking help?" Are those supposed to be unrelated to loneliness, too? Is access to "deadly knowledge" a real or new problem?

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