We’re living through an epidemic of loneliness and everybody knows it, except for one small group: people who have actually looked at the data.
Much of what appears to be a loneliness epidemic is, in fact, a well-intentioned misunderstanding. However, there is a real epidemic out there—one that is far stranger and more sinister. I’ll get to its causes and cures in a moment, but first:
I AM CONCERNED BY THE CONCERNING TREND THAT I JUST IMAGINED
When people think they’re documenting a concerning trend, they often get a little loosey-goosey with the facts. I don’t think anyone does this on purpose—no one is getting rich selling anti-loneliness pills (yet). But it means that claims about the loneliness epidemic are often tainted by two statistical sins that tend to go undetected.
First, someone will present one actual data point showing how many people feel lonely today, they’ll imply a data point from the past where people were less lonely, and then they’ll conclude, based on the trendline that they just made up, that something very bad has happened. For example, in this paper, researchers find that 76% of adults in California and 78% of adults in the Chinese province of Anhui are lonely, and then they ask why this “unprecedented worldwide rise in loneliness” has occurred. But we only know how these folks are feeling today—we have no idea what they would have said if we asked them yesterday, or a year ago, or ten years ago. It’s possible they’ve always been this lonely.1
The second bit of malfeasance is concluding that you’ve discovered a trend in loneliness when you’ve simply divided up the results by age, like this:
When you see a graph like that, it’s almost impossible not to rush to conclusions—these poor young people, sucked away from their friends by the black holes of YouTube and Instagram!
The faulty assumption here is that older people have never been lonely and that younger people will remain lonely forever. We don’t know if this is an age effect (maybe every generation grows out of its youthful loneliness) or a cohort effect (maybe kids these days, unlike their parents and grandparents, are doomed to lifetimes of loneliness). One way to separate these effects is to compare today’s kids to yesterday’s kids. And when you do that, you see declines, not increases:
More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.
That doesn’t mean everything is fine. There is, in fact, another epidemic lurking next door...
REAL DATA, IMAGINARY FRIENDS
Although the data does not show that people are more lonely, it does show that people are more alone. (Derek Thompson has made this point particularly well.) In the US, time spent with friends on the weekends has fallen by half in the past 20 years. According to the American Time Use Survey, pals are out and solitude is in:
This is mainly a recession in hanging out—most of the increase in alone time has come from people spending less time with folks outside their households2:
That 2022 time point could be a pandemic hangover, but time spent with non-household members was already dropping long before covid appeared. Indeed, from 1998 to 2018, people who live by themselves started spending much more time alone overall:
We’ve got a puzzle here. People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to. So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?
No, it’s not fine. Isolated people are more likely to get depressed, suffer a heart attack or a stroke, develop dementia, and catch a cold; they straight-up die sooner. (The “loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day” meme is a bit dubious, but it’s also not crazy.) Those findings all come from correlational studies, but when you inflict isolation on someone instead, you quickly see some massive and concerning effects. Prisoners in solitary confinement often sink into a stupor, their thoughts become obsessive and delusional, and they get agitated and irritable. (I’ve heard many people complain of similar but milder things happening to their elderly parents who live alone.)
Here’s one extreme case that’s instructive: when a Spanish woman went into a cave alone for 500 days, to both set a record and prove a point, she turned loopy. She ended up flirting with her GoPro cameras, hallucinating the sound of shamans beating drums, and accusing her electrical equipment of poisoning her with sound waves. “There is no past, there is no future,” she later told a reporter. “Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.”
Remember 2017, when everybody was making slime at home? Remember how the coolest slimes were the ones that are liquid when undisturbed, but turn solid when you squeeze or poke them? The human mind is kind of like that slime: it only has shape when prodded and pushed by the presence of other people. When left to its own devices, it turns to ooze. And that sticky, shapeless substance provides the perfect Petri dish for all of our current pathologies. The penchant for voting for extremists, the hyperfixation on gambling away your life savings on sports and crypto, the dream of perpetual gooning—these are the disordered desires of a mind that’s been liquified by solitude.
Too much alone time is clearly bad for us, but it doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it should. So the real mystery of the loneliness epidemic is: where is it? Why are we all sitting alone in our houses and slowly melting into puddles of slime, like the “this is fine” meme dog, but without the fire?
To answer that question, we need to understand another modern malady. Namely, scurvy.
TOPSY-SCURVY
If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you’ll start to feel tired and weak, your joints will hurt, your legs will swell, you’ll get spots on your skin, your teeth with fall out, you’ll feel grumpy all the time (understandably), and eventually, you’ll die. All of this can be prevented with a few tablespoons of lemon juice, but people suffering from scurvy do not develop a hankering for citrus. They will suffer and wither and collapse and never even ask for a grapefruit.
So not only are we unable to synthesize vitamin C ourselves—making us one of the few unlucky mammals who can’t—we are also apparently unable to desire vitamin C. This seems like a rather odd design flaw. If evolution didn’t endow us with a vitamin C dispenser, why couldn’t it at least endow us with a vitamin C detector and desire-er?
It’s easier to make sense of this when you think in terms of cybernetic psychology. I’ve written about this theory before (review here, expansion here), but here’s a quick recap:
Imagine the mind as a big stack of thermostats. In addition to regulating temperature, these thermostats try to keep all sorts of mission-critical variables at the correct levels—we’ve got a food-stat to make sure we don’t starve, a sleep-stat to make sure we get enough rest, a pain-stat to protect the body from damage, and so on.
Whenever one of these control systems—the general term for various -stats—detects that its target variable is out of whack, it tries to restore balance. When you haven’t eaten enough, for example, the food-stat starts sending you messages like “burritos sure are yummy” until you finally put food in your mouth. And once you’re full, the food-stat tries to stop you from bursting your stomach by sending you messages like “NEVER MIND BURRITOS ARE GROSS”.3
Our control systems have been good enough to keep us alive for several hundred thousand years. But they can go haywire when we subject them to modern environments for which they did not evolve, and that’s exactly what happens in the case of scurvy.
We don’t know exactly how our food-stat functions, but there’s a good chance it contains subsystems that look out for particular macronutrients: a carb-stat, perhaps, or a protein-stat, sugar-stat, salt-stat, and so on. Whatever those subsystems are, they’re enough to make us eat an omnivorous diet that provides sufficient vitamin C, which happens to appear in lots of different foods, like chickpeas, potatoes, cauliflower, and polar bear meat (yes, really).
That’s why scurvy doesn’t seem to have been a big problem for our ancestors. Although there are a few ancient accounts of sicknesses that sound kind of like scurvy, and there were unmistakable cases during military campaigns when the food situation turned dire, scurvy didn’t really hit the scene until the 1500s, when we figured out how to build boats big and tough enough to spend months at sea, with nary a glass of MinuteMaid in sight.4
You can see where I’m going with this: we are not living through an epidemic of loneliness. We are living through an epidemic of social scurvy.
SOCIAL SCURVY
Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation. In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it. In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence. And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.
Of course, humans don’t completely lack the capacity to desire companionship the way we lack the capacity to desire vitamin C. We do get lonely; we just don’t get lonely enough. Compared to, say, our food-stats, our social-stats are rather anemic. When people starve, they’ll become obsessed with food; they’ll fantasize about opening restaurants and going hog wild at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and these desires will only increase until the person either eats or dies. When someone starves socially, however, they don’t develop an overwhelming desire to go to a rave. They do not daydream about all the lovely chit-chat they’ll have when they’re allowed to see their friends again, nor do they concoct elaborate plans for their next birthday party. They may feel lonely, they may report a sense of longing, but mostly, they’ll just wither.5
I know this feeling—or really, this lack of feeling—because I have suffered from it myself. When I started to feel very bad during the pandemic, the signal I got from my brain was not “hey maybe we should spend more time with other people”. It was more like, “hey everything feels bad and it will never feel better”.
When I described this feeling to my friend Chelsea, who happens to be a clinical psychologist, she asked, “Do you think it’s because the pandemic has taken away all the things you enjoyed, like improv and being around other people?”
“No,” I said. “It must be some other thing.” And I meant it! It didn’t feel like I was lacking in friendship, although clearly I was. My rinky-dink social-stat was unable to connect the dots between my social isolation and my mental desolation.
The hallmark of a strong control system is that it resists perturbations. If you pilfer everything out of my fridge and pantry, my food-stat will send me scrambling to the Chipotle down the street. And if the Chipotle is closed, I’ll resort to the Qdoba next door. Our social-stats do not seem to display this property. According to a recent paper, people who got shifted to remote work in the past few years spent more time alone compared to people who stayed in-person—meaning they did not seek out additional ways to make up for their newfound alone time. It’s as if, upon encountering the closed Chipotle, they just went home hungry instead.
One rather dastardly study documented this phenomenon in real time. Researchers deprived participants of either food or social contact for ten hours, and asked them over and over again, “Hey, you hungry/lonely yet?” Both food cravings and social cravings increased over the course of the day, but food cravings increased much more quickly, more severely, and more uniformly:
By the end of the study, 10% of participants reported social cravings that were no higher than when they started ten hours ago. I picture these participants as Giles Corey, the guy who was crushed to death for refusing to enter a plea during the Salem witch trials, but instead of saying “more weight”, they’re saying “more solitude”.6
It makes sense that our social-stats would be a bit feeble. Just as our default diet probably staved off scurvy most of the time, our default desire to stay alive probably fended off most of our solitude. If our ancestors wanted food, shelter, warmth, protection, etc., they needed to be around other people. No hunter-gatherer had the option of working from home, DoorDash-ing some Thai food for dinner, and spending the evenings watching Survivor.
This is certainly true when we look at the traditional societies that remain; there, people spend much less time alone. One analysis of the Tsimane people of Bolivia found that they’re by themselves for an average of 2.4 daylight hours.7 (In the US today, that number is more like 5.5 hours.) Western anthropologists often report that the hunter-gatherers they study spend a remarkable amount of time in conversation with one another, from the !Kung of the Kalahari to the Tseltal of Mexico to the BaYaka of the Congo Basin. Here’s the geographer Jared Diamond on his indigenous colleagues:
Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking.8
In an environment like that, there is little need to develop a robust social-stat. And so, now that we don’t have to spend all of our time with each other just to survive, we simply...spend less time with each other. It would almost be easier if excessive solitude made our teeth fall out like scurvy does; at least then we would do something about it.
WATER YOU DOING TONIGHT
So what should we do about it? We actually have a good example of how to compensate for a semi-defective drive, namely, our sense of thirst.
Human hydro-stats can be laughably bad. Case in point: I used to get terrible headaches as a kid, and after several doctor’s appointments and failed medications, my parents realized that I just...wasn’t drinking liquids. They plonked a big glass down on the counter and told me to fill it and down it several times a day, which I’ve done ever since. My headaches didn’t go away entirely, but they did get less frequent and severe.
I’m not alone here—see r/HydroHomies, a Reddit community dedicated to encouraging each other to drink more water. Or see this excellent post by Julia M. Rosedale where she says that whenever she feels “like a cold dog turd lying halfway on the sidewalk in front of a run-down Burger King” it almost always “resolves with n-many glasses of water for some n ≥ 1”. Yes, the “drink eight glasses of water a day” dictum is of shaky origins, but it points at something true, which is that it’s easy for humans to get dehydrated if they aren’t careful.9 We need a smidgen of conscious effort to make up for our slightly lazy hydro-stats, an occasional reminder to drink, a gentle push from wholesome hydration memes like this:
We need a similar intervention for our social-stats. We need periodic PSAs that modern life can leave you chronically people-deficient. We need to be pushed toward one another slightly more than we want to be. Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another. They are wrong. Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want. If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.
It’s tough to target these interventions because we know a lot less about our social-stats than we do about our food-stats and hydro-stats. We don’t know what the Surgeon General’s Daily Recommended Intake of Friendship should be, or how it might vary from person to person. We don’t know what our social-stats are actually targeting—is it words spoken, whites of eyes seen, or some other, hyper-dimensional construct that would make no sense to our conscious minds? And we don’t know how those critical social nutrients actually make it into the system. Why is it hard to leave an all-you-can-eat buffet feeling hungry, but easy to leave a party feeling lonely?
Fortunately, we do know three things. First, whatever it is that keeps our minds from slime-ifying, you can’t get all of it from remote interactions. During the pandemic, I had plenty of Zooms, plenty of texting and phone calls and Call of Duty with the dudes, and I still got social scurvy. To achieve healthy levels of social stimulation, you need face time, not just FaceTime.
Second, we know that you can’t get your social nourishment from intimates alone. If complete social isolation is like smoking unfiltered cigarettes, then only talking to the folks in your household is like vaping—better, but not good for you. A healthy social diet means occasionally conversing with people who share neither your genes nor your mailing address.
And third, we know that although people are unreasonably negative about their social interactions, we can at least partially counteract this bias. Over and over again, studies find that people think that their past conversations went worse than they actually did and that future conversations will go worse than they actually do. But when you just make people talk to each other, they end up having a nice time and feeling more confident about their conversational abilities.
That suggests the best prescription for an inadequate social-stat is a bit of brute force. Just as you must sometimes drink even when you’re not thirsty, you must sometimes hang out even when you’re not lonely. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in a commencement address in 1978:
I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.
I know why we’re so willing to opt out of hanging out—I mean, have you seen people? Do you know what they’re capable of? Every hurt, every heartbreak and letdown you’ve ever had, you best believe there’s a homo sapiens on the other side of it. There is no safe level of exposure to our species. So why not keep them at bay if you can?
I suppose because the things that make you crazy are the only things you’ll ever truly love. We evolved to tangle with each other, and we shrivel up and die if we don’t. Hell is other people? No way man. Hell is when your teeth fall out because nobody was there to remind you to eat an orange.
Once people have invented a concerning trend, they often feel free to invent its causes as well. For instance, this Weill Cornell page on the loneliness epidemic claims that people feel more lonely today because they’re more likely to move to new places—for college, retirement, etc. But this is untrue. As I wrote in a previous post, people are less likely to move today than they were in past decades.
This is only measuring the proportion of time that people could conceivably choose to spend with someone else. So it doesn’t include time spent sleeping, obviously, but it also doesn’t include time spent working. The author says the American Time Use Survey didn’t start asking people about time spent with others at work until 2010 anyway, and regardless, there were apparently no change in time spent alone at work between 2010 and 2019. So the increase in aloneness from 2003 to 2019 really does seem to be a matter of people choosing to be alone, or at the very least, being put in a state of solitude and not choosing to get themselves out of it.
The cybernetic model of psychology says that we get hits of happiness for re-aligning our control systems, and the bigger the correction, the greater the pleasure. That may be why asphyxiation is so often preceded by the word “erotic”, but I leave this as a matter for future research.
Here’s another example. All humans have an air-stat that causes them to freak out if they can’t breathe. The air-stat is one of the strongest control systems around—if someone’s squeezing your throat or you’ve been underwater for too long, every neuron you’ve got will be trying to figure out how to get a gulp of air. But it turns out that the air-stat is much more sensitive to the amount of carbon dioxide in the lungs than it is to the amount of oxygen. Historically, this was a fine proxy—if you’re not clearing your CO2, then something is clearly going wrong.
Recently, however, humans have invented ways to fiddle with the mix of gases around us, allowing us to adjust the level of oxygen without affecting the level of carbon dioxide. For instance, processing plants use liquid nitrogen to flash-freeze meat, and if that nitrogen leaks out, it’ll turn into gas that can displace the oxygen in the room. Because we are not as sensitive to insufficient oxygen levels or to excess nitrogen levels—the atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen anyway—if you find yourself in this situation, you might become disoriented, fall unconscious, asphyxiate, and die, all without your air-stat sounding the alarm. That’s what happened in Georgia in 2021: six workers died at a poultry processing plant when a freezer malfunctioned and started spewing nitrogen gas. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires workplaces like these to deploy oxygen detectors precisely because humans do not come with those detectors preinstalled.
I’m familiar with this because a similar accident happened right outside my town shortly before I was born. A farmer entered a manure pit to try to clear a clog, but the methane fumes were so strong that he collapsed from a lack of oxygen. His brother came to rescue him and also collapsed. Sadly, both died. My parents would tell me this story whenever we drove past the farm, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
You might wonder: isn’t this just a matter of introversion vs. extraversion? Is the problem just that everyone needs to be a bit more extraverted?
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but it mixes up two distinct concepts. In cybernetic psychology, people’s thermostats differ not only in their set points—the target level that each control system is trying to maintain—but also in their sensitivities, which is how quickly and vigorously those systems will fight to restore balance when things go out of whack. A big beefy dude needs to eat more food to stay alive than a petite old lady does (different set points), but they could feel equally hungry when they don’t get their respective amounts of necessary nutrition (same sensitivities). If you turn down the sensitivities on their food-stats, both of them could end up equally malnourished, even if the beefy guy is eating more than the old lady.
The same thing could happen socially. Extraverts may need more social “nutrition” than introverts do—that’s the difference in set points. But if their control systems aren’t sensitive enough—that is, if they don’t respond strongly enough when they fail to reach their set point—both of them could end up socially malnourished, even if the extravert is spending more time with other people overall.
This study probably overestimated the increase in social craving simply by reminding participants that there was something to crave. And we have no idea if people would have acted on their cravings if they had the chance. Lots of people have to be coaxed into attending a party, but very few people have to be coaxed into eating dinner. In fact, millions of people will pay for GLP-1 drugs that they hope will help them resist eating dinner.
In this case, “alone” means not within three meters of anyone else and not actively in conversation. This comes from an unpublished analysis and the data is restricted so I can’t double-check it directly, but it does seem plausible from the parts of the data they’ve made public.
The World Until Yesterday, p. 273
Why would our water-intake control systems leave us slightly high and dry? I have a few guesses:
Our evolutionary ancestors did not have constant and easy access to safe drinking water, so they needed to be able to endure some amount of dehydration without their hydro-stats freaking out.
Prehistoric foods probably contained more water than modern foods do (not a lot of crackers and Cheerios in the hunter-gatherer diet). So the food-stat was shouldering some of the hydro-stat’s burden.
Ancient humans consumed much less salt than we do today; their hydro-stats never had to contend with a tube of Pringles.
It's a fascinating thesis. I wonder how much this idea could be applied to exercise? Our ancestors would never have needed to 'exercise' with necessarily active lifestyles. Though it is demonstrably good for oneself, and rarely does one have a craving for vigorous exercise
Okay. This explains a lot. Time to put into practice the good idea I have been resisting: having people over regularly for dinner and conversation. In Vermont, winter can be terribly isolating. The urge to hibernate has the viscosity of honey: it pulls me away from people. You've described the mechanism well.