Americans are Lonely and Isolated. Here’s How Public Policy Could Help.

Why is social isolation a public policy challenge and not just a personal issue?

Let me give you a couple of examples. One comes from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation. I think a lot of people are familiar with the argument in the book, which is that the “screen-based childhood” is behind today’s adolescent mental health crisis.

But Haidt actually makes a more complicated argument, one where social disconnectedness plays a significant role as an intervening variable. Kids are spending tremendous amounts of time on screens. But we must also look at what they’re not doing, and what they’re not doing is spending time with each other engaged in what Haidt calls ‘unstructured free play,’ where kids learn the social skills needed to succeed in society by interacting with other kids.

A second example comes from Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Again, many people have a high-level understanding of the book’s argument, which is that structural changes in the economy led to high levels of despair among the white working-class, and that a lot of self-destructive behaviors followed. But again, in the middle of that account you find the experience of social isolation. 

Losing your job to technological innovation or offshoring isn’t simply an economic problem; it’s an existential problem. The loss of manufacturing jobs in communities across the Rust Belt meant the loss of paychecks, to be sure. But for many it also meant the loss of those activities and structures that integrated them into their communities. Without the union and the softball team and committee building the company float for the Fourth of July parade the social glue starts to dissolve, and people’s lives lose meaning and purpose.

This unfolded across enough American communities to create a national phenomenon. When enough people sink into despair, you get 100,000 overdose deaths every year, plus the other ways that despair manifests, such as drinking yourself to death and suicide. 

Is this phenomenon happening outside of the U.S., too?

Japan and the United Kingdom have both created ministers of loneliness, recognizing that this is significant enough of a problem to create a cabinet-level position. There’s a term originally used in Japan, hikikomori, which is somebody who has spent six months or more out of social circulation at home. Three percent of the Japanese population, aged 15 to 64, fits that description. 

If you reduce the amount of time to one month out of social circulation and look at the young adult population in South Korea, one in four young adults has basically spent a month in their bedroom. The Korean government is actually offering young people cash incentives to leave the house and to connect with others.

The Economist also published a piece last month that pointed to Madagascar as the loneliest place on Earth, which tells us loneliness is not just a “first-world problem” — it’s experienced in developing countries as well.

How does technology shape how people connect with each other?

I’m worried about what AI chatbots will do to social connections. If somebody’s lonely, a chatbot might alleviate that feeling, but it certainly doesn’t solve the root problem. We’re in a period where the appeal of AI-powered chatbots is only increasing.

What are the economic forces that shape social isolation?

Think about our experience as consumers. Our economy consistently offers us things that make it easier for us to be alone. Derek Thompson recently described our economy as “optimized for introverted behavior.”

To give you an example, 75% of restaurant traffic isn’t in the restaurant today because it’s increasingly takeout or DoorDash. The consequence of that is you don’t accidentally run into somebody at the local restaurant that you might’ve seen if you were there. You go to the grocery store. You go through the self-checkout. And those encounters that used to occur in the checkout line don’t happen anymore.

The reason to be concerned about the thinning of what social scientists call loose ties, or the village, is because our interactions with our neighbors — not our close family or best friends — are where we learn how to get along in a society that is diverse along multiple axes. We learn to navigate real differences — building bridges, negotiating, practicing tolerance — in the village. Without these skills, the citizens of a democratic republic can fall into the habit of seeing the social world as composed of only friends and enemies. And, despite all the war metaphors we use to talk about politics, we cannot do the work of politics with our enemies.