Solving the Loneliness Epidemic
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing. It's Thanksgiving week in the United States, and this Thursday, many of us will be with friends and family for the kickoff to six weeks of holiday cheer. But for so many people in America, the holidays can be a very lonely time.

While the Pew Research Center reports that a small minority of Americans, just 8%, say they have no friends, the Kaiser Family Foundation says that 22% of American adults report feeling lonely some of the time or all of the time. If 20 million of us have no friends and more than 50 million of us feel lonely so often, and all of us have experienced loneliness in some seasons of our lives,

Is America experiencing a loneliness epidemic? In his 2023 report, "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation," our Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, says, yes. Loneliness and disconnection have consequences not only for individual health, but for the health of the nation.

Colloquially, people define loneliness in a very broad and casual way, right? It's any type of lack in social connection. There is consensus in trying to define loneliness as a subjective experience. It's how a person individually feels. And it's largely a dissatisfaction or an upset or a feeling of lack of

that comes from a discrepancy between how much social connection a person wants and how much social connection a person has. So when that discrepancy is wide, a person will report that they feel lonely.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas is the science director at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, which tracks cutting-edge research studies that focus on how important our relationships, our tendency towards generosity and cooperation, and our sense of mattering or contribution to our communities are to our health and well-being over the course of our lives. She wants to understand the science of loneliness.

In the US, loneliness or social disconnection has been increasing for the last 15, 20 years in kind of dramatic and noticeable ways. And the finding about the equivalency between loneliness, the health implications of loneliness and behavioral decisions like being a chronic smoker or perhaps physical conditions like being morbidly obese

are from studies that look at longevity, that look at mortality and show that, in fact, people who self-report feeling lonely for years and years end up having the same expectations and disease risk as people who have these behavioral health issues that put their health and longevity at risk. Why is it a problem? Because...

the disease states that are related to loneliness, which in many respects functions in a very similar way to a chronic stress, right? Loneliness is physiologically pretty similar to the experience of persistent and chronic stress in life.

are costly. We as a society end up having to manage and support people who are experiencing these health difficulties and dying younger as a result of their loneliness. I think what makes loneliness unique is that it feels somehow more palpable than some of the other kinds of disease states or health risks that we might think of.

People don't necessarily recognize themselves as being lonely or recognize loneliness in each other as readily. And we certainly know as less than we might like to about why, like,

Like, why has loneliness become a public health emergency in the past decade and a half? What is it about our culture? What is it about our daily behaviors? What is it about our communities and our social infrastructure that has really increased the incidence of loneliness in the recent past? How does Dr. Simon Thomas answer those questions?

We have entered a period in civilization where we choose and or expect a very, very tightly packed society.

highly active schedule where most moments are dedicated to some kind of particular activity that's focused on our success as a human. There's less of that undirected or leisurely or just incidental time to connect with each other in casual ways. One of the classic studies about people's willingness to help each other

showed that if even, and these were seminary students, even people who were training to be nurturing humans for their communities, if they were in a rush and they passed by somebody who was communicating need and discomfort, they were less likely to help.

So that's like even a harder thing to find yourself inclined to help someone. But just to have a casual, meaningful conversation or find points of connection is increasingly difficult with this kind of hustle, time, poverty type of lifestyle that we are finding ourselves in. And needing help and having that need ignored, that's one of the loneliest feelings in the world.

Human beings are an ultra-social species. We have evolved with the expectation of being together. Being isolated, being ostracized, being involuntarily forced into solitude has always been a form of punishment.

And so when it occurs spontaneously in day-to-day life, it retains that quality. It's still a form of punishment in our lives and that's unpleasant. That's stressful. When we are deprived of social support, that registers in our body as a chronic stress.

Our blood pressure is higher. Our cardiovascular system is working harder. We have a state of vigilance that is difficult for our physiological systems to maintain in an enduring way. And this is the reason why there's an increased risk of disease. Part of loneliness is feeling like you just don't matter, like you don't belong.

Loneliness isn't just about my relationship, again, to my close family and friends. Loneliness is about whether I'm part of the collective and that I matter within that collective. And again, we expect to be in community. We expect to be contributing as much as we hope for and for all intents and purposes need support from others. Why is she drawn to this work?

I come to this topic less as an expert in loneliness and more as an expert in connection and the affordances, the skills and the practices that guard against loneliness or that strengthen our sense of belonging. That said, what upsets me in my day-to-day life that makes me think about loneliness is a combination of

dire poverty, people who are living in tents, who are unhoused, who are suffering from mental health crises but are walking around and ill cared for in our society. And people who I feel like join communities that are focused on hostility and adversity

from a place of loneliness, right? A place of being unloved, but ultimately joining with others who have had that same experience and endeavoring to cause harm.

as a way somehow to express the difficulty that they're facing in their lives. Those are both parts of my day-to-day life that make me feel really concerned about loneliness. But isolation doesn't have to be as extreme as those examples of lonely people before it becomes a serious problem.

Another demographic concerns Dr. Simon Thomas. So I think purpose and meaning in later life is a big challenge. And there are lots of ideas about how communities and societies might do a better job at

including and involving and inviting older adults to be part of community experiences rather than, I think, what was kind of an emerging trend over the past several decades, which is to kind of

send them into their own separate places where maybe they feel forgotten and left aside. And I think for older adults, once they've retired, once they're out of the workforce, there's something of a vacuum. Like, what can I do? How can I be helpful? How can I still contribute to my community in a way that is acknowledged, right? And it's not because I need to be validated. It's because I'm part of humanity.

It's not just lack of connection with the workforce that isolates older adults, she adds, but a decreasing lack of mobility. Aside from the possibility that elder adults who are lonely are perhaps not receiving the kind of instrumental support that they might require given their limited mobility or greater risk of injury on a day-to-day basis or just mobility.

more difficulty navigating through the world and handling day-to-day errands and things like that. Humans were meant to be helping each other through this over the course of our lives. And something about how we live now

has made that a little bit less normative. And I think this loneliness phenomenon is the result of that. So what might help elderly people experience less loneliness?

I think that older adults, rather than choosing to remain in a kind of independent, isolated living situation, might consider the possibility of staying close to their community, whether that's family or not. I think the idea of living alone, being kind of independent is oversold in many regards and having housemates, sharing space,

Being in a collective can be a really powerful way to avoid landing in a more lonely place in life.

I think for older adults, there are probably many opportunities for volunteering, for getting involved in ways that societies could really benefit from. It's funny, as a parent of teenagers, the number of requests that I get for volunteering, for donating time in one way, shape, or form to support a variety of activities,

And it's very difficult for me to make time for that. But I think of my mother-in-law and I think, gosh, this would be something she would love to do, right? She would love to accompany the school field trip to the art museum next Thursday, but we just don't really have the structure set up for it. And some schools do and some communities do, but that feels like a low-hanging fruit opportunity for older adults to remain involved in their communities. And I feel like there are

you know, classic stories of places in the world where older adults live longer and healthier lives, then that's one of the levers, right? That they spend more time with the younger generations. They have more contact with their children and their children's children in an ordinary and regular way. One more age group is a concern for Dr. Simon Thomas.

Another popular topic du jour around loneliness and youth in particular spending less time together is digital technology. There's lots of back and forth about whether digital technology, in particular mobile devices or video games or social media platforms, make kids less interested in spending time together face-to-face, having in-person interactions.

I think it's an ongoing discussion. There are certainly some kids for whom the risk is greater and some kids for whom

digital technology can actually provide community that maybe is otherwise unavailable to them. So it's a little bit of an open question, although it is really important that researchers continue to try to understand where the points of risk are and for whom digital technology might present a more prominent risk when it comes to, again,

displacing those in-person, those important face-to-face connections with some kind of less fulfilling digitally mediated type of activity. And what does the science explain about the risks of digital technology displacing in-person connection?

If a human being learns to solicit a reward response in the pathways in their brain that signal pleasure from a digital platform that is more robust than

then what they can get in a face-to-face physical experience, that is problematic. So it can be quite problematic that the relationship to digital media and social media platforms ends up kind of just accentuating or highlighting

small parts of social interactions that are of particular interest to adolescents, as opposed to presenting the full range or the full landscape of interpersonal opportunities. Dr. Simon Thomas doesn't deny that there are positive outcomes with some uses of digital technology. I think that if you live far away from a loved one,

Or perhaps you're in some kind of affinity group and you make contact with somebody from a different part of the world through Zoom or some other social media platform. That can be a beautiful way to form a relationship or a connection or get to know about someone from a different geographical location or maintain a lifelong friendship. But...

The context is the determining factor there. Affinity groups and identity-based communities can be a great source of connection and support. But when those groups become adversarial towards other groups,

This causes more difficulty when it comes to the capacity for bigger collectives to understand one another and function in cooperative ways. It becomes problematic when social media platforms or communication platforms or digital technology

It gets used in ways that are not necessary for the kind of relationship that we're able to subsist or to maintain in our lives.

So if I can talk to my friends at school during the lunch period, I absolutely should. I think it's a mistake to spend that lunch period where I have the opportunity to interact with my peers and to form those social bonds and to navigate the social environment glued to a screen and interacting with people through a text messaging or social media platform.

In that case, I'm displacing this other experience that is available to me in the here and now. And so I think we're beginning to understand that there's a context, there's a particular avenue for which digital technology can be of service and can connect us. Dr. Simon Thomas identifies other interconnected social conditions that exacerbate loneliness.

I think one of the bigger issues that underlies polarization and conflict is inequality. As we live in a society with increasing socioeconomic and power and privilege inequality, this is a major contribution to polarization and in many regards inequality.

As it trickles down, loneliness, humans, we track inequality in a way that encourages apathy. We tend to diminish or suppress that feeling of compassion. We feel less compassion. And feeling less compassion kind of allows us to be just less concerned about the people around us.

Can we remedy the loneliness that stems from inequality? One of the ways that we avoid loneliness is through simple day-to-day interactions with people who we encounter in our ordinary lives. It's not this big, heavy-handed, you have to have a deep and profound existential discussion with the people who you live with in your house every day or your colleagues at work.

Sure, those things can be really meaningful. But those little interactions that we have with the person who we order coffee from or

the person who we cross as we're walking, you know, from our home to our vehicle or to our place of worship, when we just talk to each other in these friendly and benevolent and trusting ways, we're building social capital that is the antithesis of loneliness.

But inequality kind of makes us just less likely to do that. There's this immediate urge to kind of judge whether that person is kind of in my level of hierarchy. Can I interact with them or are they too fancy for me? Are they kind of, you know, I'm afraid to talk to them because I can't really relate to the difficulty that they're going through.

I feel like it's a significant barrier that contributes to the polarization that we're experiencing and then also to the loneliness epidemic that we're facing. What have Dr. Simon Thomas' studies of loneliness revealed? What the research is increasingly revealing is that my happiness depends on your happiness.

My happiness depends on the happiness of everybody who is living close and, you know, fairly far from me. And with all the digital technology connection that we have nowadays, with the fact that we are confronted with the joy and pain of everyone around the globe,

Everyone's happiness matters to my happiness. And I think that's a really important point for flourishing. I can't just flourish. Even if I work my whole life as hard as anybody could ever imagine, even if I reach the highest status that I ever imagined, I won't be flourishing unless everyone's flourishing. And that I feel like really matters.

Dr. Simon Thomas says we can each do our part to be an antidote to loneliness. As an individual, there are ways that you can deepen and embolden your sense of trust and supportiveness with one another. You can get better at reconciling in the wake of conflict. And then at the collective level, we as societies and communities, there are ways that we can rethink our culture, our policies, our infrastructure,

that actually will draw upon the inherent benefits

of cooperative and supportive community rather than put ourselves at risk of enduring strife associated with loneliness and conflict and inequality. Affiliation with religious and spiritual groups in the U.S. in particular, there's been a significant decline, right? People just aren't as committed or interested or involved. And

It feels like there aren't a lot of things that have presented themselves as opportunities to fill that need for gathering together, reflecting on our moral values,

engaging in shared rituals with one another. And I don't think they have to be about religion. They don't have to be about spirituality. But the idea that it matters for people to come together in groups and share space in ways that is kind of benevolent and sometimes creative.

and has this ritual dimension to it. And ritual just means that sometimes we're doing exactly the same thing in concert with one another. We're doing things in unison with each other. Maybe it's playing music, maybe it's sharing meals, maybe it's engaging in aesthetic art.

I do think that communities can do a better job of making space and creating opportunities for people to come together in informal ways that enable this shared experience and perhaps prompt conversations about morality and meaning in life. Can a remedy to loneliness be found in solitude?

There's great evidence that nature bathing, right, spending time in nature is a very powerful benefit to kind of restorative physiological processes. You feel less stress. So I suppose if you are experiencing loneliness and in the throes of despair around your subjective experience of loneliness, going out into nature might begin to resolve that.

But I do think that the actual human relationship is essential, that people need to figure out how to connect with one another, how to strike up friendly banter in, again, very informal and incidental moments that you're out in the world. There's interesting research showing that we often

assume that just chatting with other people is not going to be that fulfilling. We think that we would be more satisfied if we just kind of took this time to ourselves. That's what I think the evidence suggests, right? Being together, sharing interests.

Helping one another. It turns out that people do like being talked to. And we also feel more fulfilled when we decide to engage with another person in a friendly way instead of just keeping our head down or alluding to an earlier space of opportunity instead of just looking down at our screen.

Is Dr. Simon Thomas optimistic that the loneliness epidemic will be resolved? Will we become less lonely in America? I'm an optimist, and I think it's because, um...

I feel like we're evolved for social connection. I think of work that looks at how cooperative and interdependent and helpful communities ultimately outperform more competitive and hostile and adversarial communities. I just feel like it's not going to come without difficulty.

I honor the moment that we're in today where there is a disheartening level of conflict going on in the world that is really difficult and painful to consider. And just hope that the long-term trajectory is one that will draw upon our innate hope

kind of evolved predilection towards collective gain and benefit from being in community as opposed to loss from being separated from one another. So yeah, I think I'm an optimist. I'm happy to end on that optimistic note. And I'm grateful for each of you and appreciate that you take the time to listen to the Stories of Impact podcast.

All of us at TalkBox wish each of you a happy, abundant, loving Thanksgiving. Join Templeton World Charity Foundation this November 29th and 30th for the second annual Global Flourishing Conference for dynamic dialogues with leading scientists, policymakers, practitioners, influencers, and advocates working on the scientific frontiers of flourishing.

The Global Flourishing Conference is virtual and free for all. Visit humanflourishing.org to learn more.

We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. In the meantime, if you enjoy the stories we share with you on the podcast, please follow us and rate and review us. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org. And be sure to sign up for the TWCF newsletter at templetonworldcharity.org.

This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergei and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. Senior producer, Katie Flood. Assistant producer, Oscar Falk. Music by Alexander Frolipiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer, Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.