Opinion | We Know the Cure for Loneliness. So Why Do We Suffer?

A paradox: People are more connected now than ever — through phones, social media, Zoom and such — yet loneliness continues to rise. Among the most digitally connected, teenagers and young adults, loneliness nearly doubled in prevalence between 2012 and 2018, coinciding with the explosion in social media use.AdvertisementContinue reading the main s

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Loneliness isn’t just making us unhappy, it’s silently killing us: Social isolation is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If the situation is so critical, why aren’t we doing more to fix it? Because we’ve been collectively ashamed to talk about loneliness . Our silence has incubated one of the most insidious crises our society has to face. ... See more

The thought experiment also shows how important it is for local organizers and businesses to find different idioms than “loneliness” for framing their social projects. “Solving loneliness” is like “solving mental health:” a fool’s errand. It’s counterproductive to think this way. In my experience, it is the positive content of a social group that m... See more