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.

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 It's probably been replaced by online interaction, but it is online interaction that feels so lonely.

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.

    > “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.”

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

> 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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.