This is answering the wrong question.

You're answering the question, "In a loneliness epidemic, what can I do to be less lonely?" Your answer is to use self discipline (which is hard) to get out of your house consistently, a decent answer to that question.

To actually fix the loneliness epidemic, you'd have to get everyone else to do that.

In the 20th century, getting out of the house consistently was the easiest way to interact with other people. Now, you can interact with lots of other people (in a less satisfying way) without leaving your house. What's going to fix that?

How do we get everyone to eat better? How do we get everyone to get enough sleep? How do we get everyone to exercise more? "Just tell them to do it" won't work. "Why don't we all just put our phones away?" won't work. We'd need a policy.

(My best guess: in the US, mandate that health insurers pay for therapy, and provide therapy at low/no cost in countries with national health care.)

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SchemaLoad an hour ago | parent | next [-]

100%. Telling people they just need to work harder and do better feel like good advice but it isn't going to solve a population scale problem. Sure _you_ should do it because it's the only thing you can directly control, but also understand it isn't going to solve the problem an entire society is facing.

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publicdebates 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was with you up until you said policy was the solution. No, action must come first. Policy needs people to agree on it, and can take a long time to enact. Action can be done now, and allows experimentation and disagreement. I am looking for actionable solutions that I can experiment with as one lone individual with time to spare on Sundays.

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dfabulich an hour ago | parent [-]

If you're looking for individual advice, instead of "solving" the whole epidemic, then here's mine.

To solve loneliness for yourself, you've got to get out of the house more. But, deep down, you already knew that, right? Just like we all know we should exercise more, eat better, etc. Self discipline is hard.

So, my advice for that is to work with a therapist. A therapist can help you do the thing that you know you need to do but can't make yourself do.

People often think therapy is only for "serious" problems, but it's great for just helping you to stop sabotaging yourself (and we all sabotage ourselves, in big ways and small).

Therapists have regularly scheduled appointments, which also helps in its own right. (You'll get better workout results if you exercise weekly with a trainer.)

Scheduled recurring appointments make it easier to attend other social gatherings, too. The chess club means every Tuesday night. People will be watching Monday night football at the bar. Church is on Sunday. (Temple is on Saturday, Jumu'ah is on Friday, etc.)

But you knew all that, already, too. To do what you already knew you need to do, try therapy.

	▲	publicdebates an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry no, I think you misunderstood. For the whole thread, it's open-ended. People can brainstorm whatever they want to based on the title. It's good that it's ambiguous. The more conversations, the better. But for me, I'm looking for ways that I can help solve other people's loneliness, both on an individual basis, and eventually en masse, but still me doing something as one individual. This is what all my replies have been about, and why I posted one top-level comment asking that very specific question. I want to know what individuals can do that's actionable to help other people.