The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in Our Social Lives

It’s impossible to deny that the U.S. has a serious loneliness problem. One 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of all adults — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. That was a full two years before the Covid pandemic. And Americans appear to be getting lonelier over time: From 1990 to 2021, there was a 25 percentage point decrease in the number of Americans who reported having five or more close friends. Young people now report feeling lonelier than the elderly. This widespread loneliness is often analogized to a disease, an epidemic. But that label obscures something important: Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen — wittingly or unwittingly — to build for ourselves. Sheila Liming is an associate professor of communications and creative media at Champlain College and the author of the new book “Hangin