The Loneliest Crowd

by Ian Marcus Corbin

National Affairs

June 21, 2023

Observers of the state of America in 2023 tend to use the language of disconnection: We hear about alienation, polarization, declines in trust and civic participation, and, if we are inclined to dig for deeper roots, loneliness. For the past several years, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has traveled the country, warning about an "epidemic" of loneliness that functions as a cause and contributor to a number of psychosocial maladies — alcohol and drug addiction, depression, anxiety, and violence. In 2018, then-senator Ben Sasse wrote a book arguing that loneliness is at the root of our intensely polarized politics.

Loneliness is a difficult thing to measure, but every metric we have reveals it to be a widespread and corrosive aspect of American life. A 2018 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22% of adults in the United States say they "often or always feel lonely, feel that they lack companionship, feel left out, or feel isolated from others." This is not the occasional loneliness of a solitary, rain-dimmed afternoon; it is loneliness as a state of life.

The more we learn about the effects of chronic loneliness, the more serious its public-health implications look. Chronic loneliness leads to a rise in stress hormones and reduced capacities for focused attention and self-regulation. In more severe cases, it increases inflammation, lowers the restorative efficacy of sleep, and inhibits normal, baseline maintenance and repair functions at the cellular level. It is, by some measures, worse for your health than obesity or smoking. This kind of problem merits a collective response, and increasing numbers of people are interested in helping. But the bewildering thing is that no one knows what loneliness is.

We are confronting, in loneliness, a large and growing problem that is inaccessible to our most prestigious forms of analysis. One can describe, ever more precisely, the profound physiological or psychological effects of loneliness on a body and a life, or even prescribe a pill, a weekly trip to the senior center, or daily interactions with an AI-enabled chatbot buddy to combat them. But understanding why Americans are so lonely, and what can be done about it, will require us to dig into deeper soil, beneath the reach of Big Data, and ask what it means to inhabit the world as a human being, and what role we play in the construction of each other's worlds. The feasibility of our common life may hinge on our ability to admit that algorithms can never really explain us to ourselves, and so we'd better get serious again about the deep, dark, difficult human questions.