'A canonical belief, centuries old, in the “loss of community.”'

November 25, 2024 9:05 AM

The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic (Claude S. Fischer, Asterisk magazine)
posted by box (29 comments total)

There’s no loneliness epidemic! It’s just you
posted by Going To Maine at 9:36 AM on November 25 [12 favorites]

I'm lonely.
posted by Czjewel at 9:37 AM on November 25

I've cited Shasta Nelson on MeFi before with regards to reading about friendships, but she has categories of friendships that make sense. Like I technically have a large number of friends, but it does range from people I'm close to to what I'd call "circumstantial friends," in which you're only friends when in the same location and otherwise the friendship doesn't really develop out of that location. There's historical friendships in which you were close to someone back in the day, but they moved and thus you hear from them 1-2x a year. It varies.

I think what I miss myself is having someone who I'm really close to. Like I have great friends, but I can't really have "family" closeness or romantic partner closeness with those people. I've tried to do "found family" but most people settle down into romantic life partnerships or they have their own close family and it just hasn't worked to do that sort of grouping. I can't snuggle in bed with those people. I feel like that's my loneliness issue: that I can't have that level of SUPER closeness with anyone in this lifetime because nobody wants to with me.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:40 AM on November 25 [5 favorites]

Then there are cross-cultural variations in “friends.” For generations, visiting foreigners have complained that Americans are very friendly but very unlikely to form deeply committed friendships. A French person feels free — indeed, feels obliged — to intervene for a friend in need, even to take control if necessary, observed a French anthropologist, while an American waits to be asked to help rather than undermine the friend’s independence.

I was glad to see this. Something I see a lot both on Metafilter and pretty much everywhere on the English-language internet, and among a lot of Americans I know irl, is a set of very firm and definite convictions about how there's a "right" way to have "boundaries" and avoid "controlling" people and so forth - all things that can be really good! But in which my calibration, as someone who's only partly American, is pretty different than a lot of the very absolute interpretations I've been seeing. It helps to remember that even if a cultural attitude can be good, it's often not the only way to be good, and isn't a set-in-stone truth but a product of a specific place and time. (And when different attitudes about this stuff interact, the result is often people offended or hurt on both sides, unless there's a lot of awareness of "oh, that person is operating within framework X, and that framework has value too".)
posted by trig at 9:44 AM on November 25 [9 favorites]

Essentially the author claims that loneliness is a recurring fad issue in the US, and then lists a strong collection of information / claims on the subject. To claim an 'epidemic' is to package up a collection of innate fears into an anxiety provoking device to keep people on the self-help treadmill.

My own experience is that worrying about loneliness makes it worse, and it's resolved by accepting the discomfort of joining groups as a novice and the boredom of small interactions that lead to deeper connections. And humility.
posted by grokus at 9:45 AM on November 25 [3 favorites]

One lonely person is a problem. Two lonely people are a solution to that problem. A loneliness epidemic is an absurdity.

I am grateful beyond telling for my friends, and at age 45 I have a handful of friends with whom I have weekly tabletop game nights over Discord who I've loved since I was a teenager. I also have a large number of friends who, despite all the claims that it's impossible to make friends after college, I've met in the past couple years.

If all of my friends disappeared tomorrow I would be very sad and three months later I would have a comparably sized group of friends. Making and keeping friends is not hard but it is extremely labor-intensive and I think that's the biggest barrier a lot of Americans face when it comes to building friendships. They either lack the time and/or energy to put in that labor or they incorrectly believe that real friendships wouldn't be so much fucking work.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 9:54 AM on November 25 [2 favorites]

I get the point they're making about our changing standards for what friendship even means, but this still feels like an argument I cannot really get behind, if the author even believes it themselves, as least as it is framed in the title/header. Reading the article, I get the feeling the author thinks friendship is declining but that the way we have been framing the issue and investigating it is somewhere between inadequate and entirely wrongheaded.

There are tons of very obvious ways we are losing our social connections. Fewer people are part of religious congregations. (And say what you will about religion, but it does or at least can and often does serve a social purpose.) Fraternal societies like the Masons and Elks have seen a steep decline. Golf clubs have declined for all but the rich, but not to leave out the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, bowling leagues have, too. Moving from walkable towns to suburban bedroom enclaves probably didn't help. Chain stores do not help. You probably do not know your baker or your butcher. People move across the country at higher rates than ever, leaving their families and childhood friends behind. (This is in addition to immigrants who do this as a matter of course.) People stay at jobs at shorter intervals than in past generations, meaning that you are unlikely to keep that crew of work friends for 30 years and have them send you off with a nice party and a gold watch. People have fewer kids, so they have fewer siblings to lean on, fewer kids to help support them as they age, and fewer grandkids to interact with keeping them engaged socially.

Yes, online connections help some. but as the author seems aware, we don't really know to what extent as it's not a one-to-one replacement.

I mean, I think I actually agree with the author and the stance they take in the body of the piece that: a) we probably underestimated loneliness in the past; b) changing definitions of what "loneliness" and "friendship" even mean make it hard to compare apples-to-apples with previous generations.

But there are so many obvious factors that seem to be making people more lonely than they can handle. And these factors seem to be accelerating. Are online friendships helping? Yeah, but that's not a one-to-one substitution. And increasing reliance on online connection may be hurting real-life connections. We just don't know.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:56 AM on November 25 [11 favorites]

Family means being able to say things that would get one killed on the spot if they said them to someone they had just met. The average murdered person dies usually not by the hands of a rank stranger but rather those of someone they know -- family and friends first and foremost. Statistics bear that out. In my experience misery has no love for company. Cruelty, on the other hand...

There is something to be said for solitude.
posted by y2karl at 10:06 AM on November 25 [1 favorite]

Here's a plan for how we could end loneliness. Call it "Lonesome No More!"

Every American should be issued a new middle name made of the name of a random natural object paired with a random number between 1 and 20. Everyone with the same name would be cousins, and everyone with the same name and number would be siblings.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:08 AM on November 25 [4 favorites]

… and tell us, what could you say if somebody asked you for help and they weren’t in your family?
posted by Countess Elena at 10:24 AM on November 25

Seriously, though, we’ve already begun to see the loneliness epidemic used against progressive causes, and not just because it’s easier to radicalize young men who think they have no other options. Conservatives are increasingly open about complaining that young men can’t get wives, that parents and grandparents are cut off from their children because of woke. Which is to say that women and younger people don’t feel obligated to put up with nearly as much bullshit as they used to.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:28 AM on November 25 [6 favorites]

How many people are traveling this Thanksgiving 2024 to family/friends?
posted by robbyrobs at 10:31 AM on November 25 [1 favorite]

… and tell us, what could you say if somebody asked you for help and they weren’t in your family?

Obviously I would say:

WHY DON'T YOU TAKE A FLYING FUCK AT A ROLLING DOUGHNUT?

WHY DON'T TAKE A FLYING FUCK AT THE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON?

posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:32 AM on November 25 [3 favorites]

This is something I think about a lot as a person who spends a lot of time online, who has a social circle of also-online people, and in particular am a person who enjoys giving my opinion in a helpful way online (see my entire Ask history basically).

Any time I answer a how do I make friends question on reddit I get downvoted into oblivion for asking back some flavor of what actions are you taking to make yourself a friend? You don't just, like, accidentally have friends as an adult. You have to seek friendships. You have to be a person who people want to be friends with. You have to actively create space for friendships to develop. It takes effort and it takes vulnerability, and my impression from the people who are so quick to say they're in an epidemic of loneliness is that they refuse to do those things. It's really not that much different than dating. You have to put in effort and it's going to feel weird and bad until it doesn't.

I'm not out here being a friendship genius. I'm deeply and severely introverted, and if I didn't constantly remind myself that it's better for my long term health to have friends in my life, it wouldn't surprise me if I accidentally never saw another person again just from comfortable inertia. My parents are friendless so I never had any adult friendships modeled for me as a child, and when I was 18 I moved 1000 miles away from where I grew up so even if I had had lasting friendships from childhood, I wouldn't have that social structure either. So I had to figure it out. And I very much believe that if I could figure out how to make friends, then other people can, too.

First step:
Do things you like. Leave the house if you can. Join groups for things that you like.

Second step:
Be genuine in your interactions and how you present yourself when you do those things you like doing.

Third step:
Keep your eyes open for people who seem neat. Maybe someone left a really funny comment in your discord group, say something funny back! Someone leaves a comment on an Instagram reel sharing a personal story you vibe with? Reply back @ them and share your story with them! Out at a concert and see someone with a cool sweater? Compliment them, ask where they got it! Take little steps to foster interactions with others. Take a class to learn a new hobby, and chat with everyone you meet! Etc!

Fourth step:
The most important step. Make it awkward. You simply must. When you meet someone you like, after you've made that initial connection, you have to ask them to be friends with you. It feels uncomfortable because you're being honest and vulnerable, but rejection is part of life and you can't have a deeper relationship without doing that. I've done this lots. Here's an example from (almost nine!!!! years ago!) right here on metafilter of me asking someone I met at a meetup to be my friend*. And it worked! Nine years later and we're really friends, and she's one of the most important people in my life. Have I said some flavor of this before and it hasn't worked out? Oh gosh yes, many times. But sometimes it does, and you have to try, or else you're never going to be friends with anyone.

(*I'm sure there are smoother, cooler, more natural ways to befriend someone, but if I knew how to do that I wouldn't be looking for friends. The cool, extroverted, smooth people aren't likely to be in my demo anyway. Weird nerdy dorks for me, please.)

Anyway, if everyone's so lonely and miserable then the natural answer to that is then go be miserable together, at least you won't be lonely anymore, right? But miserable people don't want more miserable people around them. They want whatever the platonic equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl is to come magically lift them out of their misery and introduce them to their thriving network of beautiful and social people, ready made. But that doesn't happen. You have to work on yourself first, be a person who can be a friend, and then you have to reach out to others. But wow do people get big mad when you try and tell them that.
posted by phunniemee at 11:01 AM on November 25 [9 favorites]

I was not aware of this magazine, but I'll just point out that its "About" section includes this: "Open to all perspectives. Our editorial perspective is shaped by the philosophy of Effective Altruism, but not limited to it." I'm pretty confident that Claude S. Fischer is not an Effective Altruist, but this movement has been discussed before on the blue, and it's not a movement that many of us would expect good solutions to loneliness from (I think, anyway, based on how previous discussion went).
posted by demonic winged headgear at 11:07 AM on November 25 [5 favorites]

A minor (or major?) correction is needed:

Such friendship, which persists out of mutual regard and not because of social constraints or pragmatic necessity, is a modern development for ordinary, particularly middle-class people. Classical, biblical, and medieval friendships are described this way, but only among elites.

Classical, biblical, and medieval sources generally talk only about elites. Assuming X doesn't happen among the labouring classes just because they aren't written about by elite sources is ridiculous. For one, labouring class people moved a lot more in the medieval period than most people realize - especially poorer people who didn't have land to tie them down. They could have been meeting new people all the time.

I also think that it's dumb to say that a friend someone "whom we need not be entwined in any other way — not as relative, client, neighbor, fellow platoon member, whatever." For one, I doubt that any of those elite friendships that were written about didn't have similar ties. But most of our modern friendships have additional ties: you are friends with people you have gone to school with, live near, work with, people who share an activity or social group. I don't have any friends who I just met on the street by accident, though I do have friends I have met at a playground. Of course, I talked to them precisely because their child is the same age as mine (which is a kind of tie - we are comrades in the war of adult against toddler).
posted by jb at 11:11 AM on November 25 [1 favorite]

it feels less of a fucking loneliness epidemic, and more of a work-two-jobs-to-pay-for-these-kids epidemic

friends eat dinner together on a weekly basis
i am constantly with family and we have the group text with my family abroad

personally, I am alienated from life by jobs, not by technology. I am lonely at work, and everything costs more, and work is more hours = less time with friends and zero vacations.

brb i am going to take a break from ignoring this zoom call and hug someone in the other room
posted by eustatic at 11:12 AM on November 25 [6 favorites]

I used to have a ton of friends and now I have few, and have had a LOT of trouble making new friends using the tried-and-true "volunteer and do stuff" method. There are several issues I've identified:

1. I'm old. A LOT of volunteers at the places I volunteer are in their twenties. It's not that I literally cannot be friends with someone in their twenties, but our lifestyles and life experiences are really quite different. I'd say I have some friendly acquaintances in their twenties.

2. Rising rents mean that a lot of the volunteer projects that were natural friend-creators when I was younger are gone.

3. I took a really different life path from most people who are otherwise similar to me, and this has led to greater and greater divergences. My closest friends in my twenties and thirties were people who were big readers and fairly serious about, like, serious books. Those people were already mostly from a professional class background different from mine, but they all went to graduate school and have moved on to very different lives than mine. As a result, I don't encounter them in the wild very often and when I do our lives have diverged dramatically. It's easy to say that social class doesn't matter in friendships, or shouldn't matter, but it really does. I was in a union for a long time and was really the weird little guy there too - I made some casual friends but none that really lasted, and it was because we struggled to find things deeply in common.

I do have friendly acquaintances from volunteer work - people I like, people who I would gladly help and who would gladly help me, but we seem to run onto rocks of deep difference when we talk about our beliefs and ideas.

Mainly, I like to read a lot and watch nerd/snob movies. I don't watch or enjoy much TV on my own, although I'm happy to watch TV if friends are into it. My deepest friendships have been with people who also like to read a lot and watch nerd/snob movies, and then we talk about what we think, what that says about what we believe about the world, etc. I'm not saying that these are profound conversations where every word is a pearl - I'm sure a real scholar would laugh themselves sick - but it is a matter of interest.

This really sounds like I'm saying "I'm much smarter than others and that's why it's hard to make friends", but that isn't it at all - if I were some kind of gold-plated genius it would have become apparent by now. It's much more that life has taken me away from the pool of people who are similar to me and there's a limit to how much I can change myself and my approach to find new people.

It may well be that I'm just trapped in some social eddy and there's tons of nerd/snob lower middle class people out there gathering to chat about Leibniz and one day I'll stumble upon the best way to meet them and my friendship needs will be met.
posted by Frowner at 11:16 AM on November 25 [11 favorites]

Lonely individuals tend to think and talk in an unusual way, study finds

[grain, salt, "study finds" &c]
posted by chavenet at 11:29 AM on November 25

Lonely individuals tend to think and talk in an unusual way, study finds

So you're telling me autistic folks are fucked.

Cool cool cool.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:34 AM on November 25

I think the thing you have to do to develop a friendship is have exposure to the person on a regular basis for quite some time. It needs to build. Doing plays, for example, means you see the same group of people in a temporary mini-family for about three months. Taking a class on a regular basis, book clubs, whatever you do frequently, really helps. "Cold contacts" really never worked for me because you need a reason to see the person and make the effort. None of those girls I've given numbers to at karaoke have called, and why would they, because then it's just weird once you're out of the bar and it's a weeknight.

Once you've "built" something, then you can have less contact and maybe/hopefully the friendship will remain. Much as I hated having to cave in and do Facebook--almost all theater shows are run off Facebook these days and that's where you find the audition notices--it does help to keep you in contact with people on a "here's what shows they're in, here's party invites" sort of way.

So, step 1: have a situation in which the friendship can bake, step 2: have some way to connect with them at least loosely once the baking situation ends.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:35 AM on November 25 [1 favorite]

So you're telling me autistic folks are fucked.

Tell me you've never seen a LARP club without saying you've never seen a LARP club.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:37 AM on November 25 [1 favorite]

I'm old. A LOT of volunteers at the places I volunteer are in their twenties.

It's funny you say that, because except for political organizing, I feel like any extracurricular activity that I engage in is all empty nesters and retirees, because they have the time and disposable income for it. Between DSA and watercolor classes, I interact with the entire age spectrum, with elder millennials being least represented.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:38 AM on November 25 [2 favorites]

Tell me you've never seen a LARP club without saying you've never seen a LARP club.

Since I've already made one Vonnegut reference here, I'll remind you that he also has a book called Fates Worse Than Death.

(Kidding... mostly.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:39 AM on November 25 [1 favorite]

Do things you like. Leave the house if you can. Join groups for things that you like.

tfw you fail the process on the very first step
posted by mittens at 11:44 AM on November 25

“Happiness is such hard work, and it gets harder every day
And it can kill you, but no one wants to be that tacky about it”
— The Dismemberment Plan, “Gyroscope”
posted by Going To Maine at 12:10 PM on November 25

Frowner, I feel you. A lot of the budding friendships I've had over the past however-long I've ended up intentionally dropping, because yeah these are nice people and we can have pleasant conversations but we're just not on the same wavelength, to the extent that being friends with them felt like going through the motions rather than the real thing. Which made for both a tedious and lonely experience for me, and made me feel kind of dishonest towards them.

When you do click with someone, that's a whole different experience. It doesn't feel as much like work to keep a relationship like that up.

But in terms of having people to help you in a crisis, or just check in from time to time and make sure you're still alive - it would be pretty helpful if I could work up the energy and enthusiasm to also develop a community with people I don't truly click with. It's the combination of exhaustion and the feeling of dishonesty that makes it really hard.
posted by trig at 12:11 PM on November 25 [2 favorites]

One of the reasons I am so inclined to move overseas (beyond [gestures around at the US in 2024 and you know what I mean here]) is the lower bar for homogeneity that I experience travelling. For one, the bar for being acceptably social is so much lower due to the language barrier alone. In the US, I make my awkward attempts at small talk and people react as though a painfully weird autisitic person just mumbled rotely at them (because one did).

In Romania, the reaction I get for saying a simple Bună dimineaţa (good morning) is more like, "Awwwwww, look at him making an effort! Does he need any help? We should say hi." And when I open my mouth here in the US and stuff like "No seriously: defund the police" comes out, people visibly recoil. But in Romania, the reaction I get is more like, "Listen to this curious little American go off!" Nobody expects me to fit in, so any effort I make is magnified. nobody expects me to fit in, so any weird shit I say is just part of my foreign charm.

I would like to work with this overall lower bar.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:24 PM on November 25 [2 favorites]

If it's a myth, I would expect the article to rebut claims like this:

> 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.

I don't think it can rebut that, because that's true. In other words, if you look at the numbers, they bear out the claim that loneliness is increasing.
posted by julianeon at 12:35 PM on November 25 [1 favorite]