Get the latest tech news

The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic

Are we really living through a uniquely lonely moment in American history? When it comes to friendship, this isn’t the first time that authorities have cried wolf.

Twenty years after that, best-selling author Vance Packard declared in A Nation of Strangers that “personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time.” In the 1990s, political scientist Robert Putnam famously described Americans as bowling — and doing much more — alone. The historian Mark Peel writes, “The friendship of the [nineteenth-century] avant-garde — intimate, reciprocal, open and time-consuming, where the self was formed and realized and in which anything could be shared — became more achievable” by the masses — and, I would add, more expected of those whom we claim as “real” friends. Much of service journalism focuses on clothes, food, fitness, and the like, but increasingly much also addresses personal issues, including friendship, as in this from The New York Times: “Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

Get the Android app