On May 11, the CDC terminated its emergency declaration for COVID-19, marking an official end to the pandemic in America. After more than three years of lockdowns, masking, social distancing, sickness and mass death — with more than a million people perishing in the U.S. alone — the outbreak that brought American society to a screeching halt is finally "over."
Yet another pandemic rages on, one that consumed many Western countries, including the U.S., long before the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in late 2019. I'm referring to the "pandemic" of loneliness, that anguished feeling of being alone, isolated and forgotten in the world. As the psychologist Benedict McWhirter defines it, loneliness is "an enduring condition of emotional distress that arises when a person feels estranged from, misunderstood, or rejected by others and/or lacks appropriate social partners for desired activities, particularly activities that provide a sense of social integration and opportunities for emotional intimacy."
