The fabric of American society — our car-centric city design, our predilection for single-family homes and our self-reliant culture — seems engineered to engender loneliness. COVID-19 didn't help: during the pandemic, millions experienced real trauma due to the social isolation imposed during the lockdowns. Despite these easily observable realities, however, there nevertheless persists in our culture a tendency to view "loneliness" as an individual problem, not a public health problem (and therefore a social problem).
Yet attitudes on loneliness and its effect on us are slowly changing: indeed, United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently stated that loneliness is so damaging to humans that it is a health risk. And not a minor one: Murthy compared it to smoking cigarettes, something that research bears out.
