Is There Really a “Loneliness Epidemic”?

Is There Really a “Loneliness Epidemic”? (Ep. 407) - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"KLINENBERG: Unfortunately, what I find is that journalistic reporting will use survey data when it’s useful for the story and they kind of don’t care that much about whether the data underlying it is reliable... A lot of survey data is based on a sample that’s not really worth generalizing from. A lot of surveys ask questions that will work for a particular time and place but might not work very well after that, which means you can get a snapshot of a moment in time but not really a dynamic portrait of something over time...

HOLT-LUNSTAD: Loneliness has been defined as that subjective discrepancy between our actual level of social connection and our desired level of connection... someone could be objectively isolated and feel lonely. But it’s also possible that you could be objectively isolated and not feel lonely, so you may take pleasure in that solitude. And conversely, someone may have many people around them and yet still feel profoundly lonely...

MURTHY: We don’t exactly know how quickly loneliness is growing. But what we do know is that multiple studies have shown that loneliness is incredibly common. So, for example, if you look at a study that was published by The Economist a couple of years ago, they would peg the percentage of adults in the United States who are struggling with loneliness as above 20 percent. The U.K. is in a similar range, between 20 to 25 percent. The number of people struggling with loneliness in the United States is, in fact, greater than the number of adults who have diabetes. It’s greater than the number of people who smoke...

KLINENBERG: For the entire history of our species, we have lived in groups. Out of necessity. We needed to protect each other. We needed to get food for each other. We needed to divide labor. And this amazing thing starts to happen in the early 20th century and to really take off in the 1950s, which is that for the first time in the history of our species, people start to settle down on their own and to live alone for long periods of time. And now we’ve gotten to the point where, in the most kind of affluent societies on earth, there are enormous numbers of people living alone... The choice to live alone does not necessarily create loneliness.

KLINENBERG: Because one of the surprising things I discovered is that there are more people who are living alone than ever before, but actually, people who live alone are surprisingly social. They’re more likely than people who are married to socialize with their friends, with their neighbors. They are more likely to participate in all kinds of shared social activities — going to the gym, going to concerts, going to libraries, cafes, things like this... I’ve interviewed many people who had lived with a romantic partner and were now living alone. And they said to me, one after the next, “As lonely as I sometimes feel when I’m on my own, there’s nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person. There’s no feeling more lonely than having a domestic partner with whom one was once intimate, with whom once had a feeling of trust and connection, and coming home and feeling disconnected from that person.”...

CROUCH: So what we found is that one in five doctor’s appointments are solely to do with loneliness rather than other medical conditions. So we started using social prescribing in the U.K. for a whole variety of things, for example, with obesity. So rather than just prescribing people pills that would hopefully suppress appetite, we’d actually get them to do walking clubs or light sporting activities...

KLINENBERG: There are programs that do kind of, like co-op housing for older people. Like one place I went in Stockholm is a place called Färdknäppen, which it definitely is not how it’s actually pronounced but that’s how I say it. And on the first floor, there’s this big open kitchen and dining room area. And if you live in the building you commit that three nights a month you will contribute to the cooking and cleaning for the collective. And every morning, everyone in the building can sign in to dinner that night. You never have to be there, but you always have the option to have a shared meal."