Loneliness isn't paradoxical. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Sept 25, 2023. 

11 - 13 minutes

Loneliness is a serious social problem, but a lot of recent commentary on the topic seems only loosely based on what we actually know about it. I was struck, for example, by a recent Nicholas Kristof column in which he describes a paradox, writing that “while we (along with other primates) evolved to be social creatures, wealth drives us toward solitude. When we have the resources, we stop sleeping eight to a hut and build a big house with high walls, and each family member has a private bedroom and bathroom — and then to afford the mortgage we work so hard that we never manage to have meals together.”

Everyone loves a good paradox.

As best I can tell, though, rates of loneliness are much higher among poorer Americans than among richer ones. Kristof is presumably aware of this — the article appears in a series “examining the interwoven crises devastating working-class America” — but the temptation of the putative paradox is too great.

And I’ve noticed a broader trend in which people start by talking about a social problem that’s concentrated among economically downscale Americans — teen depression and suicide, for example — but then immediately engage in debates about upscale Americans’ lifestyle choices. As a business decision, I understand that perfectly well. The kinds of people who read The New York Times are the kinds of people who are likely to either live in a giant suburban home or have friends they disapprove of who have moved to a giant suburban home. The kinds of people who read the New York Times are either helicopter parents or else they have friends they don’t approve of who are helicopter parents. But if the actual crisis of loneliness is primarily among lower-income and less-educated people, then it’s unlikely that living in big houses is a major cause.

Which is a particular problem in this case because I see two persistent mistakes that people tend to make when talking about loneliness.

One is conflating loneliness — a lack of emotional closeness with other human beings — with the idea of being physically alone. And the other is making assertions about trends over time that just aren’t supported by the data. If loneliness were aloneness and if loneliness were clearly increasing over time, then the fact that we’ve come to occupy more square feet per person would be a good explanation for the rise in loneliness. But neither of those things is true.

I remember so vividly the first conference I went to post-Covid and what an amazingly good time I had. To an extent that’s because it’s a good conference. But to an extent it’s because the Covid pause in socializing was really annoying. After a long break, it was just great to get back to chit-chat with casual acquaintances, to “hey, it’s nice to finally meet you” stuff with people I only know from the internet and low-stakes bullshitting.

Which is just to say that while I’m not a particularly extroverted person, I’m not such an introvert either — I’m a pretty normal person whose life is improved by regular socializing but who also enjoys some “me time” now and again.

Some people are more to one side or another of this spectrum, but crucially, this is not what loneliness is about. Introverted people can and do have very close, meaningful friendships, and extremely outgoing people can feel profoundly lonely, even in a crowd. Indeed, feeling lonely while around other people can be particularly alienating because the physical presence of other people drives home your lack of connection. On the UCLA loneliness inventory questionnaire, five of the 20 questions are premised on the idea that you’re not literally alone:

    My interests and ideas are not shared by those around me.

    I am unable to reach out and communicate with those around me.

    My social relationships are superficial.

    I feel shut out and excluded by others.

    People are around me but not with me. 

Of course, in order to make friends, you generally need opportunities to meet people. Too much solitude does lead to friendlessness and loneliness, and relationships that start as superficial can lead to something deeper.

But the opposite is also true. For a while, I lived in a group house with four friends and it was mostly a lot of fun. We all got along and enjoyed each others’ company, and the house as a whole became a hub for socializing with people always around. At the same time, I’m not really someone who is eager to have deeply personal conversations in front of my roommate’s girlfriend’s friend who’s visiting from out of town. It was a great house to throw a party in because it had a big living room, and they were good parties because with five roommates, any given guest list would have a good mix of people — most of whom knew some, but not all, of the people there. But while a house party is a good place to meet people, real friendships are forged in quieter moments that can be harder to find in crowded spaces.

Kristof describes modern living where “each family member has a private bedroom” as isolating. But having a private bedroom is good if you want to talk on the phone (or FaceTime or whatever the kids do today) with a friend. These are just different things.

Jiska Cohen-Mansfield did a literature review with Haim Hazan, Yaffa Lerman, and Vera Shalom of the statistical correlates of loneliness in older adults and found that being low-income is a strong correlate of loneliness. You see the same thing in surveys of middle-aged and elderly Portuguese people, in the Nova Scotia Quality of Life Survey, and in Eastern Europe.

Michelle Lim, Robert Eres, Shradha Vasan have the interesting finding that low income predicts loneliness not only on the individual level but also that “living in poorer neighborhoods” is associated with loneliness.

Sometimes scholarly literatures feature big disputes, or at least nuanced disputes, but in this case there seems to be no dispute at all: loneliness is associated with lower income and thus probably not caused by big houses or lack of huts. I also think it’s notable that at least among rich countries, loneliness seems higher in the poorer (or perhaps “less rich”) ones like Greece and Italy than in the United States and Switzerland.

The low rates of loneliness in egalitarian Sweden and Denmark, in particular, suggest that having more money pretty literally leads to less loneliness. Note as well that while the United States has a somewhat threadbare welfare state, this is data for senior citizens who do enjoy universal health care in the United States and a basic income via Social Security.

It may be, in other words, that being able to afford to do more leisure activities is a significant protector against loneliness. You go do more stuff and you make more friends. Or you have more opportunity to maintain your relationship with friends because you can afford to hang out and do stuff. I don’t think the exact nature of the causal relationship is clear from the studies that I’ve seen, but it bears more examination, especially because a lot of people seem to intuitively spin out to “paradoxical” accounts of loneliness that don’t seem well-supported.

A related issue is that although there’s a lot of rhetoric about a “loneliness epidemic,” implying a dramatic rise in loneliness, it’s not clear that anything like that is true.

The best effort to find a systematic trend toward rising loneliness that I found was “Is loneliness in emerging adults increasing over time? A preregistered cross-temporal meta-analysis and systematic review” by Susanne Buecker, Marcus Mund, Sandy Chwastek, Melina Sostmann, and Maike Luhmann. It presents this chart:

Now on the one hand, there is a rising slope to the line. But it seems like the main thing that’s happened here is there are more studies in the more recent years, and because the average is closer to zero, the proliferation of outliers drives the trend upward.

At any rate, even if you think the trend is real, it’s quite modest.

Newfound attention to loneliness as a social problem is welcome, but a lot of the discussion seems to be confusing “I’m newly paying attention to this problem” with “this problem is new.” Not to pick on one guy, but again, Kristof waxes nostalgic for various aspects of the good old days with no clear evidence that the problem he’s interested in was actually better in those days. Esteban Ortiz-Ospina did a dive into this for Our World in Data back in 2019 and didn’t find any evidence of a clear trend.

What you do clearly see from Gallup is that loneliness spiked specifically in 2020 and has been subsiding since then. That’s a genuine new problem, but we also pretty clearly know what happened there (it was Covid!), and things have gotten better since 2020. We shouldn’t mistake that pandemic blip for a long-term trend or see it as strong reason to “return to tradition” or whatever. The country probably should have commissioned an after-action report on our response to the Covid epidemic. And if we had done something like that, I think there should be an entry in the “mistakes” columns noting that there should have been more effort to actively encourage people to do outdoor socializing and keep hanging out with friends in a safe way. Not just grudging harm reduction, but actual “Dr. Fauci wants you to talk a walk with your pals” stuff.

My tentative conclusion is that the loneliness epidemic is a somewhat fake problem.

People do genuinely suffer from loneliness. But it doesn’t seem to be on the rise, and it actually doesn’t seem to have any particularly paradoxical qualities. It seems like basic things you would want to have anyway — like a growing economy, less unemployment, and less poverty — are just the main things that help with loneliness. The facts about the negative health impacts of people being lonely are useful to have on hand, but mostly to keep in mind so that we can improve our emergency response playbook and not repeat a scenario that accidentally encouraged people to sever their social ties. Being lonely isn't the same as being alone, but if you’re alone all the time, it’s hard to maintain friendships.

Beyond that… I don’t know that there’s any need to panic or do things dramatically differently.

Healthier people are less lonely. Depressed people are lonelier. These are good things to know, but of course you’d want to combat poor health and depression either way. I’m not sure the focus on loneliness generates a strong independent reason to care. One thing people may want to know is that married people are less lonely. A lot of people claim on the internet that liberals don’t talk enough about the benefits of marriage, but I think the relevant audience here may be redpill/manosphere types who believe marriage is a trap for men that should be avoided.

That, though, is a subject for another day.

I remain a little concerned that the convenience of streaming video at home crowds out opportunities for socializing with friends, but I’ve been heartened by the robust demand for Taylor Swift tickets and the Barbenheimer mania, which suggest people recognize the value of getting out of the house and doing stuff. But “doing stuff” costs money, so it’s good for people to have money, which is a pretty boring conclusion. But not everything important needs to be paradoxical.