We all get by with a little help from our friends, but over the past several decades we've been making fewer and fewer of them. 1 By the end of the Covid lockdowns Americans reported having fewer close friends, talking to the ones they have less, and relying on them less for personal support. 2 A US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said in 2024 that loneliness was a major public health crisis. And earlier, even before the pandemic, the UK had thought the problem so severe that it appointed a "Minister for Loneliness". 3 Loneliness itself is difficult to quantify, however. There is actually a great deal of debate on whether loneliness is increasing or not, with some studies of US high school students reporting levels that have been jumping up or down over various school years, while a larger meta-analysis of adults has shown that it has been increasing steadily for more than four decades. 4 Isolation, on the other hand, is well-defined and easier to measure. And it's been shooting up faster than a SpaceX rocket. Church and other religious attendance has declined by more than one third since the 1960s. Between the 1970s and 1990s there has been a sturdy 40-50% decline in the number of Americans involved in any club or community meetings. There was even a 60% decline in the number of picnics per capita. 5 Over the past fifty years the proportion of households composed of people living alone has doubled. 6 This increase in isolation doesn't explicitly mean that we are lonelier. But it's hard to imagine that we, as a society, are feeling less lonely when we have fewer friends and don't make the time to see the ones we have.
Surgeon general's warning: scrolling may increase likelihood of death
Given the above, one would expect that The Atlantic would start publishing articles telling you to throw more parties. 7 In fact, loneliness is so bad for your health that just hosting friends for dinner once a month can do as much for it - both mental and physical - as quitting smoking. Making friends and seeing them regularly is important for your general well-being, duh. But this shift in social behavior has been quite dramatic (though it has also been generational, so any one generation is unlikely to observe it without looking at the statistics). So it doesn't do much good to glibly suggest that we throw more parties without understanding why we stopped throwing them in the first place, that is, why are we more lonely now, why do we have fewer friends now, et cetera? I can already hear you shouting "It's the pandemic! lockdowns!" along with chants about how we are so overworked and busy and how late stage capitalism is destroying communities. But these trends started in the 1960s and the 1970s, we've been getting progressively lonelier and more isolated since before the pandemic, before the Great Recession, before social media, and before smartphones. If you want to insist on an economic cause to the loneliness epidemic then you will have to reach back to the end of the Gold Standard, and perhaps indulge in some sort of Austrian-economics reasoning on how fiat money is the cause of societal collapse. We can go back further to talk about how social clubs were booming towards the end of the 19th century 8, when we were still at "early stage capitalism" without all those evil late stage innovations like weekends, 8 hour workdays, and bans on child labour. Simply put, I don't buy economic explanations. Rather I want to use the economic arguments differently; I want to talk about how we've been spending our fiat money to buy solutions for this loneliness.
It looks like you're running out of community...shall I order more from Amazon?
For example, co-living centers are on the rise. UK Property analysts at Knight Frank have reported a 65% rise in co-living facilities in 2023 with the addition of 2,500 more "living units". 9 "Co-living" is a form of "intentional community", that is, people who are otherwise unrelated and unknown to each other deciding to live together to build a community. 10 It sounds exactly like a solution to our society's problems, and if your life experience is anything like mine (it probably isn't), you probably hear "intentional community" and think "communes" and then think of like-minded hippies deciding to live in a less capitalistic way. But that's not what you should think here, when you hear "co-living" you should think "WeWork, but for flats" and then you should think "private equity investors", because the only "intentional" part of co-living is that you intentionally give your money away to a property investor who promises to facilitate the sort of neighborhood street parties and other community activities that one (or one's parents) got for free before they moved away from their small town. The rise in people living alone has, in other words, corresponded to a rise in the number of people who decide to pay money to a large corporate to lessen the effects of having chosen to live alone. Instead of neighborhood picnics or street parties they have property investors organize a shared kitchen and paid dinner parties. 11
Please don't misunderstand me, it is not that co-living is "bad" or that I somehow only like dinner parties when they are "organic" and not sponsored by a real estate investor (okay, the second part might be true). But I do want to highlight a trend of us not just choosing to spend less time with our friends, for whatever reason, but also us deciding to change what would have been a private, non-economic interaction with our friends into an economic transaction that includes a large company as the facilitator, overseer, and authority over that transaction. Before we would invite friends over for dinner after work. But soon that dinner party will be increasing GDP and will come with terms and conditions and a code of conduct written by the Safety Team at Co-Living Incorporated Plc.
While co-living is a growing trend, it's still a small one, and maybe it is a bit unfair to highlight it. But the transition from private social affairs to economic transactions isn't limited to just that. It would be remiss to talk about it at all without mentioning one of the biggest and most important changes in society in the second half of the 20th century: women entering the workforce. Much of the work that they did prior (excluding World War 2) would have been through private social relations — child-rearing and housekeeping is hard work, but it wouldn't have been an economic transaction. But the necessity of all that work didn't disappear. Now there are new sectors of the economy, or old sectors that have returned, for child care and domestic chores. These sectors include a large workforce that's mostly women. So the social interaction again has been replaced by an economic transaction. 12 13 14
Sale! 50% off your first hour of friendship!
We are, in some ways, indirectly replacing the concept of friendship itself with economic services. Psychotherapy and other related mental health services were reportedly a $400 billion industry in 2023 and are expected to grow to well over half a trillion dollars by 2031, according to market research firms. 15 These numbers make a lot of sense, as all the newspapers say there is a surge in demand for mental health services. The Financial Times asks "What is driving the global mental health crisis?", while the UK charity Mind reports more than 17,000 serious mental health incidents in 2023 alone. The UK's National Institute for Health Research reported in a study in the Psychological Medicine journal that incidents of depression, anxiety, and stressed increased by over 37% between 2000 and 2019. The number of mass shootings, mass murder, and murder-suicide incidents in the US bellies the state of mental health there. Obviously, a lot more people need to be in therapy.
And just as obviously, "friendship cannot replace therapy", as Psychology Today tells us. 16 Each individual case is different, and someone suffering from, e.g., post traumatic stress disorder needs professional help just as much as they need close friends. In fact, that's the curious thing about Pyschology Today's statement, it's a distraction from or repression of the reverse idea: if it's true that friendship cannot replace therapy, then can therapy replace friendship? Do we want it to? We cannot pretend not to see the trends: decline in social groups across the spectrum, more people living alone, more people reporting fewer friends, people reporting more loneliness, more mental health incidents, a rise in mental health disorders, a growing mental health industry. Our lack of friendship is creating new problems that require a therapist with professional training to solve. Sometimes not even a human therapist, sometimes what has been trained is a large language model delivered through an app and monitored by human professionals. 17 And all that time and cash spent on therapy is time not spent on making new friends or seeing old ones. We've indirectly replaced picnics and dinner parties for an economic transaction that comes with the supervision and authority of dedicated professionals.
It's all the fault of late stage capitalism
This decline in friendship and socializing, and the related rise in loneliness and mental health problems, isn't a 21st century problem. As we've already discussed, it started back in the 20th century. All the immediate explanations, smartphones and social media or working longer hours or busier lives, all of them are a bit of a cop-out. They suggest that some cosmic force, like "late stage capitalism", is driving our lives and making us miserable. That may or may not be true, but that narrative is unhelpful, because it makes it sound inevitable, like the invisible hand is pushing us away from picnics and towards infinite scrolling and virtual therapy appointments. It is, in essence, a Marxist explanation - assuming that the sole and primary driver of social structures is our economic model.
But maybe the arrow of causality is pointing the other way. I'm not actually a Marxist, I think that human psychology influences economic production just as much as the other way around. The growth in living alone, and in co-living centers, as well as more broadly the growth in mental health problems and mental health services to solve them, is caused by us choosing to spend less time with our friends and choosing social interactions that have a sort of economic authority to monitor them (e.g. a property manager running a co-living facility, or a mental health association awarding credentials to therapists). Time diaries kept from the 1940s to the 1990s show that time spent socializing was replaced with time spent watching TV. A consequence of that was that much of our inner lives would have changed from imagining or fantasizing about social interactions to watching those social interactions occur on TV, and the TV informing us how then to fantasize about them. The TV became a source of inspiration for social interactions and therefore an authority to tell us what they should look like. As TV became the model for social interactions, those raw, unscripted interactions became less desirable, leading us to withdraw from them. That meant there were fewer activities for others to go to, causing them to turn to watch more social interactions on TV instead of trying to practice their own fantasizing and imaginations about them, and so fourth. Social media is just another medium for us to watch those cultivated social interactions instead of imagining our own without a supervisor. "But Facebook helps me keep in touch with my friends all over the world!" - and the time you spend interacting through Facebook is time you aren't spending inviting your local friends over for a dinner party.
Indeed, clubs and social events can hardly function without Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, et cetera, allowing Meta and a handful of other companies to become the moderating authority over much social interaction in real life and online, and to turn such socializing into economic transactions were possible. 18 Even our attempts to try to solve the mental health crisis involve more economic transactions: more money spent on the NHS, more employers should offer mental health benefits, more regulation for social media. By contrast, Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, which is implicitly and explicitly referenced throughout this essay, has launched "Join or Die", a Netflix documentary about the decline of and importance of community. He asks people to host community screenings. It's a niche event and doesn't attract nearly the same attention as deciding that the State, another authority, should spend more money on mental health services. It's a shame, because his suggestion is a fix - not a personal fix that will solve all your problems, but a societal fix that will make the incidence of mental health problems less likely and less frequent - the same fix that was mentioned in that Atlantic article: throw more parties, and stop being such a late stage social capitalist.