Modern life makes meaningful connection harder to find
Technology has given us extraordinary freedom to remove friction from everyday life. We can work from home, order groceries to our doorstep, watch entertainment without leaving the house, exercise in our living room, and communicate without physically meeting anyone.
Most of these conveniences are genuine improvements. But something can make life more convenient while simultaneously removing opportunities for connection.
The evidence around social connection has become difficult to dismiss. According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and social connection, poor social relationships have been associated with a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke. Chronic loneliness and social isolation have been associated with roughly a 50% greater risk of developing dementia among older adults. Across 148 studies, stronger social connection was associated with a 50% increase in the odds of survival.
Loneliness is not simply an unpleasant emotion. Social connection appears to be part of the infrastructure of human health.
The more interesting question is why so many people seem to be losing it.
Source: 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.
Loneliness does not necessarily mean being alone
One reason loneliness can be difficult to recognize is that it’s not the same thing as isolation. The Surgeon General defines social isolation objectively: having relatively few relationships, social roles, group memberships or social interactions. Loneliness is subjective. It emerges when there’s a gap between the connection someone wants and the connection they actually experience.
Someone can therefore live alone, spend considerable time by themselves, and feel perfectly content. Someone else can have a spouse, coworkers, hundreds of online contacts and a busy calendar while feeling profoundly lonely.
A 2024 survey highlighted by Harvard’s Making Caring Common project found that 21% of American adults reported serious feelings of loneliness. Among lonely respondents, 65% said they felt fundamentally separate or disconnected from other people or the world, while 57% felt unable to share their true selves with others.
That begins to describe something deeper than simply wanting company. You can be surrounded by people and still feel as though nobody really knows you.
How did community become harder to find?
The decline of community is the result of several social, economic, technological, and physical changes reinforcing one another.
The institutions that organized social life have weakened. Previous generations did not necessarily possess superior friendship skills. They often participated in environments where repeated interaction was built into life. People saw one another through unions, religious congregations, service clubs, recreational leagues, neighbourhood associations, local businesses, and civic organizations. These institutions were imperfect and sometimes exclusionary, but they created recurring opportunities for cooperation and familiarity. Friendship did not always have to be deliberately engineered, life kept putting people together.
Community rarely forms through one remarkable conversation, rather it usually forms through repeated, ordinary encounters. You see the same person at the community centre every Tuesday. Someone begins saving you a seat. You learn the names of their children. Eventually, you help each other.
As participation in these organizations declines, individuals must assume more responsibility for creating and maintaining their own social lives. Friendship becomes another project to manage in an already crowded schedule.
Between 2003 and 2020, Americans’ average time spent alone increased by roughly 24 hours per month. During the same period, time spent socially with friends fell by approximately 20 hours per month. Among people aged 15 to 24, the decline was especially dramatic. In-person time with friends fell from roughly 150 minutes per day in 2003 to about 40 minutes in 2020.
Friendship networks have changed too. In 1990, 27% of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends. By 2021, that figure had risen to 49%.
These changes did not begin with COVID-19. The pandemic accelerated an existing trajectory.
Modern life has made connection more optional
When the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness and social isolation a public health crisis in 2023, one comparison received enormous attention. The lack of social connection is associated with a risk of premature death comparable to smoking as many as 15 cigarettes a day.
The comparison sounds almost absurd. We understand how cigarettes can damage the lungs and heart, but it’s harder to imagine that not having enough people in your life could affect your body in a similarly serious way.
Modern technology increasingly allows people to meet their basic needs without interacting with others, even though our biological need for social connection remains.
The Harvard survey asked people what they believed was contributing to loneliness:
- 73% identified technology
- 66% insufficient time with family
- 62% being overworked, busy or tired
- 58% percent pointed to an overly individualistic society
- 48% cited changes such as remote and hybrid work
Technology is not necessarily the villain. It can help people maintain relationships, find communities, and access support they otherwise might not have. But technology can also displace face-to-face interaction and reduce the quality of the interaction happening in front of us.
One study cited in the advisory found that people using social media for more than two hours per day had about twice the odds of reporting perceived social isolation as those using it for less than 30 minutes.
The problem may be that we sometimes allow technology to substitute for forms of connection it cannot completely replace.
We keep trying to solve a structural problem individually
Much of the advice given to lonely people is reasonable: call a friend, join a club, volunteer, take a class, talk to your neighbours. But there is something strange about building a society that steadily removes opportunities for casual human interaction and then telling individuals that it is their responsibility to rebuild a social life from scratch.
Social connection is shaped not only by personality or individual effort, but by workplaces, neighbourhoods, transportation, public spaces, schools, community organizations and technology. These systems our social infrastructure: the places, programs and policies that make it easier for people to repeatedly encounter one another.
The Harvard research reported three-quarters of respondents wanted more activities and enjoyable community events where they lived, along with more accessible public spaces designed for connection.
Perhaps that is where the loneliness conversation needs to go next. We should certainly become more intentional about our relationships. But we should also ask why maintaining a healthy social life now requires so much intention in the first place.
Humans have not suddenly lost the desire to belong. We may simply be living in environments that provide fewer natural opportunities to satisfy it.
The solution to loneliness cannot only be telling people to try harder to make friends. We also need to build workplaces, neighbourhoods, technology, and communities that make running into one another, talking to one another and gradually becoming important to one another a normal part of life again.
