In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness and social isolation a public health epidemic, citing data suggesting that approximately half of American adults report measurable levels of loneliness — levels associated with health risks equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Three years on, the epidemic is, by most measures, getting worse.
The UK appointed the world's first Minister for Loneliness in 2018. Japan, Denmark, and Brazil have since launched national strategies. The WHO has established a Commission on Social Connection.
Causes are structural, cultural, and technological. Urbanisation and geographic mobility have eroded stable community connections. Work patterns that increasingly segment people into individual productivity units. Social media that has replaced the quality of in-person connection with the quantity of digital contact.
We have built cities and economies and technologies that are extraordinarily efficient at helping individuals achieve goals, and extraordinarily poor at creating conditions for human connection. That is not an accident — it is a design flaw.