I’d written about claims of an “epidemic of loneliness” a few years ago, but the ongoing pandemic has reminded me of the subject’s continued relevance. I’m resurfacing my writing here. Anyone interested can find the piece with hyperlinks on Medium.
The twenty-first century is, evidently, a lonely place. Arthur C. Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, warns that “America is suffering an epidemic of loneliness.” A book by Republican Senator Ben Sasse inspired Brook’s editorial, in which the Senator laments that “loneliness is killing us.” Brooks never questions whether the Senator’s support of means-testing social security, demonizing same-sex marriage, and dismantling Obama Care may foment the loneliness and apathy that alarms the Senator. Brooks and Sasse’s writing is instead characteristic of a genre of self-help moralizing that proclaims that inadequate kindness has emptied modern life of meaningful social bonds.
Such articles often blame loneliness on individual habits and personality. In the New York Times, for example, David Brooks argued that “heavy internet users” and the social media companies that “feed them” were to blame for an “epidemic of loneliness.” In the Atlantic, Jean M. Twenge contends that overuse of cellphones has produced a “lonely, dislocated generation.” Oprah Winfrey launched an anti-loneliness campaign centered on the premise that people would be less lonely if they learned how to use social media the right way. The culminating point of these arguments is that individual pathology is to blame for mass loneliness. People would not be so lonely if they just stepped away from their phones.
Others come close to a more critical understanding of the causes of loneliness, but their arguments instead teeter into timid homilies about individual behavior as the cause of social dislocation. Brooks, for example, cites the “nature of work” as a cause of loneliness, blaming the gig-economy for American’s ephemeral social connections and lack of a strong sense of home. Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the former Surgeon General of the United States, likewise attributed the “epidemic of loneliness” to the fact that Americans spend longer and longer hours at work. But rather than recommend changes to workplace conditions, Brooks and Murthy recommend alterations in personal behavior. For Brooks, Americans should be more neighborly, while Dr. Murthy recommends that employers encourage worker sociability to increase their productivity.
If loneliness is a veritable epidemic, our remedies should not consist in blaming individual habits or personalities. Brooks and Dr. Murthy were closer to the mark when they indicted the nature of work in America for diminishing the quality and quantity of social interaction. As readers of Brooks’ op-ed noted, few Americans have any choice but to work. They must surrender time for sociability in order to compete for artificially scarce wealth, which the extremely affluent increasingly accumulate at a disproportionate rate even during the nation’s worst pandemic.
Moreover, conservatives and liberals alike have crippled one of the strongest bulwarks against the isolation and disaffection of workers: organized labor. Historically unions did not just champion higher wages for workers but also fought against the attempt of employers to monopolize the entirety of their employees’ time. They waged campaigns, some bloody, to ensure that workers would have stable jobs and leisure time to spend with their friends and family. While unions celebrated solidarity and collective solutions to worker problems, employers, when unchecked, endeavored to isolate their employees and consume their free time.
Consider the story of Seth King, a U.S. Navy Veteran who worked in an Amazon warehouse. At a Virginia town hall, King recounted working long hours, in which he was not allowed to sit down, talk to other people, or provided a way to see outside. His wages were so low that he picked up another job, allotting him one day of free time that he used to sleep. “I was so depressed,” he recounted at the town hall, “and I kept telling myself if this is the best I can do, why am I even still here?” Amazon — one of the wealthiest corporations in the world — circumscribed King’s social life at the workplace, but it also destroyed his possibility for meaningful sociability outside of work. Amazon’s virulent anti-union position left King powerless to contest his working conditions, and after two months he left his job. One wonders what Arthur C. Brook’s prescribed solution could have done to improve King’s social life. When was neighborliness supposed to happen?
Arthur C. Brooks and others regard the loneliness and dislocation of many as an individual fault deserving an individual solution. While well-intentioned, they ignore the political and economic structures that compel many to lose sociable hours. We can improve the social lives of Americans, not by asking them to smile more or work harder, but by reducing their work hours, providing earlier retirements, increasing their overtime pay, and guaranteeing and expanding paid family, vacation, and sick leave. We can demand wage increases for the bottom half of Americans, most of whom have seen minimal increases in their pre-tax income, even as that of the 0.001 percent has grown more than sevenfold.
These are concrete measures that give Americans more time and control over their social lives, allowing them to build meaningful connections with friends, family, and their community. But they can only be achieved through collective action. At a time of ascendant self-help sermonizing and a weakened labor movement, that collective activism will be difficult, but it is the surest way to provide Americans dignified and quality social lives.