The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

British historian, Fay Bound Alberti, co-founder of the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, writes that, “By the 21st century, loneliness has become ubiquitous. Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilization.  In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according to ideas about the self, God and the natural world.”  Alberti helps us understand the history of loneliness:

• The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialization, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasize that the individual was what mattered – not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.
• In the 20th century, the new sciences of the mind—especially psychiatry and psychology—took center-stage in defining the healthy and unhealthy emotions an individual should experience.  Carl Jung was the first to identify ‘introvert’ and ‘extravert’ personalities (to use the original spelling) in his Psychological Types (1921).  Introversion became associated with neuroticism and loneliness, while extroversion was linked to sociability, gregariousness and self-reliance.  In the US, these ideas took on special significance as they were linked to individual qualities associated with self-improvement, independence and the “go-getting American dream.”
• Loneliness is lamented by politicians because it is expensive, especially for an ageing population. People who are lonely are more likely to develop illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and depression, and 50 per cent more likely to die prematurely than non-lonely counterparts. But there is nothing inevitable about being old and alone—even in the UK and the US where, unlike much of Europe, there isn’t a history of inter-familial care of the aged. Loneliness and economic individualism are connected.

Chuck Swindoll observes that “Social media and the technological age have caused us to become alienated from each other.  We’re connected but not in community.”  Indeed, family, enduring friendship, meaningful shared work, and local communities of worship— all have grown ever thinner.  Based on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the majority of us are lonely, with the highest scores for younger adults, ages 18 to 22.  A UCLA 2010 study, using this scale, estimated that 35% of Americans over 45 were lonely.  Researchers, including former US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, describe this as a “loneliness epidemic, liking its impact on health to obesity or smoking 15 cigarettes per day.”  Smaller-scale studies have found correlations between loneliness and isolation, and a range of health problems, including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, eating disorders, drug abuse, sleep deprivation, depression, alcoholism and anxiety.  Sasse reports that today Americans have fewer shared projects than our parents or grandparents and we belong to fewer civic groups.

David French updates the situation in America:  “The story of modern America—especially for working-class Americans who did not go to college—is a story of declining connections, declining friendships and a loss of a sense of belonging. That sense of isolation makes people miserable, and as the misery spreads, it affects our economy and our culture. The data, quite frankly, is horrifying.

• “Last month, the American Enterprise Institute released its 2024 American Social Capital Survey. It exposes a stark social divide. People with high school diplomas or less spend less time in public spaces, less time in hobby groups and less time in community groups or in sports leagues than those with college degrees and higher . . .  And they’re less likely to host friends, family and neighbors in their homes.””

• “The friendship numbers are just as sobering. Americans of all stripes are reporting that they have declining numbers of friends, but the decline is most pronounced among high school graduates. Between 1990 and 2024, the percentage of college graduates who reported having zero close friends rose to 10 percent from 2 percent, which is upsetting enough. Among high school graduates, the percentage rose to a heartbreaking 24 percent from 3 percent.”
• “The news just keeps getting worse. In 1990, an impressive 49 percent of high school graduates reported having at least six close friends. By 2024, that percentage had been cut by more than half — to 17 percent. The percentage of college graduates with that many friends declined also, but only to 33 percent from 45 percent.”
• “The disappearance of friendship has profound consequences. According to the A.E.I. report, there is a class divide in the percentage of Americans who can rely on someone to give them a ride to the doctor, lend them a small amount of money in an emergency or offer a place to stay. Another way of putting this is that the Americans who are most vulnerable to losing the informal social safety net of friends and relatives may be the people who need it the most.”

There is one other related aspect to the loneliness epidemic in America—the intersection of loneliness with the Social Media.  David French reports on this tragic example: “Rarely will you read about a case with more heartbreaking facts. In 2021, a 10-year-old girl named Nylah Anderson was viewing videos on TikTok, as millions of people do every day, when the app’s algorithm served up a video of the so-called blackout challenge on its ‘For You Page.’  The page suggests videos for users to watch. The blackout challenge encourages users to record themselves as they engage in self-asphyxiation, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. Nylah saw the challenge, tried it herself and died. She accidentally hung herself.”

“At the heart of the legal dispute is a single question: Who is responsible for Nylah’s death? Blaming a 10-year-old is absurd. She was hardly able to understand the risk. Should we blame the person who created the video that she watched? Certainly. An offline analogy might be useful. Imagine that a person walked up to Nylah at school and suggested that she asphyxiate herself. We’d immediately recognize their culpability.  But does TikTok have any responsibility? After all, it not only hosted the video. According to the claims in the legal complaint Nylah’s mother filed, TikTok’s algorithm repeatedly put dangerous challenges on Nylah’s For You Page. To continue with the offline analogy, imagine if an adult walked up to Nylah after school and said, ‘I know you, and I know you’ll like this video,’ and then showed her a blackout challenge performed by somebody else.”

With legal rights come legal responsibilities. “The First Amendment doesn’t permit anyone to say anything they’d like. If I slander someone, I can be held liable. If I traffic in child sex abuse material, I can be put in jail. If I harass someone, I can face legal penalties. Should the same rules apply to social media companies’ speech, including to their algorithms?  Nylah’s case could turn out to be one of the most significant in the history of the internet . . . Nylah’s case is not an isolated one. In late 2022, Bloomberg reported that the blackout challenge was linked to 15 deaths of children 12 and younger in a single 18-month span. It’s hard to even fathom the depth of the parents’ pain. It does not hurt the cause of free speech to impose the same liability on social media companies that we’d impose on anyone else in similar circumstances. Social media companies shouldn’t be held liable for other people’s speech, but when they speak, they’re responsible for that speech.”

What then should we do about this growing epidemic of loneliness?  Repairing America’s physical infrastructure, although expensive, is conceptually simple, involving steel and concrete. America’s crumbling social infrastructure presents a daunting challenge: We do not know how to develop what Ben Sasse advocates—“new habits of mind and heart .?.?. new practices of neighborliness.” We do know that more government, which means more saturation of society with politics, is not a sufficient answer.  The solution is found in God’s Word:  As the Bible shows, God not only created humanity “in His image” (Genesis 1:26ff), He also created humanity in community.

[1]  The first institution He created was the family (see Genesis 2:18-25).  That community was to be built on the foundation of a “one-flesh union” (see 2:24-25), with children a result of that union.  That most basic of communities—the family—is to be a place of love, discipline, respect, honor and mutual responsibility (see Colossians 3 and Ephesian 5:22-6: 4).

[2]  God created the institution of the state to foster justice and thwart evil (see Romans 13:1-7).  Government is to create a society where there is order and stability and where there is respect for life and family.

[3]  Finally, God created the church, an institution the Apostle Paul compares to the human body.  Each part of the “body” is unique, of value and necessary for the functioning of the whole.  No part is insignificant.  There is perfect unity within this diversity.  Indeed, Scripture argues that the diversity within the unity of the Godhead (i.e., the Trinity) is the model for the diversity within the unity of the family and the diversity within the unity of the church.  The church is the place for the human to combat loneliness through mutual care and edification, comfort, purpose and meaning and the richness found in human relationships (see 1 Corinthians 12-14, Ephesians 4 and Hebrews 13).

One final note:  Loneliness is a real issue; one at near epidemic proportions.  The essential cure is Jesus.  There is an old hymn of the church entitled, “No one Understands Like Jesus; He’s a Friend beyond compare.”  As the Godman, Jesus knows what it is like to suffer, to be tempted, to be deserted, to be mocked, to be cursed—and to be lonely.  The key to solving the epidemic of loneliness in American Civilization is Jesus Christ.  He is the first step in the cure.  There is no other way to cure this Postmodern epidemic.

See Fay Bound Alberti, “One is the loneliest number: The History of a Western problem,”

Aeon (12 September 2018);  Ben Sasse, “Politics Can’t Solve Our Political Problems,” in the Wall Street Journal (13-14 October 2018); and The Economist (1 September 2018), pp. 49-51.David French in the New York Times (2 September 2024 and 4 September 2024); Chuck Swindoll, insight.for.living@insight.org (8 September 2024).