NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE F or too much of this young decade, social isolation was presented as a virtue — an “ethical duty” even. This week, the horrible consequences of what should have been an option of last resort are being met with some urgency by the very public-health establishment that implored you to keep to yourself.
An 81-page report released this week by Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warned of a crisis of loneliness afflicting the American public. His office maintains that, beyond the psychological drawbacks associated with loneliness, solitude contributes to negative health outcomes, too. “Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually,” the Associated Press reported.
“It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Murthy told AP reporters of the symptoms associated with acute socialization deficiency. Murthy could not produce data that advance the claim that loneliness contributes to premature death, but his office maintains that this condition increases an individual’s likelihood of succumbing to stroke and heart disease, and it augments the risk of depression, anxiety, and dementia. The surgeon general’s report calls on elected officials to make the “same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis.”
The public-health imperative to withdraw from physical social settings exacerbated what was already a measurable decline in the number of Americans who engaged regularly in communal activities with a reliable group of friends and acquaintances.
Robert Putnam’s look into the declining social capital among the American public in his seminal book Bowling Alone was published in the year 2001. He measured Americans’ detachment from one another by the declining memberships of PTAs, churches, social organizations, and youth groups such as the Boy Scouts. In the middle of the last decade, the Wall Street Journal tracked the decline and fall of workplace-sponsored sports teams, observing that the tradition had fallen out of fashion and was on a path toward extinction. The paper was joined that year by liberal columnist E. J. Dionne, who chronicled the lamentable decline of “the neighborhood” and, with it, “neighborliness.” With the rise of streaming services and the proliferation of entertainment venues, Americans have access to fewer and fewer shared cultural moments even within our social silos.
And then came the pandemic with all its attendant miseries. One study cited in Murthy’s report linked the rise of crippling loneliness to the technological tools that mimic socialization — tools that are marketed as reasonable facsimiles of community. But those tools proved woefully insufficient to the task not long into the pandemic. Indeed, they may even invite worse psychological consequences than being truly alone does. No one should have needed a surgeon general’s study to at least have the sense that social disaggregation would have lasting consequences for us all. But so many of the Americans who set public policy during those years and to whom policy-makers looked for affirmation were not troubled by the isolation of the pandemic era. They welcomed it.
By the summer of 2021, the Atlantic alternated between suffering from bouts of pathological anxiety over this or the other new Covid variant and insisting that the non-pharmaceutical interventions it championed had no downsides. Researchers who dismissed the social-isolation crisis insisted that our “psychological immune systems” turned out to be “more robust” than critics expected, and they noticed an uptick in mental health as the weather warmed — a fact attributable not to the renewed prospects for socialization, according to the magazine’s contributors, but to humanity’s capacity to adapt to hardships. The public learned, they said, how to “reweave their social tapestry” with drive-by birthdays, virtual cocktail parties, and cheering out of their apartment windows in the direction of health-care workers.
By that autumn, the magazine was mourning the passing of the worst stages of the pandemic. “Deep in the throes of the late-stage pandemic, millions of young people have grown to miss this time early last year,” the Atlantic’s Morgan Ome and Christian Paz asserted. A brief survey of the social-media networks used by young adults turned up enough evidence to support the claim. As the disease receded, the looming prospect of reentering society had made the “suspended animation of those early days” of the pandemic look rosy by comparison.
In April 2021, the Washington Post insisted that roughly “half the population” is “dreading the return to normal.” The pandemic proved to be an introvert’s paradise. Gone was the “emotional labor” of engaging with human beings. No longer were the psychologically anguished compelled to put on a “happy face” for the benefit of others. The need to maintain relationships with friends and extended family went out the window. “Unpopular opinion: I don’t have zoom fatigue and I miss zoom happy hours and game nights,” wrote one 30-year-old software engineer profiled in the New York Times. “I feel more isolated now than I did when friends all took time to chat online at the beginning of the pandemic.” She wasn’t alone in her nostalgia. The Times featured the responses of several young adults who preferred the à la carte communitarian experience available online. “Studies show they [social-media and digital substitutes] meaningfully benefited people’s mental health during a historically isolating period of human history,” the Times insisted.
In this period, policy-makers were bombarded with messages from media professionals that it was reckless, irresponsible, racially suspect, and hopelessly selfish to prioritize social reintegration over extended — seemingly indefinite — pandemic-related mitigation measures. Those messages were coming from a class of Americans for whom socialization is apparently a burden. Almost overnight, their social anxiety became a species of probity, and they were reluctant to let that go. Even when we had ample evidence to suggest that self-isolation was only being selectively observed and was, therefore, useless, the arbiters of American discourse prosecuted the case for loneliness for as long as they could.
Now, however, the loneliness epidemic will be written about as though it is a fatherless phenomenon. The conditions that exacerbated it will be written off as though they were no one’s preference, but that is not true. If only for posterity’s sake, there must be an accounting so that the experience of the pandemic is never repeated — regardless of how much elite opinion misses the sequestration and solitude in which its mouthpieces thrived.