On Community And Loneliness
It’s no secret that we need community in order to properly function.
Okay, that’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it’s true. The effects of loneliness on one’s mental and yes, physical health are well-documented. According to a report from the U.S. Surgeon General at the time, Dr. Vivek Murthy (back when we still had qualified people in charge before the voters had to ruin it again), chronic loneliness can be as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Think about that for a moment. Being lonely on a long-term basis might be as hazardous as smoking almost a pack of those cancer sticks daily. Even if the smoking rate has declined pretty quickly in America, the loneliness rate has, if anything, risen. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of them unique to the USA.
Today I walked to a nearby park and participated in an exercise class with a handful of other people. Let me tell you: Although most of them were probably at least twenty years older than me, they’re fit. I struggled to keep up with them. Now my arms are a tiny bit sore, but it would be well worth it even if the after-effects were far worse.
Obviously, exercise such as this is good for you. Unless you live in Tehran, that is. But in all seriousness, people who stay active, especially the older they get, are more likely to live longer, healthier lives when all else is equal. Again, that isn’t a revolutionary observation.
However, what occurred to me more than once as I was lifting weights and jumping over hurdles is how much of a community this exercise class was. You could pay a small fee for each session, but many of the same people go there every week, to the point where they consider one another good friends. And yet somehow, it didn’t feel “cliquey” the way some friend groups do, even when the preponderance of the members are on the wrong side of middle age.
If we are to believe that chronic loneliness is this dangerous for your health, then it might be a reason why the average life expectancy in the USA lags other wealthy nations. Obviously, there are other factors at play here, such as income inequality, a higher obesity rate, and the lack of universal health insurance. Perhaps these factors are interrelated, but the point is that loneliness is not the only reason our health outcomes aren’t what they could be. That being said, I think it’s a significant enough factor that it deserves to be discussed more, particularly in light of the way our infrastructure lends itself to social atomization.
Stock image of suburban tract housing (from iStock). This could be Anywhere, USA, but wherever it is, it’s very hard to have spontaneous community here.
I want to be clear that loneliness is not unique to the United States. Like obesity, it might be worse here, and there might be more systemic factors leading to it than in, say, most of Europe, but there are plenty of lonely people in other countries too.
Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party gave a controversial address that’s often referred to as the “island of strangers” speech. Now, I’m not going to delve too deeply into this, because it's about glass houses and whatnot. However, while I do not know if this line was meant as a dog whistle, quite a few progressives interpreted it as such.
I read a fascinating article, which I’m going to link here, about the very real issue the Prime Minister brought up; namely, a lack of social cohesion. People aren’t spending as much time with one another as they used to, and many feel lonely or like they don’t know their neighbors as a result.
This is a legitimate problem, but as the author of the linked article argues, immigration isn’t the cause of it. A national identity can change over time; just because someone is British by choice instead of by chance doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t be considered part of British society. It’s a different world than it was some decades ago.
Rather, the author points out that numerous community centers, locations that might be considered “third places”, have closed in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A public service union in the UK is quoted as saying that roughly two-thirds of council-run youth centers had closed in England and Wales since 2010, largely due to funding cuts. If Prime Minister Starmer truly wanted to alleviate this problem, he might be wise to push for increased funding for such programs.
Again, I realize that I’m one to talk, given that I’m from the USA and the problem of societal alienation is likely even worse here. There’s a reason young men outright voted for Trump in last year’s election. And most of the United Kingdom is a pedestrian paradise relative to most of the United States. Car dependency isolates people, particularly those who don’t or can’t drive.
The latter group frequently includes the elderly. Once your doctor advises you to stop driving and you give up your license, your quality of life is going to drop precipitously if you live in a car-dependent place. Now, no country is perfect about integrating the elderly into society; even the Netherlands, every urbanist Redditor’s favorite country, isn’t amazing in this regard. But not having other transportation options is going to exacerbate loneliness for old people who can’t drive anymore. If you didn’t or couldn’t save for a retirement community during your working years, tough luck.
And even if you can afford to live in such a place during your “golden years”, it’s mostly other old people you interact with. That seriously hinders one’s chances for intergenerational friendships, which have many benefits.
In any case, note the earlier statistic about youth centers, which are presumably places for relatively young people to get to know each other. They’re withering away in both the UK and USA.
As a current 25-year-old, I’m well aware that a person’s twenties can be a very formative decade indeed. The habits one sets or keeps now will very often matter many years down the line, both in terms of your actual well-being and the habits you keep holding in later stages of life. If you eat healthily in your twenties, you’re more likely to keep doing so in your forties. Again, that’s not rocket science.
I found it notable that the crowd at the aforementioned exercise class skewed on the older side. It could be that people under age 40 were too busy looking for a job in today’s economy and didn’t have time to attend a Saturday morning exercise class. Or maybe it was just this week and it’s not necessarily representative of what happens every week. Sure. It’s possible.
But exercise classes aren’t the only community event that’s mostly older people. Whenever I’ve phonebanked for Democratic candidates, most of the other people on the Zoom call look to be over 60. From what I’ve heard, it’s the same way at in-person civic gatherings. Hell, say what you will about religion, but churches have served as a “third place” before, and as Reddit will love to tell you, nobody under 60 goes there regularly anymore. And church attendance is one institution that’s declined a lot faster in Europe than in the USA.
We’re constantly told that young people are our future leaders. Strictly speaking, this is accurate. But in the age of online socializing and declining community engagement in general, political leaders in the United States and elsewhere haven’t been fostering the policies necessary to make sure today’s young people have community.
This matters for two reasons. One is that if young people, who’ve already lived through a decade of Donald Trump in some of their formative years, grow accustomed to a lack of social cohesion, that’s going to make us a world of strangers. It will seriously damage the community. In some ways, we’re already there.
The other reason is that if young people are used to isolation, they’ll eventually be old people who are incredibly lonely. Worse yet, if former Surgeon General Murthy is right about the health hazards of loneliness being as serious as he said they are, many of them might not grow old.
Let’s not let that happen.
