I think this is a very thorough and interesting post. I think the post focuses mostly on interventions to directly treat social anxious people, as we would treat people for other mental health problems. While I think researching and implementing these treatments is worthwhile, I also think that we want to pursue solutions to the underlying technological and cultural shifts that may have caused the significant upswing in loneliness in past decades. Below I'll share the contents of an essay I recently wrote about about some potential solutions. I'd be curious to hear what thoughts other readers have about these potential solutions. I apologize in advance for the unsettling AI art :) I wanted to find a way to quickly get images for the essay without having to worry about copyright, so I used ChatGPT.

4 Ways to Solve Our Loneliness Crisis

The Problem

Many articles have established that loneliness is a significant and growing problem facing America, so I won’t spend too much time establishing the importance of the issue.

In May 2023, the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an Advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, highlighting how loneliness is bad for physical and mental health: “Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling — it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” Murthy also explained that loneliness is prevalent and on the rise: “Changes in key indicators, including individual social participation, demographics, community involvement, and use of technology over time, suggest both overall societal declines in social connection and that, currently, a significant portion of Americans lack adequate social connection.”

Solutions

1. Restrict Smartphone Usage among Kids

Smartphones and especially social media, have been thought to be harmful to the social lives of kids. According to a NY Times article written by psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge: “In a paper we just published in The Journal of Adolescence, we report that in 36 out of 37 countries, loneliness at school has increased since 2012. . .This synchronized global increase in teenage loneliness suggests a global cause, and the timing is right for smartphones and social media to be major contributors.” The authors go on to say that after examining a number of global trends that might explain the rise of teenage loneliness, only smartphone use and internet access appeared to move in lockstep with teen loneliness.

The two psychologists recommend the following solutions: ban smartphones in schools and delay entry to social media via effective age gating. With no smartphones in school, students can practice “the lost art of paying full attention to the people around them.”

Social media, which has been thought to be the most deleterious form of smartphone uses, especially for teenage girls, can be restricted by effective age gating. Tech platforms have nominally age gated their platforms, but teens can easily bypass these mechanisms by lying about their age. Although I generally pride myself in being honest, I remember lying myself to gain access to Facebook in middle school. According to the article tech platforms “should be required to implement age and identity verification for all new accounts, as many other industries have done. . . the verification could be done by reliable third parties.” States have actually begun passing laws to enforce age gating and restricting the use of social media apps for minors. In spring 2023, Utah passed laws imposing a curfew on social media use for minors, making their sites off limits between the hours of 10:30 p.m. — 6:30 a.m. for anyone under the age of 18. The laws also seek to curtail tech companies ability to lure kids to their apps using addictive features. Utah is the first state to enact such laws, but other states such as Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, Louisiana and New Jersey have similar proposals in the works.

We can contact our local schools and state representatives to help promote school phone bans and effective age gating of social media platforms.

2. Facilitate More Unsupervised Play

Jonathan Haidt argues that there has been a significant reduction in unsupervised play among kids in America for many decades. Unsupervised play is essentially play that is freely chosen by kids and not overseen by adults. Haidt believes that less unsupervised play for kids means a whole host of harms, including weaker social skill development. I speculate that the reduction in unsupervised play has been a major factor in loneliness of both kids and adults (who developed weaker social skills as kids).

Why did unsupervised play decrease? Haidt argues that a major cause of the decline was an irrational fears of kids being abducted that arose in the last 20th century. The data shows that there was never much risk of child abduction. But television portrayed heinous abductions, making parents afraid to let their kids play freely. Eventually, new social norms of kids needing constant supervision were reinforced by state negligence laws making it illegal for parents to let their kids roam unsupervised in many places. Haidt also pointed out that Kids spend an increasing amount of time doing homework and supervised activities like sports outside school, crowding out time for unsupervised play.

How can we increase the amount of unsupervised play our kids have? We can potentially educate parents on the safety and health benefits of allowing their kids to engage in unsupervised play via the media or existing parental education programs. We can contact our state legislatures to advocate for changing negligence laws to be more permissive of unsupervised play. We can work with our local schools to reduce the amount of hours of homework children have.

We can get involved in our local zoning boards to stop new housing projects from being blocked, allowing for more dense and walkable communities. We can ask our representatives to fund better public transit. With denser housing development and improved transit, more kids will likely live in neighborhoods where they can reach their friends’ homes without being dependent on parents’ car rides (which can be limited in supply).

3. Leverage Economies of Scale in Parenting

In this section, I’ll offer a solution that may improve the social lives of parents. Let me preface this section by acknowledging that I have no personal experience parenting. I hope to be a parent one day and I am daunted by the sacrifice and stress that parenting appears to require.

Anecdotally, I have several single friends in their 30s and I hear from them that most of their friends have kids and are hardly ever free to hangout. According to an article by the World Economic Forum, from the American Time Use Survey “When we’re young — particularly in our teens — we spend a lot of our time with friends, parents, siblings and extended family. . . Throughout our 30s, 40s and 50s — over this period of [our] life, [we] spend much of their time with partners, children and, unsurprisingly, co-workers.” The article goes on to say that for adults with children, the fraction of their time spent with people outside their immediate family is even less than the average for adults. In sum, parents’ friendships and social lives outside their immediate family typically weaken significantly.

Is having a limited social life outside one’s immediate family an inevitable cost of parenting? According to Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, this needn’t be the case. In her book, Everyday Utopia, Ghodsee discusses how throughout history, people have relied on larger networks beyond the nuclear family to assist with parenting — extended family, neighbors, and fellow community members. American parenting culture, where almost all the effort of raising children falls on the nuclear family, is a fairly unique division of labor. Ghodsee suggests that Americans should strive to leverage extended networks to help reduce the heavy burden of parenting. Americans should consider living closer to their extended family members and seeking help from family. For example parents could have grandparents help watch children. Friends who are raising children could move in together or buy nearby units, helping take turns watching each other’s children or cooking meals (see this podcast episode for a real life example).

While searching Google, I came across a medium post by environmental engineer Katie Patrick, proposing a coliving unit design for parents to efficiently raise children together. The residence could consist of a bunch of studio apartments adjoining a central play space. According to Patrick, the space could have a “A roster of parent rotation to cook dinner and oversee the children from 5pm — 10pm. Each parent is on duty about 2 to 4 nights per month. . . Parents are able to leave their child in the home from 5pm — 10pm on evenings supervised by the parent on duty.” Such an arrangement could massively reduce the workload for parents, allowing them to maintain vibrant social lives, reducing the stress on spousal relationships and improving happiness.

As another solution to parental isolation, universal child care could be subsidized or provided for free by the state or federal government. This solution would also provide parents with more time to socialize. In her book Ghodsee states that children are a public good. American citizens benefit from Americans having more children, yet the cost of having kids is born on individual families. With the high stress of parenting and the rising costs of raising a family in the US due to rising housing, higher education costs, and healthcare, parenting is in many ways increasingly difficult. Maybe we should reduce the burden of parenting to incentivize having more kids with free or subsidized child care? Of course, among other downsides, providing childcare at this scale would be a huge taxpayer burden. The benefits would have to be weighed against the costs.

Finally, changing norms and laws to allow kids of a relatively young age to roam their communities and play unsupervised could reduce parental isolation by reducing the amount of time parents need to spend watching over their kids and giving them rides.

4. Screen-Minimal Coliving Communities

I believe screen based entertainment is at the core of our loneliness problem. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argued that the introduction of TV reduced Americans’ participation in civic institutions like church or service organizations, which ultimately damaged our trust in each other and in our democracy. However, data seems to show that TV did not reduce our amount of hours spent doing social activities.

According to data from the American Time Use Survey, the amount of hours Americans spent with their friends between 1970–2013 remained relatively constant. Then, after 2013 the time dropped precipitously. What happened? According to the Australian writer Joseph Friedman, the decrease can be explained by the rise of smartphones, tablets, high-speed internet and affordable laptops. Friedman says: “30 years ago, we still crowded around the television with our tribe. Today, we stream alone, hunched in a corner of the house watching TV on a phone or a laptop, while our partners and children do the same in their corners, alone”

How can we solve our screen-based entertainment problem? Having the government simply ban screen-based entertainment would seem to me to be a problematic precedent-setting overstep of government authority. Instead, a more tenable if farfetched solution could be for like-minded people to live together in coliving communities where time spent on screens is limited. According to an Australian coliving company “Coliving is a modern form of housing where residents share living space and a set of interests, values, and/or intentions.” Coliving communities could be established to encourage community and social connection, in part by limiting the isolating effects of screen-based entertainment. How could screen-based entertainment be limited? Internet access could be blocked by making the walls and/or windows of the building contain materials known to block cell signals and by installing no internet/TV cables in units.

Residents could still work modern jobs by working from their workplaces or in coworking spaces in the surrounding metro areas. To allow residents to function in our digital-driven modern societies, cell signals (but not data signals) could be provided in buildings so people could still send and receive calls and texts, using a similar technology to how NYC brought cell + data signals to the NYC subway. A small computer lab could be provided to allow adults a limited amount of access to computers per month (e.g. 10hr) to do such errands as online shopping or planning a trip. Like many modern day coliving spaces, these communities could build social connection through regular community events (e.g. service activities, dinners, etc.), shared spaces (e.g. sports fields and courts, common rooms with games, etc.), and chores.

Without the ability of residents to easily entertain themselves in isolation, I suspect residents would be much more likely to want to spend time with each other, both in and out of the coliving space. These communities could be built as resident owned, nonprofits, or for profit organizations. I suspect the biggest barrier to building these coliving spaces would be that the downsides of living in such communities are very clear (limited access to the screens) while the upsides are currently speculative (better social life and sense of community). Possibly, a prospective founder of one of these spaces could target a segment of people who are most eager to live in an environment with limited screen access (e.g. parents who follow a particular religious tradition) and build a screen-minimal coliving community for them. Eventually if this group has a very positive experience and data by unbiased third party researchers shows the superior social outcomes of this living arrangement, more widespread interest in these living spaces could arise.

I would like to hear what you agree and disagree with!

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Joe Connolly

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4 Ways to Solve Our Loneliness Crisis

The Problem

Solutions

1. Restrict Smartphone Usage among Kids

2. Facilitate More Unsupervised Play

3. Leverage Economies of Scale in Parenting

4. Screen-Minimal Coliving Communities

Joe Connolly

Posts 1

Comments5

4 Ways to Solve Our Loneliness Crisis

The Problem

Solutions

1. Restrict Smartphone Usage among Kids

2. Facilitate More Unsupervised Play

3. Leverage Economies of Scale in Parenting

4. Screen-Minimal Coliving Communities

Posts
1

Comments
5