How to combat America’s loneliness epidemic

Vice Admiral Dr. Vivek H. Murthy is used to making history.

The 47-year-old clinician and research scientist is the nation’s first surgeon general of Indian descent and the youngest active-duty flag officer in federal uniformed service.

But if Gen. Murthy succeeds at his latest battle — its announcement largely lost, last spring, amid the daily crush of bombshells and scandals — he will achieve another historic first: a primal human pursuit.

“When I first took office,” Murthy wrote recently, “I didn’t view loneliness as a public health concern.” Then he embarked on a “cross-country listening tour…that surprised me.” The culmination of this process was “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community”.

Published in May, the 82-page study marked a call to arms to help America become less lonely.

It’s a roadmap, of sorts, for the nation to meet what the surgeon general, in his preface, termed “an obligation . . . to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis.”

This quasi-official designation of loneliness as an “epidemic” — the Centers for Disease Control only describes loneliness and social isolation as “widespread problems”— drew on data from the fields of sociology, psychology, neuroscience, political science, economics, and public health.

The need for such efforts is clear – even if ending social isolation may ultimately be beyond the government’s control.

Roughly half of Americans—prior to the pandemic— reported recent experiences of loneliness.

These respondents exhibited higher rates of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.

“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected,” Murthy observed, “is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than . . . obesity and physical inactivity.”

New York, at least statistically, is emblematic of the country.

The city’s health department finds “more than half” of New Yorkers recently reported feeling lonely “some of the time.” 

This is hardly surprising in a city where 32% of residents live alone.

Each of us, the Murthy report recommended, should be “taking small steps every day to strengthen our relationships.”

Immediate action was also urged on schools and workplaces, health care and public health systems, technology companies, religious organizations, and governments at every level.

The nation’s medical system, for instance, was encouraged to “integrate social connection into primary-, secondary- and tertiary-level prevention and care efforts.”

What is loneliness?

Murthy cited feelings of isolation, invisibility, and insignificance; but his prescriptions for federal action, recognizing an elemental problem in the overall enterprise, notably call for the creation of “standardized definitions for relevant terms.”

Fay Bound Alberti, a British writer who identifies herself as “a historian of medicine, emotion, gender, and the body,” wrote in 2109’s “A Biography of Loneliness: The History of An Emotion” that she wanted to “refute” the notion that loneliness “is an integral part of the human condition.”

Use of the word in English prior to 1800 was “negligible,” Alberti argued, while the sentiments the term embodies are “a recent phenomenon . . . a product of the 19th century, of an increasingly scientific, philosophical, and industrial focus on the individual over the collective.”

Only relatively recently has that collective weakened; in fact, as late as 1940, more than 90 percent of Americans lived with other people.”

Up until 1940, less than 10% of Americans lived alone. 

In his seminal work Loneliness (1961), Dr. Clark Moustakas, a Detroit psychologist, took a more humanistic view of the subject.

Moustakas called the condition “neither good nor bad, but a point of intense and timeless awareness of the Self” (emphasis added).

What is unmistakably new is the conviction that loneliness can be eradicated — and that this is a job for the federal government. 

Murthy is not the first to embrace this idea.

In the 1976 novel “Slapstick,” author Kurt Vonnegut envisioned a candidate in a dystopian future who wins the White House on the promise of “LONESOME NO MORE!”

Under orders from the fictitious President Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, federal computers assign a new middle name to every American, with groups of 10,000 or so each receiving the same new name, in addition to their existing ones.

This big-government intervention was intended to strengthen social connections through these shared — albeit manufactured — identity markers.

As Vonnegut explained in Playboy: “If some guy came ringing my doorbell and he said, ‘Hey, you’re a Chipmunk and I’m a Chipmunk; I need a hundred dollars,’ I would listen to his story, if I felt like it, and give him what I could spare.”

Within two decades, the first social-media platform came online, digitizing the grand interconnectedness Vonnegut presaged.

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram created virtual communities filled with extended families of “friends” and “followers” that could be leveraged, rejected, or ignored, in the real world.

Of course, as Murthy himself points out, social media often makes lonely people feel even lonelier.

Murthy’s boss, President Biden, has emphasized mental health in White House messaging but has never spoken publicly of loneliness — even if loneliness has proven particularly dangerous for older Americans like Biden.

But given the multiplying effects of the condition — diminished economic productivity, increased polarization, and political paralysis — Murthy insists Americans will suffer greater costs from inaction.

“We will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country,” Murthy wrote. “Instead of coming together to take on the great challenges before us, we will further retreat to our corners — angry, sick, and alone.”

James Rosen is chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and the author, most recently, of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”