There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy

photo cred: my dadWe’re living through an epidemic of loneliness and everybody knows it, except for one small group: people who have actually looked at the data.Much of what appears to be a loneliness epidemic is, in fact, a well-intentioned misunderstanding. However, there is a real epidemic out there—one that is far stranger and more sinister. I’ll get to its causes and cures in a moment, but first:When people think they’re documenting a concerning trend, they often get a little loosey-goosey with the facts. I don’t think anyone does this on purpose—no one is getting rich selling anti-loneliness pills (yet). But it means that claims about the loneliness epidemic are often tainted by two statistical sins that tend to go undetected.First, someone will present one actual data point showing how many people feel lonely today, they’ll imply a data point from the past where people were less lonely, and then they’ll conclude, based on the trendline that they just made up, that something very bad has happened. For example, in this paper, researchers find that 76% of adults in California and 78% of adults in the Chinese province of Anhui are lonely, and then they ask why this “unprecedented worldwide rise in loneliness” has occurred. But we only know how these folks are feeling today—we have no idea what they would have said if we asked them yesterday, or a year ago, or ten years ago. It’s possible they’ve always been this lonely.1The second bit of malfeasance is concluding that you’ve discovered a trend in loneliness when you’ve simply divided up the results by age, like this:When you see a graph like that, it’s almost impossible not to rush to conclusions—these poor young people, sucked away from their friends by the black holes of YouTube and Instagram!The faulty assumption here is that older people have never been lonely and that younger people will remain lonely forever. We don’t know if this is an age effect (maybe every generation grows out of its youthful loneliness) or a cohort effect (maybe kids these days, unlike their parents and grandparents, are doomed to lifetimes of loneliness). One way to separate these effects is to compare today’s kids to yesterday’s kids. And when you do that, you see declines, not increases:Notice that y-axis is super zoomed in—this scale goes from 1 to 5, so these are teeny-tiny changes we’re talking aboutMore recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.That doesn’t mean everything is fine. There is, in fact, another epidemic lurking next door...Although the data does not show that people are more lonely, it does show that people are more alone. (Derek Thompson has made this point particularly well.) In the US, time spent with friends on the weekends has fallen by half in the past 20 years. According to the American Time Use Survey, pals are out and solitude is in:This is mainly a recession in hanging out—most of the increase in alone time has come from people spending less time with folks outside their households2:That 2022 time point could be a pandemic hangover, but time spent with non-household members was already dropping long before covid appeared. Indeed, from 1998 to 2018, people who live by themselves started spending much more time alone overall:We’ve got a puzzle here. People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to. So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?No, it’s not fine. Isolated people are more likely to get depressed, suffer a heart attack or a stroke, develop dementia, and catch a cold; they straight-up die sooner. (The “loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day” meme is a bit dubious, but it’s also not crazy.) Those findings all come from correlational studies, but when you inflict isolation on someone instead, you quickly see some massive and concerning effects. Prisoners in solitary confinement often sink into a stupor, their thoughts become obsessive and delusional, and they get agitated and irritable. (I’ve heard many people complain of similar but milder things happening to their elderly parents who live alone.)Here’s one extreme case that’s instructive: when a Spanish woman went into a cave alone for 500 days, to both set a record and prove a point, she turned loopy. She ended up flirting with her GoPro cameras, hallucinating the sound of shamans beating drums, and accusing her electrical equipment of poisoning her with sound waves. “There is no past, there is no future,” she later told a reporter. “Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.”Remember 2017, when everybody was making slime at home? Remember how the coolest slimes were the ones that are liquid when undisturbed, but turn solid when you squeeze or poke them? The human mind is kind of like that slime: it only has shape when prodded and pushed by the presence of other people. When left to its own devices, it turns to ooze. And that sticky, shapeless substance provides the perfect Petri dish for all of our current pathologies. The penchant for voting for extremists, the hyperfixation on gambling away your life savings on sports and crypto, the dream of perpetual gooning—these are the disordered desires of a mind that’s been liquified by solitude.Too much alone time is clearly bad for us, but it doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it should. So the real mystery of the loneliness epidemic is: where is it? Why are we all sitting alone in our houses and slowly melting into puddles of slime, like the “this is fine” meme dog, but without the fire?To answer that question, we need to understand another modern malady. Namely, scurvy.If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you’ll start to feel tired and weak, your joints will hurt, your legs will swell, you’ll get spots on your skin, your teeth with fall out, you’ll feel grumpy all the time (understandably), and eventually, you’ll die. All of this can be prevented with a few tablespoons of lemon juice, but people suffering from scurvy do not develop a hankering for citrus. They will suffer and wither and collapse and never even ask for a grapefruit.DON’T YOU WANT ME BABY // DON’T YOU WANT ME, OHHHH (photo cred: Ivar Leidus)So not only are we unable to synthesize vitamin C ourselves—making us one of the few unlucky mammals who can’t—we are also apparently unable to desire vitamin C. This seems like a rather odd design flaw. If evolution didn’t endow us with a vitamin C dispenser, why couldn’t it at least endow us with a vitamin C detector and desire-er?It’s easier to make sense of this when you think in terms of cybernetic psychology. I’ve written about this theory before (review here, expansion here), but here’s a quick recap:Imagine the mind as a big stack of thermostats. In addition to regulating temperature, these thermostats try to keep all sorts of mission-critical variables at the correct levels—we’ve got a food-stat to make sure we don’t starve, a sleep-stat to make sure we get enough rest, a pain-stat to protect the body from damage, and so on.Whenever one of these control systems—the general term for various -stats—detects that its target variable is out of whack, it tries to restore balance. When you haven’t eaten enough, for example, the food-stat starts sending you messages like “burritos sure are yummy” until you finally put food in your mouth. And once you’re full, the food-stat tries to stop you from bursting your stomach by sending you messages like “NEVER MIND BURRITOS ARE GROSS”.3Our control systems have been good enough to keep us alive for several hundred thousand years. But they can go haywire when we subject them to modern environments for which they did not evolve, and that’s exactly what happens in the case of scurvy.We don’t know exactly how our food-stat functions, but there’s a good chance it contains subsystems that look out for particular macronutrients: a carb-stat, perhaps, or a protein-stat, sugar-stat, salt-stat, and so on. Whatever those subsystems are, they’re enough to make us eat an omnivorous diet that provides sufficient vitamin C, which happens to appear in lots of different foods, like chickpeas, potatoes, cauliflower, and polar bear meat (yes, really).That’s why scurvy doesn’t seem to have been a big problem for our ancestors. Although there are a few ancient accounts of sicknesses that sound kind of like scurvy, and there were unmistakable cases during military campaigns when the food situation turned dire, scurvy didn’t really hit the scene until the 1500s, when we figured out how to build boats big and tough enough to spend months at sea, with nary a glass of MinuteMaid in sight.4You can see where I’m going with this: we are not living through an epidemic of loneliness. We are living through an epidemic of social scurvy.Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation. In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it. In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence. And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.Of course, humans don’t completely lack the capacity to desire companionship the way we lack the capacity to desire vitamin C. We do get lonely; we just don’t get lonely enough. Compared to, say, our food-stats, our social-stats are rather anemic. When people starve, they’ll become obsessed with food; they’ll fantasize about opening restaurants and going hog wild at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and these desires will only increase until the person either eats or dies. When someone starves socially, however, they don’t develop an overwhelming desire to go to a rave. They do not daydream about