It's now official: America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. That's not a metaphor—it is, according to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a major public health crisis. On May 3, Murthy formally announced a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connection” geared toward reducing the emotional isolation that is damaging our psyches and our bodies.
Public health experts have been warning tor years about the toll loneliness can take. But the scope of the problem, as laid out by Murthy and others, is striking—not just how many people are lonely but how much damage that loneliness does. The lonely are at substantially elevated risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, addiction, and dementia; being lonely increases your overall risk of premature death by more than 60 percent. And the number of Americans afflicted by loneliness is not small: a recent survey found that more than 50 percent of us reported feeling lonely—and that was the pandemic forced us to pioneer new frontiers in physical isolation, leading to rising rates of with a meditation on how when loneliness metastasizes into “an everyday experience” (as opposed to being something that afflicts just, say, the elderly), a large swath of the populace seeks to assuage its aloneness by submitting to a charismatic fascist—a precondition for the rise of tyranny.
