The answers lie in our past

People have already figured out how to solve problems related to loneliness

Credit: Disney Pixar

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I’ve been at a conference all week so I’ve had to write this post somewhat hastily while on the road, but I wanted to bring attention to two pieces of writing that recently landed on my radar.

The first is an Atlantic piece from Hillary Clinton about the loneliness epidemic. She is responding to Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s warning about isolation from earlier this year, which is also something I wrote about. My take at the time was that loneliness and isolation are indeed serious problems and I’m glad they’re getting more attention. But also, it was weird how Murthy almost completely ignored family as a potential solution to loneliness — especially when by Murthy’s own admission family is what cured his own bout of isolation. It was classic for-me-but-not-thee.

Clinton mostly follows Murthy’s lead and leaves out families. Though the word “family” is sprinkled throughout the piece, aside from a fleeting mention of “paid leave,” there are basically no specific ideas about how to actually strengthen families or to make their benefits more widely accessible¹.

It’s an unfortunate omission because, as I previously argued, family has a demonstrable ability to alleviate isolation. We know, for example, that lower levels of marriage and parenthood are associated with higher levels of loneliness. Marriage is also associated with better mental health and greater levels of life satisfaction. (Check my previous piece for various links and sources). And of course, kids with two married parents tend to have an array of positive advantages.

In that light, strengthening marriage and promoting family seem like obvious strategies for combating loneliness. Perhaps not the only strategies — it’s a free country, do what you want — but at least some of the big things to talk about. It is, in other words, at least worth telling people about the loneliness-alleviating effects of family so they can make informed decisions.

I’m genuinely glad that Murthy, Clinton and anyone else are raising the alarm about the loneliness epidemic. I don’t think the ideas they’re floating are bad. They’re just incomplete. And this reluctance to consider obvious, time-tested solutions to systemic problems is a recurring issue. For instance, it’s basically the same thing I wrote about last week; a researcher of utopias was looking for solutions to isolation but instead of zeroing in on what has tended to work best for the most number of people, instead focused on exotic ideas with limited ability to scale up.

And this brings me to the second piece of writing I wanted to highlight here: this New York Times piece on the “joy of May-December friendships.” The article highlights the value of friendships that cross generational boundaries. And indeed, the people I know who have such friendships benefit from them immensely. I’m very much in favor of cross-generational relationships and in fact that was one of the things I wrote about in this post from late last year; if everyone you know is more or less in your same age demographic, life is going to get rough when everyone in the group gets old.

But how does one build May-December friendships? The Times piece includes a number of anecdotal examples of people building such relationships, but it’s otherwise not a how-to guide. At one point the piece quotes a professor of social work who laments that society “is ‘really good’ at segregating groups by age,” with the implication being that this is simply a reality of life.

But in fact that’s not the way life has traditionally worked. Historically most folks did have connections to people outside their own age demographic. Even when I was a kid, most of the adults in my life had a social group that was more varied in age than what I and my cohort of friends have. Anecdotally, age segregation seems to have become more pronounced in just one generation.

The professor quoted in the Times alludes to this fact, and to the solution: She says that people tend to form May-December bonds via “mentoring and volunteer opportunities, religious settings and, especially, workplaces.” The quote jumped out to me because while many people today work, religious activity is waning and waning fast. The Times itself covered the trend of “de-churching” earlier this summer.

And yet church is a really good place to meet older or younger people. And in that context wouldn’t it make sense to A) stress that point to people, and B) have more conversations about how to reinvigorate religious participation? The fact that western society is experiencing a “dechurching” is a big part of why it’s hard to build May-December friendships in the first place. It seems like that fact should be a bigger part of articles like the one in the Times, and of any conversation about isolation.

Look, I get why religion is on the retreat. I’ve had my own circuitous relationship with faith that maybe someday I’ll write about, but suffice it to say here that I’m the last person who should be calling people back to church. But regardless of where any of us individuals stand, it seems like the relationship between religion, connectivity and loneliness ought to be a bigger part of the conversation. As is the case with family, research shows that religious participation is associated with lower levels of loneliness. Everyone should be made aware of that fact, and we should use it to inform anti-loneliness strategies going forward.

In the end I’m glad that all of these topics are getting more attention. But again and again, we’re identifying problems that people in the past have already solved. Why not take a closer look at how they solved them? Put another way, maybe instead of looking for something new, the answers lies in our past.

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1. Clinton and Murthy both seem to see infrastructure improvements (eg public transit) as pro family policies. As an urban design nerd I like that idea, but I think there are also plenty of ways that we could help families in a more direct way too. Paid leave, which Clinton does bring up, is an example of a policy that is more obviously directed at families.