The loneliness epidemic has a cure

Supporters wait to hear former President Donald Trump speak at a campaign event at the Schnecksville Fire Hall in Schnecksville, Pa., April 13, 2024. (Damon Winter/The New York Times)

By David French

What is the most important single thing that you can do to heal our national divides and to improve the social and economic mobility of your struggling neighbors?

I’d submit that it’s not voting for the right candidate (though you should certainly do that), nor is it engaging in activism to raise visibility for a worthy cause (though I endorse that as well). Instead, it’s something that is at once much simpler but also much more difficult.

Make a new friend.

The story of modern America — especially for working-class Americans who did not go to college — is a story of declining connections, declining friendships and a loss of a sense of belonging. That sense of isolation makes people miserable, and as the misery spreads, it affects our economy and our culture. The data, quite frankly, is horrifying.

Last month, the American Enterprise Institute released its 2024 American Social Capital Survey. It exposes a stark social divide. People with high school diplomas or less spend less time in public spaces, less time in hobby groups and less time in community groups or in sports leagues than those with college degrees and higher (for simplicity, I’ll refer to the two groups as high school graduates and college graduates). And they’re less likely to host friends, family and neighbors in their homes.

Let’s pause here for a moment. Think about the consequences of this distinction: Tens of millions of working-class Americans experience a social reality different from that of their more educated peers. The lack of common spaces and common experiences means that isolation can become self-perpetuating.

The friendship numbers are just as sobering. Americans of all stripes are reporting that they have declining numbers of friends, but the decline is most pronounced among high school graduates. Between 1990 and 2024, the percentage of college graduates who reported having zero close friends rose to 10% from 2%, which is upsetting enough. Among high school graduates, the percentage rose to a heartbreaking 24% from 3%.

The news just keeps getting worse. In 1990, an impressive 49% of high school graduates reported having at least six close friends. By 2024, that percentage had been cut by more than half — to 17%. The percentage of college graduates with that many friends declined also, but only to 33% from 45%.

The disappearance of friendship has profound consequences. According to the AEI report, there is a class divide in the percentage of Americans who can rely on someone to give them a ride to the doctor, lend them a small amount of money in an emergency or offer a place to stay. Another way of putting this is that the Americans who are most vulnerable to losing the informal social safety net of friends and relatives may be the people who need it the most.

It should be no surprise, then, that Americans at lower income levels report a far lower sense of belonging than those who are more prosperous. The Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, and Over Zero, an organization that studies and seeks to prevent identity-group-based violence, have created a comprehensive Belonging Barometer that measures the extent to which Americans feel a sense of belonging in their families, among their friends and in their workplaces, their communities and the nation as a whole. In every category, those with fewer resources reported less belonging.

We should care deeply about these numbers regardless of any larger social or cultural impact they might have. The thought that so many millions of our fellow citizens feel as if they don’t belong, as if they can’t call anyone for help or simply lack the pure joy of fellowship with close friends should grieve us all. It should change the way we behave. It should make us be more intentional about reaching out to people. And it should call us to action in our own neighborhoods and communities.

But declining friendship isn’t just a matter of individual pain. It’s also a matter of national concern. I recently read an intriguing paper by New York University’s Jay Frankel that makes the argument that “emotional abandonment, both in individual lives and on a mass scale, is typically felt as humiliating; and it undermines the sense that life is meaningful and valuable.”

One might think that isolation leads to the quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau observed in his time, but for many people it triggers a much more aggressive response — including a pull toward authoritarianism. In 2021, The Washington Post’s Michael Bender wrote about his experience embedded with Donald Trump’s most loyal fans, the “Front Row Joes” who traveled from rally to rally across America to support the politician they loved best.

Following Trump, Bender writes, had “made their lives richer.” They came for Trump, but they stayed for the relationships. Trump’s rallies “gave the Joes a reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.”

If you wonder why the Trump fever won’t break, consider the extent to which the movement transcends politics. “In Trump,” Bender notes, “they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work.”

Of course you can make friends in mass movements (as we see from the Front Row Joes), but there is often a tangible benefit to local engagement. You meet people who live close to you. There’s an ease in creating and maintaining the relationship when there’s physical proximity, and local engagement also means creating local spaces where people can feel at home.

Ever since I started writing about American anxiety, polarization and fear, I’ve gotten an immense amount of correspondence from people who are both worried about the state of the nation and worried about people they know personally — an old friend who’s gone off the deep end or a family member who seems lost to conspiracy theories.

Frequently they ask me for resources. They might ask for the best fact check I’ve read to respond to an election conspiracy theory. Or they might ask if there’s a good book they can send to change a friend’s mind. I’ve started responding to their questions with a question of my own: How much time do you spend with them?

Millions of Americans are lonely. They feel sad, mad and stuck. They’re alienated from their communities and angry at their predicament, and they don’t feel that they have many options to improve their lives. But friendship can help fix each of those problems. With fellowship comes joy. With connection comes opportunity. There are few higher and better callings than to forge a bond with a person and provide a place where they belong.