Loneliness is enjoying a quiet, plaintive celebrity.

Last year, the Surgeon General deemed loneliness a public health hazard and reported that 1 in 2 Americans experience loneliness. This scourge began before COVID, got worse with the pandemic, and is far from benign. Loneliness is associated with heart disease, depression, anxiety, stroke, decreased immunity, chronic illness, dementia, and early death, to name a few. To continue the tobacco analogy, loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Loneliness isn’t just individual, or specific to the U.S. It affects societies across the globe, with those who live in higher-income countries reporting more social disconnection (another term for loneliness). Feeling lonely is so epidemic, in fact, nations like the UK and Japan now boast “Ministers of Loneliness.”

And while healthy social bonds contribute to thriving civic society, loneliness, or social disconnection, corrodes the social fabric. Isolation fractures civic engagement, contributing to a fraying democracy. Individual disconnection at work and home (everyone in their bubble doom-scrolling rather........

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