What is the loneliness project?

A lot has been written about the shared sense of isolation that shapes our modern lives: Loneliness is a social epidemic; it is as bad for your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day; it’s especially common in young adults, in new parents, in the elderly, and the disabled; it’s a product of social media or fading institutions or pandemic isolation.

These ideas are interesting, don’t get me wrong. But so often what I read about loneliness feels too far removed from my day-to-day experience: too academic and theoretical, too daunting and intractable. It’s easy to get the sense that loneliness is a personal problem to be solved by finding a good therapist and joining a softball league or, alternatively, that it is a crisis that demands we completely reshape our society. The problem is somehow both impossibly simple and impossibly complex.

The goal of this newsletter is to consider loneliness not as an extraordinary epidemic or an individual failure, but as a series of everyday problems that are tightly woven into our ideas about happiness and success. What do we do about these problems? If loneliness is built into our modern lives, how might one live differently? Is it even possible?