The loneliness crisis is a content crisis

Derek Thompson on the antisocial century

A man watches a wall of televisions at the Wiz electronics store in New York City, 1985. (Illustration by The Argument using ChatGPT, photo by Nik Kleinberg/Getty Images)

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Last year, Derek Thompson — perhaps best known as a columnist for The Argument — wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled “The Anti-Social Century,” in which he chronicled our nation’s long, slow decline in hanging out.

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America,” Derek wrote, pointing to statistics that show Americans spending more time alone — between 2003 and 2020, the average amount of time Americans spent alone increased by roughly five and a half hours a week. But Derek is very clear that alone-ness and loneliness are not the same thing. Importantly, we are not seeing a large rise in self-reported loneliness, even as Americans spend more and more time alone.

The conflation of rising alone-ness and loneliness makes sense, but it’s possible to be alone and not feel lonely. It’s also possible to be around tons of people and feel incredibly lonely.

This is what worries Derek: that people are spending more time alone but aren’t feeling lonely. Cheap, personalized home entertainment has made solitude unusually easy and attractive. As a result, we’re seeking out human connection less, which has larger consequences for relationships and long-term fulfillment.

He also argues: “All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional.”

There are really two arguments bundled together here: One is that spending less time with other people may deprive us of friendship, intimacy, and fulfillment. I’m open to that, though I find the low rates of self-reported loneliness temper my concern. The second is that our retreat into solitude is in part responsible for America’s broader political and cultural dysfunction.

I think the emphasis is too much on the few hours more per week we’re spending alone and too little on what we’re doing with that time. If Americans were spending more time alone but they were spending that time reading great works of literature, FaceTiming their relatives, playing musical instruments, or consuming fantastic liberal magazines, would we all be so worried?

I don’t think so. To be honest, even if we were watching tons of prestige TV or short-form video content about breakthroughs in mRNA vaccines, this would all strike me as a positive development.

The problem is not that we’re alone a few more hours a week than we used to be; it’s that for hours and hours a day, whether we have vibrant social lives or not, we are subject to an unending stream of negativity and extremism. Whether that content is political in nature, rage-bait-gender-war commentary, or internecine conflict between influencers, the internet is just full of stuff that’s making people unhappy.

This is an important distinction. If everything else stayed the same, but every human being in America spent 45 minutes more a day hanging out with their friends, I don’t think that would result in massive political, cultural, or social change.

Being together does not necessarily make people tolerant, reasonable, or happy. People can radicalize each other, communities can be suffocating and cruel, and some of the ugliest political movements in history were very social affairs full of thick social bonds.

My big worry is that we devote a lot of time and attention to the alleged problem of loneliness and succeed in getting people to hang out a little bit more — all without addressing the elephant in the room, which is that we’re all mainlining the informational diet equivalent of 50 Twinkies.

We know that this kind of informational diet can change people's mood, beliefs, and feelings. We don't know that a small increase in socialization would help undo political or cultural dysfunction.

Regular Fox News viewers who researchers paid to watch CNN for a month learned facts that Fox didn’t cover and moderated their attitude as a result. It wasn’t hanging out at a bar that made people take COVID-19 seriously. It was hearing from CNN news anchors that COVID was a serious problem that could lead to long-term health consequences.

We even have credible causal evidence that what you browse online can have dramatically different effects on your immediate mood.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t hang out with our friends. But interventions that seek to increase socialization without changing how much bleak social media content we consume are unlikely to do very much about our broader dysfunctions.

I don’t think this is a frivolous worry: In England, you can see that the official anti-loneliness strategy is much more focused on prescribing socialization than it is on limiting the intake of harmful content.

What do you think? Are Americans suffering from too little social life — or from too much of the worst kind? My co-host Matt Yglesias and I invited Derek on the podcast to try to get to the bottom of it.

Next month, Matt and I will be reading F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. If you have comments or questions about the book you’d like us to discuss, drop a line in the comments below!

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

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Correction:

• Around 38:00, Matt says there was a 15-percentage-point gap between Spanish and U.S. literacy rates around 50 years ago. This gap was reached in approximately 1950. By 1975, it had narrowed somewhat.

Show notes:

• “Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults,” study by sociologist Patrick Sharkey, referenced by Derek, showing the amount of time people spend in their house increased an average of one hour and 39 minutes between 2003 and 2022: Sociological Science article

• “The elites aren’t who you think they are,” recent poll that investigated voters’ attitudes toward elites: The Argument article

• Bowling Alone, book by Robert Putnam, referenced by Derek, about the decline in American associational life: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Does it really matter that we’re bowling alone?” previous episode of The Argument discussing Bowling Alone: The Argument podcast episode

• American Time Use Survey data showing that between 2003 and 2025, in-person socializing declined about 25%: 2003 data, 2025 data

• “Mistakenly seeking solitude,” study by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, referenced by Derek, that randomly assigned study participants instructions to speak to strangers on a train or keep to themselves: Journal of Experimental Psychology article

• 2025 polling data showing 55% of respondents who made $100,000 or more in annual income were “very satisfied” with their personal lives: Gallup survey

• “The loneliest Americans are the ones who can’t make rent,” article by Paddy Maher that argued the loneliness epidemic being caused primarily by economic hardship: The Argument article

• “Moving Back Home Used to Be a Sign of Failure. Now It Shows Financial Savvy,” article discussing the fact that 49% of adults under 30 reported living with a parent, up from 37% in 2019: Wall Street Journal article

• “If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad?” article by Derek Thompson trying to address the discrepancy between better empirical data and worse reported happiness: Derek Thompson article

• “The Anti-Social Century,” article by Derek Thompson about the rise in alone-ness: The Atlantic article

• “People in Spain Still Read,” article by Jeffrey Lawrence about a Spanish study showing that the percentage of Spain reading for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025: Avenues of the Americas article

• “The End of Reading Is Here,” article by Rose Horowitch that Lawrence was responding to: The Atlantic article

• “I could watch TikTok for 10 hours a day,” article by Jerusalem Demsas about her short-form video addiction: The Argument article

• Cross-country literacy statistics showing a narrowing gap between Spain and the United States: Our World in Data chart, National Assessment of Adult Literacy data

• Peer Review: “Life After Divorce: Effects of Joint Custody on Parents and Children,” study by Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Mårten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, and Pengpeng Xiao about the outcomes of divorced couples based on the custody status determined by a judge: NBER working paper

Transcript