America's Epidemic of Loneliness

Last night, I went to the Senate floor to give what I think was the Senate’s first speech about a very simple topic: loneliness. Every single one of us has felt lonely at some point in our lives, but something deeper is going on.

There are a lot of reasons to believe that fewer Americans today should feel lonely than ever before. More of us live in densely populated parts of the country. Technology allows us to connect to friends, family, and communities that share our interests with just a press of a button. But evidence from psychology and sociology tells us that the opposite is true. In recent decades, we have seen rising levels of both aloneness, which is defined as having fewer social contacts, and high levels of loneliness, which is defined as feelings of isolation.

So about eight or nine months ago, I started talking about this epidemic of loneliness. Millions of Americans are feeling this way, and it's irresponsible for policymakers to just keep ignoring it. Last night, I put forward a few policy proposals as a starting point and asked my colleagues to join me in being part of the solution.

I hope you’ll give it a watch. It’s a long one, so here are some of the highlights:

As we look out at a country, that seems to be kind of coming apart a little bit at the seams — I mean, people are getting shot at just for ringing the wrong doorbell or pulling into the wrong driveway, hundreds are dying every day from taking a drug that's designed to deaden their emotions, thousands of people engaged in violent rebellion right here in the nation’s capital — we need to be engaged in this search for the reasons why people are feeling more pessimistic, more frustrated, and more angry than ever before.

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Now, there are a lot of explanations for how we got here, but a few stand out as particularly important for my colleagues to consider.

So it's true that technology does allow us to stay connected to family and friends, to find new communities. But on the whole, technology has left many Americans, especially young people, feeling more alone than ever before. During the height of COVID-19, we learned the hard way that digital communication cannot replace the value of in-person experience. For example, studies show that face to face interactions create faster connections to humans and build stronger, more enduring relationships than anything that you can create online.

Of course, staying in touch electronically is better than losing touch altogether. But when Facebook likes and Instagram comments replace in-person experiences, it actually can drive up feelings of loneliness. Staring at your screen for six hours a day, no matter how many people you're looking at, it can be a very lonely experience.

And it doesn't stop there. Because there are millions of users with developing minds, children, who spend hours staring at their screens, scrolling through an endless stream of pictures and videos that have been carefully curated to create an illusion of perfection, leaving young people feeling inadequate or wanting. Constant comparison, it breeds in young people especially, but in all of us, envy and [resentment], more anxiety than fulfillment. Kids are feeling really lousy today. And it's not just because they're spending tons of time on their screens instead of engaging in real in person experiences. It's also because the content that they're watching is dangerous and corrosive, and making them feel more alone in the world because of those feelings of envy.

The second really important factor contributing to this epidemic of loneliness in America is the erosion of local communities. Connection sometimes happens randomly, but mostly it's facilitated through local institutions, churches, sports teams, civic clubs, labor unions, business organizations. We derive personal meaning, as well as from those institutions, from the communities that we create or join. We get connection, but we also get meaning. Those institutions help us construct an identity, a sense of purpose, connect us to something bigger than ourselves.

But in 2023, you'd be hard pressed to find a community with the kind of thriving local institutions of decades ago. Globalization has erased thousands of healthy, unique downtowns where people often met each other at local businesses. And that outsourcing of commerce online has also diminished local cultures that facilitate connection, identity, and meaning.

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Now, the picture I'm painting, I get it, it's pretty grim. But I'm here to tell you there are reasons to hope. One of the reasons why I really believe Congress can get something done, attacking isolation and loneliness, building more social connection, is because there is a growing consensus across the aisle about this set of problems that we're dealing with and the solutions, which on this problem set are maybe a little bit less political than other problems we face in this body.

I think Congress is coming to acknowledge that the consequences of rapidly advancing technology are not value neutral. We've seen how social media has deepened polarization and addicted a generation of kids to their screens. And in the past few months, we've been involved in a new conversation about generative AI and machine learning and how it has the potential to displace millions of jobs and a whole bunch of basic human functions. Most Republicans and Democrats agree that we made a big mistake by sitting on the sidelines during the early days of the internet and the development most recently of social media. The good news is that Republicans and Democrats are working together on this problem.

There are a few good pieces of legislation that could start to hold social media companies accountable, who are driving kids into lives of increasing loneliness, and isolation. Senators Cotton, Schatz, Britt and I have proposed a bill to set a minimum age of 13 to use social media. to require parental consent. It also prohibits social media companies from using these highly personalized algorithms to drive dangerous, isolation inducing content to kids. And on the issue of AI, Senator Schumer has convened a bipartisan group that is beginning its work as well. And I'm glad to be a part of it.

A second starting point that I really think has bipartisan potential would be to advance policies specifically aimed at restoring the health of our local communities and local institutions. In Western Connecticut, in my old congressional district, we've got the Brass City, the Silver City, the Hardware City, the Hat City. For a long time in this country identity and meaning and connection were created because we really were proud of the things we made, of the jobs that existed.

But the theory of economic neoliberalism sent most of those jobs overseas and assumed that better jobs would replace them. That's not what happened. And so I really believe that industrial policy is part of the solution to increasing isolation and loneliness. Why? Because so many people get meaning and identity, from the things that we make and used to make, from jobs that have meaning and good wages and benefits and pensions attached to them. That's why the Chips and Science Act, paving the way for a new industrial policy, suggests that Republicans and Democrats can come together and work on creating more meaning in work, which I think leads to less isolation and loneliness.

But as I said before, that only works if a full time job provides a living wage and you have enough time in the evenings and on the weekends to be able to engage with your friends and your family and your community. And so, I'm also hopeful that we can make progress across the aisle, driving up the minimum wage, in incentivizing jobs to pay real living wages.

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There's real possibility that both parties, the right and the left, can come together to address this crisis of American isolation. America's epidemic of loneliness is far from terminal. Our retreat into ourselves is a product of economic, cultural, and political choices we have made, but it is not too late to chart a new path.

This is a Congress that has a hard time solving much more straightforward problems. So tackling a metaphysical crisis like loneliness might feel like a Herculean task. And so, right now, I'd argue we just need a starting point, an organizing point for some of these discussions. And so I'm working on legislation that would just start by establishing a national strategy, a national conversation around loneliness and how to promote connectedness.

Every agency should have a role to play in this crisis. And so I'd argue that we just need to start with a dedicated office that's coordinating a government wide strategy to tackle loneliness and strengthen communities. I also think we should have guidelines and best practices for public entities to engage in trying to connect people. We have guidelines for nutrition and physical activity and sleep. We should have these guidelines for social connection. And finally, we can't really address this crisis adequately, if you don't understand it. And so my legislation will also include small amounts of funding to support research on the social and health impacts of widespread loneliness.

I look forward to talking to my colleagues about this legislation. It doesn't solve the problem. But I think it's time that we start organizing our work and our thoughts around what is, in many ways, a foundational problem, which explains a lot of the things that people are feeling that drives political instability, bad health outcomes, and just general unhappiness in this country.

Loneliness is one of the few issues that defies traditional political boundaries, cuts across almost every demographic from teenage girls living in cities to white men living out in rural areas, blue states to red states, unaffordable cities to left behind manufacturing towns. There’s a ton of room for us to come together to combat this growing epidemic of loneliness, and I hope that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are eager to be part of the solution.