Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Really, that’s it.

You want to play D&D together, you host and DM.

You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing.

You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with.

Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little alarms in your head that go off when you haven’t seen someone in a while, you can use automated reminders.

I have observed my spouse (who is not on social media) do this and she maintains friendships for decades this way. Nowadays she has regular zoom check ins, book clubs, and more, even with people who moved to the other coast. You do now have the tools for this. I have adopted it into my own life with good results.

Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.

You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live. We have a wealth of passive entertainment, often we have all consuming jobs or have more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did. We move to different cities for jobs, and even as suburban sprawl has grown, you’re on average probably further away from people who even live in the same city! You get from place to place in a private box on wheels, or alternatively in a really big box on wheels with a random assortment of people. You don’t see people at church, or market day, or whatever other rituals our ancestors had. On the positive side, you have more tools and leisure than ever before to arrange more voluntary meetings.

> So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school. How can we solve this?

The naive solution is to place blame on the people who are influenced by the most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans. Kinda like how the plastic producers will push recycling, knowing they can shift blame for the pollution away from their production of the pollution, because people love blaming. You'll see commenters here telling us that the answer is for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get out, get involved in their communities under their own willpower. These ideas are doomed from the outset.

The real solution is already being enacted in a number of US states and countries[1]: legally restricting access to the poison, rather than blaming the people who are at the mercy of finely honed instruments of behavior modification when they're unable to stop drinking it under their own willpower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...

I've been a remote engineer for about 10 years now, just over 50, enjoy programming but most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy (trumpers) in recent years, and I never got married.

I recently took a local wheel throwing (pottery class), which was daunting at first, among a class of almost all females, younger, etc, but im 6 months in and literally just interacting with humans is one of the best parts of my week. Hobby is pretty cool too, so completely different than banging code all day.

Sometimes I don't feel like going after days of being alone and literally talking to no one, it puts you in a "zone" for sure, but then I go to the class, and you realize, at least imho, humans are social creatures. It's like food, we need that interaction or we whither and die.

I‘m a cofounder of a German loneliness startup. My core insight is that loneliness often stems from a badly adjusted internal social threat function ( f(social event)=perceived threat ).

This function runs subconsciously all day long. From talking to strangers to reaching out to a friend, the lonely mind is much more aware of negative outcomes, so your mind protects you by telling you things like „I don’t talk to strangers because I would annoy them“ or „I don’t reach out to that friend because he’s probably busy“. And that makes it much much harder for lonely people to maintain a healthy social life.

As for the fix, you can try to set the social event up in a way that has less room for perceived threat. Think of third places, regularly scheduled meetings, etc. Or you can work on the function itself (=your thinking patterns). If you look at research on loneliness interventions, working on this function is the most effective way to help individuals overcome persistent loneliness.

Now the sad thing is that people don’t like to hear that the most effective way to combat loneliness is to work on their own perceptions, which makes the sales pitch rather challenging.

Intentionally choose community and the effort it takes to build and cultivate it [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. People are work, but you cannot live without community [6].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250212233145/https://www.hhs.g...

[1] https://thepeoplescommunity.substack.com/

[3] https://www.tiktok.com/@amandalitman/video/75927501854034854...

[4] https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s...

[5] https://boingboing.net/2008/07/13/postapocalypse-witho.html

[6] How A Decline In Churchgoing Led To A Rise In ‘Deaths Of Despair’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408406 - December 2025 (2 comments)

Technologists are not going to solve this with a startup, it requires organized political and social movements, then the legislation and re-allocation of public funds for the public's good.

Quoting from elsewhere in this thread: "I have made big inroads solving my old-age isolation with AI. Personally, I prefer Claude."

The people who most exacerbated this epidemic were forged here in this culture and were rewarded with trillions in investment to step between every social interaction, to monetize our connections, to maximize our 'engagement' and capitalize on the damage they caused. They will not stop until there are laws and enforcement mechanisms that address these perverse incentives.

Building American cities around the whims of car manufacturers is, to my mind, as bad as any social media. We've foreclosed casual connection in so many ways, and social media stepped into that gap and wrenched as hard as it could. Lower real wage growth also matters, free time and funds are required for a full social calendar.

It's multifaceted, but none of these issues can be solved without real political power that counters the whims of capital, venture or otherwise.

I don't have a full answer, but a couple thoughts:

1. Volunteer. Somewhere, anywhere, for a good cause, for a selfish cause. Somebody will be happy to see you.

2. Stop trolling ourselves. As far as I can tell, all of the mass social media is trending sharply towards being a 100% troll mill. The things people say on social media do not reflect genuine beliefs of any significant percentage of the population, but if we continue to use social media this way, it will.

Disengage from all of the trolls, including and especially the ones on your "own side".

I once shard a flat/apartment with a female social butterfly. She once gave me some great advice, which is to NEVER turn down an invitation.

Going out and trying to be comfortable in non-ideal situations (i.e. you know hardly anyone there) is a skill you can learn. I often think it's probably like sales cold calling. After a while you develop calluses.

I see this is still front-page news.

There’s really two main ingredients to loneliness:

1) We don’t meet others in a way that sparks relationships.

2) We have personal issues that interfere with our ability to have relationships.

#1 is fairly straightforward. We have the ability to make friends; but lack the opportunity. If we can meet and interact with others, we’ll make friends, and mitigate our isolation. We need to “get out more.” We can join organizations, go places, right-swipe on apps, and we’ll eventually break our isolation. I’ve found that a key is to get together with others, over shared interests or goals.

#2 is a different beast. We need to work on ourselves, first and foremost. We may often need help, like therapy or guided self-help. Usually, there’s a lot of pretty humbling work involved. If we don’t treat the root cause (our own issues), then we can meet as many people as possible, and we’ll still be lonely.

Lots of potential reasons for our problems. Could be trauma, neurodivergence, addiction, mental health problems, personal insecurity, or simply lack of experience. Often, a combination of these.

The good news is, is that if we get serious about treating our own issues, we will absolutely end the isolation. Almost every treatment involves a lot of interaction with others, and relationship-building.

For myself, I was definitely in the #2 category. I’m “on the spectrum,” and I had an addiction problem. Intervention was required, and I needed to stop running, turn around, and face my demons. I needed to learn to ask for, and, even more importantly, accept, help. I had to develop a taste for crow and humble pie. Doing this, changed everything.

That was 45 years ago, when I was 18. The road has been anything but smooth, but it’s always been onward and upward. Today, I have close relationships all over the world, with an enormous variety of people, and have done work that affects thousands of lives in a positive manner.

I’ve also found that helping others to deal with their own issues has been effective.

Not for everyone but if you can, get a dog. Dogs are icebreakers. People like to meet a cute dog. They won't know your name at first but you will be "Fido's Dad" or "Dave's Mom". Other dog owners will greet you and so long as your dogs don't hate each other you already have something in common.

A dog gives you a reason to be wherever you want to be - take a walk around the neighborhood or to the park. You're not a rando taking a walk for mysterious and possible nefarious purposes, you're walking the dog.

But for for goodness sake, pick up after the pooch. If you can wipe your own arse you can pick up a dog turd with a plastic bag.

The older people get the more disposable they are viewed as by society.

When you are younger, you belong in school. When you get older, you belong at work.

If you fall out of any of these social structures its extremely difficult to find your way back in.

I was already pretty disconnected from society and people in general when my divorce hit and now I am completely untethered from any kind of community. Living is miserable I hate my life and I do not want to exist like this anymore.

None of the solutions people provide are easy or functional. "Go meet people" is the most vague, unhelpful bullshit ever.

I think the reality is some people, no matter how intelligent, caring or otherwise full of empathy they may be are just "too far gone" for anyone to have the initiative or concern to care about us. The world is so corroded and socially poisoned that any kind of meaningful effort in this kind of thing is pointless. Anybody with time or money is busy making money.

You can't solve the epidemic because it is a byproduct of multiple irreparably broken systems. People will continue to fall through the cracks and it will get worse. I don't know what happens after that but we'll probably all be dead.

This is something that I care deeply about and have put a lot of thought into. I can only speak to what I think needs to be done in America.

Public transportation.

Removing or heavily rolling back zoning laws.

Government investment in child care.

Nature takes the path of least resistance. If we want people to actually meet people and have the energy to make meaningful connections, the government has to set up the infrastructure to make it possible.

I’m going to gloss over Europe because I went there for the first time, and it blew my mind.

People were at the park at 4 pm! I live in a city and hardly see people outside at 4. They have the time to go to these 3rd places.

People were visiting friends with kids, which blew my mind because everyone I know who has had a child instantly has dropped off the grid socially. I understand why, but we need to make it easier for those children and parents to continue to have social interaction.

In my hometown, everything is so spread out that visiting a friend could be a 30-min drive. I was conditioned to believe that isn’t a lot, but at the end of a workday, who has the energy? Personally, I think public transportation would help that also create a lot more interactions with strangers to maybe create new friendships.

Also, zoning laws would help that. If everything there is to do is 40 min away, it adds so much resistance that it’s not worth it for most people. If every neighborhood had a pub or restaurant, it would add a lot of meeting points for your neighbors and will create a lot more spontaneous, “let’s invite this stranger to eat with us.”

Lastly, we have to work less. This is the toughest to chew. I’m fully in the office now, but when I was hybrid, it was so much easier to see friends because I had some ownership of my time. We need to have the energy to be social.

I have a lot of friends but don’t have the time or energy to see them so I have felt lonely for the past couple of years.

I think it’s true walkable communities like Europe kinda feels like college, everyone is busy and have their own life but hanging out is so accessible that it’s a matter of why not hang out compared to why hang out

Many answers address the question of "how to build community." I like those responses! I also want to contribute to the discussion with an emotional intelligence response. The theory is that "loneliness" can be a symptom of underlying internal factors.

While it is true that loneliness can arise from a lack of community, people, and related factors, for some people, the problem stems from not knowing how to be alone. At its core, the question becomes, "Am I externalizing my world, or internalizing my world?" When you externalize your world, you require something external. We are social creatures, and I do believe we need other people. I'm only suggesting that sometimes people need to look internally first.

Personal anecdote: No amount of community would have helped me feel like I wasn't alone, because I needed the world around me to provide some sense of my self-worth. It felt counterintuitive, but for me, I had to learn to be alone. Only then could I feel like I wasn't alone. It all came down to attachment theory and self-worth.

I was addicted to weed from ages 15-23. I have clinical depression and anxiety/OCD (now medicated and stable). I basically isolated and got stuck in a loop of believing I was broken and a bad person. When I committed to quitting I joined addiction recovery groups and asked for help instead of trying to do it alone. I still rely on the wisdom I gained in AA/MA. Trust God, clean house, help others, go do something when you are in danger of wallowing in self pity. 4 years later, I have a few real friends and many acquaintances. I swing dance and volunteer. I work in a semi-social office. Life is good. I still get paranoid thoughts, but they don't own or define me. I wish the best to all the lonely programmers and alienated people out there.

I am in North Seattle, and I have a flock of nerds under me that would like to see real demonstrations of penetration testing via radio (Wifi and more). I have been proposing doing monthly meetups where we go up on a the rooftop of various buildings, bust out the tools, the antennas, and every other toy we have to scan and show how it's done. There are stories about others and me that the younger generation would love to see in action and then we teach what is going on, how we are doing it, and more importantly, when we find a vulnerable target, offer help to fix the hole. Kind of like white hat pen testing. So many of the younger generation wants to exploit things, but do not understand the ethics as to why and why not, and how to do good with having those sort of skills. I know this might be slightly off topic, but I think the real answer to the question here is who is willing to take the lead and step out of the normal club, party, con, meetup crap and get back to the old school groups like we had back in the 90s?

It seems a lot of you are in Seattle and I'm willing to try and host an event like this if any of you might be interested.

A social circle is like a garden, inasmuch as you have to put in work to tend and maintain it. You have to put yourself in a position of potential awkwardness or rejection, which isn't easy. Interacting with people (especially strangers) also takes practice - small talk is a skill like any other.

If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.

I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.

I doubt it's the solution, but a silly program I want to build is something like this:

- Give users a modern Tamagotchi

- Give the digital pet a need to socialize.

- Strap a basic LLM to it so users can talk to their pet.

- Have the pet imprint on its owner through repeated socialization.

- Owner goes to bed, pet still has social needs, goes out into the digital world to find other pets.

- Pet talks to other pets while you're asleep, evaluates interactions, befriend those with good interactions.

- Owner wakes up the next morning, checks their pet, learns it befriended other pets based on shared interests, and is given an opportunity to connect with their pet's friends' owners. Ideally these connections have a better-than-random chance of succeeding since you're matched via shared interests.

I'm sure there's a ton of unsexy technical reasons this is hard to make work well in practice... but dang, I think it would be so cool if it worked well.

I realize this exacerbates the issue in some ways - promoting online-first interactions. But, I dunno. I'll take what I can get these days, lol.

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. A person can feel lonely surrounded by others. Like being the only non-drinker in a family Christmas celebration.

Loneliness is when there is a gap between desire for companionship/connection and reality.

I've done both extended periods of home office and a period of co-working in an open plan space. I didn't feel lonely in the home office. I guess because I did it by choice and had the agency to opt into joining a co-working.

I think that loneliness could be a symptom of lack of connection. And this need for connection can in some cases be fulfilled online or even through reading books. Participating in forums like hackernews or effect-ts satisfies some of the handful facets of connection that I need. It gives me a feeling of not being totally alone with some of my ideas.

All of the replies so far are suggesting ideas for an individual but seem to be missing the real crux of the matter...

Yes, you'll be less lonely if you join a group, get out of your house, etc... But how do we actively incentivize that? Social media and whatnot have hundreds of thousands of people working around the clock to find ways to suck you in and monopolize your time.

While "everyone should recognize the problem and then take steps to solve it for themselves" is the obvious solution, it's also not practical to just have everyone collectively decide they need to get out more without SOME sort of fundamental change in our society/incentives/etc

People need to purposefully and intentionally do things. Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. There is no fear or rejection, there is no work to get out of the house, there is no risk. But there is also no reward.

My thoughts on this are you need to have multiple roots into your community. This is something that you go to often and talk to people, become a regular, say hi. Think back to how your parents or grandparents did it: They went to church/temple/synagogue, they went to PTA meetings, they talked to their neighbors, they were in clubs, they went to the same bar.

So I think doing things that get you out of the house, consistently the most important part:

1. People need to make a point to talk to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner or bbqs, make small talk. How towns are constructed now is a hindrance to this (unwalkable towns where all of the houses are big garages in the front and no porches).

2. Join a religious organization. Go to church, but also join the mens/womens group, join a bible studies class. Attend every week.

3. Join social clubs / ethnic organization. The polish or ukrainian clubs, knights of columbus, elks, freemasons. Go every week.

4. Join a club / league. Chess club, bowling league, softball league, golf league. Tech meetups, DnD Night etc. But you have to talk with people and try to elevate things to friendships.

5. Have lunch, happy hour, etc with coworkers.

The causes are deeply structural. It won't be solved any time soon. We're talking about the fundamental organization of modern society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic#Causes_of_...

I think there's a lot of good advice in these comments already, at least for individuals to think about for themselves.

I happen to have discovered a fantastic contra dancing community[1] in Chicago that could be great for some who are lonely. You have to chalk up the courage to go (if you aren't used to trying new things, or dancing), but everyone is extremely welcoming, the dancing is easy even for people "with two left feet", and the happiness going around is truly contagious.

I think it's a terrific place to find community. It's a social dance where you'll basically dance with everyone by the end of the evening. There's time before, in the middle (snack intermission), and at the end for striking some conversation. The dancing is every Monday so it's routine. The crowd (100-150 people on average) is diverse in many ways (at least in age, gender, income, interests) so you're bound to find people with commonalities that, using some of the other advice in these comments, you could try to hang out with outside of the dancing.

As far as getting people to feel like they can join, I'm not the expert, but I've had such a great experience that I'm happy to at least bring it up and "spread the good word".

For outside of Chicago: contra dancing is a bit niche, but a surprising amount of large-ish US cities have it. I think it's more popular (relatively) on the East coast. Can't speak for outside of the US.

[1] https://www.chicagobarndance.org/

Late to the thread but I recommend volunteering. The best medicine for loneliness is to serve others in greater need. Churches, hospitals, libraries, all not-for-profit institutions.

Part of loneliness is feeling like you won't be missed. When you serve others (even indirectly if direct contact is not your thing), you feel needed and have purpose.

I usually do night walks, talking to strangers, outcasts such as homeless people, street children, store or restaurant sales persons. I treat them food and talk with them and learn from their stories, I do this consistently that they know me. I genuinely love helping people, I also do ministries which I can say is very effective on helping people with depressions, they will learn to have a purpose in life or at least they will learn that some people are living life with much difficulty. I organize people I do not know and play sports I do not know how to play, and ask people to join. We do monthly activities which is optional for others to join our not. Nothing is forced but every one is welcome.

In the past, whenever I felt lonely and hopeless, I jumped into helping others: volunteering, helping an old neighbor garden, help someone move, etc. Helping people gave me a short-term purpose, which eventually let me ride out the low phase of life. YMMV, of course.

The common denominator is to have shared spaces where it's expected to be among strangers' presence, and for those strangers to eventually become repeat guests in a person's life. That's the maximally comfortable scenario for inducing social behavior and it's responsible for eons of human social history. Think church.

The problem there is that it's the responsibility of groups or society to arrange that. There's not much that a single lonely person can do there.

The less common denominator, that an individual may partake in until society concocts a better solution, is to intentionally visit existing shared spaces even where they otherwise wouldn't (hint: bouldering gyms are good for this because there are repeat faces as well as a social okay-ness to congratulating strangers, or asking how certain challenges can be solved).

Or break with convention, comfort, and perhaps etiquette, and instead just talk to people. Even outside of those spaces. (This is the advice that will piss a lot of people off if it's presented as their only option.) This advice is horrible until it isn't. It does, with enough practice, 'just work'.

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For an entrepreneur or organizer: it would just go a long way to think about things in terms of allowing conversation to happen unimpeded. Pay attention to where people talk, and about what. Conversations happen a lot in hallways but famously by water coolers, perhaps because it affords people enough time in a shared space to muster the internal capital to start a conversation.

In college I ran a forum for people to meet others and some of the most self-reportedly successful participants just asked questions into the void and were surprised by the number of responses.

We are training a culture of passive consumers who don’t create. People are attracted to activity and action. The next generation is inundated with creation through their phone. They don’t see the space to create. They sit at home alone wondering why they are alone. The reality is because they are consumers not creators. You must produce.

The first place to look is suburban development.

I wrote an article[0] on Tiny Neighborhoods (aka “Cohousing”) that starts with:

> “I often wonder if the standard approach to housing is the best we can do. About 70% of Americans live in a suburb, which means that this design pattern affects our lives – where we shop, how we eat, who we know – more than any other part of modern life.”

We have been so uncritical of the set of ideas that make suburbia—single family homes, one car per adult, large private yards—even though these play a big role in how people act.

Some people want to address loneliness by making incremental changes. But if the statistics are right and nearly everyone is somewhat lonely, we should expect that the required adjustments feel “drastic” compared to the current norm.

People would be less lonely if they could live in a community of 15-20 families with (1) shared space and (2) shared expectations for working together on their shared space.

[0] https://iambateman.com/tiny

Something I've noticed with me and other gen-Zers is that meeting with friends or strangers over Discord VoIP is a great way to socialize. It's missing some of the social benefits of in-person meetups, but it's very low-commitment (just hope on a call) and it's much easier to find others who share your interests.

I built an art practice after volunteering on Burning Man projects for a few years. I’m now a competent art fabricator and engineer in carpentry, lighting, electronics, and power systems. It’s fun, and it keeps me connected to lots of different communities. You meet a lot of people who like to get together and nerd out, host parties, and make cool things.

When people talk about the loneliness epidemic, I realize how lucky I am to be in community with people who want to get together to do cool things just for fun. I know these kinds of art communities also exist in places outside the Bay Area, and it seems like a good model for creating excuses for people to gather anywhere.

“Get a hobby and find the others” seems like its too simple to be the answer here, but that’s what it is for me.

I'll add another suggestion: be more forgiving.

Anecdote: I had a friend in SF. He and I would hang out once in a while, and I always looked forward to these hangouts (we'd meet up for coffee, or go for a walk, hang out at Dolores Park, etc.). He is gay, I'm not. His perspective on things was often quite different than mine and I found that interesting. I got married, he stayed single. Even after marriage we would still hang out (though not as often as before). Then we had a child, which sucked all spare time out of my life; but even then we hung out once in a while. Then one winter there was cold/flu/COVID going around. We planned on hanging out and I unfortunately bailed on him at the last moment. This happened 2 more times. Then that bout of illnesses passed and I reached out to him to hang out again. But this time he seemed cold and distant. So I dropped it. And I didn't see him again for almost 3 years.

Then one day I ran into him while walking through Dolores Park. He didn't see me, but I hesitated and still hollered out at him, for old times' sake. He responded and walked over. We chatted a little, I gave him a parting hug and we agreed to hang out again.

A couple of weeks later we managed to hang out again. What I gathered from our meeting was that he had been miffed at what he thought was me blowing him off; and I, when I felt he was cold and distant, had misread his grief at losing his cat. We both misread each other and wasted 3 years.

Moral of the story that I took away from it was: be more forgiving. Friendships are worth the extra effort.

Since it's a societal problem, but solved on the microlevel of one person at a time, it seems the way to have a broader effect is to show the value of having connection with other people over the value of not.

Overcome any addictions (scrolling, gaming, etc.) that stand in the way would be easier if the goal was clear.

Overcoming attitudes and defensive beliefs (too many cliques, they won't talk to me...) go away when you can either recall a time when you had friends or know others who do.

Convince people it's better (in their own value system) to be social, have friends of all kinds, and let them know their value and meaning increase by being a friend, I think you'd have a hard time stopping people from becoming social.

Church used to hold more sway with people in forming communities. When at its best, it provides a safe place for strengthening relationships, celebrating the community's successes and mourning with the time calls for it. If you are lonely, try a church regardless of your spiritual beliefs. You are always welcome at mine!

Having a family solves this issue nicely. I have a wife and five kids, and none of us are lonely because we have each other. It's one of the choices I made in life that I am most grateful for.

I was the head of the men's group for my town's Newcomers Club and when it comes to having a blueprint for organizing a small, quick gathering I cannot say enough about Nick Gray's [0] book The Two Hour Cocktail Party [1]

It has tons of small but useful tips:

- host it Monday or Tuesday from 7-9pm. People are usually free those nights and make sure it ends at 9pm for the folks who have to wake up early

- don't send an evite with "0 of 60 guest have responded". Start by having your core group accept and then send the invite directly to each new person

- have name tags. but make sure YOU fill out the name tags or you will have "Batman" and "Superman" at your party

- introduce people and have "get to know you games"

Now, I'm sure someone will say "this is so formulaic and doesn't feel natural!". That's kind of the point. You need to give folks some structure to be able to interact. The name tags for example remove the "oh, I met this person before but I can't remember their name so I just won't talk to them" etc.

0 - https://x.com/nickgraynews

1 - https://amzn.to/3ZhtSfi

I've not looked at the research associated with the Friendship Bench [1] or UK Men's Sheds [2] -- evaluations or data associated with the model's development -- but I would be surprised if either relied only on individual action. Meaning, the resource is there but participation relies heavily or solely on an individual taking affirmative action to join.

I agree with others that individual initiative is important for connections to be made, but I struggle with imagining how people find out about what the opportunities are. Certainly, there's been a ton of work on social isolation, community connections, whatever you call it, and at some point I need to dive in.

This space needs a lot of investment as well as evaluation of initiatives. I worked in nonprofit land in the US for years and from my limited view of the landscape, way more work is needed to determine what works and fund that and not fund efforts that take no initiative to show their effectiveness.

[1] https://www.friendship-bench.org/ [2] https://menssheds.org.uk/

Sports. CrossFit and similar social sports have been healthy for me and for many others, and I think the community is at least equal to the exercise in improving people's lives.

Not saying this is the only way, but it made a big difference for me and my friends. I realize the physical challenges are artificial, but so is an Advent of Code puzzle when you already have a day job. Hard things are worth doing because they're hard, and they're even better when done together with those you love.

I will separate this into expensive, still has a cost, and "free"

Expensive:

Car meetups and car modding

Horse based activities (learning to ride etc is group based)

learning a craft (ie blacksmithing, knitting circles, ceramics)

Swordfighting of various styles (east/west/modern/renaissance/polish drunk people in armour)

Warhammer

Cost, but not as much:

local hackspace

local cycle club

Local running club

Local team sports (real football, basketball, baseball, tennis, 5-a-side)

local choir (secular)

Amateur dramatics (highly recommended, darling.)

Free, but with connotations

Scouting adult leader

Local environmental people (ie park maintenance )

Animal shelter

charity shop

local choir (religious)

local organised religion

local political party organisation

I’ve always been someone who likes to go to local coffee shops, shops, and walks around the neighborhood. While I’ve met a few friendly employees who learn my name and say hi to me, in general I’ve found customers and people in general aren’t super approachable. They’re usually there as a part of an existing group of friends, or are focused on their work.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to meet people in this situation, but it is difficult to break the ice. Especially if your social skills are rusty.

On a larger scale, I think most people’s budget for anonymous social interaction is consumed through social media, where they scroll past strangers arguing and let’s be honest, mostly vitriolic comments. So in the real world, they don’t want to deal with anonymous strangers and intently focus on their own friendships.

Groups are a good way to bridge this gap, but the groups that are easier to host aren’t always accessible to everyone. And they require a lot of time and ideally strong social skills to run effectively.

I’ve thought about starting a campaign to make socializing with people in person more of a common practice again, but I’m honestly not sure how to convince enough people

Affordable third places[0] where people can impromptu join and serendipitously meet friendly faces repeatedly. All of my strong friendships were from exactly this at either skateparks, college dorm common area, or run clubs. Churches had this figured out for millenia

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

There are, of course, multiple causes for loneliness. We can't fix them all with one clear action. Here are the main five, in my view:

First, social media. It's too easy to temporarily forget about your loneliness by staying home and doomscrolling or watching TV.

Second, increased mobility. People move around the whole continent now for work, removing them from their closest and oldest social connections.

Third, God is dead. Churches as community centers are dying out. Young people don't trust them anymore, because they don't believe in God, and because churches had many scandals. Secular community centers are very rare and struggle with funding.

Fourth, work is more stressful now. There used to be more time to socialize, but in our quest for productivity, work became denser with fewer idle times.

Fifth, fewer people want to have kids. Much has been written about this.

Now what can we do at societal scale? First of all, study the phenomenon more closely. Who is lonely? Who isn't? Which interventions work? Which cultural factors are important? At your local scale, you can just call or meet a friend.

Make a social app whose goal is to get people off their phone as quickly as possible. There used to be a slew of apps where you a press a button to indicate "I'm bored/free, who wants to hang out?" and then you get matched with your contact list and anyone else who pressed the button at the same time. But for whatever reason they all flamed out and died.

Personally I’m living with a partner (only 50% of the time for now), have only two social activities per month outside work in average and some small talk at work. I don’t need more and have no intention to volunteer, join church or anything like that just for the social aspect. I guess the big problem is the (growing?) minority having close to no social experiences.

Shared stressors are what bring people together. Communities form when a group of people all have the same problem. Go around egging peoples homes in your neighbourhood, and keep doing it. By the time your neighbours finally catch you they will all have gotten to know and appreciate one another better. They will have formed a communtiy identity.

Ritual, purpose and community are what's required to build a group.

I cured my own loneliness episode by joining a local running group. It provides the same kind of thing as church. Ritual, we meet every week and there's a few different groups. Purpose, it doesn't feel useless to be improving your fitness level. And community comes when you suffer through a run with others.

Showing up regularly means you start to integrate people into your lives as you know when they skip a week for a vacation or something.

I went from living in my town and not knowing anyone for 17 years to having 20+ friends or people I can say hello to and have a chat.

Just find a local running group, or start one. You want the "meet at Starbucks at 6:30 on Tuesday" ones. Show up and keep showing up and you'll make friends. It's impossible to be on your phone when you run and there's always something running related to keep the conversation going.

No one is asking for this advice, but I'm sharing it anyways.

My #1 top priority this year is _social health_. I'm taking it into my own hands. Mostly just continuing things I'm already doing with tremendous payoff. My measurable result is going to be throwing my own birthday party in fall. I've never done that before, I've never had enough friends in my city!

No one group or app is going to come save you from loneliness. You have to get up, go outside, and find people.

0. Say yes to everything, at least if you're new in town. Don't care how scared you are of X social situation. "Do it scared" - @jxnl

1. I am part of my community's swing dancing scene. I take classes, go to social dances, I _show up_ even when I don't feel like it. People recognize me now, know my name, etc. I'm also a regular at my gym. Find a place and be a regular face there. (_how did I become a swing dancer? I got invited, and my social policy prevented me from saying no!_)

2. If I have no social plans for a week I do a timeleft dinner (dinner with 5 strangers). Always have something on the books. I call this my "social workout". If I vibe with anyone I ask if they want to grab ramen the following weekend. Leads me to point #3..

3. Initiate plans. Everyone is waiting for that text "hey, want to go do x with me?". Be that person. I have an almost 100% enthusiastic response rate to asking people to do literally anything. Go on a random walk? Go to costco? Go checkout ramen or pizza spot? You don't have to think of anything special. Whatever you're already doing.. ask someone to come with! Soon they start inviting you to do random stuff.

4. (experimental) I don't drink, which does curtail my social opportunities. I'm considering updating my drinking policy this year. My hypothesis is that the benefits of having a strong community out-weigh the health benefits of abstinence.

Spending time in parts of Latin America or western Europe or east Asia and then coming back to the US, you can see a lot of ways in which we've built loneliness into the fabric of US culture.

It goes beyond car culture. It's probably illegal to build a cafe within walking distance of your neighborhood or into the first floor of your apartment complex.

Americans get an idea of how bad we have it when we go on vacation, but we don't see it as something that can be built at home.

I have been working on a theoretical framework regarding these topics lately, and I believe this isolation is a structural phenomenon rather than an individual failure.

Until around 80s to 90s, when we say “that album is really good”, we shared plenty of experiences along. Such as, looking up for release news, getting to the record store, purchasing, and so on.

People listened to the full tracks in that album again and again.

Nowadays, the same sentence “that album is really good” carries far more less than before. Algorithms just bring tracks to us, we buy albums by a click.

The density of shared experience itself has been degraded, and more effort is required for us to understand each other.

I’ve named this phenomena as “Experiential Thinning”.

The experiential substance to get to know each other is getting scarce.

I don't think this will ever be resolved.

It's a twofold problem, I believe. People are lonely because of fear of rejection and also actively avoid new people out of caution and high standards.

So two people who are otherwise lonely will make no effort to connect.

I think social networks have done a tremendous amount of damage to our collective psyche. Because on the web, you can single-click permanently block someone and never see them again. If you are admin of a group this person is in, you can also ban this person and prevent them from interacting with members of the group (in the group, that is, you cannot control private messages, but by banning someone from a community you are effectively isolating them), and I think we haven't considered how much power we are giving to random Reddit mods due to this.

There is a gap between thinking and action. I think the social media and gaming and online stimulions currently designed to bombard and drain your thinking brain, leaves nothing for the action you and your body needs to take. Your brain only has so much chemistry to trigger neural activation and we are blowing it on mental stress to the point where the body doesn’t have any more mental energy to tackle real world stress or handle real world emotions.

Try an A/B test. Do days with zero screen stimuli - no TV, no phones, no online interaction. Go into the world to a cafe, or a common area with people and do stuff. See how you feel and what you feel up to. Vacations might be good and relaxing because you disconnect. Maybe do it without paying for it.