Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

Is it an epidemic or culture.

Is there such as thing as loneliness, theoretically, I mean.

Consider this, since when was the physical body or its constituents not lonely. Imagine nail on finger, it grows anyway, lonely :), amazing!

Ask about the abstract parts too, the heart or the mind. On its own it is always lonely. But the mind is imagining way beyond, because it can. That little twist in thought, creates such a dilemma. Mind can bring more to life, it can comprehend that loneliness is included in the experiential existence AND simply to move on "along" with life. The bonding is built in. Nothing magnificent, it just exists and evolves, amazing!

The deeper you get the lonlier you get.

And that can happen even when you are among 1000s of people, not just alone , if you are among people thinking of something else, staring into the void or that you can't connect etc. you are a deep person.

Deep person + deep thinker is the worse. Also people aren't doing them any favor by singing the praise of being a deep person and a deep thinker.

It also has to do with abundance of everything and being not in need of cooperating 24/7/365 to avoid starving ....some people slip into deep thinking and deep emotional introspection...yeah fuck that

Keep in mind that the answer to this question is likely multifaceted. That is, there isn't going to be one killer policy or app or attitude or event which will solve this problem, but it would require a multi-pronged approach.

The first step to solving it would be proving it exists.

Because it doesn't. It's been a phrase used for over 40 years to decry basically any change the author didn't like, from different technology, the rise of the 'me' generation or the declining religiousness of the US.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/202504/loneliness-is...

Individuals may be lonely, but that has always been true. There is no evidence this is different than before, growing, or in anyway an 'epidemic.'

In person RPGs, tabletop wargames and boardgames are amazing for geek culture. Thanks to local Discord groups, I have an active nerd community that I play games with at least once a week. This has revolutionized by social life!

There is a introverted crafty side of painting and 3D printing miniatures that works great for me too.

These games all work as essentially offline alternatives to videogames and are way more fun!

Also, my local game store serves beer; so its essentially a nerd bar even though most people don't drink.

Wargaming related references: Tabletop Minions on YouTube, The HiveScum podcast, Companies such as Black Site Studios and Conferences such as Adepticon.

Go look these up!

You must go outside your traditional groups(family, friends, colleges) find several activities that you like or you had always wanted to do, meetups etc, stay on them for a while, that's how friendship happens, the key is a new group of something you enjoy, keep doing it, guaranteed will work

To paraphrase Barney Stinson:

When I'm feeling lonely, I stop feeling lonely and feel awesome instead.

There are lots of good suggestions in here. People just need to go do them. And if there are structural impediments to doing them, then eliminate those impediments.

I wasn't getting out enough during the day because I share the car with my wife. So I bought an EBike and now I go out all the time.

I chose to live in a place with things near by that I can go to.

Whenever I'm thinking, I'd like to go do an activity, but I need something else first, it's usually not true, or the other thing I need is easy to get.

People just need to decide to stop doing things that make them unhappy.

By restoring free “third places” where people just go to hang out and either bump into people they know or meet new people. The sorts of interactions you get in the common room in a dorm or a school cafeteria.

Its mostly social anxiety. Which makes sense. Children have progressively been raised more and more on screens and devices. Teenagers rely more and more on technology to solve problems. Adults do too. No one has to interact anymore, which means many people no longer know how. Cue the anxiety.

In previous generations, you had to interact with others to get anything done at all. Kids had to play with kids, parents had to talk to the postman, the milkman, the newspaper boy, the telephone operator, the neighbors, you name it. It was a necessity for a functional life, so people did it.

It's so interesting to see the tech community all angsty about the loneliness epidemic.

20 years ago, the Pope warned of the coming "epidemic of loneliness" that the tech industry would bring us, and the tech industry laughed at him. They said he was just an old man who didn't understand and that technology would bring us together in unity and happiness.

And yet, here we are 20 years later, and hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't submit an article to HN about loneliness.

I think people approach it wrong. The framing of solving our loneliness is kind of transactional in a way. Good relationships are not transactional. You got to work on yourself to be curious about others. If it’s genuine, people will reciprocate and relationships develop. You also won’t care as much about putting yourself out there, because the act of getting to know someone is what you like. Greatest thing that ever happened for my social life was hearing Ted Lasso quote “Be curious, not judgemental”.

Start a community or join one. I have a friend that started a social community where they host discussion groups, sharing circles, art marking, picnics, field trips, cooking club, etc. The whole focus is on creating connection. I myself run an experimental games meetup where our small niche share what were working on each month. I also have a book club each week with some friends (although we chat more about life than books). I think 2026 is the year of community. Make an intentional effort. Show up in the same space repeatedly.

I wonder if there would be some way to create a hyper-local MMO. Let people meet each other from the comfort of their homes and bond over the shared activity of the MMO, and make it so the people you are likely to play with are also in your general geographic region. That way, it would be an easy way to meet people, bond with them, and potentially meet up IRL to take the friendship further.

I think this would be an awesome idea but the main challenge here would be game design and implementation. You'd need a lot of capital and some big ass game studio.

Friendship is hard and requires a lot of energy, and it will not always pay off. You're going to get burned, ghosted, and bailed on. It's far too easy to push the hermit-mode button, and doomscroll your life away.

Social capital requires *active* participation. If you're willing to invest, put yourself out there. Be the person that kicks off the things that are interesting to you. You'll find that people are interested in things you thought were niche. As a mentor once told me: life is a body-contact sport; get out there.

LifeKit did an episode on this recently. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/06/nx-s1-5667582/how-to-build-a-...

Some things I do: I organize a monthly brunch for friends. I try and grow it, invite people I've recently met.

If someone asks me to do something, I try and do it. Get invited to poker night, I'm there. Asked to play Fantasy Football, yep! Even though I don't watch football and have never played.

Working on a basketball app to bring people together. Basketball was invented out of grief, by James Naismith who lost his grandfather, mother, father, and family home to a fire within 4 months. He was tasked with helping to have rambunctious youth learn the principles of teamwork and sharing and slowing down and thus created the game. It truly brings people together and I hope everyone gets a chance to experience the magic that is pickup basketball. It got me out of a deep hole after the pandemic after my mom had passed and I gained 30 lbs.

A couple of years ago I tried to create a platform to connect people to local communities. The twist was that each community had members that worked as buddies to help welcome and guide new members. I got 10s+ communities and members but since there was no business model associated and I needed to work, I couldn't kept it up. The website was https://tribalo.app.

From the few numbers I got, I figure out it help. Maybe one day I don't need to work and can focus on it again.

Pick an activity that is accessible that catches your fancy. Even better if you already have an activity, just spend more time doing it and with people you enjoy hanging out with. At a minimum you'll start feeling less lonely and over time hopefully you'll start forming relationships outside the activity

I am a recent convert to pickleball and highly recommend it because it relatively easy to start with but also the wide range of people who participate in the sport - college kids to retirees

In urban areas, we really should have less cars. But it’s emblema of a deeper issue; the interests of control and convenience in one’s time has crowded out everything else. If you have an established social circle and a decent income there’s never been a better time to take charge of your social life. Unfortunately the most able to change the system for those who have neither of these things are the least likely to understand. It’s a tough and old question to be honest

Number one in managing loneliness: stand on your own legs. Realise that true happiness comes from inside not from outside, find meaning in just being alive.

Second is family, parents until 30's and then your own. Wife, kids will always be there, either on Wednesday night or on Christmas. You will give no f for others.

Third long time friends in decreasing time scale: high school, college/uni, work.

Fourth you reach out any club you find, from mushroom lovers to blind date lovers.

Get off social media, and go do things you enjoy that aren’t centered around consuming.

Volunteer at a museum if you like art, etc.

You just have to go live and bump into other people living in the world.

There is an old joke or trope of an evil scientist creating a worm that destroys the Internet and everyone ends up thanking him for saving the world.

I think one solution is to have more accessible public spaces where people can meet. As a host of board game meetups, my biggest challenge is finding places to meet. I had to stop hosting Friday game nights because the available spaces were too expensive or closed early.

I'm working on an open source non-commercial website to drive up demand for public spaces. https://createthirdplaces.org/

Kids make friends pretty easily when they go to school and later college. Only after graduating college it becomes very hard to make friends.

So one solution is have folks attend classes in schools and universities or even local libraries during weekends. Classes specifically designed for different age groups - 30s, 40s, 50s etc. Classes related music, personal finance, investing, art, sports, cooking etc

Govt should offer tax breaks for attending these classes. That would attract a lot of people.

You can organize things. It's surprisingly easy. You just put up a FB event.

When I was younger and moved to a new (foreign) city, The first thing I did was to create a "picnic" for people coming from my country. No agenda, no nothing, let's just hang out and have some wine, cheese and chat while sitting on the grass. You'd be surprised how successful this was, and some of them keep running regularly without me for over a decade now.

For me, the loneliest period of my life was when I was socially active but hanging out with people that I didn't really like or respect. Don't neglect spiritual and mental health as a strong component of loneliness. It's not always about dragging your body from one event to another to maximize the number of people in your life. You have to make sure your mind, body and spirit are present and aligned.

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

This. Isn't it fascinating that for all the different ways we have to reach people (almost immediately, anywhere in the world, at virtually no cost) and all the different social entertainment options, people feel unable to perform an action that is so simple? An action that their ancestors going back all the way to the hominids has done at massively greater costs to them?

What is it that makes people feel this powerless?

Encouraging people to meet up in everyday life and gathering them just to talk is where I’d simply start.

In that spirit I have created and deployed a vibe coded app: come have dinner.com (not the real website).

A simple website we share with my SO to our loved ones, friends, co workers and more. People can register to come have dinner at ours, with an attendance they don’t know.

The website has an admin interface with a simple password, some good jokes, email reminders and calendar invitations.

Should I open source it?

One probable cause of it is hyper individualistic achievement culture. Not everyone is tuned for this. It's not a shortcoming.

Community, friends and when spirituality helps.

It seems you can't ignore a lot of this is a product of fewer children, temporary and transitional relationships that are not governed by the boundaries of marriage, and fewer intact families. This leads to fewer siblings, fewer responsibilities toward others, and more opportunities to be and feel isolated. There is a reason why the concept of a family protected by certain legal responsibilities and obligations have been around for a long time. I can't imagine getting older and having no children or siblings. I look at my parents and the only reason why they advanced into old age with tons of support is because of their siblings and children. Friends only go so far. Also the loss of belief in God and purpose lived out through regular Church attendance, charitable activities with a purpose, and community prayer leads to fractured relationships, philosophical and existential anxieties, no matter how many people you have around you. There's a reason why religious communities and institutions have survived thousands of years through all sorts of political upheavals and change. The modern experimentation rejecting God and family doesn't seem to be working out so well. As the older population ages (and increasingly gets euthanized), the younger population shrinking, and the greater reliance on recreational drugs and technology to fill the void, it really doesn't seem that hard to understand the increasing loneliness.

There is so much to this issue. One major problem is the lack of fourth places. If I want to be low-key social where do I go? Some people say the library but IMHO libraries are not social spots. The concept of man shed is cool except for the gender aspect but it's mostly private sheds. There is a maker space in the city but membership is limited and there is a wait list.

I have been trying to make more friends in the real and virtual world the past two years, and I have been pretty successful. Most of my new friends come from the following: Volleyball, MtG, or a writing group.

Really, I think that it comes down to make making or joining a space with a shared activity and moderating out the crap.

The problem is most communities are losing those spaces in favor of private social clubs. That's what we need to fight.

It looks like every comment here is suggesting that lonely people should do something to feel less lonely. But that's not how you stop an epidemic.

The epidemic is a systemic things, and you don't solve systemic things by giving advice to individuals. You solve systemic things by changing the whole culture. and you change the whole culture by large scale initiative.

That said, I have no idea about what to do!

I save myself from total loneliness by hanging out in the background through a virtual frosted glass with my friend (via the https://MeetingGlass.com/ app). We do that every day for a few hours. Its better than nothing. It gives a relief from being home alone. At least you can see that someone is out there.

I have no link or affiliation with this company, but recently heard about it:

https://storiboardclub.com/

They say they want to “make meeting like-minded people easy, natural, and fun” and “ Loneliness doesn't have to be the norm.”

https://storiboardclub.com/about-us

I think part of the problem is that social media is normalized and it is easy. It is way easier to engage socially (or at least you feel like you're engaging socially) with likes and lurking and stuff. It is way harder to put on pants and go out and it is normalized to do so (phrasing like bedrotting is super casual, whereas it is actually really hard to maintain an eating disorder because you have to be constantly hiding it from people).

Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.

Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.

if you want to be interesting, be interested. the error in a lot of this that most people mistake solitude for loneliness and index on the wrong problem.

solitude is a rarefied luxury, but loneliness requires being around other people.

real loneliness is a lack of trust, and the lack of trust is the effect of anxiety, which originates from a lack of stable personal boundaries, both in self and others.

the lack of trust can be the effect of a cycle where solitude doesn't give you normal social momentum, so there isn't a way to be present in the moment with anyone you do meet. if you go to a cafe and start talking at a stranger about warcraft, you're ignoring their experience, and the experience you share in the place.

If you are a man, you need to learn to be around other men and recognize it's a n important skill that takes experience and practice. The epidemic might not be cured, but you can develop local immunity to loneliness by practicing relating to other men and refining your boundaries.

There is no "loneliness epidemic". It's a bad journalism epidemic. People in general are a combination of lone and grouping. Both are OK. People don't need to socialise all the time. People who want to socialise but can't usually suffer from emotional difficulties that they haven't addressed. Same for people who obssess about socialising all the time.

Maybe social media just meets their social needs. Maybe this is not a problem that needs to be solved, this is just the way things are now.

The answer is actually less technology. More in person community is the solution.

How do you get people to talk to each other again? It has to come through forming community groups that can meet and enjoy life together in the real world. It also can come from meet with a shared purpose to advance common causes that make the community and the world slightly better.

Organize things.

Start a bowling league, a DnD group, a book club, a charitable organization... whatever.

Have a dinner party. Join the chess club. Start or join a sports league.

Many of these community events aren't happening because nobody has created them yet and it might just be up to you to do it.

Part of the loneliness epidemic is somebody actually has to initiate things and not enough people do. YOU can do it.

I'll jump.

I've been meaning to set up a bi-weekly dinner for hacker types who live mid peninsula, specifically near San Mateo. I have a group of 4 or so in mind and have a good place to host, but would like a slightly larger group.

If anyone would be interested in helping to get something stood up, send electronic post to carl chatfield snail (mail run by g)

Communities, in-real-life communities.

Dancing, knitting, cooking, sports, gardening, board games. Which activity is secondary, what is crucial is that people can come (no matter if they feel great or not), can bring friends, with low pressure (so they can sit and talk, no need to actually dance, cook or so).

Regularity is crucial - weekly are the best.

We (reading this) can't do anything. An enlightened government might set policy in such ways as to fix this over the course of decades, but I don't even seen that being acknowledged as possible or desirable in those same decades. The problem will continue to deteriorate until it becomes catastrophic.

i like loneliness. in my teens i could not encourage my friends to travel so i went on my own and was happy. in my twenties i would comfortably break up my relationships if i knew i could be happier alone. i have worked overseas for extended periods alone. i am old now but i am happy alone. i enjoy my huge garden alone. i avoid crowds. I online shop instead of travelling to a store if i can. I just have no connection to people around me anymore and i have been able to recognise this need in me and encourage myself to follow my own understanding of a happy life. I have no real regrets. I am in a good position financially and have nobody to really bother me. I can look ahead to the next month or two and feel happy knowing there is nothing on the horizon to displace my solitude.

I wish I understood how people arrived at this state in the first place…

My parents are retired boomers who’ve lived in the same area for decades. This has afforded them a strong local fried network, despite being an ocean away from their homeland and extended families. Mom and her friends have a weekly gathering to chat and have tea/cake.

My wife and I likewise have a geoup of local friends. We get together quarterly or so for a group dinner. The wives usually organize that. Most of the guys are cat enthusiasts and/or cyclists so we see each many weekends.

Is this mostly a Millenial thing? Is there a whole generation that for whatever reason never found hobbies outside work?

I visit whatever sport activity I can find. Like Go Karting, gymnastics, bouldering, etc and always start asking pro guys: “yo, how come you visit this so often? How do you get fun from it?”. And people lovely tell their story. Later they teach me how to do things. It works for me.

I am a solo bootstrap founder, ultra lonely.