OPINION: The politics of loneliness is totalitarian – By Damon Linker (The Week) / June 30 2021
What Hannah Arendt would say about all the lonely people
Friendlessness is on the rise — and so, one must presume, is loneliness.
That’s the troubling takeaway from a study released last week by the Survey Center on American Life that shows the number of both men and women who claim to have “no close friends” increasing five-fold over the past 30 years. For men, the rate of friendlessness has gone from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2021, and for women from 2 percent to 10 percent today. The pattern is the same on the high end, with the percentage of men saying they have 10 or more friends dropping from 40 to 15 percent and the percentage of women saying the same falling from 28 to 11 percent.
However you cut it, this is bad.
It’s bad for the lonely, isolated individuals themselves, because having close ties to other people is strongly correlated with various markers of physical and mental health. Without such ties, individuals tend to grow unhappy and unhealthy and can even sink into depression.
CONTINUE > https://theweek.com/politics/1002095/the-politics-of-loneliness-is-totalitarian
