There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy

Adam Mastroianni argues that claims of a rising "loneliness epidemic" rest on shaky statistical moves: treating single contemporary snapshots as evidence of a trend and confusing age differences with cohort change. When researchers compare today's teens to yesterday’s teens, differences are small and mixed; some datasets show slight declines, others small rebounds to 1980s levels. Yet multiple time-use studies show a clear shift: Americans spend far less time with non-household friends than they did two decades ago, and people who live alone have been increasingly solitary since the late 1990s. So social contact has fallen even if self-reported loneliness has not surged in parallel.

The real problem, he says, is "social scurvy": chronic underconsumption of essential social input. Using a cybernetic model of the mind - built from competing "stats" that drive hunger, sleep and social needs - he contends the mind’s social-stat is weak, so people don’t generate powerful cravings for companionship even as isolation damages health. Evidence ranges from correlations linking isolation to depression, heart disease, dementia and mortality to extreme experiments like solitary confinement and prolonged cave isolation. The consequence is a populace increasingly alone, mentally blunted and vulnerable to radicalization or addictive behaviors, requiring remedies that restore everyday social contact rather than mere awareness-raising.