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It’s pretty much an uncontested truism that we are living through an “epidemic of loneliness”. Google searches for that exact term yield 100,000 results; you get another 100,000 for “loneliness epidemic”. It is a topic of regular concern both in Britain and the US.
The problem isn’t just that loneliness makes people sad; it’s also killing people, according to a 2017 report by the Jo Cox Commission. It claimed that loneliness (or “weak social connection”) is “as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day”. It also suggests that it costs UK employers £2.5 billion a year.
But an “epidemic” is a disease that has spread suddenly – which by analogy implies a problem which has rapidly and recently increased in its magnitude. And I’m not at all convinced that is the case, or that the doomy claims about its health effects are well-supported.
One of my reasons for thinking this is a new study, available in preprint ahead of publication in the journal Psychology and Aging. It asks: has loneliness among older people got worse in recent years?
It found that “newer” old people (baby boomers born 1948-1965) are no more likely to think of themselves as lonely than “older” old people (born 1920-1947), and that older people have not become more likely to think of themselves as lonely in the last decade (2005 – 2016). There may be more lonely older people now, it says, but that’s because there are more older people in general. The average older person appears to be no more likely to be lonely than they were a decade ago.
I’m always wary of trusting any one study, though. All the more so when that study confirms my own beliefs. Also, it’s about elderly Americans, so its findings may not apply to, for example, younger Britons. But I think it is a good study: it has a large sample size and, most importantly, it has preregistered hypotheses, so that we know it probably can’t have p-hacked its way to exciting but false findings.
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