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What is Causing Our Epidemic of Loneliness and How Can We Fix It?

Researchers share what Americans have to say about social disconnection and potential solutions

We've Lost the Spaces That Foster Friendship

We keep offering individual fixes for loneliness while ignoring the disappearance of the spaces where adults once built real relationships.

How we can solve loneliness in America

An expert in loneliness says the U.S. is in a new "social frontier." Here's how we can cope

Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition

In 2004, the social network site was set up to connect people. But now, with lives increasingly played out online, have we forgotten how to be alone?

Loneliness epidemic

The concept of a "loneliness epidemic" relating to rising rates of social isolation was first described in the 2000s. Robert D. Putnam's 2000 study Bowling Alone was an early instance of describing loneliness as an epidemic, arguing that decreased participation in civic life and community groups was weakening social bonds in the United States.[5]

The Follower Factory (Published 2018)

Everyone wants to be popular online. Some even pay for it. Inside social media’s black market.

Automated Intimacy

This isn’t capitalism’s first loneliness epidemic. But in the 21st century, relationship simulators like Replika are here with the solution: your very own AI lover.

Loneliness is taking friend-making apps mainstream

Post-pandemic loneliness is driving young adults to seek friends more intentionally.

Researchers Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness (Published 2016)

Social isolation is linked to physical illness and to functional and cognitive decline. Programs to reach out to the elderly are growing, particularly in Britain.

Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosys…

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

I bet you're wondering how we got here...

Your Loneliness Was a Design Decision Made by Your Enemy

or: they want us isolated because it's easier to sell us shit

Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been

Why didn't the FOAF standard give us distributed social networking in the 2000s?

Chris Olah on Twitter / X

Research Intimacy: Internalizing obscure knowledge, equations, relationships, and ways of thinking related to a research topic.— Chris Olah (@ch402) August 16, 2020