The Human Loneliness Epidemic

Capitalism is killing us

Much has been written over the last half decade about the “male loneliness epidemic”, a social crisis where men are less likely to find partners, have social networks, are increasingly isolated from each other and their communities. This framing has always rubbed me the wrong way because I think its focus on a single gender misses the true crisis: loneliness and alienation are increasing for everyone. As our society heads towards collapse, as capitalism’s contradictions continue to sharpen, people across all genders and demographics are increasingly disconnected from each other, their lives becoming more and more solitary and detached from broader society. Studies have shown that female loneliness is rising at the same rate as male loneliness, if only a point or two lower. The problem also seems to worsen in younger generations, with people aged 18-25 feeling acute loneliness most often of every cohort. Because loneliness also has dire health implications, its sharp rise prompted U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to release a report in 2023 on the “healing effects of social connection and community”. In fact, chronic loneliness increases the risks of all sorts of diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

While droves of articles, studies, and reports have been released that cover the topic of loneliness in the United States and other countries, few of them have talked about the ways in which this is nearly entirely a product of the conditions of capitalism. In countries where individualism is exalted, personal success is the highest aim, where our spaces for interrelation - online or off - have been entirely monetized, and where “personal responsibility” trumps responsibility to the community, it is no wonder that people are finding it harder and harder to connect. When market forces dominate our every aspect of our lives, our identity at the most basic level becomes about the atomized self. Each person in a society dominated by market whims is competing against one another for the scarce resources that capital offers. There isn’t enough for everyone, so you need to be smarter, faster, better, than all the others. These fellow citizens aren’t your comrades, they are your rivals. It is only logical that under such conditions we would find it difficult to feel as if we were a part of something bigger than ourselves or to find common cause with one another.

If you doubt that capitalism is the cause of this crisis, consider that perhaps the most alienated and isolated person you will ever encounter in your day to day life is a homeless person. Most homeless people will tell you that they feel invisible as the majority of society looks through them and pretends they don’t exist when they aren’t violently expelling them. The have been de-personed in every meaningful way by capitalist society because they have committed the greatest crime one can commit under capitalism: being economically useless. The punishment for not contributing to the economy is being rendered functionally nonexistent.

Not only is this system responsible in so many ways for our misery, the concept of happiness itself is big business. Virtually all modern advertising is based around selling us the idea of consuming our way to happiness. That gaping hole inside you? Just fill it with more stuff. If you just buy this car, that house, this beauty product, then suddenly your life will have meaning and everyone will love you. Your real problem is that you aren’t thin enough, pretty enough, successful enough. If you could just be better than you are now then you wouldn’t feel so damn miserable all the time. The pursuit of happiness in modern society is often not a pursuit of happiness at all, but instead a pursuit of ways to fill the void with enough bullshit that you finally quiet the voice in your head that asks “is this really all there is?”.

While loneliness truly is an epidemic in modern society - with a staggering 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. reporting a lack of social and emotional support - like everything else under capitalism, the suggested remedies are individualized. Meditate, join a club, reach out, get therapy, stay off your phone. All of these are good suggestions in a vacuum but all of them are turning a societal problem into a matter of personal responsibility with virtually no interrogation of the ways in which the structure of the system must change to truly change our outcomes.

It often isn’t that people don’t want to meditate, don’t want to join a club, don’t want to spend more time outside and less time online. It’s that we are so exhausted by the daily grind and our responsibilities to our families that we have little time for any of these esoteric pursuits. When you look a little deeper you can see that everywhere, in every instance, society is structured to place us on the back foot and to push us away from one another.

In Marxist theory, the concept of abolishing the family is frequently misunderstood but contains a vital critique of the way society under capitalism is structured. When the full responsibility for unpaid domestic labor and child rearing falls on the one or two adults in the nuclear household, the sheer breadth of that commitment is enough to leave little time for community. If instead society was structured in such a way that the community helped to raise the children, to cook and serve the dinners, to pick up the slack, not only would fewer and fewer children fall through the cracks, humans would naturally find the connection that they need to thrive and have more time for fulfilling pursuits.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx explains that capitalism, being based on alienation of man from his labor, would always consequentially alienate man from man and man from himself.

“Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.”

Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

The very fabric of society under capitalism is structured in such a way that we never truly know ourselves or each other. In many ways, capitalism thrives on our isolation. It creates the illness and then monetizes the cure. The dating apps, the social media, the AI therapists, the Hustle and Grind industrial complex, the consumerism - a chunk of the economy that exists entirely because the system split us apart in order to sell us something that promises to put us back together, but never does. It cannot, because the problem inherent in loneliness, in isolation, in alienation, is a spiritual problem. Nothing that can be sold on the market will solve it.

Capitalist society also benefits in another way from our increasing disconnection. An atomized, weakened, individualist, depressed, overworked society is not a society that can rebel. It is not a society that is capable of uniting to mount a fierce opposition or even to question the nature of the system that is breaking them. It is not even a society in which one sees themselves in another, as fellow workers with a common cause. Capitalism seeks to make each man his own island, never truly interacting with each other in any meaningful way. And especially never sharing any big ideas about the ways it could be different.

Where “third spaces” - spaces that aren’t the workplace or the home and are communal and free to use - are waning, more people search for what they would find in these in-person spaces online. While online spaces can provide some means of support and connection, they are a poor substitute for face time with the people around you. Because the majority of these spaces are also products that are privately owned and monetized, users are encourage to market themselves with branding and self-promotion. You become not so much a person looking for like-minded people but a product to be sold. The perverse incentives created by social media encourage its users to promote a lifestyle that may look nothing like their real life, opinions they may not truly hold, and an image of themselves that may have no real bearing on who they are. Everyone online is a competitor in the attention economy, and if you’re competing and selling yourself how can you authentically be yourself?

This search for online cures for our isolation has now resulted in an increase in the prevalence of a new mental illness called “AI psychosis”. People are turning to large language models in greater and greater numbers for feelings of belonging and connection that they are not finding in their offline lives. And as capitalism is wont to do, naturally this human connection mimeograph is imbued with a profit motive and virtually no regard for the social cost.

The true cure for loneliness is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalist mode of production. Connection, sharing, empathy, community, are the essence of what it takes for humans to lead fulfilling lives. They are the building blocks of happiness, and as such they aren’t things that you can monetize. In a system entirely driven by the profit motive, these things are the first to go because they bring no value to shareholders and are replaced with poor imitations that can be sold back to you, promising to replace what was stolen from you for a monthly fee.

We can see the catastrophic results of our alienation everywhere we look. From mass shootings, to deaths of despair, to the opioid crisis, to 1 in 10 adults being on anti-depressants, on every metric that counts this system is killing us. Our discontent isn’t a character flaw or a personal failure, it is capitalism working as it was designed. To truly confront this crisis, to lead connected, fulfilling lives, we must be willing to confront the mechanisms that have turned us from thinking, feeling human beings into line items on a spreadsheet. There is no app we can download to cure us. Our cure lies in creating a fundamentally different system that doesn’t define our value by the value we generate for the bank accounts of another, but by the fact that we are living, breathing souls who have earned the right by nature of our birth to be free.

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