From the article:

Although the data does not show that people are more lonely, it does show that people are more alone. (Derek Thompson has made this point particularly well.) In the US, time spent with friends on the weekends has fallen by half in the past 20 years. According to the American Time Use Survey, pals are out and solitude is in:

This is mainly a recession in hanging out—most of the increase in alone time has come from people spending less time with folks outside their households:

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We’ve got a puzzle here. People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to. So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?

No, it’s not fine. Isolated people are more likely to get depressed, suffer a heart attack or a stroke, develop dementia, and catch a cold; they straight-up die sooner. (The “loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day” meme is a bit dubious, but it’s also not crazy.) Those findings all come from correlational studies, but when you inflict isolation on someone instead, you quickly see some massive and concerning effects. Prisoners in solitary confinement often sink into a stupor, their thoughts become obsessive and delusional, and they get agitated and irritable. (I’ve heard many people complain of similar but milder things happening to their elderly parents who live alone.)

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Too much alone time is clearly bad for us, but it doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it should. So the real mystery of the loneliness epidemic is: where is it? Why are we all sitting alone in our houses and slowly melting into puddles of slime, like the “this is fine” meme dog, but without the fire?

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Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation. In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it. In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence. And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.

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The hallmark of a strong control system is that it resists perturbations. If you pilfer everything out of my fridge and pantry, my food-stat will send me scrambling to the Chipotle down the street. And if the Chipotle is closed, I’ll resort to the Qdoba next door. Our social-stats do not seem to display this property. According to a recent paper, people who got shifted to remote work in the past few years spent more time alone compared to people who stayed in-person—meaning they did not seek out additional ways to make up for their newfound alone time. It’s as if, upon encountering the closed Chipotle, they just went home hungry instead.

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It makes sense that our social-stats would be a bit feeble. Just as our default diet probably staved off scurvy most of the time, our default desire to stay alive probably fended off most of our solitude. If our ancestors wanted food, shelter, warmth, protection, etc., they needed to be around other people. No hunter-gatherer had the option of working from home, DoorDash-ing some Thai food for dinner, and spending the evenings watching Survivor.

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So what should we do about it? We actually have a good example of how to compensate for a semi-defective drive, namely, our sense of thirst.

Human hydro-stats can be laughably bad. Case in point: I used to get terrible headaches as a kid, and after several doctor’s appointments and failed medications, my parents realized that I just...wasn’t drinking liquids. They plonked a big glass down on the counter and told me to fill it and down it several times a day, which I’ve done ever since. My headaches didn’t go away entirely, but they did get less frequent and severe.

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We need a similar intervention for our social-stats. We need periodic PSAs that modern life can leave you chronically people-deficient. We need to be pushed toward one another slightly more than we want to be. Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another. They are wrong. Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want. If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.

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That suggests the best prescription for an inadequate social-stat is a bit of brute force. Just as you must sometimes drink even when you’re not thirsty, you must sometimes hang out even when you’re not lonely. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in a commencement address in 1978:

I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.