Loneliness Busting and Overcoming the "Social Crash"
Some ideas for restoring connections
In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 event, hit parts of Louisiana, the Bahamas and southern Florida. Vivek Murthy, later to become the U.S. Surgeon General, was a high school student living with his family in Miami when the storm hit their neighborhood.
For a time Murthy and his family had to huddle in a temporary shelter, surviving in the aftermath, as he reports, due to “the kindness of strangers who brought food, water, and comfort,” until gradually normal life resumed and, as he puts it, “the distance between people returned.”
One gift experiences of mutual aid like this often brings survivors is the imagination to create long-term organizations grounded in this kind of social solidarity.
For the young Murthy, here was a moment, potentially similar to the impact of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on a young Dorothy Day, in which connection for the Murthy family was everything. Ordinary people—not elites or experts—came together and self-organized in effective ways, a moment which can sometimes inspire new organizations (as happened in the New York area after the 9/11 attacks) that continue to hold the community together in the years following.
As we know from the Surgeon General’s 82-page advisory report, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation”, published last May 2, this is precisely the kind of small-scale, localized social connection Dr. Murthy is hoping to see restored. Reading it, we may wonder: did he learn the lessons of Hurricane Andrew?
The report describes this pre-COVID pandemic as emerging in 2020 after building for many years. The phenomenon of reported loneliness, according to the report, now affects half of all Americans. Lack of social connection, according to one dramatic formulation in its pages, has been found to be as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
We should note that the topic of loneliness is one of those “amoeba words”, as Ivan Illich called them, terms (like “community”) which often shift their meanings and are hard to pin down.
Still, as Surgeon General, Murthy obviously can’t issue a diagnosis without a prognosis and a prescription, naturally, so the report contains a section on the “Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” Here, we might anticipate, we’ll find the report’s recommendations for “loneliness policies,” whatever that might mean. Not quite.
For those who might prefer the two-minute YouTube summary, Murthy assures us that “the keys to connection are simple,” prescribing not public policies but what we might call a mix of the obvious and the inadequate:
1) answer a phone call from a friend;
2) invite someone over to share a meal;
3) listen and be present during conversation; and
4) seek out opportunities to serve others.
These steps may seem small, he acknowledges, adding without evidence, “but they are extraordinarily powerful.”
The advisory document includes an analysis of the concept of social connection, a survey of its various impacts (especially on young people), and a list of recommended actions for governments, public health departments, philanthropy, schools, tech companies, media, parents, caregivers, and individuals.
Also asked to do their part: “workplaces.”
The latter term feels a bit squeamish here but is in line with the Surgeon General’s mostly medicalized approach (after all, the report did not come from the Department of Commerce)—i.e., one which is far too polite to mention the economic elephant in the room.
Murthy’s 2017 HBR article, “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic”, took a similar neoliberal line in its focus on everything but root causes: the way loneliness reduces task performance for employees, diminishes their innovation and initiative, and damages trust among teams. The author also notes (without a hint of irony) that “half of all CEOs report feeling lonely in their roles,” poor things.
Lack of social connection, Murthy commented to his C-suite readers, “isn’t just bad for our health; it’s also bad for business.”
Another placebo of a prescription in the Advisory: “We must decide how technology is designed and how we use it.” Granted, the Surgeon General is speaking to the nation as a whole here, with a particular focus on social media’s harm to young people. But given Silicon Valley’s rise to become a global power center, we need to ask exactly who is the “we” invoked here and how they might collectively make decisions around technology’s future.
Although economic prosperity is commonly listed as one of the key social determinants of health, the report’s timid language about “communities harmed by structural barriers”, the impact of “financial insecurity” and related “life events” hints at a missed opportunity to point out one key source of our condition—namely, the volatile mix of economic precarity, status anxiety, and disconnection from meaningful work in a world where the “workplace” is increasingly a laptop screen on a kitchen table. (For the record, I’m not the only observer to notice this omission in the Surgeon General’s report—see also the response of Capita’s Ian Marcus Corbin and Joe Waters here.)
Simply offering better corporate HR programs to build social connection will not go far to address the latter ills, which include “deaths of despair”, fentanyl epidemics, and the way poor Americans are three times as likely to report pain in their daily lives as wealthy Americans. Taken together, these phenomena are themselves part of a “social crash” we are only beginning to understand.
And yet missing from the Surgeon General’s report is any awareness that the kind of business culture he wants to see already exists, especially in Europe and the global South, including his family’s ancestral home of India. Whether called the solidarity economy, the social economy, or something else, this popular movement is a mix of mostly smaller but highly relational businesses, many operating as workers’ cooperatives with democratic governance and self-management.
The result is workplaces which offer much more meaningful work that actually empowers and engages.
To take only two examples, the Canadian province of Quebec and the northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna contain literally thousands of such solidarity-based enterprises making up a substantial portion of area GDP. These businesses include cooperatively-owned social care services—childcare, elder care, care for the disabled--offering some of the highest quality care available. Their impact on public health and community wellbeing over the last several decades has been shown to be transformative.
In his 2018 book Lost Connections, author Johann Hari helpfully argued that loneliness is best understood as a pre-condition to depression, identifying the latter not merely with social isolation but rather with disempowerment of several kinds. These include disconnection from the following:
meaningful work,
other people (the usual definition of loneliness),
meaningful values (consumerism),
childhood trauma,
status/respect (loss of livelihood),
the natural world (when our natural biophilia is blocked), and
a hopeful or secure future (as in the precarious gig economy—no benefits, no contract, no rights).
Thus what the Surgeon General’s report calls loneliness is actually a state of disconnection, driven largely by a half-century of economic displacement and disempowerment in pursuit of a chimera—the false utopia of a free market.
Let’s follow the research and the examples of what’s working—even better, the gold standard—in other societies so that we can advocate for policies that reconnect us to genuine wellbeing.
Coming in Part II next week: some ideas on what those policies might look like!
See you next time—peace.
Outstanding!