Lonely Boys

The epidemic of isolation among young men.

- Rachel Giese

In 2017, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identified the most common threat to public health that he had seen: not heart disease, diabetes, or cancer — but loneliness. Isolation and weak social connections, he wrote in Harvard Business Review, “are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity. Loneliness is also associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety.” Murthy was supported by a large body of research, culled from more than 200 studies involving more than 3 million subjects worldwide, that showed that we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. The culprits are manifold and include the fluidity of modern life (we move and change jobs more), the weakening of community institutions such as service organizations and faith groups, the gig economy, and our increasing reliance on social media.

Men, in particular, are affected by the loneliness epidemic and by attendant feelings of depression and despair. In their 2009 book, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century, Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, a married couple who are both psychiatrists and professors at Harvard Medical School, observed that it was common for men to form closer bonds with their spouses at the expense of other social connections. And, over their lifespans, men tended to lose the connections they did have with male friends, depriving them of the inoculating effect of social ties — which have been shown to increase happiness, help people cope with trauma, and extend longevity. Olds and Schwartz noted that men don’t work as hard as women at maintaining friendships — and more importantly, they don’t work as hard at making new friends; women are generally more likely to replace their fading friendships with new ones.