Loneliness results from an isolating society, not individual failures to pursue connection

In a hyper-individualistic society where we’re constantly told to exercise personal responsibility, it’s not surprising that we are told to manage our emotions this way [contact a friend]. And for those who can’t self-manage, and for whom mental healthcare is either unaffordable or undesirable, there’s life coaching to pull us out of our rut.

In the midst of what has been characterized as a “loneliness epidemic” in American society, even friendship is being commodified and outsourced to the market.

The liberal media will instruct you to manage your emotions, and the life-coaching industry will sell you a product to help you manage your life, conservative media will focus on a different but familiar bogeyman [...] the decline of “the family.”

When it comes to underlying structural factors that have caused changes in our “old-fashioned patterns,” the analysis stays relatively superficial [...] “wealth drives us toward solitude.” This makes loneliness seem a bit inevitable—an unfortunate side effect of human progress—and if something is seen as inevitable, how likely are you to propose major structural changes to address it?

These problems are not individual-level problems. Changing them requires policy and political will. Simply put, we have to create an entirely different society which prioritizes human social life along with human and ecological well-being. Doing this requires ending the prioritization of private profit in our society.