Reconnecting Our Communities
- Tyler VanderWeele
- Dec 10, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Some neglected aspects of our epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
By Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D.
Key points
Americans are less connected to one another than in the past.
Policymakers have drawn attention to some important aspects of this crisis.
We need more attention to the economic drivers of disconnection.
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Co-written by Brendan Case and Tyler VanderWeele.
In May 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a public health advisory, describing "our epidemic of loneliness and isolation," and highlighting strategies for reducing it. He resumed this theme in his "Parting Prescription for America," in January 2025, shortly before his term ended. As he emphasizes, and as we've noted previously, social connection has important effects on mental and physical health both through its objective dimensions—the number of relationships and communities, the time we spend with them, and the material supports they offer—and through the subjective sense of connection and belonging, of being loved and cared for.
An Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation
Unfortunately, many aspects of social connectedness are in long-term decline in the United States. The Advisory notes that from 2003 to 2020, Americans’ self-reported time spent with friends and in social engagement decreased by two-thirds and one-third, respectively, while time spent in isolation increased by 17 percent. By some measures, half of Americans now report being lonely, with the highest proportions found among young people. Marriage and birth rates are at all-time lows, and religious affiliation and participation, and other forms of civic participation have declined steeply as well. This is cause for lament, but also represents a significant threat to public health, since social disconnection and loneliness predict increases in unhappiness, depression, anxiety, and even premature mortality.
Murthy’s report offered a description of the current crisis—not least in stressing the critical role played by the overuse of smartphones and social media among young people—and proposed six “pillars” to structure public health responses to it, each of which is reasonable and important in its own right: (1) strengthening social infrastructure in local communities, (2) enacting pro-connection public policies, (3) mobilizing the health sector, (4) reforming digital environments, (5) deepening our knowledge, and (6) building a culture of connection. All of Murthy’s proposals are worth pursuing and could go a long way toward addressing contemporary social disaffiliation. Nonetheless, in a recently published paper, we at the Human Flourishing Program have also argued that the Surgeon General’s report does not address some of the epidemic’s key causes and most damaging aspects.
Neglected Dimensions
Economic factors are critical drivers of many aspects of social disaffiliation, but this received little attention in the Surgeon General’s Advisory. Fostering strong families, rich friendships, and deep participation in communal life are clearly affected by having adequate time for leisure and social life, financial stability, low levels of financial stress, and the dignity of socially valued work. In recent decades, each of these four foundational elements has been eroded, especially for Americans without college degrees, by stagnant or declining real median wages and the increase of low-skilled, “dead-end” jobs with unpredictable schedules and tenuous contracts.
Communities with low-paying and erratically scheduled jobs will often struggle to foster stable families, clubs, civic associations, and religious communities. As Case and Deaton argue, “the loss of good jobs for less educated Americans” has triggered a cascade of social pathologies, amounting to “the slowly unfolding loss of a way of life,” which in turn partly explains the rising epidemic of “deaths of despair,” from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse. We need to help these communities.
Young people are America’s loneliest demographic, owing much to their screen time, but that is not the whole story. As Gray and Haidt have argued, there has been a decline in independent play in childhood. Play in which kids socialize with one another without adult direction is increasingly crowded out by the expansion of the school day, growth in adult-monitored extra-curricular activities, and increasingly anxious parenting keeping kids from unsupervised play. In 2020, for instance, high-school seniors “went out with friends” 1.9 times per week, down from 2.9 times in 1976.
The Surgeon General’s advisory also understated the importance of declines in institutions such as religious communities and marriage. These are probably humanity’s oldest forms of community, present in nearly all societies, and consistently shown—not least in our own research—to have strong effects in promoting flourishing, and indeed to do so more strongly than other forms of belonging.
Economic factors again may play a role in depressing family formation and religious participation, but there are a number of additional likely drivers of those trends. About half of Americans are religious by conviction but do not attend services. “Secular competition” from work, leisure activities, or children’s sports may partially play a role. Marriage rates have perhaps been depressed by the set of “marriage penalties” in federal and state means-tested welfare programs. Most Americans do still want to marry, and we need to find ways to enable this.
Reconnecting Our Communities
Addressing our epidemic of loneliness and isolation will require, beyond the helpful sixfold approach of the advisory, finding ways to revive the economic fortunes of less-educated Americans, to restore a greater measure of freedom and independence to the lives of young people, and to revitalize the critical institutions of religious community and marriage. Pro-community policies might include greater investment in technical and vocational education for high-schoolers or the promotion of worker cooperatives, the elimination of “marriage penalties” from welfare programs, or the revival by local jurisdictions of once-ubiquitous “Sunday-closing laws” (still quite common in Europe) to enable religious service attendance and provide all workers with a day of rest.
Beyond public policy, however, we need a broader cultural and even spiritual reorientation to the good of community. Many of us instinctively turn to community during the holiday season, making extra efforts to spend time in celebration with family and friends. But what if we were to carry that commitment to the importance of being together past December? What if parents always took seriously the importance of independent and unstructured socializing for kids’ well-being? What if religious community were considered not only at Christmas-time but throughout the year? What if each of us made a deliberate effort to nourish loving relationships that might otherwise languish? May it be so during this holiday season...and beyond.
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References
Case, B., Corbin, I. M., Ivey, R., Teubner, J., Bachiochi, E., Cowden, R., ... & VanderWeele, T. J. (2025). Reconnecting our communities: Social flourishing on the far side of “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation”. International Journal of Wellbeing, 15(4).
Hong, J.H., Berkman, L.F., Chen, F.S., Shiba, K., Chen, Y., Kim, E.S., and VanderWeele, T.J. (2023). Are loneliness and social isolation equal threats to health and well-being? An outcome-wide longitudinal approach. Social Science and Medicine - Population Health, 23:101459.
Hong, J.H., Nakamura, J., Sahakari, S., Chopik, W., Shiba, K., VanderWeele, T.J. and Kim, E. (2024). The silent epidemic of loneliness: identifying the antecedents of loneliness using a lagged exposure-wide approach. Psychological Medicine, 54:1519–1532.
