There’s a strange kind of silence humming beneath the noise of 2025 America– We scroll, we post, we like, we tweet, we Uber, we DoorDash — and we are lonelier than ever.

You don’t need a Yale study to know it (though there are plenty), just walk through a public park or ride a subway: everyone is either staring into their phones or wearing earbuds like they’re trying to block out the very world they’re in. We’ve confused hyper-connectivity with connection. The former makes a lot of noise. The latter, when real, is quiet and powerful.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health crisis. It wasn’t flashy, didn’t trend long on social media, but it was deadly serious. Loneliness increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia — and, yes, suicide. That same year, a Pew survey showed that nearly 60% of young adults report feeling “serious loneliness.” Not just occasionally left out. Not just bored: serious loneliness.

What’s more American than pretending everything’s fine while falling apart inside?

Friends, but make it transactional

Part of this collapse is economic. Capitalism doesn’t reward rest or relationships: two jobs and a side hustle leave little room for dinner with friends. And when you do make time, the algorithm tries to turn it into content. We’ve turned friendship into a brand, love into a swipe, and ourselves into personal PR firms.

Every app promises connection, but none of those deliver it. Instagram lets you see what your ex from college ate in Lisbon, LinkedIn makes you feel like you’re failing at networking, and TikTok shows you a million strangers dancing in their bedrooms, but none of it cures the ache for someone to look at you — really look at you — and say, I see you.

The loneliness is loudest in youth

Young people feel it the worst. Raised online, their reality is filtered and gamified. They enter adulthood with student debt, climate dread, and a gnawing suspicion that the system was broken long before they arrived. They’ve always been told to find purpose in work while watching their parents’ generation own homes and healthcare and retirements they might never see.

In this context, loneliness becomes more than personal — it becomes political. It becomes a symptom of a society that prioritizes profit over people, consumption over community, and image over intimacy.

Loneliness has a color, a class, a context

Let’s be honest: not everyone experiences isolation the same. A Black single mother in rural Alabama doesn’t have the same loneliness as a queer teen in suburban Utah or an elderly Chinese immigrant in a San Francisco high-rise. Loneliness is shaped by the racism, homophobia, and economic stratification baked into the American pie.

But what unites them all is a lack of spaces where people can just be — safely, freely, wholly.

What does real connection look like?

Maybe the answer isn’t an app or a TED Talk– maybe it’s something simpler, more radical: knocking on a neighbor’s door. Starting a potluck. Sitting without distraction across from someone and asking, “How are you, really?”

Maybe it’s creating a culture that doesn’t pathologize need, or mock vulnerability, or treat rest as laziness.

Maybe it’s building systems, cities, schools, and work lives — that actually value human beings over productivity.

Loneliness isn’t a personal failing

It’s not a you problem. It’s an us problem. A nation can’t run on individuals who feel like ghosts in their own lives.

The good news? Loneliness, for all its bleakness, is a signal — a symptom that we are wired for more. That we want to be seen, known, loved.

And that means we can build something better.

Together.

Even if it starts with something small. Like putting your phone down. Like looking up.

Like saying hello.