Loneliness is a tricky thing to study. For one thing, it is highly subjective. Time spent by

ourselves only counts as lonely if what we really want in that moment is to be with other people. And we all know

it's possible to feel lonely in a crowd. We do know that chronically lonely people are at greater

risk for a number of health problems, but we don't seem to know yet exactly what to do about that.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Well-meaning public health officials have

prescribed remedies that sound reasonable. Suggesting people who feel lonely a lot start showing up

for town hall meetings or join a church or mosque or synagogue. That advice may have been helpful for

people half a century ago, but let's be straight here.

Trying to recreate social conditions that existed decades in the past is probably not a scalable

solution to the particular problems of loneliness in the 2020s.

Matthew Scher is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, an Emerson Collective

Fellow at New America, and a founder of the podcast studio Campside Media.

This New York Times Magazine article is titled, Why is the Loneliness Epidemic so hard to cure? Matthew, welcome back to think.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me back on. I have to start by saying the word epidemic might strike some people as a little over the top.

So I want to get right into the numbers.

What can we learn from Americans' responses to surveys about their experience of loneliness?

Well, you touched on an interesting point here in a good one, which is there is still a fair amount of debate over the use of the word epidemic, which is obviously something we typically use to refer to describe diseases or, you know, like the COVID pandemic.

And that's not exactly the case here.

So there's, you know, if you talk to various experts, you will get different answers as to whether or not we should be using the word epidemic.

However, the stats from surveys over the past, you know, let's say three years, four years, certainly since the pandemic, but starting long before that have been pretty clear that there is a

significant portion of the American population that deals with loneliness in different forms.

It depends on how you ask the question and who's doing the polling.

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