Hello, hello.

I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR,

a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. I'm so lonely.

Do you relate?

Well, you may be lonely, but you're not alone.

One third of Americans report feeling lonely at least once a week.

And 16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time.

A lot of attention is being paid to loneliness right now. After the former American

Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic, news organizations from the New York Times to the Atlantic

to NPR jumped to cover it.

And it's hard to say definitively if loneliness has gotten worse, but what we do know is that

a significant amount of people are feeling it. And I know a lot of you have been feeling lonely,

too. That's because so many of you wrote to me sharing

your own stories about loneliness and how you got out of it. It was really incredible how many

of you responded. It really showed, I guess, how not alone we all are in our loneliness and that

there's no one way to reconnect with people.

Here's what just a few of you said.

I started college in 2020, so during the pandemic, and that was definitely a very lonely time

to be in what is supposed to be such a social place.

And I decided that I needed to do something to stop from being so miserable.

I decided to join a sorority.

And I was never the type of person to join a sorority.

...