Does the Loneliness Epidemic Really Exist? - Dr. Claude S. Fischer (POY 63)

You've probably heard about the loneliness epidemic by now, right? It's this idea that humans across the world are feeling more lonely and isolated today than ever before, and that this trend is creating ripple effects throughout society. There's been a ton of media coverage and alarm raising about the topic, especially since the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020. But it turns out this is one of the many times in history that Americans have panicked over the idea. So I talked with a distinguished professor at one of the top sociology programs in the U.S. i asked him about the history of loneliness epidemics, how difficult it is to measure loneliness, and the other social problems he thinks that we should focus on instead of this one. I'm Josh Morgan. That conversation is coming up next on the Plural of youf, the podcast about people helping people. I'm an applied sociologist and aspiring helper living in Huntsville, Alabama, and I'm on a mission to promote two beliefs in my life that humans are social beings and that we all benefit when we help one another. I publish this podcast on the 15th of every month to share how we can all be better helpers for those that we care about. So if you haven't already, subscribe to the Plural of youf wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the monthly [email protected] newsletter I put a lot of extra things in the newsletter, like media pics and things like that, so I think you'll enjoy it. But for now, put this episode on in the background of whatever you're doing and enjoy the show. This month I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Claude S. Fisher. He's a distinguished professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He's probably best known for his research on urban sociology and American social history, and he's published several books on different topics during his career. He even founded a magazine called Context in the early 2000s to make sociology easier to understand for the public, and is still active online. So I discovered Claude in November 2024 because he wrote an article for another online magazine called Asterisk, and in the article he summarizes why the scientific evidence for the present loneliness epidemic isn't consistent, and this is the most recent scare in a long history of scares about loneliness. He also writes in the article about how the concept of friends didn't exist as it does today prior to the modernization of Western society, and for him, this calls into question how our methods of socialization and our conventional wisdom about loneliness have changed over Time. We'll touch on all of these items in a few minutes, but I'd encourage you to read the article for yourself. I'll put a link in the show notes for this episode at the podcast website pluralview.org and in the newsletter for this episode. If you sign [email protected] newsletter, it's a huge honor for me to be able to share Claude and his point of view with you. And I want to say up front that my idea when I invited Claude to be on the podcast wasn't to discount anybody's experiences of loneliness. And Clyde will say the same thing later on. What I'm hoping instead is that this episode will provide you with some relief in case you've been concerned about this loneliness quote, unquote epidemic. If we assume that Claude and his arguments are correct, then it takes some of the pressure off the loneliness issue and we can focus on other problems in society. There's a lot to choose from. I'd be curious what you think about all of this, so give this episode a chance and let me know what you think when you're done. Here's my conversation with Dr. Claude S. Fisher, distinguished professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. So, like I mentioned, you know, as we're talking before we started recording here, I discovered you and your work through the article that you wrote for Asterisk magazine, which is entitled the Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic. And I don't want to breeze past your entire career to talk just about, you know, your current research on loneliness, but I thought I'd open by asking you what interests you about sociology? What is it that got you started in the field that kept you going for all these years?

Well, I guess since I was a teenager, I'm sort of curious about understanding people. I certainly had a very vivid interest in history when I was a kid and at some point decided sociology had a somewhat broader canvas than history alone. And I've done a lot of historical research in my career, but I find, you know, I find people curious and interesting and. And trying to figure them out and understand what's happening.

That's the word I use when I. When I pursued sociology, is I'm just curious about people. So we relate in that way.

Yeah, yeah. I would say I haven't had a savior complex that I'm going to discover something that will, you know, revolutionize people's lives. I'm much more interested as an intellectual, as an academic, and try and figure out what's gone on, what's going on.

And what was it about? The topics that you studied. So, for example, off the top of my head, I'm thinking of the social history of American culture. I'm thinking of social networks, placemaking, that sort of thing. What was it about those topics that kind of lured you in?

Well, I think there's a consistent theme, even though I've touched on a lot of different things in my career, including, for instance, social history of the telephone. One of the major issues or controversies or conceptual frameworks in sociology is the idea of modernity or modernization.

Yes.

That at some point, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, people vary in what they say. There was a sort of major transformation in Western societies, economically, structurally, but also in the lives, ordinary lives of individual people. And that's where you get a lot of attention to the questions of what changed in family life? What changed in people's relationships to other people? What changed in communities? I've been interested in that big question for much of my career, and I started off attacking that question by looking specifically at questions of urban and rural, which often in the classical literature on this issue are stand ins for modern and pre modern. Correctly or not, that's often the way people think. Both people in the street and academics.

Right? Yeah.

And so I wrote. I wrote some things about urban, rural differences. I got interested in looking at social networks because the network idea, that is to think about people as connected through these individual bonds that have connections to each other, was an interesting tool for addressing issues like community and family and friendships and so forth. So I did some work on that, and I've done books on change in the last century in the United States. And the biggest sort of ambitious book I did was this, one of trying to understand the social history of American culture. But it's all. It's all tied together with this sort of question of was there and what happened when what we consider modern life developed in the 18th, 19th, early 20th century.

Mm. Yeah. So I appreciate that summary. Like you said, you have covered a lot of different things in your career, but at some point it seems that there was sort of a klaxon in your head or an alarm in your head that said, I need to look at the loneliness epidemic, because it seems like there's more attention being paid to what's happening, at least in the media. Is that accurate? Like, was there a moment when you can think where you started paying attention to it?

Yes. So one reason I sort of sat up and took notice is that loneliness is a topic connected to topics I've been studying for Many years, like the nature of social relationships, the extent to which people feel close to other people, the extent to which people are active in social activities with other people. And so when the media starts talking about related topics, I pay attention. And I think starting about 10 years ago, there was an increasing drumbeat of attention to the question of loneliness. Some of it was connected to the spread of cell phone and then smartphone technology. But the most dramatic event in this little micro history was when the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, announced that we were suffering an epidemic of loneliness and that this was, by his lights, sort of the major thing to focus on in affecting people's mental and physical health.

Yeah, I remember seeing it that at the time and thinking, wow. I mean, not knowing any better, just thinking, you know, if the Surgeon General's talking about this, then maybe we better pay attention.

Yeah. And he had started his career talking about guns and gun control, but he was pushed off of that pretty quickly.

Right.

And I just felt that a lot of what was being said did not ring true to the research I know about. And also that there were a lot of things that a Surgeon General or anybody of in major location, both government and media, might be time better spent on other topics. And so I would occasionally write in my blog over the period of, let's say, the last 10 years, there are a handful of blog posts I put up on this topic, responding to an article here, an article there, and occasionally I would write a letter to the editor. I got one in the New York Times, I don't know, a couple years ago. But it's hard to push against a very popular meme in the public discourse. And so when the editors of Asterisk came to me and asked me to write this article, I pointed them to a couple of my blog posts, which I already discussed this. And essentially they said, why don't you just give us a fuller, longer version of those discussions? But I have been commenting in my own largely invisible way about this for about a decade.

I see. Okay. And like you said, it does seem like the conventional wisdom among Americans, at least, is that there is an epidemic of loneliness. But in this article that we're talking about in the beginning, you. You mentioned that this isn't a new concern, that there have been several publications in the past, you know, over the course of the 20th century, especially, where people have kind of raised the alarm about an epidemic of lack of friendships and chronic loneliness, concepts like that. So I would say lately I haven't seen as many articles like yours, as I have articles to the contrary which are, we need to do something. People are suffering from loneliness.

Yeah. Well, I think just to pick up on your last comment, you know, the volume on one side versus the other, the academics in our largely invisible and very boring journals addressing this for a long time. I mean, I can end up with a bibliography of dozens and dozens of scholarly studies. But that doesn't break through.

Right.

For one thing, if you're running a media company, whether it's a newspaper or magazine, a website, and a writer comes to you and says, I've had this idea for an article about how there is not a loneliness epidemic. That's not going to sound very exciting. But you come and say, oh, we have a crisis. I have an article I can write about this crisis called the Loneliness Epidemic. And then once the ball gets rolling and notable writers start to write about it, others jump on the bandwagon. And then when it gets sort of officially certified by the Surgeon general, you know, you're on a roll.

Right?

You know, here's a comparable thing. When crime is escalating or there are very dramatic crimes, there are lots of stories about crime and people feel crime is out of control. When crime is dropping, as it did very, very substantially between the 1990s and the 2008s, you don't see too many articles saying, oh, by the way, folks, there hasn't been a murder spree lately. And so the public impression is left with the claims of crisis. Those are the things that people write about, those are the things that people read about, those are the things that people remember crisis. And a lot of it is just misinformation, not only about the historical trends, but also about the simple facts about loneliness. For instance, it's commonly thought that we need to worry about all these lonely old people. Well, it turns out that old people report less loneliness than do young people.

Oh, interesting.

Academics have known this for decades. It's the same reason, if you've stopped to think about it, that old people tend to rate their health as about the same level as young people do, because it's all for them. It's comparative. For a guy who's 75 years old, I'm doing relatively well. I'm only on three or four medications.

That is pretty good, right?

But the 20 year old who can't, who's lost a step on the basketball court, starts to complain about his health. So that's one thing that's misunderstood about loneliness. Another thing is what's a major driver of loneliness among people who report being lonely. It's really one relationship. Whether you have a spouse or a partner, that is the major thing that determines whether people will tell survey researchers whether they feel lonely or not. It's not how many people you live with. It's not how many people you interact with during the day. It really. The key factor is. Or the most important factor is, do you have a romantic relationship? Or. I should correct that. People have a good romantic relationship.

Right, yeah, Makes sense.

So people in bad marriages, for example, will often report themselves as feeling lonely, even if they've got a spouse and, you know, three kids running around the house. So there's a lot of misinformation about this that's out there in the public media. And as to the historical part of it, you asked me, beginning of your question, I should preface by saying often there's some very notable book that sets off a lot of chatter about loneliness or isolation or alienation. These terms are often used interchangeably. So around 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam published his book Bowling Alone.

And I will say, just for context, I based a lot of my master's thesis in grad school around kind of the premise of his book when I was writing about the topic that I wrote about. So it influenced me as well.

Yeah, no, and it is. I wrote an extensive review of the Putnam book. I know Putnam. It is a masterful piece of social science research. I think it is wrong on the historical claim, and I think he's modified it since the book came out. But if you roll back to the 70s, there was a book, I think, called roughly, Nation of Strangers that was about people moving all the time, which also is another historical error. People are moving less. They're not moving more than they used to. In the 60s was a popular sort of hippie kind of book called Pursuit of Loneliness, all about how we're really individually lonely in the 60s. The major example of this was a book that came out in the early 50s by sociologist David Reisman and colleagues called the Lonely Crowd. It's about how Americans in the 1950s, even though they lived in crowds, that is urban places, big organizations, at some deep level, we were all those of us who were alive in the 50s, existentially lonely and really disconnected. So this is just comes. That comes and goes. It comes and goes at the level, at the high level of the media, of media discussions. Occasionally, there are real reasons to be concerned about loneliness. And one of the things I've pointed out is early in the 20th century, there was a lot of public concern Based on research actually about isolation and loneliness in rural America and a big concern about what some people called the country problem, quote unquote, which included that issue, as well as the closing of churches and so on, and sometimes called the farm woman problem. And there were a couple major surveys done in the early 20th century of women in rural America who complained about not seeing anybody but their husbands for days on end and not having anybody they could talk to and so forth. And there was actually Teddy Roosevelt establish a commission on this problem. There are also reasons in the 19th century to be concerned about immigrants. Some of them arrived in the United States with a lot of already existing connections in the United States, but some of them came by themselves and had no family in the states to meet up with. And so you had stories, I mean, you didn't have a social science then, really, but you had a lot of stories in the media about some immigrant who had been in America for six months and basically was still unemployed or looking for employment, but had no family here and was distressed. So I'm not saying it's always a media concoction, but it's periodic. The media concern, the public concern, has this wave, and the current one is just one that we've seen before, but not as elaborated, just as media has become much more elaborated. There are now websites and there are businesses devoted to helping you deal with your loneliness.

Yes.

So it turns into an industry that wasn't true a century ago. And so I don't think that loneliness is a more acute problem today, but it is a more visible topic of discussion.

That's so fascinating because a lot of the examples you described of people like in the early 20th century, for example, like the immigrants coming over without family, or like the. The woman on the farm who might feel loneliness. You know, those sound like they could be problems you could describe of folks in the 21st century. So the one thing I wanted to talk about was there are still some groups that do experience loneliness more than others. And there are people that are lonely today, but it's not like there's just this rampant epidemic. And I think that's what you've been saying, or that's what you're calling attention to.

Of course, there are people who. I mean, loneliness is a real emotional state. It is a distressing emotional state, and there are people who suffer from it. One question is how many people? And you see a extremely exaggerated number based on taking people in surveys who say they sometimes feel lonely and putting them together with the people who say they almost always feel Lonely. That's where you get some of these high numbers and you have to make a judgment. The people who answer a survey and say, sometimes I feel lonely, are we going to put them in a category that is a clinical problem or that that's just part of life that, you know, there will be a day here and there where you haven't gotten in touch with your, or you've had a fight with your, your partner, romantic partner, and it's led you to feel lonely, but the next day you make up. I mean, so that's part of it. The other is a misunderstanding again of who the vulnerable populations are. And everybody says the elderly. And as I mentioned before, when you look at surveys, the elderly are less likely to report themselves as feeling lonely. That doesn't mean that there aren't lonely people among the elderly. There's are, of course. Yeah, but there are also lonely people. Among middle aged, divorced people, for instance, I think that's a vulnerable, very vulnerable population. Among young people, vulnerable population would be people who are for some reason unpopular in their school groups or are new, let's say people who've just gone off to college, gone many, many miles off to a college and they don't know anybody yet. Those first three or four months are likely to be months of acute loneliness and homesickness. Right now you come back in the second semester and you can't find these kids because they're so busy, their social lives are so busy. People who are poor and uneducated are vulnerable, low educated, vulnerable to loneliness because of all sorts of social disruptions in their lives.

They may not have as many opportunities to socialize exactly. For various reasons.

It may be difficult. Let's put it this way, will be an example. If you're working the night shift at McDonald's or something or at Amazon Warehouse and you're not getting a chance to see your friends or your family because you're on a different time schedule than they are. I could see that those people are at risk of, among other things besides having their biological clocks disrupted. But among other things, they're at risk of feeling this emotion we call loneliness. So I and other people who are skeptical of the epidemic are not skeptical of the proposition that some people some of the times feel lonely and that there's a proportion of the population, a small percentage, but still an important part of the population that is chronically lonely. And that may be 7%, 10%, I don't know. It's somewhere in that ballpark.

It's tough to measure. As you mentioned, in the article.

Yeah. I mean, how do we measure loneliness? Well, we can't give people a thermometer. There are all sorts of things about people's health we can measure very easily with instruments. But how do we know people are lonely? Because when we ask them, do you feel lonely? They say, yes, that's the only way we know. And then. So you have to wonder what is prompt people to say yes. And as I've suggested, it could be that they are really isolated, or it could be that we know this sort of phenomenon, that other people around them are having more fun. It's not that they're isolated, it's just that they've got friends who've got a more active social life than they do, and it makes them feel lonely.

Yeah. Fear of missing out.

Fear of missing out. That could be a major source of. Of people then saying on a survey, I feel lonely and indeed experiencing, you know, personally that emotion we call loneliness. So again, I'm not discounting this for people in your audience who are feeling lonely. I'm not saying it's a figment of your imagination. You should stop it. I'm just saying if we're talking about this as a social problem, how many people are affected? How deeply are they affected? I think the answers to that have been exaggerated in the recent time. And then I've also argued, what are we giving up by focusing our attention on loneliness? And what in particular is a surgeon general or other people who are responsible for setting our health agendas not focusing on. Because they're focusing on loneliness?

That was going to be my next question for you because there are a lot of people who look at the loneliness epidemic or, you know, the perception of it, and they think, well, you know, we need to do something. We need to take action. So they're, you know, I see in my news feeds, especially lately, but over the past few years, there have been organizations that have popped up to try to help solve the issue, you know, bridge political divides and. And that sort of thing. So I'm glad you, you explained that, you know, loneliness is important to study. It's just not to the extent that maybe some people would say, well, my.

Argument would be it's not as great as we've been led to believe by the current flurry of attention. And now there are people who are actually making money on all this flurry of attention to loneliness. And secondly, that it hasn't. There's no reason to believe it's increased a lot in any way that you would use the word epidemic. I mean, there has been an epidemic of opioid use. That's real. There are bodies you can count, and you can see that there are many more bodies recently than there were 20 years ago. There are biological epidemics like Covid that come and there was another one or two that may be on the horizon that should be paid attention to. There is in the United States, you could argue there have been chronically epidemics of violence, murder rates skyrocketing. We had that occur in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and then we had it occur a brief flare up right around and after Covid. These deserve the label epidemic. You know, there's some real surge in a problem in which you could say, oh, at least for the time being, we should drop other things and pay attention to this. So part of my motivation is the implication that, oh, we should drop other things like poor nutrition among many American children or alcoholism and so forth. We should drop our attention to things and pay attention to loneliness. That's been a bugaboo of mine.

I see. So I don't know if this is a fair question or not, but I'm going to ask anyway. Are there other issues that you would recommend we pay attention to or just not? You're just drawing attention to the fact that we should not be focusing on loneliness as a social problem.

I would say if you ranked the kinds of social problems the American public should be paying attention to, I would put loneliness way down on the list. We have, for example, in the United States, life expectancy is declining. Okay, what does that mean? That means we have all sorts of deaths that are connected to sort of pathological problems like opioid use, addiction, alcoholism, violence. So Americans used to live longer than other Western peoples, and now we are far behind in our life expectancy. It's also diet that's also, you know, we have worse diet. We have the worst health system in the Western world, and that's contributing to this very clear indicator of a crisis, which is a shortening of American life expectancy. By the way, one thing social scientists have used over the years is measuring people's height as an indicator of health. At the beginning of the 20th century, Americans were basically the tallest people in the Western world. Our average height is now shrunk compared to Europeans, and that's usually connected to nutrition and health.

I didn't know that. Huh.

Height is being used as an indicator of health, and it's something you can go way back in time and get records of. You can't give people who've been dead for 100 years health exams. But you have records for many of them, how tall they were. And so that's been used across a wide set of indicators. American health is in bad shape. And I'm talking about physical health. We haven't kept up. Our heart disease rates have. While they've been curtailed in other Western countries. We've done a terrible job on this. These are the things, if you're going to ring a bell of alarm, these are the kinds of things that I would bring alarms on.

But at least you're doing okay as far as health goes.

Tomorrow I will be 77.

Oh, congratulations.

Thank you.

Yes.

And I'm a monk. I mean, this is another. Another feature of American society is the great inequality in these kinds of outcomes.

Yes.

So I am fortunate to be in that group, highly educated, have a good income. Thank you. And I get along with that package. I get long life expectancy. Meanwhile, we have an enormous number of Americans who, for various reasons, have poor health and they are looking at short life expectancies. And again, we are the worst or among the worst in Western countries on that dimension, which is the gap in life outcomes between the top and the bottom.

Yes. So going back to talking about your career and, you know, the theme of this podcast, helping people, I was wondering, where do you feel like you made a difference in the lives of others?

Well, it's very interesting question. As I think I said at the beginning, I. I didn't engage in sociology because I thought I was going to save people.

No, of course.

Right. I've had great experiences with students over the time. Not, you know, I haven't been a grand teacher, but I've been okay. But the one on one with students doing advanced work, I feel I've contributed and I've gotten some feedback. I like to think that my work has been innovative and so other scholars have learned from it or at least been entertained by it.

I will say you're the first person I've interviewed with a Wikipedia page, so it's a great honor for me.

I don't know where that Wikipedia page came from. I did not put it up.

No, I didn't assume you did. But.

I think the last time I looked at it, which was probably two or three years ago, it was out of date. So I hope my work has been innovative. And then one thing that you and I share is I've been concerned over the years with what I call public sociology, which is bringing what we know to the wider public. And as you can see in some of the conversation we've had today, there are a lot of simple facts that are misunderstood by the wider public. I mentioned in passing this business about residential mobility. We have this impression that every year people are moving more and more and more in the ruthless society. And the truth is exactly 180 degrees the opposite. Americans have never been more settled, less likely to move than ever. So trying to bring what sociologists and historians and other social scientists know about people, about society, I think is an important responsibility of us academics. And so I have, over my career, tried to do various things, I hope, in my blog. And then doing articles like the one you mentioned, the asterisk article, allows me occasionally to try to accomplish this thing which I would like to accomplish, which is to bring more understanding of the realities of American life, American history, and so forth to the wider American public.

That's great. So as we wind down here, I wanted to ask, where can we follow you online? What's the best place to keep up with what you're doing?

I have a blog called Made in America the Book. That is. If you look online and just write those words all as one word, Made in America the book, you'll find a blog that I've been running for about, gee, 13 years or something like that.

Oh, that's good. Congratulations.

I used to have. Thank you. I used to have more time and energy and would put out a blog post about every week. It's now down to about every couple months.

I can understand.

But there is. You can access, you know, as I say, about 13 years of posts on various topics. Some of it is on political stuff, some of it is on these kinds of interpersonal issues like friendship and community ties. Some of it is just sort of odd odds and ends, like this historical stuff about Americans becoming shorter compared to other Western peoples. So there's a lot of tidbits there. If you just scroll down the topics and, and I try at least to put some. Some stuff on regularly. The pieces I'm doing these days are, are. Are longer and more thorough than the earlier pieces so that they take more time to repair.

Makes sense. Yeah, We've covered a lot. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to talk about?

I think you've prompted me on a number of topics and I've responded, perhaps vociferously, but you've given me the opportunity to talk about a number of things on my mind. So thanks a lot.

This is the Plural of youf. I'm Josh Morgan and the show's website is Plural of youf. That's all for now. Thank you for being kind today. Take care.