Every night on my stroll home from nowhere I pass a warm-looking farm-to-table restaurant. It’s new. Or new to me, anyway. When I lived here last, nearly two decades ago, it was an art studio.

It sits on a corner, across from a 14-room pied-à-terre. The front door opens to a narrow, one-way street that leads to downtown proper. A wrap-around window effuses haute hospitality onto an otherwise dark side street that looks every bit Tim Burton’s Gotham on the two nights a week when the restaurant’s closed.

I walked by the place dozens of times before I ever went in. Initially, I didn’t think of that as timidity, but rather another manifestation of my deliberate resignation from society. For years (seven of them, plus eight months to be precise about things), that resignation was a sun-soaked, stoic exile — an experiment in literal separation which, if nothing else, proved that although no man is himself an island, a man can certainly make his home on one.

Not long after returning to city life in August, I realized the resignation wasn’t over. It was just recast. The separation isn’t literal anymore — there are plenty of people around — but it’s still separation. This city was real for me once, and I was real for it. Neither seems to be the case now. Flashes of shared familiarity feel suspiciously figmental. There’s mutual recognition, but also a reciprocal otherness. There’s no present tense context for me in this place. Only past tense. A wraith in a pea coat drifting through an eventuality I can observe, but can’t alter.

The Friday before Christmas, bored and by then a bit miffed by my own timorousness towards the kind of fine dining experiences which, as recently as eight years ago, were for me a singular source of felicity, I decided to give the farm-to-table spot a try.

A decade ago I’d have been a regular. The place checks every box for a moneyed loner who wants to be flattered, impressed and indulged, but not bothered. The chef won a James Beard Award during a long stint at one of the most renowned resorts in the country, and according to local reviews, he talks to every patron, every night. The kitchen isn’t just in full view of the bar, it’s almost in the bar — the food’s cooked just a few feet away from the bar top.

The menu prices are prohibitive for anyone I wouldn’t be interested in talking to and ample distance between bar stools is insurance in that regard. That distance was always important to me. I was never antisocial, as such, but I found it useful to feign unapproachability. The pretense to aloofness reliably repelled the sort of small talk that leads to nowhere, but was otherwise intriguing, a balance that paid conversational dividends by enhancing the signal to noise ratio of any interactions I did have.

My first night in, I happily claimed a seat at the far end of the bar by a wall. It was the only open seat in the house as far as I could tell, and the hostess was dubious. “Can I eat at the bar?” “Yes sir, we do offer dining service at the bar, but –” She motioned to the full seats. “What about that one down there? Can I sit there?” I made an up-and-over gesture. “Sure?” Now she was asking me the questions. Nobody wants the bar seat by the wall for full service dining. I prefer it. Old habits.

I sat down, ordered a french press and turned sideways on the stool, using the wall as a seat back. I was under-dressed, or as far as anyone in this city knew I was. There was a couple beside me. “Interesting shirt,” the wife (or girlfriend) said. Her husband (or boyfriend) looked over. “You a cartoonist?” I was wearing the Newsroom tee under an unassuming white, Missoni Sport zip-up with a pair of wholly nondescript Nili Lotan pants. “No.” Other than my exchange with the hostess and ordering dinner, it was the only word I said all night.

In Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Sheila Liming describes a “quiet catastrophe” in our lives. As a standalone work, Hanging Out isn’t great, and that’s me being generous. Liming, a communications professor at Champlain College, isn’t an especially compelling writer, and she’s only slightly more effective as a narrator and autobiographer. Her anecdotes and stories (and the book’s full of them) feel contrived even when they clearly aren’t. That’s its own catastrophe: As a writer, you should be able to make the contrived feel real. If the real feels contrived, you’ve got a problem.

The work is also short on evidence, and while I agree with the tacit notion that evidence for the book’s central claim isn’t necessary (there’s no doubt that social cohesion is disintegrating across advanced economies, and particularly in the US), evidence isn’t hard to come by in this case. Liming seems, at times, to be unaware of the very rich body of extant literature (it’s almost a canon) examining precisely the phenomenon she explores.

Let me try to redeem myself with Liming: Hanging Out is, I think, essential reading precisely because it’s a new edition to that canon. It speaks, wittingly or not, to nearly every aspect of America’s larger, multi-faceted socioeconomic crisis which, at heart, is the story of a society gone bankrupt in the social capital department. Liming manages to bridge that tale with a sometimes accidental critique of capitalism, all while documenting the absurd tragicomedy that is our social media-enabled march towards isolation and loneliness.

One review (from Goodreads) captured it well. Hanging Out is “a sort of spiritual nibling of [Robert] Putnam’s Bowling Alone and one unsatisfyingly divorced from the deeper histo-political roots of social alienation.” References to Putnam’s canonical account of civic disengagement in America are, of course, a mainstay in my writing.

The basic message from Liming’s book is that hanging out with other people is hard in modernity — a lost art, as it were. Hard not only because our store of social capital is almost entirely depleted, and not just because we’ve structured society such that isolation is seen as a virtue to the extent it’s equated with self-reliance, private property and independence, but hard because we’ve literally forgotten how to do it. “How [did] such a simple act became so incredibly hard for many of us?” Liming wondered.

That resonates. It hadn’t occurred to me that something as elemental as talking with other people without a preset agenda is a skill one could lose. But it is, apparently. It’s not like riding a bike or tying your shoes. More like tying a tie. If you don’t do it regularly, you might screw it up the next time you try.

“This is a world… that started to take shape long before the average person ever learned the word ‘coronavirus,'” Liming writes, at the outset of what she repeatedly describes as “a manifesto.” The book never gets anywhere close to realizing the manifesto promise (unfortunately), but that’s beside the point for our purposes.

She goes on to say that, “The conditions of this world have been forming for decades in response to an intricate combination of pressures: The expansion of digital technologies and our increasing reliance on them; the growth of the private sector and accompanying diminishment of the public sphere; policies and social practices that champion individualism and make social connection more difficult; and an ethos of do-it-yourself ruggedness that has taken the place of shared support structures.”

Her use of the term “intricate” is especially apt. One of the biggest challenges in writing about the decline of civic engagement and the attendant fraying of the social fabric in America involves crafting a linear narrative. Put as a series of questions: When did this start? How did it start? What factors kept it going? And if it’s become self-fulfilling (which it plainly has in many respects), how do the dynamics interact, and is it even possible to extricate ourselves before the deleterious sociopolitical consequences become irreversible?

I’ve delved into those questions at length in these pages, and they come up again and again in my Monthly Letters. I won’t revisit them all here, but context is important. The context for Liming’s work and, relatedly, for what public health officials have now recognized as a medical emergency, is the long-running diminution of social capital.

Recall Putnam’s definition of social capital: “Connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” As I wrote nearly a year ago, the social network (i.e., Facebook) only served to worsen the cracks in America’s civic foundation, even as Putnam was writing before the age of social media.

For Putnam, what distinguishes social capital from the more nebulous concept of “civic virtue” is the former’s focus on reciprocity and connections. “Real connections, not virtual friend requests,” as I put it. How rare are such connections these days? And how lonely are we?

One statistic you might’ve come across suggests 12% of Americans had no friends they considered close in 2021, up fourfold in three decades. The comparison comes from the juxtaposition between Gallup polling from 1990 and a May 2021 survey conducted by The Survey Center on American Life, an AEI project.

The same comparison suggests that in just one generation, the number of Americans who have five or more close friends plummeted 25 points. Gallup recently estimated that more than 300 million people around the world couldn’t count even one friend. And around 20% indicated they don’t have any friends or family they can count on.

Plainly, the pandemic was a factor, but as the The Survey Center on American Life noted, “broader structural forces may be playing a more important role,” not least of which are the long hours Americans work.

“Perhaps reflecting its central place in the hierarchy of American social life, Americans are now more likely to make friends at work than any other way — including at school, in their neighborhood, at their place of worship, or even through existing friends,” the color accompanying the research said. Of course, as more people work virtually, the fewer opportunities they’ll have to make in-person work friends. Their work friends will be just like their other friends: Digital.

A related piece published in August of 2023 described a “friendship recession.” Survey director and Georgetown PhD Daniel Cox directly referenced social capital. “Friendship predicts community involvement and civic participation,” he wrote, noting that “the shrinking of [America’s] friend groups is not an individual tragedy, but a collective one.”

This can all sound a bit saccharine when it’s couched in colloquial terms — terms like “friendship.” But the consequences of widespread social disengagement are quite serious. By definition, social disengagement erodes societal cohesion, and that can be terminal if it reaches the point of civic dissolution, which it arguably has in America. (Depending on your definition of “dissolution,” the point actually isn’t arguable.)

There’s an overlap with education, which speaks again to the “intricate” nature of America’s multi-faceted “everything crisis,” one defining feature of which is an almost complete lack of trust — in anything. One of the key arguments from “Holistic People,” was the suggestion that falling college enrollment and the demise of the humanities is likely working to accelerate civic dissolution in two distinct ways. “If college enrollment continues to fall, it could create a self-fulfilling socioeconomic crisis, whereby Americans are bereft of the credentials they need to avoid precarity and unprotected intellectually from those who might endeavor to leverage that precarity for their own gain, and to the detriment of civil society,” I wrote, in June.

Two months later, a Gallup poll showed that “Americans with at least some formal education beyond high school are far more civically engaged than those with no post-secondary education, in terms of both volunteering and giving money to charity.”

The more educated you are, the more free time and money you’re likely to have, and therefore the more of both (time and money) you could theoretically invest in your community. Volunteerism and charitable engagement are the kinds of activities that strengthen social bonds, with allowances for the fact that the rich have non-altruistic motivations for charity.

The same Gallup study noted that majorities of Americans agree with the contention that higher education is conducive to, among other things, “increased citizen participation in elections and governing” (60% agreed), “more citizen involvement in local communities” (53% agreed) and “increased compassion for, and tolerance of, others” (51% agreed).

I should note: Just 46% (so, not a majority) agreed that higher educational attainment should generally be expected to produce “a more cooperative and harmonious society,” but that’s pretty nebulous compared to the other outcomes respondents were polled on.

The point is that a less educated society is likely to be a less civically engaged society and that, in turn, should be expected to exacerbate feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression. In the social media era, the isolated, lonely and depressed may be inclined to seek camaraderie among other isolated, lonely and depressed citizens in online groups organized around shared grievances. Commiseration among the disaffected can easily breed more contempt for society in a self-fulfilling cycle that naturally (i.e., by definition) perpetuates grievance- and identity-based politics.

A recent study conducted by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars “reveal[ed] a warning sign for American democracy,” as an executive summary of the national survey, which included more than 4,000 young adults across the country, put it.

A third of 18–24-year-olds indicated “no intention to participate civically in 2024.” Participation could mean anything from voting to volunteering to attending an event. The same share indicated they’re not “currently engaged in community activities,” whether sports, volunteering, going to church or even playing at hobbies.

Worse, America’s young adults “lack critical civic knowledge regardless of education level,” the editorial said. For example, young adults were able to answer just 1.6 of four standard civics questions correctly, on average. Just four in 100 could successfully answer all four questions.

The president of the nonprofit called the poll “a wake-up call.” “We urgently need to do more to civically prepare, activate and support young adults because the future of our democracy depends on it,” he said.

As should be obvious to anyone who’s wallowed in the noxious bog of vitriol that is the social mediascape, online interactions are poor substitutes for the real thing. Indeed, social media is doubtlessly contributing to the demise of civility and by extension, to the collapse of civil society.

Last year, while interviewing Liming, Ezra Klein cited Arthur Brooks in distinguishing between anger and contempt. “Anger is often a constructive emotion. When I’m angry with you, what I want to do is have some kind of interaction around that anger,” he said. “Contempt is the opposite. Contempt is I’m not going to deal with you.” He went on to suggest that online interactions condition us to choose contempt and as we “get more and more used to that online, it becomes our reaction to conflict in real life.” Liming generally agreed.

A 2023 study published in Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine (a peer-reviewed journal) found that in fact, social media may be counterproductive for those who use it to facilitate and maintain interpersonal relationships.

“People whose motive for using social media is for maintaining their relationships with other people feel lonelier than those who spend the same amount of time on social media, but who do it for other reasons,” the authors discovered. “While social media may facilitate social contact to a degree, they may not facilitate the type of contact sought by those who use social media primarily for maintaining contact with others.”

That’s hardly the only study to posit (tacitly or explicitly) a connection between social media use and loneliness. In an extensively-cited 2023 health advisory, the American Psychological Association said parents should “routinely” monitor adolescents for signs that so-called “problematic” use of social media may be impeding teens’ “ability to engage in daily roles and routines.”

That could mean a lot of things, and the same notice was keen to note that social media can also be a facilitator of good outcomes, but the overarching message was cautious — foreboding even. “[A]dolescents with social anxiety, depression, or loneliness… may benefit from interactions on social media [but] unfortunately, these populations may also be at higher risk for some of the negative facets of social media use.”

An April 2023 article in The Washington Post asked, somewhat rhetorically, “Are tech companies helping the lonely or taking advantage of them?” “Many times, technology including social media helps forge new connections. Other times, it makes people feel worse,” Tatum Hunter wrote.

In a follow-up piece published in December, Hunter described interviews with social media users. “While some described [tech] as a social lifeline, others said it offers only the illusion of human connection,” she said, summarizing.

The next day, Hunter published yet another piece in the same series. In a testament to the notion that “hanging out,” to channel Liming, is in fact a lost art, Hunter wrote that following the pandemic, which was accompanied by record levels of self-reported loneliness in America (one in four people), some Americans told the Post that “returning to friendships and activities… felt exhausting, confusing or even impossible.” For some of those lost souls, social media “was a lifeline,” but others described it as “a road to nowhere,” in Hunter’s words.

“Road to nowhere” is euphemistic. As noted above, and on countless occasions in these pages over the years, social media increasingly looks like a newly-constructed express lane on the highway to societal dissolution along which we’ve been traveling for over three decades.

Importantly, the link between social media and loneliness predates the pandemic, which is to say it’s not necessary to solve the chicken-egg problem associated with higher reported loneliness and higher social media usage that went along with the public health crisis. In 2017, three years before the pandemic, a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that young adults with high social media use “seem to feel more socially isolated than their counterparts” who used social media less.

Still, the chicken-egg problem is a fixture. Even in the absence of an exogenous shock that forces people to socially distance (and thereby forces them onto social media), tracing causation is difficult. “Determining directionality” is problematic, as the 2017 study put it. Six years ago, in an article citing one of the study’s authors, NPR explained the dilemma in simple terms. It’s possible that spending a lot of time on social media contributes to feelings of isolation, but “it could be that when people feel socially isolated, they go online a lot in an attempt to feel less lonely.” In all likelihood, the same piece noted, the “influence goes both ways — isolation drives social media use and vice versa.”

In the same article, NPR quoted a UC San Diego professor who co-authored a separate study published in 2017 which looked at the relationship between Facebook use and well-being. Long story short, statistically notable interactions with Facebook (e.g., one standard deviation increases in “likes,” status updates and so on) was linked to decreases in self-reported mental health. “The negative associations of Facebook use were comparable to or greater in magnitude than the positive impact of offline interactions, which suggests a possible tradeoff between offline and online relationships,” the study said. The very first line in the abstract reads, “Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being.” Face-to-face. Not Facebook-to-Facebook.

In Liming’s interview with the Times‘s Klein, she described the “average college classroom” in the social media/tech era. “When I walk into the room before the start of class… it’s dead silent and everybody’s staring at their phones,” she said. “[T]hey’re talking to someone somewhere else… who’s going to help them process whatever’s going on in their life.”

Then, and in some sense by accident, Liming explained, rather precisely, the mechanism through which technology is facilitating loneliness and buffeting civil society. “I don’t think it’s a lack of a realization that they could have the same conversation with the person sitting next to them,” she said, of her college students. “I think it’s more about a fear of the risk that comes from doing that — that there’s this kind of public exposure that’s going to happen, or you’re going to be judged in the act of trying to start a conversation with somebody you don’t already know yet.”

Obviously, there’s a continuum: Not everyone who uses social media is condemned to suicidal depression or psychosis, just like not everyone who smokes socially will die of lung cancer. As one MD at Harvard’s School of Public Health put it in 2018, “Asking if social media makes you lonely and depressed is a little like asking if eating makes you fat. The answer is yes, absolutely, but not always, not in everyone and not forever.”

What matters, apparently, is the extent to which life in the virtual sphere begins to replace real life. A widely-cited 2018 study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that college students (in this case undergrads at Penn) who limited their Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use to 10 minutes, per platform, per day, “showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group.”

Stop to consider: 10 minutes, per platform, per day. Even if you’re using half a dozen platforms, that’s still just an hour a day. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, more than half of American teenagers spend at least four hours per day using social media apps.

From 13 years old, Americans cultivate a social media habit (and a tech habit in general), which they carry with them to college. As Liming noted, the silence is deafening in full college classrooms prior to the start of class in the age of the smartphone, and it’s safe to say the vast majority of students are texting or scrolling through their social media feeds.

A study published in Technology, Mind and Behavior last year using a similar methodology to the 2018 study came to the same general conclusion. The authors randomly assigned 230 undergraduate students from a large Midwestern university to one of two groups, one which limited social media usage to 30 minutes per day and one which didn’t. “After two weeks of limiting, the self-monitored group showed significant improvements in their psychological well-being,” the study noted. “Anxiety, depression, loneliness, fear of missing out and negative affect decreased while positive affect increased.”

Think about all of that in the context of pervasive loneliness among young adults in America and then consider the alarming statistics mentioned above on civic disengagement among 18–24-year-olds. It’s hard to come away optimistic about the prospects for a country running dangerously low on social capital. And social capital is the currency of democracy.

To be sure, it’s not just social media. And it’s certainly not just teenagers and young adults. At the center of this whole discussion is a sweeping report from US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In the first two paragraphs of the introduction, Murthy said it wasn’t until he toured the country and heard testimonials from Americans that he understood the scope and gravity of the problem.

“Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, from every corner of the country, would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself.'” More unnerving, Murthy also heard this phrase repeatedly: “If I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”

I’m in no position to weigh in authoritatively on the health claims Murthy makes in his report, but if you are, and you haven’t read the public health notice, it’s heavily cited. You can access his sources and assess the evidence for yourself. All I can do is mention the numbers that Murthy uses to help make the case that isolation is more than just a drain on social capital (which, as noted, is existential enough on its own). It’s also a serious personal health hazard.

Loneliness, the surgeon general said, “increase[s] the risk for premature death by 26%.” The absence of social connection is comparable to smoking more than a dozen cigarettes a day in the context of increased risk for premature death, he went on, adding that insufficient socialization raises the risk of heart disease and stroke by nearly a third, is (self-evidently) associated with depression, has also been linked to dementia and “may increase susceptibility to viruses.”

Among hundreds of citations, Murthy referenced a Morning Consult survey commissioned by Cigna, which showed that 58% of US adults are considered lonely post-pandemic.

Believe it or not, the post-pandemic share was actually lower than in 2019, when Ipsos (also on behalf of Cigna) polled nearly 10,500 American adults and discovered that 61% were lonely based on UCLA’s Loneliness Scale, the gold standard. Both the 2019 share and the post-pandemic share were considerably worse than 2018’s 54%.

The polls include all manner of demographic analysis. You can assess loneliness across age cohorts, by gender, in the workplace, by geography and so on.

In a blog post acknowledging the 2019 Cigna poll, the American Psychiatric Association noted that “heavy social media users are lonelier.”

The same caveat applies regarding the difficultly of discerning which way the causation runs, but as Cigna pointed out, “negative sentiments” among heavy social media users became “more pervasive” from 2018 to 2019. As the figure below shows, “more pervasive” is an understatement.

“Is social media taking a greater toll on our society?” the survey wondered, on the way to noting that in 2018, only a “slight majority” of very heavy social media users recorded a loneliness score above the 43 danger threshold, not all that much worse that the 47% of light users. By 2019 (so, just a year later) the gap between those two groups ballooned to more than 20 percentage points.

Nearly three quarters of heavy social media users were considered lonely in 2019, compared to just 52% of light users, the survey went on, adding that while “in 2018 there was just a one-point difference in average loneliness scores between very heavy users and light users,” by 2019, that disparity had grown to four points.

“These estimates and multiple other studies indicate that loneliness and isolation are more widespread than many of the other major health issues of our day, including smoking, diabetes and obesity,” Murthy wrote, in his public health advisory. “Despite such high prevalence, less than 20% of individuals who often or always feel lonely or isolated recognize it as a major problem.”

He linked the issue directly to America’s social capital bankruptcy proceedings, which play out on social media, cable news and in the halls of Congress each and every day. If the country fails to address the problem, the surgeon general warned, America “will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being, and we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”

To be absolutely clear: It’s not all technology’s fault, let alone solely the fault of social media. Indeed, as documented exhaustively in these pages, the decline of American community and civic engagement predates the personal computer revolution. You could argue that, over time, we inadvertently engineered loneliness while trying to prove something to ourselves about liberty and private property.

In his interview with Liming, Klein mentioned structural factors that’ve contributed to isolation among Americans. “A lot of us… have really set the default against community,” he remarked. Liming suggested that inclination, to the extent it’s pervasive in America, “stems from the expectation of private property and the expectation of what comes with private property.” There’s the link to capitalism. Or a link to capitalism, anyway.

America is a capitalist cult. We follow it blindly, even when it produces objectively bad outcomes for us personally and even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that only those in the upper echelon of the cult are benefiting (that’s the famous “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” phenomenon). We think of private property “in terms of pride and privacy,” Liming said, adding that with “distance and isolation, you get to choose when you want to be alone and when you want to shield yourself from society.”

That sounds nice, and in many ways it is, but as Murthy emphasized, humans are social animals. Total isolation is counter to our nature, and as I can personally attest, choosing isolation leads inescapably to the atrophying of the most basic social faculties. Where once sat the intriguing stranger, now sits the estranged misanthrope.

On my third visit to the farm-to-table spot, a fortysomething with a hopelessly out-of-season Louis bag took the bar seat beside mine. Certainly not because she wanted to talk. Or at least not to me. It was the only open seat. She ordered a $17 espresso martini, which wasn’t surprising: A vainglorious, but wholly unimaginative cocktail to match a pretentious, but entirely conformist handbag.

“Are we thinkin’ food too or just drinks tonight?” Leah, the bartender, asked. “I think I’ll have a salad and maybe a small plate, is there something you recom–” Leah cut her off. “I love the pâté en croûte, but this gentleman beside you may have some suggestions too, he’s been here three Fridays in a row.”

My bar neighbor turned and looked at me for the first time. My coffee conveyed a former drinking problem, and I was badly under-dressed. Again. Or at least as far as she knew. She eyed my hoodie (an all black piece from Comme des Garçons Homme) and jacket (white denim from Carlota Barrera) skeptically. To the unrefined, under-trained eye of yesteryear’s Louis clutch, I was a clueless drifter wearing Gap to a nice restaurant.

“Get the roasted beet salad first, then do the tagliatelle with the périgord black truffles,” I told her, in a definitive cadence that took her off guard.

The matter was decided, apparently. That’s what she’d be having. She paused to process it: The fellow in the hoodie and the jean jacket just told her what she’d be eating, and there seemed to be no getting around it.

“I think I’ll take his advice,” she told Leah. “As long as you confine that to food, not life in general, you’ll be ok,” I told her.

She didn’t understand, but sensing I’d said something meaningful, she felt compelled to venture a response. “So you’re a regular here?” “I don’t know if three times counts as a regular, but I’ve been told I need to get out a little more, and socialize with real people,” I said. She nodded, taking a sip of her drink: “Same here.”

She turned down to look at her phone. I did the same. And that was that.

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