REBUILD PHILADELPHIA:

Friendlessness is on the rise -- and so, one must presume, is loneliness.

That's the troubling takeaway from a study released last week by the Survey Center on American Life that shows the number of both men and women who claim to have "no close friends" increasing five-fold over the past 30 years. For men, the rate of friendlessness has gone from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2021, and for women from 2 percent to 10 percent today. The pattern is the same on the high end, with the percentage of men saying they have 10 or more friends dropping from 40 to 15 percent and the percentage of women saying the same falling from 28 to 11 percent.

However you cut it, this is bad.

It's bad for the lonely, isolated individuals themselves, because having close ties to other people is strongly correlated with various markers of physical and mental health. Without such ties, individuals tend to grow unhappy and unhealthy and can even sink into depression.

But it's also a bad sign for our country and our society, culture, and economy, since it could mean that we're developing in a direction that will make more of us lonelier and more isolated. That is bound to lead to deep and increasingly widespread discontent with our way of life.

And that brings us to the most ominous thing of all about rising rates of friendlessness: It provides a potent (if probably only partial) sociological explanation for why our politics have become much more polarized in recent decades, with increasing numbers of people attracted to more radical forms of political dissent on both the right and the left. It also suggests that if the loneliness and isolation become worse, so could our political pathologies.

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