Designed to Be Alone: The Loneliness Epidemic and the Architecture of Disconnection
- Written by Mark J. Chironna, PhD.
You already know something is wrong. You can feel it in the silence of a neighborhood where no one walks. In the way a room full of people can leave you feeling more alone than an empty one. In the odd exhaustion that follows an evening of scrolling through the lives of people you technically know but haven’t spoken to in months.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General put a clinical name on what most of us had already been living: he declared loneliness a public health crisis. The research behind the advisory was not new. It showed that chronic disconnection carries a mortality risk equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It exceeds the risk of obesity. It outpaces physical inactivity. The advisory was not alarmist. It was late.¹
But here is what the advisory could not say, and what most public conversation about loneliness still avoids: this is not a mystery. We are not lonely because something went wrong. We are lonely because of how we built our lives. We zoned it into our suburbs. We engineered it into our platforms. We economized it into our schedules. And beneath all of that, something even harder to face: we have lost every shared framework for helping people deal with the kind of aloneness that no amount of company can fix.
The data confirms what your gut already suspects. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends has quintupled since 1990. Among men, fifteen percent now report having no close friendships at all, up from three percent three decades ago. The United States ranks among the loneliest developed nations on earth, despite being the most digitally connected. And the health consequences are not metaphorical: a major meta-analysis found that social isolation increases mortality risk by twenty-six percent.¹
These are not numbers about a mood. They are numbers about a structural shift in how we live. Something changed, and it was not human nature. Think about where your grandparents ran into people: the barbershop; the diner, the lodge hall, the front porch, the corner pub. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called these “third places”: spaces that were neither home nor work, where people simply showed up and encountered each other without an agenda or an algorithm.²
We dismantled nearly all of them. Zoning laws separated where we live from where we shop and eat. Suburban design made it impossible to walk anywhere. Civic organizations hollowed out. Working hours stretched until the margin of free, unstructured time that community requires simply disappeared. Research on social infrastructure has confirmed what common sense suggests: when the physical places where people gather vanish, the relationships they sustained do not migrate somewhere else. They dissolve.³
But we lost more than buildings and park benches. The psychologist James Hollis has argued that we also dismantled something less visible: the structures that once helped people grow through solitude rather than be destroyed by it. Every traditional culture had rituals of passage, elders who walked younger people through difficult transitions, and shared stories that gave suffering a place in a larger narrative. All of that is largely gone. Without it, isolation does not become depth. It just accumulates. Hollis puts the problem with uncomfortable precision: the two greatest fantasies we must eventually give up are “that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some ‘magical Other’ who will rescue us from existential isolation.”⁴
That language may sound dramatic, but think about how many industries run on exactly those two fantasies. The magical Other is the product that will finally make you feel whole, the feed that will finally make you feel seen, the tribe that will finally make you feel like you belong. A consumer economy depends on people never quite arriving. An initiated adult who has honestly faced aloneness and come through it with depth is a terrible customer.
Into the vacuum left by vanishing third places and abandoned rites of passage, social media arrived with a promise: connection, at scale, on demand. The reality has been something else.
The research is more nuanced than the usual headlines. Active, back-and-forth digital communication does not appear to increase loneliness. But passive scrolling through curated lives does. The technology critic Sherry Turkle has spent years documenting what she calls being “alone together”: performing social life for an audience without actually experiencing encounter.⁵ We all know the feeling. You can spend an hour on a platform and come away knowing less about anyone than you did before you opened it.
But the problem goes deeper than bad design. The philosopher Dan Zahavi, drawing on a long tradition of research into how human beings actually experience each other, has shown that empathy is not just a feeling. It is something that happens between bodies in shared space. When you sit across from someone, you are not just receiving information about them. You are perceiving them as a living subject, and they are perceiving you. There is a kind of mutual recognition that depends on physical presence: on seeing a face react in real time, on the texture of a voice in a room, on the simple fact of shared air. Zahavi’s point is not sentimental. It is structural. Embodied co-presence is not one option among many for human connection. It is the primary mode. Everything digital is a representation of that. And a representation, no matter how vivid, leaves the deepest need unmet.⁶
This is why video calls exhaust us in a way that lunch with a friend does not. It is why a thousand followers can leave you lonelier than a single neighbor who waves from the driveway. The screen gives you an image of a person. It does not give you their presence. And presence, it turns out, is not a luxury. It is the thing.
There is a layer beneath all of this that most writing about loneliness does not reach. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom named it decades ago: existential isolation. Not the loneliness of having too few friends. Not the disconnection of being out of touch with yourself. But something more fundamental: the recognition that “no matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone.”⁷
That sounds bleak, but Yalom’s insight is actually the key to the whole problem. His argument is that genuine connection with another person is only possible when you have honestly faced the isolation that no connection can remove. If you cannot tolerate being alone with yourself, you will not be able to be genuinely present with anyone else. You will cling. You will perform. You will scroll. You will search endlessly for what Yalom calls the “ultimate rescuer”: the person or platform or tribe that will finally spare you the weight of your own existence.
Look around. The flight to tribal identity. The parasocial relationships with influencers who feel like friends but are not. The algorithmically curated feeds that tell us what we already believe and call it community. These are all versions of the rescuer fantasy, operating at the scale of an entire civilization. And the danger is not only that lonely people are unhappy. It is that lonely populations are vulnerable: more susceptible to radicalization, to conspiracy thinking, to authoritarian appeals that offer belonging in exchange for surrender.
The psychologist Clark Moustakas made an observation that cuts against nearly everything the culture is telling us right now: efforts to escape the experience of loneliness “can result only in self-alienation.” When we successfully avoid our aloneness, we cut ourselves off from “the one significant avenue of…self-growth.”⁸ In other words, the path out of the loneliness epidemic does not run away from aloneness. It runs through it.
If we designed this crisis, we can redesign it. But not with better apps. Not with more efficient platforms for matching strangers. The redesign that actually matters is harder and less marketable: rebuilding physical spaces where unstructured encounter is possible. Recovering communal practices that can bear the weight of genuine presence. And beneath all of it, doing the one thing the culture least wants to do: facing the aloneness that every human being carries and that no technology, no tribe, and no rescuer can take away.
We will not solve a crisis of presence with better representations of it. We will solve it, if we solve it at all, by showing up. In the body. In the room. With the unbridgeable gap between us held open rather than denied. That is where real connection begins. It has never begun anywhere else.
Written by Mark J. Chironna, PhD.
Dr. Mark Chironna is a public scholar, executive and personal coach, and thought leader with five decades of experience in leadership development, cultural analysis, and future-focused strategies. With advanced degrees in Psychology, Applied Semiotics and Futures Studies, and Theology, he brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to helping individuals and organizations navigate complexity, unlock potential, and craft innovative solutions.
As a Board Certified Coach with over 30,000 hours of experience, he empowers leaders and teams to thrive through resilience, foresight, and actionable strategies. Passionate about human flourishing, he integrates psychological insight and cultural trends to inspire growth and transformation.
WEBSITE:: www.markchironna.com
Endnotes
1. Vivek Murthy, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2023). Daniel Cox, “The State of American Friendship,” Survey Center on American Life, 2021. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review,” PLOS Medicine, 2010, updated 2015. Gallup Global Emotions Report, 2024.
2. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Paragon House, 1989).
3. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (New York: Crown, 2018).
4. James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1996), 68–69.
5. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015).
6. Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 125–126. Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 156–157.
7. Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 9.
8. Clark Moustakas, cited in Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul, 69–70.
