Harvard Graduate School of Education – Researchers share what Americans have to say about social disconnection and potential solutions – “U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy placed a spotlight on America’s problem with loneliness when he declared the issue an epidemic last year. Murthy explained, in a letter that introduced an urgent advisory, that loneliness is far more than “just a bad feeling” and represents a major public health risk for both individuals and society. Murthy also pointed out that, although many people grew lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of American adults had already reported experiences of loneliness even before the outbreak.  Over the past four years, researchers with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common (MCC) project have been investigating the underlying causes of loneliness and in May they conducted a national survey with the company YouGov to find out what Americans had to say about the problem as well as the types of solutions they supported. Here are some of the findings from the survey which are explained in MCC’s new report, Loneliness in America: Just the Tip of the Iceberg, authored by Milena Batanova, Richard Weissbourd, and Joseph McIntyre…”

See also Asterisk – The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic, Claude S. Fischer – Are we really living through a uniquely lonely moment in American history? When it comes to friendship, this isn’t the first time that authorities have cried wolf…Americans hold quite varying notions of who is a friend. Some include relatives and others do not; some insist that a friend is someone with whom you share deep secrets with while others are satisfied with laid-back companionship; and some simply call anyone a friend who is a congenial acquaintance. This variation is probably the major reason why many Americans claim to have several dozen friends and many others claim to have only a couple. Dictionaries don’t help. Merriam-Webster’s, both in the 1820s and the 2020s, listed the first meaning of friend as one “attached to another by affection” but gave a second meaning simply as one who is “not hostile.” That today’s social media uses friend to mean an online connection muddles things further…”