The Perils of Social Atrophy
Governments, social scientists, public health officials, and others have grown concerned about a possible “loneliness epidemic.” They paint a picture that looks a bit like this: old people staring wistfully out the window, young men growing radicalized online, teenagers glued to their phones, missing real-life connections. It’s a worrying portrait. But what we’re facing isn’t a loneliness epidemic. It’s something much worse.
Regardless of societal handwringing about the spread of loneliness, people today do not in fact report feeling any lonelier than previous generations. As one researcher put it, “despite the popularity of the claim, there is surprisingly no empirical support for the fact that loneliness is increasing.” People are not feeling lonelier than they used to, either overall or by age group. But they are spending more hours of the day alone. In America, men have reduced their hours of face-to-face socializing by 30 per cent, unmarried people by 35 per cent, and teenagers by 45 per cent. Americans today report having fewer friends than Americans of previous generations reported back then. Global data on the same metrics are hard to find, but limited data from some countries tracks US trends. People are more alone, though not necessarily more lonely.
And even if people don’t feel any lonelier, all this being alone is very bad news. For neuroscientific research shows that when people spend more time alone, their brains change. At first, being alone for a while might be a relief in an overstimulating, stressful world (who hasn’t felt relieved when someone cancels plans?). But soon, the grey matter associated with social judgment shrinks, and in the process people get worse at judging social cues and noticing social opportunities. At the same time, the parts of the brain associated with imagination go into overdrive. Imagination sounds positive—but this imaginative strengthening often leads to a kind of social paranoia, such that those experiencing isolation often interpret neutral social cues in negative ways. (Someone not texting you back? They must hate you!) As neuroscientists involved in these studies have described it to me, the increasingly-alone person turns away from others because they are exhausted by social interactions, they cannot spot social opportunities, and they are full of distrust of those they once relied on.1 This in turn makes them more socially isolated. It’s a vicious cycle: social isolation leads to more social isolation.
The result is social atrophy: the shrinking of people’s social brains as they increasingly withdraw from others. As many of us experience this social atrophy, we all end up in a world where people are not so much too lonely as (strangely) not lonely enough: not noticing that they should be seeking out company when they most need it. If this sounds like a scary, self-reinforcing spiral, an unsettling horror story about the dark side of neural plasticity—well, it is. And we may all be experiencing this to some degree without even noticing it.
The good news is that thinking with rigor and precision about social atrophy – both the changes in the brain and the diminishment of our social lives – is helpful in combatting this problem. So let’s consider the nature of social atrophy and what it suggests about how this profound predicament can be overcome.
Firstly, social atrophy describes a different, and deeper, harm than many previous uses of the world “loneliness.” Empirical findings show that social atrophy is not a passing or even chronic feeling, as loneliness would imply. It is a change in someone’s ability to perceive the world and act within it. It might start with an alteration in their perception and end with changes to their skillset and desires. A person experiencing social atrophy might not say “I am lonely” but rather, “I prefer to be alone” – or even in more dire cases: “people cannot be trusted.” They may no longer wish to share life with others.
This is far worse than loneliness, no matter how painful or personality-altering loneliness may be. The socially atrophied person (lonely or otherwise) is no longer able to recognize cues from others well, no longer attuned to the socially and even empirically desirable opportunities to connect. This kind of harm is a deeper wound than mere loneliness, and far more difficult to reverse. Simply offering people new social opportunities won’t work if the problem is social atrophy, because many will not desire them.
Secondly, social atrophy describes a problem that may not be visible to the very people experiencing it (unlike loneliness). It is a useful framing because it describes a shift in subjectivity while allowing us to question whether social interaction is something we can choose well, especially in complex modern societies. One common assumption is that people intuitively know how much social interaction they need (consider the way people assert, even proudly, that they are extroverted or introverted). But findings suggest that we don’t accurately judge what we need to maintain our wellbeing and social skills. Indeed, people specifically consistently underestimate how much they will value future social interactions once they have them. The value of social interactions, it turns out, is just one of the many things humans are not good at judging ahead of time.
This points to an important insight, not to mention a strategy for a better life. We should think of social life as something similar to physical exercise: an activity that we often don’t feel like doing even though a baseline is good for us. As we do more of it, however, it will also become less exhausting and less painful. People may still find different levels of social interaction desirable or even beneficial; but everyone’s baseline for health is likely higher than they expect.
This approach sees social life as an intentional practice of self-shaping rather than something that comes easy from the start or always feels fun. We protect and expand our brains and ourselves through interacting with other people, even if it is exhausting at times. Knowing this can help to counter certain glorifications of “introversion” as in some way more intellectual or refined. It can help challenge harmful aspects of individualism (the belief that one is an island, or that others are naturally competitors) that attend some (not all) conceptions of an “introverted” life. Which is not to deny there are more introverted people with their own needs—rather, it is to decouple introversion from other more dubious assumptions and associations. Recognizing that all people need regular social contact to thrive also makes clear the slippery cognitive danger of the homebound, delivery-oriented, frictionless world that is increasingly made possible through new technologies and social norms. What is needed in this framework is likely a world of social infrastructure, of design that makes it not only easy but largely necessary to regularly interact with others.
Finally, thinking about social atrophy fruitfully reorients us to collective questions of mental illness and wellbeing. Some psychological problems cannot, by their nature, be understood outside of the person’s social context. Social atrophy cannot be treated solely with individual-oriented solutions, like a combination of medication and therapy. Much of the solution necessarily involves the very structure of society. The proximity of the local cafe, the burden of a work schedule, the access to local clubs and organizations, the availability of friends and family –all of these factors and many more have a bearing on social atrophy. It is a collective, structural problem that can only be solved collectively and structurally.
The structural problem of isolation—of which social atrophy is both cause and consequence—has long exercised theorists beyond neuroscience. For three decades, the sociologist Robert Putnam has written extensively about a decline in “social capital” or valuable social ties, going so far as to have private meetings with three American presidents as well as other world leaders about the issue.
Putnam’s account focuses on the value of social ties, both to the individual and society. These ties have often been measured by social scientists alongside social trust, a measurement of how much people trust others in society—which is mostly declining around the world. One factor that directly, if inversely, correlates with social trust is inequality. As inequality has risen, people increasingly distrust their neighbors and society itself. There is evidence that this is causal; those who are able to keep their health insurance during periods of unemployment, for instance, hold on to their social trust, while those who lose health insurance stop trusting others.
What the term “social capital” does not capture, however, are changes in a person’s way of experiencing the world that occur due to isolation. Even “social trust,” which gestures at part of this problem, does not include many of the ways a lack of social bonds reshapes the human subject (it does not, for example, suggest we might be losing perceptive abilities or social skills). These subjective changes are a necessary component to any understanding of the problem of isolation. We’ve grown more distrustful not only because we notice when society lets us down materially, but also due to the neuroscientific effects of social isolation. Our distrust is both driven by changes in our neurons and a reasonable concern about the world we live in. And this doubly driven distrust leads us to withdraw further.
Other material concerns drive us further apart as well. The infrastructure that enables social life is shrinking, in large part for financial reasons. Public green spaces are being shut down around the world. In the United Kingdom, a pub closes each day; music venues are similarly dwindling. Though data is not as accessible elsewhere, it’s likely that this trend is continuing around the world. Other forms of social infrastructure have also been damaged. As Putnam points out, clubs and associations are at a low point. And, as he puts it in his latest film, it’s likely that since the 1950s or so “half of all the civic infrastructure in America had vanished.”
The result, in the US and elsewhere, is a society of estranged, isolated, distrustful, paranoid and tired people—which likely contributes to xenophobia, plummeting trust in government and increasing conspiratorial thinking. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), theorised that loneliness was fuel for authoritarian politics. Neuroscience is now catching up to this insight by demonstrating that isolation (which may or may not feel like loneliness) makes people more suspicious of one another. Indeed, loneliness does appear to be correlated with more right-wing views.
Furthermore, one’s physical distance from others is a strong predictor of politics. And while causation runs both ways, there is evidence that people come to vote more conservative when they live further away from others, and the trend holds true even when all other characteristics are held constant and accounted for. This may be due to both changes in both people’s brains and their lived experience: living far from others may mean people view themselves as less invested in others’ wellbeing, and vice versa. This points to a causal link between isolation and reactionary beliefs.
This new strand of research on the effects of social isolation suggests our estrangement from one another over the last few decades has driven us apart not just socially but also psychically, while potentially empowering reactionary politics. Changes in our brains that make us more paranoid and less connected have real political effects, likely exacerbating phenomena such as distrust of immigrants, increased racism, unwillingness to fund social services and more.
Since many of the possible causes of social atrophy are the result of modern technology and capitalism, one might reasonably wonder if social atrophy is an especially “Western” phenomena. Psychologists and other researchers have begun to consider whether their findings are universal aspects of human psychology or if they’re particular to an unusual group of people commonly termed “WEIRD”—those living in “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” countries. While the idea that social atrophy might be a specifically “WEIRD” phenomenon is an interesting hypothesis, there is little available data on how much time people spend alone by country. People in the Global South are, if anything, more likely to report being lonely. And many countries in the Global South are increasingly “WEIRD” anyway, which is to say culturally and economically influenced by the “West.” This means it’s very difficult to know about the specificity of social atrophy to WEIRD countries. It is an academic platitude to put it this way, but further research is needed. It might allow us to better understand which precise aspects of different societies most alienate us from one another, and from ourselves.
The most crucial point about social atrophy is that it changes and harms human experience, and diminishes key aspects of human potential. The idea of social atrophy provides a very different political critique of isolation than other frameworks like “social capital” or loneliness. In the framework of “social capital”, those without social bonds are effectively poorer: they are facing a problem of inequality that also harms the political body as a whole. This framing of the problem as inequality and relative deficit fits with politically liberal frameworks in which most problems can be boiled down to inequality or injustice. Yet while there may be real inequalities related to social atrophy (poorer people have far less access to leisure spaces and may specifically have less time with friends), the problem of social atrophy is not just one of an unjust imbalance between groups or even a sort of general impoverishment. Those experiencing social atrophy are also effectively misshapen—out of alignment with what a good human life entails, and unable to see the world as they would need to in order to escape this dangerous cycle.
We need a term like “social atrophy” to describe the way people come to see one another and even themselves as the world grows more transactional, individuated, and alone. It’s not just that we have less of something that is individually or socially desirable; it’s that the kinds of people we are changes—both to our individual detriment and to the detriment of society.
Whether or not one endorses every aspect of his social theory, there is an illuminating term from Marx that can be brought to bear on the meaning of social atrophy: alienation. As the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi writes,
Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also—so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation—to oneself. An alienated world presents itself to individuals as…a world that is not one’s own, which is to say, a world in which one is not “at home” and over which one can have no influence.
In the traditional formulations of Marxism, alienated people labor for someone else, and in the process lose parts of themselves: their own agency, their own creativity and especially their own capacity to shape themselves. They become estranged from one another. They are not just poorer but transformed for the worse. And they no longer have the agency to correct this, since they have lost the essential ability to shape themselves. Social atrophy also has some of these effects, albeit in slightly different ways. It not only makes our lives worse but makes it harder for us to have certain abilities, achieve certain ends or even notice we’re in a diminished state.
I am here making not only a political but also a related ethical claim, an assertion about “the good life.” I make this claim based on both empirical data and a commitment to democratic politics, which requires the kind of social trust that atrophy and alienation destroy. We live better – both in relation to our obligations to other people and in terms of our own flourishing – when we are meaningfully social. Only with one another can we be thoughtful, self-aware, and self-developing. We are simply less when we are less together
Social life is also itself a kind of crucial activity, a way of creating together that shapes everyone involved, like musicians playing in a band together, or friends whose interactions bring out the truest version of one another. When we do the work of creating a social life together, we discover new things we want and care about, and we acquire new skills, from care to self-reflection. Not unrelatedly, we also preserve and extend the health of our brains.
I know there have been, and always will be, people who are loners, who find social interaction difficult, or who simply prefer to be on their own. (More commonly, there are people who simply want less direct and stressful ways of being with others.) My intention is not to shame those who find social things difficult, nor to insist on a one-way-fits all approach.2 Rather it is to suggest that trends towards greater isolation are deeply worrying — for our wellbeing, and for our ability to live the good life, both individually, collectively, and politically.
Social atrophy in the brain is due to one of our most remarkable cognitive qualities: neuroplasticity, the way our brains adapt and reshape themselves. Neuroplasticity is a part of what allows for the incredible malleability and potential of human beings. Yet humans are not infinitely malleable. And do worse when socially isolated, losing their skills and abilities and spending more time consumed by fear and worry. To be meaningfully plastic – that is, transformable and capable of self-shaping – we need one another. We need a shared social and political life. In the company of others, we extend our brains and our minds and selves better than we ever could if we were mostly alone. And only through this kind of shared life can we also begin to do the work of improving the world.
Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano is a social theorist, broadcaster, and writer. Her first book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds, was recently published with Bloomsbury.
