What’s Behind America’s Loneliness Crisis?

Much of modern work is designed to reduce the agency of workers, meaning that even if they have a sense of purpose that comes from their family, church, peer group, etc., they do not have the power to pursue it in their working lives. Management science was founded in the early twentieth century by theorist Frederick W. Taylor with the specific goal of eliminating as much know-how, judgment, and decision-making power as possible from the jobs of factory workers, who in an earlier era might have been craftsmen who displayed creativity and taste in the production of useful goods.

The tight concentration of creative control in the hands of a few anointed managers has gradually spread to office work, with the growth of “best practices,” bureaucratic micromanagement, and, most recently, AI-driven surveillance of office workers. Depending on your point of view, the rise of artificial intelligence threatens or promises to hammer a few final nails into the coffin of human agency. Few tasks in the work world we create can be deployed for a truly human purpose, and so fewer and fewer workers will have the experience of working with real comrades—people for whom you might be willing to make sacrifices. In this system, we are all mercenaries, scrambling to secure a shred of security for ourselves and those we love.

If our work lives are stripped of purpose and purpose, this is just one aspect of an accelerating concentration of agency in America. Many Americans feel increasingly dwarfed or even powerless in their interactions with vast, faceless forces and institutions. All power, whether in government, commerce, finance or technology, seems to rest in the hands of a few insider-trading, Epstein Island-attending, geriatric elites who barely have to pretend to work for the greater good. They hide behind sanitized PR and phone menus designed to frustrate your attempts to speak to a person. If you don’t like it, you can scold the online chatbot for a few minutes before shaking your head, closing the window and moving on with your day.

Housing is another important location of agency-hoarding. For many Americans, home ownership, the primary engine of wealth accumulation, seems forever out of reach as real estate is bought up by private equity and baby boomer homeowners cling to homes far too big for them and block new housing construction in their communities. This is a big problem because in American society, home ownership is both economically and psychologically vital. A homeowner can generally be relatively secure in the stability of her life. She may even have enough security to take some risks, start new ventures, and make mistakes. She has a strong personal stake in the fate of her community and is therefore more likely to take responsibility for its future. Employee-tenants have no such stake or security. We have to do what we are told at every stage, regardless of what we value and believe, because we are all one email away from social death, from HR or perhaps from the property management company.

This is no way to live. And it is no way for our democratic experiment to survive, let alone succeed. Neither Jefferson nor Lincoln believed that you could have a free society of equals without widespread property ownership. As bosses and landlords buy up ever larger chunks of the American landscape, promising that the rest of us will own nothing but be happy, they threaten the very existence of what we call America. The problem has been growing steadily for decades, but now at least its symptoms—loneliness, fear, alienation, bitter partisanship—are being recognized, even if we don’t all agree on their cause.

The least lonely among us belong to families, religious congregations, professions, artistic scenes, or political movements that set us tasks that advance a deep and shared purpose. The future lies there—whether in generative, hopeful, creative communities or in an increasingly desperate and narrow tribalism. American society has increasingly asked us to stand alone in the void, but humans are not built for that, and we cannot keep it up for long. Loneliness is not soporific, like depression; it is depression’s frenetic cousin, driving us to seek a sense of belonging, no matter how ill-conceived or dangerous.

Hannah Arendt famously argued that loneliness is the sine qua non of totalitarianism. That’s what she meant. The absence of shared agency is a desperate condition for our kind of animal. The lonely will fight for community, even if it requires believing or doing terrible things. No app, life hack, or doctor’s appointment is going to save us here. If the American experiment is to survive the current century without turning into something terrible, we will need the vision and courage to radically reimagine the purpose of our collective lives and enable the broad distribution of meaningful tasks. We will have to make ourselves a nation of agents.