B. Harrison Levine MD

Your brain evolved for predators.
It got push notifications instead.
Full Anxiety article is on Substack — link in bio.

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ALONE TOGETHER:
How America Built a Loneliness Machine
Loneliness is not the same thing as being alone. Being alone is situational. Sometimes chosen, sometimes not. Loneliness is emotional. Being unseen even in a crowd. One can be peaceful. The other eats you alive.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has warned that “loneliness is more than just a bad feeling. It harms both individual and societal health.”¹ His 2023 advisory compared chronic loneliness to smoking fifteen ci******es a day.² Nearly 50 percent of American adults now say they feel lonely at least sometimes.³ Epidemic or not, that is a crisis.

Suburbia: Privacy Palaces, Empty Streets
After World War II, America poured its optimism into suburbs: single-family homes, fenced yards, big, beautiful garages. Homeownership rose from 44 percent in 1940 to 62 percent in 1960.⁴ The suburban population doubled between 1950 and 1970.⁵
These neighborhoods delivered comfort, but also disconnection. Compare Paris, with 54,000 people per square mile, to New York City’s 13,000.⁶ Density forced Europeans into contact. American suburbs insulated them from it.
The comedian George Carlin joked in 1981 that “a house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”⁷ It sounded like satire then. Today it reads like prophecy, when the “stuff” often includes isolation.

The Gender Story
Loneliness cuts across genders but coping styles differ. A 2020 Cigna survey found 61 percent of men and 58 percent of women in the United States described themselves as lonely.⁸ Women are more likely to phone a friend; men more often “tough it out.” Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, once called this reliance on stoicism the “emotional equivalent of duct tape.”⁹ He is blunt about its consequences: “Loneliness kills. It is as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”¹⁰
Living alone, once rare, is now common. In 1950, only 4 million U.S. adults lived alone. By 2020, the number had climbed to 37 million, or 28 percent of households.¹¹ Among Americans over 75, 43 percent of women and 20 percent of men live alone.¹² In one comparative study, 29 percent of middle-aged Americans reported loneliness versus 18 percent of Europeans.¹³

Cults: Together Alone
By the 1970s, suburban emptiness had a counterculture. Groups such as the Hare Krishna movement, the People’s Temple, and the Manson Family promised instant belonging, alternative families, and cosmic missions. Their communes were anti-suburbia by design, with bunks and group kitchens instead of garages. When I was in my temple’s confirmation class, our curriculum revolved around cults and how they were “out to get you”. Meanwhile, people don’t join a cult, they join a “movement”, something they agree with that later is determined to be a cult.
Comedian Bill Burr once remarked, “People join cults because life is hard and it is easier to just be told what to do.”¹⁴ For nearly a thousand people who followed Jim Jones to Jonestown, the search for belonging ended in mass death. Cults filled the void of loneliness, only to weaponize it.

MAGA: The Digital Commune
Today’s version is political. Roughly 35 percent of Americans still identify as strong Trump supporters, and among Gen Z men Republican identification has risen nine points since 2020.¹⁵ The MAGA movement offers the same ingredients as 1970s cults: belonging, alternative family, cosmic mission.
Political scientist Barbara Walter has said, “Movements like MAGA are not just about ideology. They are about identity and belonging.”¹⁶ Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls social media “an outrage machine that hijacks our need for belonging.”¹⁷ MAGA rallies echo cult “love bombing,” and hashtags replace bunkhouses. The architecture of isolation is digital now.

The Vanishing Tween Girl
Meanwhile, another crisis brews quietly. Media once aimed at girls aged six to fourteen has withered. In 2007, Disney Channel shows reached over 200 million viewers worldwide.¹⁸ By 2022, the network’s prime-time viewership had dropped by more than 90 percent.¹⁹
Representation has shrunk. The Geena Davis Institute finds that male characters still outnumber female ones in children’s programming by 13 percentage points.²⁰ For many girls, role models disappeared just as social media algorithms stepped in. “Without stories, without characters to identify with, kids just get noise,” comedian Ricky Gervais observed.²¹

Kids as Content
At the same time, children themselves have become the content. The “kidfluencer” economy now numbers more than 20 million child creators worldwide, generating billions in ad revenue.²² Ruby Franke’s daughter told a judge that family vlogging “ruined my innocence.”²³
States such as California and Illinois now require parents to place at least 15 percent of influencer earnings into trust funds.²⁴ Netflix’s Bad Influence described the kid-influencer economy as “a candy store for predators.”²⁵
Legacy children’s TV has its own reckoning. The 2024 docuseries Quiet on Set exposed s*xual abuse at Nickelodeon. Media critic Peggy Orenstein summed up the change: “We used to worry about advertising to kids. Now we are turning kids into the advertising.”²⁶

The Pattern
Suburbia left Americans alone together. Cults offered togetherness but sealed members off. MAGA supplies a digital commune where outrage substitutes for intimacy. Kidfluencing commodifies childhood to fill adult emptiness.
As comedian Louis C.K. once said, “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.”²⁷ His line, tossed off on late-night television, has become a cultural diagnosis.

What Now?
If loneliness is a design flaw, redesign is the cure.
• Homes with courtyards, not garages.
• Media that gives children identity, not just algorithms.
• Politics that rebuilds community instead of outrage.
• Digital spaces that protect children instead of selling them.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, insisted: “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”²⁸
Humans do not need cults, hashtags, or children-as-content to feel less alone. We need systems that make belonging possible without exploitation.
Being alone is where your body is. Loneliness is where your head is. For a century, America has patched the gap with bad architecture and worse ideas. It is time to start building better. Please leave a comment here or if you want to continue this conversation, go to my website: www.boulderpsychiatryassociates.com.

Footnotes
1. Murthy, Vivek. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.
2. Ibid., p. 7.
3. Cigna Health. Loneliness Index Report. 2020.
4. U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Homeownership Data, 1940–1960.
5. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 243.
6. OECD. Urban Density Data. 2020.
7. Carlin, George. A Place for My Stuff. Random House, 1981, p. 45.
8. Cigna Health. Loneliness Index Report. 2020.
9. Waldinger, Robert. Interview with Harvard Gazette. “What makes a good life?” 2017.
10. Waldinger, Robert. TED Talk. “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness.” 2015.
11. Klinenberg, Eric. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. Penguin, 2012, p. 23.
12. Pew Research Center. “Living Alone in Older Age.” 2020.
13. Holt-Lunstad, Julianne. “Loneliness Across Europe and the United States.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. 2018, Vol. 35(11), p. 1572.
14. Burr, Bill. Paper Tiger. Netflix Special. 2019.
15. PRRI. “Partisanship and Young Americans.” 2024; Pew Research Center. Voter Trends Data. 2024.
16. Walter, Barbara. How Civil Wars Start. Crown, 2022, p. 142.
17. Haidt, Jonathan. Interview with The Atlantic. “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” April 2022.
18. Disney Media Networks. Global Reach Report. 2007.
19. Nielsen. Cable Ratings Report. 2022.
20. Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. “See Jane 2024 Report.” 2024.
21. Gervais, Ricky. Interview with The Guardian. 2012.
22. Business Insider. “Kidfluencer Economy Market Size.” 2023.
23. Court testimony of Shari Franke, cited in People Magazine. Feb. 2024.
24. AP News. “California Child Influencer Law.” 2023.
25. Bad Influence. Netflix Documentary. 2024.
26. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter. HarperCollins, 2011, p. 212.
27. Louis C.K. Conan. NBC interview. 2008.
28. Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press, 1959, p. 67.