Are we all that lonely?

 Loneliness is a truly fascinating thing as there is genuinely no reason to think anyone is more or less lonely then anyone was in 1980 or even 1880. 

Loneliness is the first phantom of the modern age, a modern Prester John. Loneliness is for the most part a completely made up issue. Nobody is more or less lonely then anybody else barring significant anomalies that are exceedingly rare. But why do we still hear about it?

Myth is fundamental to the human experience. Ever since the dawn of humanity there has been whispers and rumors that are untrue. There’s nothing exceedingly harmful about it partially because myth is so frequent. The epidemic of loneliness is just the newest myth our specific society and culture has created.

This specific myth that our culture has chosen shows a strange thing about modern America. There is a prevailing sense of pessimism about American and more broadly western culture that is both founded and unfounded. Because of this pessimism we have discovered many real long term issues that we are now rightly combating but we have also found many issues that are much more like mirages and we have attempted to combat them sometimes to our benefit sometimes to our detriment. 

I fear the fight against loneliness will lead to our detriment by just making the government waste much more money then we currently waste by creating awkward programs that mostly fail at solving a problem that does not exist.