mental health. Former surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.”
The psychological, social, and moral toll caused by this detachment is horrific.
Since 1999, the U.S. suicide rate has risen by 30 percent. The plague hit the young hard. Between 2006 and 2016, suicide rates for those between age ten and seventeen rose by 70 percent. Roughly forty-five thousand Americans kill themselves every year, and suicide is largely a proxy for loneliness. Opioids kill an additional seventy-two thousand Americans every year. And opioid addiction is just slow-motion suicide. In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the life span of the average American had declined for the third consecutive year. This is an absolutely stunning trend. In affluent, cohesive societies, life spans get gradually longer as a matter of course. The last time the American life span contracted for this length of time was 1915 to 1918, when the country was enduring a world war and a flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans. The reason American lives are shorter today is the increase in the so-called deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdose, liver problems, and so on. And those, in turn, are caused by the social isolation that is all around us.
2. DISTRUST
The second crisis is one of alienation. The great sociologist Robert Nisbet defines alienation as “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent.” That’s pretty much the normal state of affairs in America today. People in that earlier generation generally assumed that self-sacrifice made sense, because if you served your organization, it would serve you back. But, as the pollster Daniel Yankelovich pointed out decades ago, faith in that giving-getting compact has broken down. Now it is assumed that if you give, they will take. If you sacrifice, others will take advantage. The reciprocity is gone, and people feel detached from their neighbors and disgusted by the institutions of public life.
In the 1940s and ’50s, when the ethos was more “We’re All in This Together,” roughly 75 percent of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Now less than 25 percent do. In that earlier age, according to the General Social Survey, roughly 60 percent of Americans said that their neighbors were trustworthy; now only 32 percent do and only 18 percent of millennials. Every age group in America is less trusting than the one before, and, as Robert Putnam of Harvard points out, that’s for a very good reason: People are less trustworthy. It’s not that perception is getting worse. It’s actual behavior. The quality of our relationships is worse. Distrust breeds distrust. When people feel distrustful they conclude that the only person they can rely on is themselves. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch.
3. THE CRISIS OF MEANING
The third crisis is a crisis of meaning. It is a stunning fact of our age that, despite all we have learned about the brain, mental health problems, including depression, are rising, not falling. And things seem to be deteriorating quickly. In 2012, 5.9 percent of young people suffered from severe depression. By 2015 it was 8.2 percent.
This is, in part, because of the smartphone, but also because so many people have lost a sense of purpose in their lives. When you take away a common moral order and tell everybody to find their own definition of the mystery of life, most people will come up empty. They will not have a compelling story that explains the meaning of their life in those moments when life gets hard. In a study for his book The Path to Purpose, William Damon found that only 20 percent of young adults have a fully realized sense of purpose.
Many people have lost faith in the great causes and institutions that earlier generations relied on to give life a sense of purpose and meaning. They have lost faith in faith. Actual church attendance has declined by almost half since the early 1960s. They have lost faith in country. In 2003, according to the Gallup organization, 70 percent of Americans said they were “extremely proud” to be Americans. By 2016, only 52 percent of Americans said that, and only 34 percent of millennials agree. And this was before the election of Donald Trump. All of these numbers suggest people do not