It’s lonely at the top. But it’s also lonely a lot of other places, too.
And it turns out that loneliness and social isolation are as much public health issues as they are private emotional ones.
Latest evidence: a study of 277,489 adults between the ages of 40 and 69 that found loneliness and social isolation were associated with fewer years free of seven serious physical and mental health conditions.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed data from UK Biobank participants who began the study free of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, neurodegenerative disease, cancer, depression and anxiety.
The researchers then estimated how many years a person could expect to live from age 50 without developing those conditions.
Results:
Women who experienced both loneliness and social isolation had 2.4 fewer years free of physical disease and 3.7 fewer years free of mental health disorders than women who experienced neither.
Men who experienced both loneliness and social isolation had 1.7 fewer years free of physical disease and 5.8 fewer years free of mental health disorders than men who experienced neither.
We should make sure we establish the difference between loneliness and social isolation.
Social isolation describes a lack of social contact or connections. Loneliness is the feeling that the connections you have fall short of the ones you want. You can experience one without the other.
Unfortunately, we’re in the midst of a bit of a loneliness and social isolation epidemic. Perhaps it’s the long-lasting effect of our shared experience of the Covid days and intentional social isolation:
An analysis of 50,900 adults published in April using 2024 data found that 12.7% felt lonely usually or always. Among adults ages 18–29, it was 23.3%.
AARP found loneliness among adults 45 and older rose from 35% in both 2010 and 2018 to 40% in 2025.
A Gallup report this year found 22% of employees worldwide experienced loneliness for much of the previous day. The figure was 24% for remote and hybrid workers.
“The findings weren’t surprising to me,” said study coauthor Lu Qi. “Previous studies found that social isolation and loneliness are related to mortality, especially premature mortality, and this study provides additional evidence.”
I hate to put a spotlight on a social or public health problem without also looking for solutions.
But long before Covid and our current societal condition, we heard over and over from other researchers that the number-one thing people with the happiest and healthiest lives had in common was good relationships.
Seek out and nurture better relationships. Volunteering, for example, gives you a chance to meet people while making somebody else’s day less lonely.
It’s not just a matter of shielding yourself from loneliness.
It’s a matter of helping other people shield themselves as well.
As if you really needed another reason.
Other things worth knowing …
USA Today: President Trump sparked immediate backlash from California leaders after suggesting Iran could “take out” a U.S. city with a nuclear weapon and mentioning San Diego and Los Angeles by name at a Nebraska campaign rally. “They can take out a city. Let ‘em take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” he said, arguing Americans should accept the economic impact of the Iran war.
CNN: The Trump administration is struggling to get clear answers about the death of a Russian laboratory worker at an institute dedicated to studying the plague, amid days of stonewalling from Russian officials. “It’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Secretary of State Rubio said Tuesday. “Maybe it’s bigger than we thought. We don’t know, but I think it would be reckless at this moment, given the limited information we still have, to speculate.”
The Guardian: Trump’s Justice Department has moved to strip the citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens accused of crimes, in what authorities describe as “the largest” such initiative over a single period during his administration. The naturalized citizens are alleged to have committed offenses including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.”
Mediaite: Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis accused President Trump and his eldest son of wanton corruption Tuesday. “Whether or not it’s illegal remains to be seen,” Tillis said, talking mostly about Trump’s meme coin, which has apparently netted him $104 million. “Appearances are not good. Anytime a president makes a billion dollars in the same year that people are growing up in a trailer park ...”
NYT: Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal injection drug last week during a botched execution in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking, her lawyers said Tuesday. Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person to have survived doses of a lethal injection drug.
MSN: McDonald’s is facing a proposed nationwide class action alleging the fast-food company illegally coordinates menu prices across its franchises and company-owned restaurants through an AI-powered pricing system that uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across its nearly 14,000 restaurants.
WSJ: Inside the Albanian village fighting a Jared Kushner-backed luxury resort. How Zvernec residents are pushing back against plans to build hotels, casinos, and a water park where villagers once farmed.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
The Other Things Worth Knowing section was repeated (same as yesterday) but I am okay with that as it showed I can still recognize patterns via memory, that it is evidence that I can have a daily habit of reading something, and that there are things indeed worth knowing. I appreciate you, Bill.
As for Lonely at the top...or anywhere...in chatting with people yesterday at work, I mentioned that my 3 best friends in life have passed on (for me, best friends in life are in a class of their own, few and far between. Don't get me wrong, I have friends...). I can almost capture what loneliness feels like when I do that brief stream-of-consciousness thing of thinking to share something with them and then remembering that they're gone, in that moment of remembering. I am content with being alone, maybe spending all that time in my head (swimming) does that.
The question I have though is, if some people are found to experience fewer years free of something than another group, does it mean that that other group experiences more years free of the thing? I think that is implied in the words, but is it a correct conclusion from the study? Sorry, just in my head this morning.