How COVID Has Affected Our Friendships—and What to Do About It

Before COVID, we were already facing an epidemic of loneliness in America. As I wrote in 2018, social isolation has become the functional status of American life, and loneliness has made a profound and tragic impression on our mental health, physical well-being, and community life. And that was before we were all locked in our homes indefinitely.

Last year, the cure for one pandemic only deepened another one. The antidote to the COVID pandemic—social isolation and distancing—has exacerbated what the former surgeon general called “the epidemic of loneliness.” Read More