I’m not arguing for car dependency, and it is component to the loneliness epidemic, but it’s not the sole cause. More than 1 in 10 Europeans are lonely, so car dependency can’t be the only factor.

This widespread loneliness has really only hit its stride in earnest in the last decade or so. And what hit the scene about 10 years ago? Social media, ironically. The thing that is ostensibly designed to connect us has pushed us apart.

We can’t have an honest conversation about this without identifying who it affects the most: young men. As a crude metric, /r/ForeverAlone has literally an order of magnitude more users than /r/ForeverAloneWomen. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the latter subreddit literally banned male users because the female users were getting asked out on dates … literally this meme.

Which brings me to dating apps. They have insanely lopsided demographics that make half of all men who use them persona non grata. They have a greater matching inequality than the economic inequality of Venezuela. This is not a comfortable conversation to have, but ignoring it won’t help solve the problem.

Speaking of the economy, that sure isn’t helping either. What limited opportunities for real-world social interaction still exist are becoming less and less accessible when more and more people have to spend more of their time earning piss-all income just to scrape by.

The loneliness epidemic is a coalescence of these, and other factors, that have been accumulating over decades of consolidating organic social opportunities into overorganized spaces with inherent and high barriers to entry.