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On the morning of November 25, 2021, Liya Khaimova toasted two crumpets, brewed a mug of coffee, and sat down in the kitchen of the home she shared with her boyfriend in St. Louis. “I remember waking up and being in a somewhat okay mood,” she says. “But as I was eating breakfast, a wave of sadness hit me. I was sitting there by myself on Thanksgiving morning, which I don’t think I’ve ever done in my life.”
Khaimova’s boyfriend, a musician, was on tour. Her family was in Atlanta, where she grew up. Her friends were scattered; after getting her master’s in music from the University of Southern California, Khaimova moved to the Midwest.
“In St. Louis I now have maybe two solid friends, and family who I see pretty frequently,” she says. Her then boyfriend, now her husband, is often touring. “I am physically alone a lot of the time,” she says. “When he’s home, I have one life. When he’s gone, I have another. And sometimes it’s hard to bring them together.” She pauses. “I still struggle with trying to figure out if I’m feeling lonely or not.”
An Epidemic of Loneliness
There is surprisingly little quantitative data on who feels lonely during the holidays and what that loneliness means. Much of it, confoundingly, comes from a personal finance company, which for several years commissioned a survey of Americans 18 and over on the topic. In 2021, 55 percent reported experiencing loneliness during the holidays. In 2017, when the AARP Foundation asked the same age group to reflect on the previous five holiday seasons, 31 percent said they had felt lonely sometime. But these numbers lack context. How many of these people were also lonely in October, or January, or July?
“We know that people who feel isolated and lonely around the holidays don’t feel that way only around the holidays,” says Jennifer Raymond, chief strategy officer at AgeSpan, a nonprofit that works to build social connection and food security among residents of northeast Massachusetts.
Maybe someone is feeling lonely in November or December “because they’ve lost a loved one or they have some struggles with their family members,” says Jillian Racoosin Kornmeier, executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection, a Washington, DC, nonprofit. Grief or family conflict don’t necessarily stop when the holidays end. Neither does the sense that some form of social connection is missing from our days.
In this regard, the data is more comprehensive. The American Time Use Survey, published each year by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), presents a detailed account of how people 15 and older spend their days. In 2003, the first year BLS asked Americans to keep time-use diaries, people spent an average of 4 hours 47 minutes a day alone. But in 2023, people spent an average of nearly seven hours a day alone and just about four hours a week socializing.
Isolation is not the same as loneliness, which exists in the space between the social connection a person wants and the social connection they have. A person who spends much of their time alone might do so happily; conversely, it’s possible to feel lonely when surrounded by people. But as social isolation has risen, loneliness has too: A recent study found that people who spent more than 75 percent of their waking hours alone reported the greatest loneliness. Nearly one in three American adults reports feeling lonely at least once a week, according to the American Psychiatric Association. One in 10 say they are lonely every day. Worse, both are linked to the risk of premature death; lack of social connection can be as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness and social isolation, US surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy, MD, declared last year, have become an epidemic.
It’s important to consider the bigger picture around loneliness because it affects how we think about solutions. Advice columns often suggest a day of volunteer work or cooking or baking something special as a fix for the “holiday blues.” This leaves chronic loneliness out of the conversation. (Volunteering is wonderful, but in one landmark study, it alleviated loneliness only for those who logged more than 100 hours a year.) These kinds of suggestions also place the burden of solution on the individual, when many times we should be thinking more systemically.
What if we used this season as an opening to talk about our year-round struggles with loneliness and isolation? And what if the movement toward social connection was rooted in societal change—something much bigger than phoning a friend or taking a self-care day? Racoosin Kornmeier calls this “thinking upstream.” To improve social connection across the country, she says, we need to start considering solutions on a larger scale.
There is no one answer to loneliness. But by examining what’s working in some communities, we can craft a picture of how that work might be replicated or adapted for others.
Transforming a Park
When city staff in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, set out to build a network of community gardens in public parks, the impetus was to increase healthy food access—with the added benefit of fostering community cohesion through social space. Concept plans for the new gardens include shared picnic areas and shade structures, along with a prioritized focus on accessibility guided by the Americans With Disabilities Act. This alone can help neighbors connect. By providing space to interact, community gardens broaden and strengthen social networks, studies found. But there was another crucial element to the Cedar Rapids initiative: involving residents in the planning process. A survey open to all city residents, offered in five languages, asked for input on garden design and programming. A steering committee included local gardeners and representatives from local food-focused nonprofits, many of which have experience operating and maintaining gardens.
Emma Avery and Leah Karlberg, urban planners based in Vancouver, use the term placemaking to describe community efforts to improve a place, such as transforming public spaces into social hubs. “Placemaking is the process of bringing spaces to life,” Avery says. Through collaboration, residents gain a sense of belonging and ownership, which can foster social connection.
Karlberg and Avery work at Happy Cities, an urban planning firm focused on how to design communities to boost well-being and social connection. In 2023, the Canada Healthy Communities Initiative partnered with Happy Cities to interview more than 100 people who had participated in a placemaking effort in their community. The resulting report, titled the Power of Placemaking, looked at the benefits and challenges of these efforts. Seventy-two percent of respondents reported that they had created more social connections, and 69 percent said these efforts fostered a greater sense of meaning and belonging.
Placemaking poses unique challenges in urban and rural areas alike, as government presence, funding, infrastructure, and demographics vary between communities. Avery and Karlberg hope that more towns and cities recognize the importance of funding placemaking, both through supporting local organizations and creating more shared spaces that function year-round. Some examples include building community structures in parks that incorporate garage-door-style windows that fully enclose the space in case of rain or cold, or altering policies to allow (safe, controlled) outdoor firepits in appropriate situations. “Those can be huge assets if we’re thinking about placemaking in the wintertime to combat social isolation in [colder] months,” Karlberg says.
Sharing a Greenhouse
Cohousing is not a commune, a co-op, or one of those luxury condo buildings that hikes the rent because there is a shared room with a pool table on the second floor. Traditionally, cohousing refers to a cluster of private homes arranged around a common house or other shared spaces managed and maintained by residents. Examples include Vashon Cohousing in Washington, where community members share an orchard; Driftwood Village in North Vancouver, where residents have a Slack channel to coordinate shared meals; and Heartwood Cohousing outside of Denver, where neighbors in detached single-family homes share a wood shop and a greenhouse.
Cohousing provides a sense of community and strengthens social networks, according to the Foundation for Social Connection’s 2024 SOCIAL Framework report, a document evaluating the data and science behind various community- and policy-led strategies for reducing social isolation. Six months after moving to Our Urban Village, a cohousing development that opened in Vancouver last year, 88 percent of residents considered two or more neighbors to be friends, and 100 percent said they felt lonely “never or rarely,” according to research conducted by Happy Cities.
Yet, cohousing is a hard model to scale. Design plans often mix individual and shared space in ways that conflict with zoning ordinances. Introducing affordable-housing units can also complicate what a city or town will allow to be built, and where. Many cohousing developments can take years to be approved, if they come to fruition at all, and leave developers with little incentive to incorporate lower-priced units or assistance for low-income families. There aren’t easy answers to these problems, outside of comprehensive housing policy reforms. This report from Happy Cities outlines policy suggestions that could make a big difference, including providing city-owned land for cohousing developments.
“There is something about having the community condition or the design set up in a way where you don't really have to work at making social connections happen, right?” Racoosin Kornmeier says. “So that we can gather in person in those less forced ways, and just through the natural way that we live.”
Addressing Food Insecurity
Food-insecure adults are more likely to experience loneliness than those who have regular access to meals. People connect over food, says Raymond of AgeSpan. The Reunir Restaurant Program, launched by AgeSpan in 2022, aims to address social connection and food access by offering twice-monthly restaurant vouchers to adults who report experiencing food insecurity, social isolation, or both in northeast Massachusetts.
“They get to order whatever they want from the menu,” says Raymond. “They get to make requests like, ‘this salad, hold the tomatoes, dressing on the side.’ Or ‘this, well-done.’ They get the dignity of the food experience.” She compares this to meal delivery programs, where menus are often fixed or have limited options.
Since Reunir began, the program has enrolled more than 500 participants, who have logged more than 2,500 meals. In follow-up surveys, 70 percent of participants report improved social isolation scores (measured by how much they agree with statements including “I feel completely alone” and “No one really knows me well”). Sixty-four percent of participants say they usually dine with friends, though it might not matter: Studies show there is a strong benefit to the “weaker” types of social interactions that come with eating out, including interacting with restaurant staff.
One reason for the program’s success, Raymond says, is the choice to work with small, family-owned restaurants where Reunir diners can feel that sense of community: “Our staff has received telephone calls from a restaurant saying, ‘You know, Maria used to come here, and she hasn’t come in a couple of weeks. We just want to make sure everything’s okay.’” Since the population served by Reunir is predominantly Latino and Southeast Asian, menus are available in Spanish, Vietnamese, and Thai, and restaurants offer dishes from a range of cultures.
A meal out may take on added meaning in November and December, but year-round efforts make the real difference when the holidays arrive. Margo Gustina, an economist in New Mexico who studies community and well-being, cites a scene from the movie Trolls World Tour, which they recently saw with their kids.
Barb, a villainous but lonely troll, receives a glitter-filled invitation from a relentlessly positive troll named Poppy, who suggests the two can be fast friends. “Barb’s line is something like: ‘Doesn’t she know it takes years of mutual care and respect to develop a true friendship?’” Gustina says. Or put another way: “It’s the regularity of experience that helps people feel less alone.”