Companies of all kinds are coming after loneliness. 

It’s a seemingly commendable effort, given that the surgeon general issued an advisory last year calling loneliness an “epidemic” that leads to everything from societal breakdown to shorter lifespans.

The company playbook to solve loneliness is typically some version of: Use technology to ultimately get people together in person and they’ll be less lonely. 

Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd told a crowd at Bloomberg’s tech conference earlier this month that “loneliness is killing us.” So in addition to the dating app, this month the company acquired friendship app Geneva, “The online place to find your offline people.”

At the same conference, WeWork founder Adam Neumann said loneliness was a raison d'être for his new tech-enabled apartment rental company Flow.

“We're so connected digitally,” he told the crowd, “we've never been less connected physically.”

There’s also a whole host of venture-backed startups hoping to take on the seemingly intractable problem, and make money for themselves doing so. From Airbnb to Nextdoor and from new-agey community popups to Partiful ("Facebook events for hot people”), tech and tech adjacent companies are trying to save us from (being alone with) ourselves.

Is tech the problem?

Of course there’s a bit of irony here, because one could argue that tech companies in particular have contributed to the loneliness epidemic in the first place. From smartphones to social media, there’s no shortage of potential technological causes.

The scientific evidence for tech’s contribution to loneliness, however, is largely mixed. You can find both negative and positive outcomes, depending on the study. How tech affects a person depends on a whole host of factors — like the specific tech itself, how it’s used, and who uses it. 

For example, the internet broadly — from message boards to Facebook Messages — has long helped people connect with like-minded people they never would have met otherwise. At the same time, social media like Instagram is often associated with hurting the mental health of young women, since it facilitates comparison with others. 

The surgeon general’s report doled out some blame: “the existing evidence illustrates that we have reason to be concerned about the impact of some kinds of technology use on our relationships, our degree of social connection, and our health.”

But there’s also a lot more fueling this issue that goes far beyond tech, including numerous demographic and societal factors, like wealth, job opportunities, health, age of marriage, and family size.

Again the surgeon general: “It will require reimagining the structures, policies, and programs that shape a community to best support the development of healthy relationships.” 

There’s a reason why tech companies keep inventing “the bus”

Of course if the problem were just finding a means of getting people together, it would already be solved. Tech industry observers might point out how every few years a tech company seems to come up with what is essentially “the bus,” and yet buses are still widely unreliable, inconvenient, and uncomfortable. 

One complication is that loneliness is not just one thing to all people. There are different types of loneliness and different levels, according to Dr. Jeremy Nobel, a Harvard Medical School lecturer and founder of the Project UnLonely initiative, which aims to destigmatize loneliness through arts and culture (its annual film festival is June 2 and will be hosted by Steve Buscemi).

In his book of the same name, Nobel discusses three kinds of loneliness: psychological loneliness (where you don't have someone to tell your troubles to), societal loneliness (where you're systematically excluded), and then spiritual or existential loneliness (unsure of your place in the world or whether your life has consequence). And each requires a different approach. Most tech companies are attempting to tackle just one type: psychological loneliness. 

Different levels of each type of loneliness also require different actions, much like you’d treat early stage and severe diabetes very differently, he said.

“Loneliness is too big a word,” he said. “Interventions work differently at different vulnerability levels.”

So while Nobel thinks that technology can absolutely play a role in helping alleviate loneliness, the problem is more difficult than some business people would hope.

“A lot of what I see out there — not all of it — actually is pretty naive,” Nobel told Sherwood. “That if you just give people each other's digital coordinates, then it solves loneliness. It's a little bit more complicated.”

For example, if someone is experiencing societal loneliness because of their race or disability, just bringing them together with the same group they’ve felt excluded from won’t fix things. They first have to understand that they’re being excluded and that it’s not their fault, Nobel said, and then they need to seek out others experiencing a similar situation to connect with.

And of course finding solutions for why those people are excluded in the first place requires tackling big knotty problems that are less malleable than software.

In person is good (though not strictly necessary)

Generally, though, the aim of getting people together in person is a sound one, if not a panacea, according to the experts we spoke with.

“We have so many ways of avoiding social contact that we take because it makes our life more efficient,” said Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at University of California, Davis, who studies relationships. “Oh I don’t have to commute into work today? Cool. At the movie theater I can just order the popcorn online and then it's just sitting there?” 

Therefore people these days often need excuses to get together, he said. What that excuse is, though, can be anything and nearly arbitrary: cultural events, common interests, making art. 

Once they’re together, people can be good at finding commonalities.

“You become less of this, ‘I'm a consumer, I'm here to evaluate whether I would like to purchase that,’” he said. “You're not browsing Amazon. You're now interacting with a person. And you're just kind of feeling it.”

In other words, in person people behave more like, well, people. 

“Where tech’s head gets in the way is the idea that people are a combination of values and numbers and if you just crunch them in just the right way, you can put people with their perfect numerical match. No,” Eastwick said. “People will invent a reason to get together, they will invent the importance of similarities to share, if they like being around the person.”

Such interactions can be tiring. They take a lot of work and can feel impossible for introverts or for those who are neurodivergent. But ultimately they make people feel better. The trick is to get them together in the first place, and if tech companies can help facilitate that, it can be beneficial to combatting loneliness.

And there are plenty of examples of people finding community and connection online. Nobel relayed a story of a woman who realized that she’d found community among fellow viewers of a fat bear live cam, who helped support her after a cancer diagnosis. 

Of course, tech is obviously not the only solution. 

Indeed, what most of the tech these companies have on offer isn’t much different from the technology that’s been available for decades. They’re just building a shinier message board and yet we’re still as lonely as ever.

“On balance I’m glad that the tech sector is seeing this as a problem and that they think that face-to-face interaction is the solution,” Eastwick said. “Am I weary? Of course.”

Tech solutions could make things even worse

The worst-case scenario is if these tech solutions actually increase people’s disconnection from one another. 

These companies of course have different incentives than the people they’re serving. Their main incentive? Making money, typically from subscriptions, ads, and events. Much like dating apps — and some of these companies are also dating apps — they only bring in cash so long as you’re on their platforms. You, the lonely human looking for a friend or a mate, don’t necessarily need to keep coming back once you’ve found your people.

As Eastwick put it, “Is it possible to make cost-effective a thing where people use it once? Can anything survive on a model that’s designed to be used for a brief window of time?” 

Of course one could say the same thing of therapists. If they solved all your problems, why would you go back?

Aimée Lutkin, author of The Lonely Hunter: How Our Search for Love Is Broken, thinks the bigger problem is the extractive nature of for-profit companies. 

“A lot of the communities online that I think are most successful are self-organized,” she told Sherwood. “The places where technology tends to fail people is when they just serve as an intermediary, trying to skim money or time and attention off the top.”

Lutkin says people’s bad economic situations are an important driver of loneliness. People don’t have the money or time — because they’re busy working to stay afloat — to participate in the community activities they once did.

“You have to work more to get less,” Lutkin said. “And with the time you have left over, developing relationships, which is an arduous process that takes both time and space, is less appealing to people.”

Perhaps counterproductively, people turn to their technology like their phones for connection, which is ultimately not as fulfilling and can even make them more lonely. Paying for one of these apps to help with loneliness could even make them more broke. 

Ultimately she says the cures for loneliness lie in fixing the big underlying societal and economic problems — more social services, more money coming back into communities, policies like rent control, universal healthcare, and subsidized child care that let people hold on to some more of their money and time, so they can spend it better. 

“This is something that needs to be fixed but I don’t think that the answer is going to be found in some startup app,” Lutkin said.