Do the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape — encourage isolation and alienation?
FILE – A man crosses the street in a nearly empty Times Square, devoid of the usual weekday morning crowds, March 23, 2020, in New York. In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an American epidemic. According to his report, Americans spent 20 minutes a day with friends in 2020 — down from an hour daily two decades ago.
This has been a recurring thread in how Americans perceive themselves. In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
Those omissions continue. Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days — to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism.
In the suburbs, Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking “The Feminine Mystique” helped give voice to a generation of lonely women. In the city, Edward Hopper’s work — like the iconic “Nighthawks” — channeled urban loneliness. At around the same time, the emergence of film noir — crime and decay in the American city its frequent subject — helped shape the figure of the lonely man alone in a crowd who might be a protagonist, might be an antagonist, might be both.
In March, the show’s creator and star, Jason Sudeikis, appeared with his cast at the White House to talk about the issue that the show is, in its final season, more about than ever: mental health. “We all know someone who has, or have been that someone ourselves actually, that’s struggled, that’s felt isolated, that’s felt anxious, that has felt alone,” Sudeikis said.
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