[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 108 (Wednesday, June 21, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2174-S2176]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Loneliness

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor tonight to talk about a 
topic that rarely, if ever, gets discussed on the Senate floor. I am 
here to talk about loneliness.
  Every single one of us, over the course of our life, has felt lonely, 
maybe really intensely lonely. I certainly have. It is an awful 
feeling, right? It creates this pit in your stomach. It creates a 
consuming melancholy for many. Sometimes intense loneliness can make 
you physically ill. Often, it makes you really agitated and angry, 
right? Why is this happening to me?
  Now, there are, frankly, a lot of reasons to believe that less 
Americans today should feel lonely than ever before. More of us live in 
densely populated parts of the country than ever before. Technology now 
allows us to connect to friends and family and communities that share 
interests more easily than ever before at the press of a button.
  But evidence from psychology and sociology tells us that the opposite 
is true. In recent decades, we have seen rising levels of both 
aloneness, which is defined as having fewer social contacts, and high 
levels of loneliness, which is defined as feelings of isolation.
  We live closer to each other than ever before. We have technologies 
that allow us to connect to people with more ease than ever before, but 
people are feeling lonelier. As we look out at a country that seems to 
be kind of coming apart a little bit at the seams--I mean, people are 
getting shot at just for ringing the wrong doorbell or pulling into the 
wrong driveway. Hundreds are dying every day from taking a drug that is 
designed to deaden their emotions. Thousands of people engaged in 
violent rebellion right here in the Nation's Capital.
  We need to be engaged in this search for the reasons why people are 
feeling more pessimistic, more frustrated, and angrier than ever 
before. And so about 8 or 9 months ago, I started talking about what I 
believed to be one of the most important political issues of our time: 
loneliness.
  Millions of Americans are feeling this way. People report feeling 
more intense loneliness than ever before in our lifetime. And it is 
irresponsible for policymakers to just keep ignoring it.
  Now, there are a lot of explanations for how we got here, but a few 
stand out as particularly important for my colleagues to consider.
  So it is true that technology does allow us to stay connected to 
family and friends and find new communities, but on the whole, 
technology has left many Americans, especially young people, feeling 
more alone than ever before.
  During the height of COVID-19, we learned the hard way that digital 
communication cannot replace the value of in-person experience. For 
example, studies show that face-to-face interactions create faster 
connections to humans and build stronger, more enduring relationships 
than anything that you can create online.
  Of course, staying in touch electronically is better than losing 
touch altogether, but when Facebook likes and Instagram comments 
replace in-person experiences, it actually can drive up feelings of 
loneliness.
  Staring at your screen for 6 hours a day, no matter how many people 
you are looking at, it can be a very lonely experience.
  And it doesn't stop there, because there are millions of users with 
developing minds--children--who spend hours staring at their screens, 
scrolling through an endless stream of pictures and videos that have 
been carefully curated to create an illusion of perfection, leaving 
young people feeling inadequate or wanting.
  Constant comparison breeds--in young people especially but in all of 
us--and can result in more anxiety than fulfillment. Kids are feeling 
really lousy today, and it is not just because they are spending tons 
of time on their screens instead of engaging in real in-person 
experiences. It is also because the content that they are watching is 
dangerous and corrosive and making them feel more alone in the world 
because of those feelings of envy.

  Now, the second really important factor contributing to this epidemic 
of loneliness in America is the erosion of local communities. Now, 
connection sometimes happens randomly; but, mostly, it is facilitated 
through local institutions: churches, sports teams, civic clubs, labor 
unions, business organizations. We derive personal meaning as well from 
those institutions, from the communities that we create or join. We get 
connection, but we also get meaning.
  Those institutions help us construct an identity, a sense of purpose. 
It connects us to something bigger than ourselves. But in 2023, you 
would be hard-pressed to find a community with the kind of thriving 
local institutions of decades ago.
  Globalization has erased thousands of healthy, unique downtowns, 
where people often met each other at local businesses. And that 
outsourcing of commerce online has also diminished local cultures that 
facilitate connection, identity, and meaning. Growing up, my identity 
was really strongly connected to the town that I lived in, and there 
was no shortage of ways that I could easily connect with the people I 
lived with.
  Back then, we had thriving local newspapers where I could learn 
really easily about the people in my town, which made it easier to 
create that connection.
  Those local newspapers are drying up by the day. We all get our news 
from national sources. It was my local grocer who used to slip me a 
free slice of American cheese when I would visit on the weekend with my 
grandparents that made me feel like I belonged to a community, that I 
wasn't alone. But now the local grocer is gone, driven out of business 
by superstores or food-delivery drivers.
  But even if you still had these local institutions to be a part of, 
who has time any longer? A few decades ago, one job could easily 
provide a family with a comfortable middle-class life. Today, adults 
are forced to maintain two or three jobs to match that same income, or 
work 50 or 60 or 70 hours a week. There is no time any longer for 
millions of Americans to go to church, to be part of a civic club, or 
just hang out with your friends or your neighbors or your family.
  And so what are you seeing? Participation in youth sports is 
plummeting. That is in part because overextended parents are just too 
busy these days to shuttle their kids to games or practices, or they 
just can't afford the fees

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or equipment costs. Yes, kids are more interested in online gaming and 
their screens, but it is also stressed-out parents who just don't have 
time to participate in all those extracurricular activities with their 
kids but also don't have time to join the kind of institutions that 
used to give them value back when 40 hours a week was enough.
  And so here is maybe the most important question: Why should we care? 
What are the public policy implications of loneliness? Well, first, 
there are health consequences to loneliness. American suicide rates are 
rising at an alarming rate, most significantly amongst two key 
populations: teenagers and rural men, who are both disproportionately 
affected by the changing landscape of American culture and economics.
  Researchers at NYU found a direct correlation between teenage girls' 
use of Instagram and the corresponding spike in teenage girls' self-
harm rates; and teenage rates of sadness are higher than ever.
  For rural white men--one of my favorites--Nobel prize-winning 
economist Angus Deaton, he argues that as the white male dominated 
``blue-collar aristocracy'' of 50 to 100 years ago has vanished, with 
the loss of social and economic status that went with it, those men are 
struggling. And this feeling of isolation, specifically amongst that 
population, is rising to epidemic levels as well, with a record number 
of white men who are struggling in this new world, committing acts of 
self-harm.
  Surgeon General Vivek Murthy does a great job of connecting the dots 
between widespread loneliness and individual health. It is not just 
suicide. Last month, he released a detailed advisory with shocking 
statistics: Social isolation is associated with a 29-percent increase 
in the risk of heart disease and a 32-percent increase in the risk of 
stroke. Chronic loneliness can increase the risk of developing dementia 
in older people by 50 percent. Do we think it is a coincidence that 
life expectancy rates in this country are falling at the same time that 
loneliness is spiking?
  The second reason that we should care about this epidemic as 
policymakers is because this growing isolation of Americans is helping 
to fuel a growing culture of resentment and anger.
  I mentioned that young woman who was shot because she pulled up to 
the wrong driveway; but we see this edginess all over in our culture 
today. People are strung out. Violence is more common as a means to 
settle disputes, and fringe groups and conspiracy theories are more 
popular than ever.
  I think loneliness is a big part of the reason why all this is 
happening. I mentioned that loneliness is often accompanied by a sense 
of anger. Why do I feel like this? Who is to blame? This anger, coupled 
with this diminishing availability of positive identities like family, 
place, or institution, makes negative identities built on hatred and 
distrust all the more attractive.
  And so the newly isolated, the lonely, become targets for demagogues 
who offer up scapegoats to blame for the decay of these traditional 
sources of meaning and identity.
  In 2017, America was shocked when a huge White Supremacists rally in 
Charlottesville drew thousands, but this shouldn't have been a 
surprise. Loneliness drives people to dark, dangerous places. And those 
young White men carrying tiki torches are only the tip of a giant 
iceberg of isolated, angry Americans whose search for meaning might 
lead them to a seething anti-Semitic or racist mob.
  Now, the picture I am painting--I get it--is pretty grim, but I am 
here to tell you, there are reasons to hope. One of the reasons why I 
really believe Congress can get something done attacking isolation and 
loneliness and building more social connections is because there is a 
growing consensus across the aisle about this set of problems that we 
are dealing with and the solutions, which this problem set may be a 
little less political than other problems we face in this body.
  I think Congress is coming to acknowledge that the consequences of 
rapidly advancing technology are not value-neutral. We have seen how 
social media has deepened polarization and addicted a generation of 
kids to their screens, and in the past few months, we have been 
involved in a new conversation about generative AI and machine learning 
and how it has the potential to displace millions of jobs and a whole 
bunch of basic human functions.
  Most Republicans and Democrats agree that we made a big mistake by 
sitting on the sidelines during the early days of the internet and the 
development most recently of social media.
  The good news is that Republicans and Democrats are working together 
on this problem. There are a few good pieces of legislation that could 
start to hold social media companies accountable who are driving kids 
into lives of increasing loneliness and isolation.
  Senators Cotton, Schatz, Britt, and I have proposed a bill to set a 
minimum age of 13 to use social media, to require parental consent. It 
also prohibits social media companies from using these highly 
personalized algorithms to drive dangerous, isolationist-inducing 
content to kids.
  On the issue of AI, Senator Schumer has convened a bipartisan group 
that is beginning its work as well, and I am glad to be a part of it.
  A second starting point that I really think really think has 
bipartisan potential would be to advance policies specifically aimed at 
restoring the health of our local communities and local institutions.
  In Western Connecticut, in my old congressional district, we have got 
the ``Brass City,'' the ``Silver City,'' the ``Hardware City,'' the 
``Hat City.'' For a long time in this country, identity, meaning, and 
connection were created because we really were proud of the things we 
made, of the jobs that existed. But the theory of economic 
neoliberalism sent most of those jobs overseas and assumed that better 
jobs would replace them. That is not what happened.
  So I really believe that industrial policy is part of the solution to 
decreasing isolation and loneliness. Why? Because so many people get 
meaning and identity from the things that we make and used to make, 
from jobs that have meaning and good wages and benefits and pensions 
attached to them. That is why the CHIPS and Science Act paved the way 
for a new industrial policy to get the Republicans and Democrats to 
come together and work on creating more meaning in work which I think 
leads to isolation and loneliness.
  But, as I said before, that only works if a full-time job provides a 
living wage and you have enough time in the evenings and on the 
weekends to be able to engage with your friends and your family and 
your community.
  So I am also hopeful that we can make progress across the aisle 
driving up the minimum wage and incentivizing jobs to pay real living 
wages.
  This week, a conservative group called American Compass released a 
report that was underlaid by a really scathing critique of modern 
capitalism. The conference was attended by a bunch of our Republican 
colleagues here. The report called for policymakers to remake 
capitalism so that our economic system works to build strong families, 
healthy individuals, and connected communities instead of just viewing 
families and individuals as mere pawns of the global market, the grease 
that makes the wheels of profit move. This is a really interesting 
development. Serious people on the right are starting to rethink the 
nature of capitalism to make sure that our economy works for families 
and individuals to make us more connected and less lonely. So there is 
real possibility that both parties, the right and the left, can come 
together to address this crisis of American isolation.
  America's epidemic of loneliness is far from terminal. Our retreat 
into ourselves is a product of economic, cultural, and political 
choices we have made, but it is not too late to chart a new path. I get 
it. This is a Congress that has a hard time solving much more 
straightforward problems, so tackling a metaphysical crisis like 
loneliness might feel like a Herculean task. So, right now, I would 
argue that we just need a starting point, an organizing point for some 
of these discussions.
  So I am working on legislation that would just start by establishing 
a national strategy, a national conversation around loneliness and how 
to promote connectedness. Every Agency

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should have a role to play in this crisis. So I would argue that we 
just need to start with a dedicated office to coordinate a 
governmentwide strategy to tackle loneliness and strengthen 
communities.
  I also think we should have guidelines and best practices for public 
entities to engage in trying to connect people. We have guidelines for 
nutrition and physical activity and sleep. We should have these 
guidelines for social connection.
  Finally, we can't really address this crisis adequately if we don't 
understand it. So my legislation would also include some small amounts 
of funding to support research on the social and health impacts of 
widespread loneliness.
  I look forward to talking to my colleagues about this legislation. It 
doesn't solve the problem, but I think it is time that we start 
organizing our work and our thoughts around what is, in many ways, a 
foundational problem, which explains a lot of the things that people 
are feeling that drives political instability, bad health outcomes, and 
just general unhappiness in this country.
  Loneliness is one of the few issues that defies traditional political 
boundaries, cuts across almost every demographic, from teenage girls 
living in cities, to White men living out in rural areas, blue States 
to red States, unaffordable cities to left-behind manufacturing towns.
  There is a ton of room for us to come together to combat this growing 
epidemic of loneliness, and I hope that my colleagues on both sides of 
the aisle are eager to be part of this solution.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hassan). The Senator from Colorado.