This is a difficult problem to want to solve. Some of it has to do with low income or joblessness. So this is the first focus I would set - make income easier to come by, more fair, more distributed. This in itself will not fix the solo state of people but it would alleviate some worries. Then we have to tackle the social problem. This is really difficult to want to solve. Activity helps, so the state should be able to encourage more activity overall. For instance, in my own youth I was physically more active, so you meet a lot of people through sports - that alone works fairly well. You can probably think of many more cohesive social structures and what not. I think it is a difficult to want to solve problem though. Not everyone uses social media by the way but is still isolated; Japan even gave some odd name to this.

Build or join a local community!

I’ve been working with https://fractal.boston/ and adjacent communities for the last year and my loneliness has been cured. I now have the opposite problem where I don’t get enough time to myself!

When I go to tech meetups, I often see a great deal of people sitting alone using their phones, because interacting with people you don't know is scary.

Try to resist! Yeah it's scary but most tech-heads are as nerdy/goofy as you and are interested in all the details of whatever you hacking on.

Start with you: 1. Daily sunshine 2. Nutritious diet 3. Adequate, quality sleep 4. Exercise

You'll find virtually every dimension of your life will improve if you're on top of these four things. It will make you more ambitious in pursuing social engagement. And that will make socialization much easier.

Decommodify relationships

Decapitalize third spaces.

Reduce the difficulty of making walkable cities - building zoning reform, mass transit.

Housing in my city has been expensive for years, and the knock-on effect is that most people I know live so far apart we barely see each other anymore.

When you stack a two hour trip each way on top of the rising cost of doing anything at all, on top of already crushing housing and living costs, you end up with a perfect storm where staying home becomes the default. Not because people don’t want to socialise, but because the effort and expense make it impractical.

This has been a prolem where I live for years and I've actively watched it become worse over time as people have been forced to move further and further apart, and further and further away from the active areas of the city in order to be able to afford to keep a roof over their head.

Since this is a tech forum, the best solutions I've seen to this problem seem to be arising on instagram due to its good location based advertising (it was originally meetup.com but they sacrificed their lead during grandstand on covid). Lots of run clubs, events, dances, and things to do get recommended in my feed all the time, and once you get into a scene people are usually recommending more things to do. There are sometimes community based apps as well which recommend local things to do. Ultimately though you need to go outside and meet people, you can't solve it by sitting in your house alone talking to internet people.