A lot of very good suggestions already. I found meetups are also really good for finding people with similar interests to hang out with and another upside is usually you can also learn something new from meetups.

I fit the

> sit alone every day and have no one to talk to, people of all ages, who don't feel that they can join any local groups

I do not fit the

> So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school

I'm bringing this up because, at least for me, the issue is has nothing to do with social media, at least not directly.

Phone a friend. A buddy of mine texted me yesterday and we went to lunch together today. We’re talking about starting the old hackathon up again, this time with agent armies. It was just fun and easy and long overdue. Be the one to break the ice if you can.

Trading Cards!

IMO the biggest barrier to entry to the hobby is the price, coupled with the existing communities being really old. I'm trying to get people to print their own cards for casual kitchen table play through https://cardstocktcg.com.

I visit whatever sport activity I can find. Like Go Karting, gymnastics, bouldering, etc and always start asking pro guys: “yo, how come you visit this so often? How do you get fun from it?”. And people lovely tell their story. Later they teach me how to do things. It works for me.

I am a solo bootstrap founder, ultra lonely.

People just don’t want to do stuff.

If I don’t ask my friends to hang out or play video games or whatever no one else will.

have kids

my social life got pretty busy once i had multiple kids in school and having to go to various events etc, and i have formed genuine friendships with many of the other parents

my “soulless suburb” has a much stronger sense of community than any big city neighborhood i ever lived in

Best way to solve it is to recognize that it's intentional and start calling it the anti-social epidemic instead. If we keep calling it loneliness then everyone thinks its something that is happening to them, instead of something they are doing.

From my perspective, the issue is quite simple: progress optimizes everything other than the cost of human labor. Socialization, as defined today, inherently requires human labor, and thus falls under the Baumol effect.

The 'loneliness epidemic' is merely the result of weakening demand, owing to a slew of low-cost alternatives. Thus, we end up with two options,

1. automate the social experience

2. accept that the comparative cost of socialization will grow higher forever

For some reason, the vast majority of humans in the 21st century are interested in morally rejecting (1), thus ensuring (2) as an outcome.

.

Note: this is not to say I reject the notion that individuals can be helped. I think most comments in this thread are quite healthy, even as they narrowly focus on the individual case.

But it is rather impractical to adopt a positivist "how you can help" framing to address the epidemic at large. While certainly instrumentally useful, it is necessarily unlikely for the same traditional solutions to loneliness to spontaneously 'gain influence' against what has thus far been a gradual decline in their effectiveness and buying power.

The older people get the more disposable they are viewed as by society.

When you are younger, you belong in school. When you get older, you belong at work.

If you fall out of any of these social structures its extremely difficult to find your way back in.

I was already pretty disconnected from society and people in general when my divorce hit and now I am completely untethered from any kind of community. Living is miserable I hate my life and I do not want to exist like this anymore.

None of the solutions people provide are easy or functional. "Go meet people" is the most vague, unhelpful bullshit ever.

I think the reality is some people, no matter how intelligent, caring or otherwise full of empathy they may be are just "too far gone" for anyone to have the initiative or concern to care about us. The world is so corroded and socially poisoned that any kind of meaningful effort in this kind of thing is pointless. Anybody with time or money is busy making money.

You can't solve the epidemic because it is a byproduct of multiple irreparably broken systems. People will continue to fall through the cracks and it will get worse. I don't know what happens after that but we'll probably all be dead.