Might want to read Bowling Alone[1] (or at least some commentary on it) and the "hunkering down" effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

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.

Super easy... Just quit being selfish and fulfill the biological purpose of life every textbook describes: have a family. I have five kids and am the happiest and most content I've been in life.

Some people think loneliness is somewhat a result of stress and anxiety, it’s far from it. It is precisely the lack of pressure that makes them stay home. You need to apply as much pressure on them so that staying at home becomes unbearable.

kind of a different answer but it really comes down to "politics and religion":

namely with politics, the lack of freedom which leads to more poverty and less ability to take risks to create things (so people insulate to prevent risks in a vicious cycle)

and with religion the lack of shared values as might have existed in the USA for example as we go back each decade (which leads to frequent conflict and questioning of different values in conflict and the inability to form more groups and relationships)

Join local groups. Talk to and engage with your neighbours. Volunteer in your community.

My girlfriend built a web app for meeting up in small groups. I think it's going to be fun! It's not public yet but almost there. Let me know if you live around Stockholm (or Sweden perhaps) and want to beta test it!

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.

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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.

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.

If you're a programmer you should do everything to make the internet something you must sit down to use not something that follows you everywhere. The last 25 years of tech "progress" must be unmade.