Get a puppy. A puppy will get you moving on walks, empathize, and make you smile.

For me, the answer was smoking. I made a ton of friends that way. Always went out to a pool hall, a bar, or a nice patio so I could smoke. It was great. You can’t smoke in your rental so you gotta get out and find places to smoke. Few states you can do it in anymore though. I moved to a state with a smoking ban and quit smoking, no point to it. Don’t get out as much nowadays.

Step one might be to stop calling it the loneliness epidemic. Loneliness is an emotion, isolation is a condition, and we might even expect that if people felt lonely more often they would try harder to be social and actually be less isolated. This is also a network effect: my reaction to my loneliness affects someone else's loneliness if I go talk to them (or not).

Your problem statement is problematic.

To a first order, how can we decrease percentage of people that are single should be the question.

From wikipedia: ” An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time.”

As with covid, individual actions are not enough to stop the spread of the epidemic. You need vaccinations, health education, public policy etc. not just individual actions, so ”go dancing” and ”talk to people” doesn’t quite cut it.

Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…

I cannot either, but I think we need to start looking at technology from a point of view of public health. Some sort of sociology/medical studies on the effects of computing on human body/mind and society.

We can encourage people to start families and stop telling them that it's the end of anything fun.

Why just join a local Kingdom Hall near you? People will genuinely love you there.

We all need screen-time limits.

People cannot help themselves.

Its too easy and satisfying to sit on your phone.

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.