From a physician’s point of view, we know that social isolation can be bad for your health. There is plenty of evidence demonstrating an association between weak social ties and a higher risk of premature death, possibly rivaling the impact of obesity and smoking. A lack of friends and social life is associated with poor cardiovascular health and higher all-cause mortality. There’s also some research showing that social isolation may weaken the immune system, raising susceptibility to infectious diseases.

Strong social ties, on the other hand, are associated, for example, with lower blood pressure and lower levels of systemic inflammation, factors that help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. And there’s an obvious link between connectivity and mental health, with good data showing that close friendships can buffer against depression and anxiety.

So it’s concerning that the term “friendship recession,” describing a decrease in the number of friends people have and an increase in the number of friendless individuals, has gained so much traction that it has its own Wikipedia page. In a 2021 survey, the proportion of Americans who said they have no friends increased from 3 percent in 1990 to 12 percent.

In the same survey, however, 13 percent of participants reported having 10 or more “close” friends (with the definition of a close friend being “subjective and open to interpretation”). This more or less mirrors the proportion who have none. Also, while 17 percent said they were not satisfied with the number of friends they have, about a third reported being somewhat satisfied, and slightly more than half were very satisfied with the size of their friendship group.

A more recent study suggests that the discouraging numbers around this purported friendship recession may have more to do with methodology—how survey questions are asked, how friendship is defined—and that in fact Americans’ friendships have remained relatively stable since the 1970s. While 40 percent of adults and college students surveyed in the American Friendship Project in 2022 and 2023 wished they were closer with their friends and nearly half would like to spend more time with them, a whopping 75 percent were happy with the number of friends they have, and two-thirds reported satisfaction with how those friendships were being maintained.

Yet another review of various articles and surveys of friendship and loneliness (albeit a pre-pandemic one) reported finding no empirical evidence that we’re in an escalating friendship crisis. The author suggests that what we have is more like an epidemic of misleading headlines than an epidemic of loneliness.

That said, overall numbers and trends are meaningless if you yourself are lonely. You are not an anecdote. You’re a human, and humans need social connection.

Sadly, there are numerous obstacles to forming and maintaining close friendships, especially in adulthood. With work and family demands, people may relegate friends to the back burner. Many of us are still working partly or completely from home, and while remote work was an absolute necessity during much of the pandemic, it limits contact with the coworkers and colleagues who once represented the largest pool of potential friends for most adults. Overall, although it’s hard to know whether the quality of our friendships has changed over the decades, if half of us don’t see our friends as much as we’d like, that’s a meaningful proportion.

While some of the research described above has found that adults over 50 are doing quite well with their social bonds, those over 75 report feeling lonelier. It’s an unfortunate fact, the older we get, the more of our friends move away or pass away. To keep a satisfying number of friends around us over the course of our lives, we need to be pro-active about building friendships along the way.

It may not be as easy to find friends in adulthood as it was when you were a child, organically befriending classmates and neighborhood kids, but there are still many opportunities for meeting people: volunteer opportunities, alumni organizations, neighborhood/block associations, and common interest clubs (for readers, runners, pickleball players, photographers, bird watchers, gardeners, bakers, mah-jongg enthusiasts, bikers, music lovers). Showing up or signing on for something new may be more challenging for those who don’t identify as joiners, but overcoming that initial reluctance may be well worth the effort.

Also, although there’s been a lot of concern about the role technology plays in social isolation—that we spend more time face to screen than face to face—it can close the gaps when meeting in person is impractical or impossible. For example, since the pandemic, my friend and colleague, Dale (who is also our managing editor), meets remotely twice a week with a longtime group of knitting friends. They not only knit together but also provide a support system for one another during both happy and difficult times.

And I meet every other week via Zoom with a group of fellow academics scattered throughout California. These meetings originated during the pandemic and kept on going. I didn’t know any of the participants very well before those initial Zoom sessions, but some have become close friends; they, and those meetings, fill a need in my life. I also have a weekly standing date with a group of academic colleagues who meet on campus for lunch and conversation.

Just as we need to invest consistently in our physical health—eating right, exercising, avoiding deleterious excesses—we need to invest consistently in our friendships, doing what it takes to find them and to keep them. Don’t forget the old camp song (inspired by a poem written by Joseph Parry): “Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold.” There is wisdom in those words.