Why do I feel as if I’m being sold friends?
Join a “modern social club,” one ad beckons. “Turn strangers into friends” via curated dinner parties at trendy restaurants. A luxury condo building flogs its “community clubhouse” as an exciting amenity, and yet another social start-up informs me, rather ominously, that “we find your people.”
It’s possible that my feeds are too well primed: The algorithms can tell that I’m in my 30s, that I’m living in a city known for its transience and that I frequently search for data on and read stories about our changing social lives. But the sheer number of these ads suggests that the need for friendship is widespread enough that an industry is forming around it.
There are the run clubs and exercise cults. On Instagram, I was seduced by a vibey post reminiscing about the precellphone era of house parties. After I swiped through a carousel of nostalgia-inducing pictures, I was invited to just that kind of gathering — for a fee.
The loneliness epidemic has been well publicized, from the surgeon general’s repeated warnings to musings in major media outlets. And the loneliness market has boomed: Venture capital firms are investing in social and relational health; technologists are selling companions and chatbots as cures for isolation; politicians and philanthropists have adopted “belonging” as a buzzword.
Even though I’d still love to make more friends, I’m lucky to already be embedded in a tight-knit group dating back to college. And these for-profit solutions all seem pitched at those who need them the least — socializing positioned as a luxury good. If isolation really is a societywide crisis, we need societywide solutions — and an understanding of who has been left out most acutely from what friendship promises.
In pursuit of that aim, the researchers Sam Pressler, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, and Soren Duggan, a communications strategist and Army veteran with a background in human intelligence collection, produced a report this spring titled “Nobody to Call,” based on a series of 30 in-depth, qualitative interviews with men ranging from their mid-20s to their mid-40s without college degrees. They hoped to add texture to the conversation on loneliness by seeking out those who they believe are struggling the most. We’ve all experienced social atrophy, Mr. Pressler told me, but for men without degrees, the bottom has fallen out.
College completion rates have risen over the decades for both men and women, but a growing proportion of those who aren’t graduating are men. As of 2021, men made up around 43 percent of four-year-college enrollees, down from approximately 57 percent in 1970. “As the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life,” Pressler and Duggan wrote, “men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.” We tend to talk about the loneliness crisis in terms of gender, but class, as derived from educational status, is the factor too touchy — or too invisible — to acknowledge.
Less than half of Americans hold bachelor’s degrees, but those without are less likely to have places to gather (parks, libraries, even coffee shops), are less likely to join civic groups or social clubs and report having far fewer close friends or people to turn to for social support. The four-year degree isn’t just an economic signal; it’s become a lifestyle determinant.
In the “Nobody to Call” case studies and interview transcripts, men without college degrees described social drift that turns into a social cliff: Graduating from high school meant the loss of an accessible infrastructure for connection and, with it, a whittling down of peer groups and no new structure — college, the military, a union, churches or civic groups — to take its place.
And while higher education is often discussed in terms of its economic value, its relational value is strangely overlooked. The multiyear college experience brings together groups of peers who transition into adulthood together, often forming lasting bonds in the process and connecting to mentors and institutions along the way.
A majority of the men Pressler and Duggan interviewed were almost completely disconnected; of the 30, almost half reported having no close friends, and six reported having only one. In one of many poignant lines from the report, one interviewee said bluntly, “I don’t have anybody that I feel like I matter to.”
Friendships, purpose and opportunity are built over time, through institutions and shared settings. For many men, unstable work — transient gig jobs, uncontrollable schedules — allows only for the creation of tenuous, easily breakable ties. A lack of money, time and affordable places to gather adds to a lack of confidence and social know-how, making relationships harder to form or sustain. As one interviewee put it, “It is not community when you exclude people that don’t have them jobs like you, the money like you or even look like you.”
Most of the men interviewed as part of “Nobody to Call” seemed to deeply want to connect and contribute to their broader communities (contrary to the common public narrative of nihilistic, misogynistic loners actively contributing to a male loneliness crisis), but material barriers, compounding into psychological ones, often kept them from doing so.
Many admitted that although they wanted to build community and make friends, they had little sense of where to start. “I don’t know how to just go out in the wild and pick up friends. People don’t do as many in-person things as they used to many years ago.”
But there are examples of civic leaders making it easier. For instance, as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup celebrations, New York City’s Office of the Mayor opened five public soccer pitches around the city for overnight pickup games — an initiative called NYC Open Play. It was free, available at nontraditional hours and staffed to encourage connection; thousands joined to play.
There are other brass-tacks policy changes that could help: ending just-in-time scheduling, providing more job support and protections for gig workers and putting in place better leave policies that might allow space for the development of one’s civic life. But a major issue is simply being seen and understood — not as statistics or caricatures but as members of a shared community.
America is overdue for a reckoning with how we have made college the main rite of passage to cultural life while letting others atrophy. Potential solutions to this could be anything from more support for apprenticeships and vocational programs — ones that impart the sense of belonging that can be achieved only through the shared pursuit of excellence — to the dream of a national service corps that pools young people together across economic lines.
Like many of America’s most pressing social crises, the loneliness epidemic is divided by class. The loneliness industry seeks to capitalize on the crisis of social isolation via paid solutions like those hawked to me online, but friendship as a pay-to-play luxury will continue to leave broad swaths of Americans out.
If loneliness really is a public health crisis, it’s the responsibility of government and institutions, not just the market, to begin offering solutions. Connection is, or at least should be, a public good.
