Are Older Adults Increasingly Lonely and/or Isolated and in need of more Social Opportunities?

If you pay attention to a wide range of news reporting, articles and blog posts across the US in the last couple of years, from many sources (some highly credible and some not so much) you’d think we have an ‘epidemic’ of loneliness among older adults. As a result, there has been a rush to find solutions, many of which involve finding new or different ways to bring about greater social opportunities for those affected. The UK has even appointed a minister for loneliness in 2017 to tackle this significant problem as it was perceived. While I accept that we always want to solve a problem where there is one, in this brief article I want to explore the base assumptions we are making here and perhaps assess whether or not we might need to be on a different future path or quest.

Let’s start with whether older adults as a group are experiencing more loneliness than they were before? As recently as late 2018, a research report from the AARP Foundation on 2,500 people of 45 and over said that almost a third of adults over 45 are lonely. Unfortunately, this report failed to say not only that this skewed higher in the 45-60 age range but that the feelings of loneliness declined from 60 years onwards and only started climbing again after age 75 (especially where individuals experienced the loss of a spouse or other close family member and ended up living alone, or even lost a beloved pet as an only ‘friend’ and did not have the heart to get another one, feeling perhaps, that he or she may pass before it did!.

If we go back 10 years to 2008, we find that a similar research study conducted by AARP (this time done with 3,000 people over 50 years of age) concluded that just over 1 in 3 of this population felt lonely. So, this tells us that little has changed or perhaps that things in the present are a little better than they were a decade ago for older folks. This is a little different to the hype we see today, which seems to want us to believe that things are deteriorating rapidly!

In the end, this kind of data, in my view, is merely ‘headline-grabbing’ and hides considerable complexity, not the least of which is that living alone or being isolated does not necessarily correlate with being lonely. The US National Council on Aging understands this well when it publishes its reports. It suggests that loneliness in adults 50 years old and over is running at present at around 16% (and reaches its peak at age 55 before declining) but only half of these or just under 8% are considered to be chronically lonely-a very different number. Once again, we have to get underneath this 8% to assess whether these people are ‘comfortably alone’ (meaning they are happy with their own company and do not crave a wider social network) or ‘uncomfortably alone’, meaning that they would prefer to have a wider social network and more regular connection. One way to illustrate this concept is in a simple 4-quadrant grid such as the one shown below:

As this grid shows we should support people’s needs to be on the right (at least some or perhaps all of the time) but be concerned with the states shown on the left (including feeling very ill at ease in group settings-a situation common in many more ‘introverted’ older adults.

The implications of this simple chart are that the interventions we should be thinking about or make should be highly cognizant of the needs of the particular person involved and his or her needs. In fact, the antidote to feelings of loneliness (short term or long term) may arise from physical, personal or social factors, as the diagram below nicely illustrates, and we need to consider all of these, both individually and in isolation, as needed:

If this model is nearer to what is needed to assess the overall loneliness issue, then we need to assess which changes are likely to have the quickest and greatest impact for the person involved and then further assess whether or not this change can be successfully brought about (given the person’s willingness and acceptance that this is a desired change, of course).

The bottom-line from all of the above is that we should be extremely careful about making untested guesses and assumptions in making pejorative determinations about highly complex problems like loneliness and the reasons for its existence. Instead, we should look for the facts and more nuanced reasons for loneliness to prevail in particular older adults and develop more sophisticated models that allow for more flexible solutions to be offered-sometimes in combination. If we do this well, the solutions offered will not only be about getting people to socialize more (which will be appealing to some, especially if their interests and motivations are well-aligned) but will offer a range of other possible changes that may have much greater efficacy for many others. In the end, the older adult, himself or herself must be the main arbiter of whether or not they still feel lonely.  

Jon Warner is CEO of Silver Moonshots-www.SilverMoonshots.org, a research and mentoring organization for enterprises interested in the 50+ older adult markets. He is also Chapter Ambassador for Aging 2.0 in Los Angeles and Co-chair of the SBSS “Aging in the Future” conference, in Los Angeles.