Vocabulary para el examen de admisión

Being lonely has all sorts of negative health consequences, especially later in life when people are more vulnerable to downturns in both physical and cognitive health. More people are becoming aware that loneliness is connected to everything from heart disease to diabetes, to dementia. Being lonely is roughly equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

It’s not that we are less friendly than we were a decade ago, but we participate far less in activities that provide the glue of social connection. Declines in social connection date back at least to the 1980s but it is shocking what is happening with older Americans over just the last decade and a half.

According to AARP, for people 60+, attendance at religious services plunged from 50  % to 37 %, belonging to a community group dropped from 32 % to 25 % and volunteering rates collapsed, falling to 33 % from 47 %. These are huge, epochal changes for older Americans that have happened in just the past 15 years. COVID-19, we might speculate, may have had something to do with that, but trends predate the pandemic and there is no evidence that in the three years past that participation rates among older adults are rebounding.

Loneliness in the second half of life needs to be a focus of public health policy, not just because rates of loneliness are increasing but because we have so many more older people now. It is particularly complex because everything from how we live (far apart from each other) to how we work (older workers routinely lose social networks when they are pushed out from work) to how we use technology (way too much) contributes to our epidemic of loneliness.

Adapted from Stern, K. (2026). Older Americans are lonely. It’s a public health crisis. USA Today.