In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy sounded the alarm about what he called “the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country.” Under Murthy’s direction, the Department of Health and Human Services released a surprisingly frank exposition of America’s social problems, titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” Marriage rates, fertility, and household sizes have all declined dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, the report finds. Social networks are getting smaller. Time spent alone is rising. Three in ten households consist of one person. Only 30 percent of Americans think that they can reliably trust one another. And 16 percent of Americans feel strongly attached to their local community.

These are all alarming statistics, but they are part of a longer-running trend. A kind of loneliness grew over the course of the twentieth century in the West, worsening toward its end. Robert Putnam’s famous book Bowling Alone showed that participation in clubs or civic societies had declined over the course of the last century. The number of men with no close friends has increased fivefold since 1990. Suicides have increased in the United States since the end of the twentieth century, as have deaths of despair. In 2016, Europe was found to be the most suicidal region in the world by gross rate. Average life expectancy in America has begun to decline. According to a recent Gallup survey, only 31 percent of respondents said that they had attended a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple within the past seven days. This represents a noteworthy decline of about 10 percent from the late-twentieth century up to about 2012.

Young people, too, are increasingly unhappy. The percentage of teenaged Americans who claim not to enjoy life, or who believe that their lives are not useful, is now just under 50 percent—nearly a 20 percent rise since the early 1990s, as documented in Jean M. Twenge’s new book Generations. Hopelessness, despondency, and a sort of “flatness” have been invoked to describe the dominant feeling of our time. Politics is polarized practically everywhere. Warfare has returned to Europe, and a deteriorating Russia is once again threatening to use nuclear weapons.