On the recordJune 21, 2023
Mr. President, I am on the floor tonight to talk about a topic that rarely, if ever, gets discussed on the Senate floor. I am here to talk about loneliness. Every single one of us, over the course of our life, has felt lonely, maybe really intensely lonely. I certainly have. It is an awful feeling, right? It creates this pit in your stomach. It creates a consuming melancholy for many. Sometimes intense loneliness can make you physically ill. Often, it makes you really agitated and angry, right? Why is this happening to me? Now, there are, frankly, a lot of reasons to believe that less Americans today should feel lonely than ever before. More of us live in densely populated parts of the country than ever before. Technology now allows us to connect to friends and family and communities that share interests more easily than ever before at the press of a button. But evidence from psychology and sociology tells us that the opposite is true. In recent decades, we have seen rising levels of both aloneness, which is defined as having fewer social contacts, and high levels of loneliness, which is defined as feelings of isolation. We live closer to each other than ever before. We have technologies that allow us to connect to people with more ease than ever before, but people are feeling lonelier.…
Source
govinfo.gov




