In this thought-provoking conversation, Lawrence Quill, co-director of the Loneliness Project at San Jose State University dives deep into the modern loneliness epidemic and the surprising role technology plays as both the cause and potential cure. Drawing on ancient philosophy and cutting-edge insights, we explore why so many people—from the “feral generation” to Gen Z—feel more isolated than ever, how our phones and social media may be quietly rewiring our relationships, and whether AI companions and chatbots could genuinely ease loneliness or make it worse.
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Transcript:
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, joining me now is Dr. Lawrence Quill of San Jose State University. He is the co-director of The Loneliness Project.
Dr. Quill, it’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us on the program this morning.
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Thank you. It’s a very great pleasure to be here.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Let’s, before we get into isolation and loneliness, I would love for you to tell myself and the audience about The Loneliness Project. Tell us about what you write about, what you’re studying, and why it’s so important in today’s world.
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Well, thank you for the question. It’s important because we’re thinking about it and we’re talking about this a lot. And at San Jose State, in the College of Social Sciences, which is where I’ve spent most of my academic career, it turns out that there are lots of people interested in the topic.
They can be anthropologists, psychologists, urban studies professionals, and sort of political science people like me with a philosophical bent. And it turns out that people have been thinking about loneliness in all sorts of ways for literally hundreds of years. So it’s not exactly a new topic.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Okay, so it’s not a new topic, but yet it’s of interest to everyone. Doctor, would it be safe to say that human beings in general and by nature are communal, meaning they like to interact with each other? I mean, is that traditionally how human beings have interacted?
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Yes, it’s a very good question. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that assumption. Depending, of course, upon who you talk to, people will say we are communal creatures, we are social by nature.
This is all true. But at the same time, some of the earliest writings that we have in the ancient world talk about the importance of being by yourself, actually retreating away from the city, away from the crowd. And the reason they say that, interestingly enough, and I think it does resonate, is because they say politics is really not good for your mental health.
Really, these ideas…
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
They were onto something!
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Thousands of years old, these ideas. It’s like retreat from the city, put politics to one side, hang out with your friends, don’t surround yourself with people that are going to cause you anxiety. So we’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, apparently. And, you know, coincidentally, I just finished reading again Thoreau’s Walden, and he had a very interesting story. I’m sure you know Thoreau very well.
He actually went off for two years, two months and two days, and was out on his own. That, I think, aligns very well with what you’re talking about in terms of individualism and kind of keeping your thoughts, exploring your thoughts. So let’s talk about some of this technology.
And I have my iPhone over here. It’s not on camera, but, you know, a lot of people… I remember when it was first created, and Steve Jobs, the former founder of Apple, now unfortunately no longer with us, founded it.
And he gave this big introduction, and he said, this is going to bring the world together, and you’ll be able to make phone calls and do all these things. But in some ways, Doctor, it’s also an isolating technology.
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Hmm. I think you’re onto something. I think that’s right, and I think there’s an awful lot of research that would support that.
It varies, interestingly enough, by generation. If you can remember a world before the Internet…
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I do, I do.
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Right. And before the iPhone, which came in 2007, 2008, if you can remember a world before then, in some ways you’re better prepared to handle the kind of challenges that the new technology has presented. So you can use it as a connecting device.
I speak to my elderly mother in England regularly via the iPhone, and it’s absolutely wonderful. But if you’ve been born into a world where this is all you know, and that the social media world, the digital world, is more present and real to you than the reality that perhaps we grew up with, the physical reality, then that can cause some problems. That way it can be a sort of disconnect while you’re connecting.
And the data does show that millennials and Gen Z tend to suffer, and they do suffer more and speak more about feelings of loneliness than perhaps Gen X or even some boomers. So that’s kind of interesting, and that’s a new phenomenon.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, you know, I guess I can relate to that because, you know, I grew up, I’m probably a little bit older than you are, but I grew up with like the typewriter, the fax machine, you know, the Apple II computer. So most of the interactions I had were with people, you know, playing on sports teams and doing whatnot. And maybe in some ways my generation and those that came before me maybe had better coping mechanisms because of that experience.
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
Well, I think you make a very good point. So I’m part of Gen X, which has been called the feral generation, which I rather like because we were let loose. We had a lot of unsupervised play.
We spent hours by ourselves or with our friends, and we kind of just got on with it. There’s been a change independent of the technology with how Gen X parents brought up their children. They were much more supervised.
The term is helicopter parenting. We’re familiar with that. I think that plus the technology has created an ecosystem where there’s less opportunity for young people to spend time by themselves that isn’t supervised.
And, you know, there are pros and cons, but it means that the generations have grown up differently. So we have different ways of understanding what is okay, what is appropriate, what we should worry about, and what we should just let go. And that makes it hard to understand a phenomenon like loneliness, which is, I suppose, in part why I’m interested in studying it.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So let’s talk a little bit about more the condition. I’m not a psychotherapist. I don’t really come from the behavioral world.
But how would you define is it a feeling? Is it an emotion? Is it a combination of all those things?
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
A very good question. And a lot of ink has been spilt just trying to work out what it is we’re talking about. Because a lot of the information that we’re working with has come about because of surveys.
So surveys that have been administered since the 1990s. There’s the UCLA Loneliness Index. That’s a whole range of questions that people have been given over the years and variations on that kind of test, that survey.
But it’s self-reporting. So if people feel particularly lonely one day, it’s possible that they may not feel quite so lonely the following day or a week later or a month later. So in a sense, you have to take these surveys with a pinch of salt.
It’s much easier to report that we feel a certain way now than it was in the past, not least because of the digital environment. We’re filling out surveys all the time. So we do have a lot of data.
But what that data means, it’s kind of harder to say. And there have been some high profile cases of the same surveys being administered years apart to roughly the same group of people. And they produce different results.
So you can’t really pin down with any great degree of accuracy how bad loneliness is. That said, in popular culture and thanks to some rather high profile reports by the former surgeon general in the United States, we allegedly live in a loneliness epidemic. I’m not convinced personally, but it’s pretty alarming to hear that sort of thing.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And when you think about the generations, would you think the millennials or maybe maybe Gen Z? Maybe that the are they? And I think back to Covid when we were really all isolated, but in particular, the kids were kind of coming up.
You know, they didn’t know what you know, they had no experience. They were asked to stay at home. But do you think that they maybe feel loneliness more than you or I as a as a feral generation or maybe our parents who are the boomer generation?
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. There’s a wonderful professor at San Diego State called Jean Twenge. She’s a social psychologist and she’s written books about this.
And all of the data that she’s collected suggests that millennials and Gen Z speak up much more about their feelings. And they report much more about their state of mental health. And that includes loneliness.
They feel it a lot more. Now, the irony here is that Professor Twenge isolates or points to the introduction of the cell phone as the technology that marks the generations apart. And has, in a sense, I suppose you could say, had a great deal to do with creating loneliness.
But also it’s the technology that many, many tech companies try to use, utilize to resolve issues of loneliness, to make us less lonely. So they’re using the same technology that perhaps has created some of these conditions in the first place.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So, you know, I have to be honest and say, you know, I work from home. The studio that you’re seeing me in is in my home, one of the bedrooms. But I feel connected to you because you and I are having a conversation.
Now, we aren’t in the same room technically. And I guess I can’t see you from the sternum down. But for me, that’s very satisfying.
It would, you know, in terms of I don’t feel lonely. Now, if I was home alone, it was just me and the cats. I guess if my wife wasn’t here, I would feel by myself and a little lonely.
Does that connection that you and I are having, do other generations, the younger generations feel that same connection? Or do I do I resolve the loneliness by being physically next to somebody, seeing a warm body or having the the aura of a warm body, if you will, next to me?
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
So these are great questions. So let me see if I can, if I can, in the time that we have, do my best to splice them apart. About physical connection, what we know about millennials and Gen Z is that they physically connect a lot less than the feral generation did or the boomers did.
And that’s been a cultural phenomenon. People over the decades, people spend less time together in public places. And there are all sorts of reasons why that might be.
People don’t hang out the way they used to. So that’s the simplest way to put it. They spend a lot more time online and that’s how they’ve learned to communicate.
So the communication is mediated and that’s the first point of contact. And this is really a big generational shift that X’s and boomers can’t really wrap their heads around because the default for them is always to come back to a physical connection that makes sense. But there’s an additional problem with that as well.
And this one’s a little harder to unpack, but I’ll try to keep this as simple as I can. And that is that people are finding it much harder to talk to one another now. And there are all sorts of reasons why that might be.
We hear a lot about polarization in our political communities, not just in North America, but across the English speaking world. And that’s very sad, but there’s something to it. It means that while the technology has been making us more individual and isolated and covered really tips us over the edge.
Before that, there’s some evidence to suggest that people were moving to parts of America where they felt more comfortable with people like them politically, perhaps socioeconomically, religiously. This has been going on since the 90s, perhaps even before then, from the 70s, when urban centers emptied out and the suburbs really took off. So there’s this going along as well.
And and so we have a technology that individualizes and we have a desire to be surrounded by people with whom we’re comfortable for one reason or another. And that does not make it easy to talk to people randomly. So I would say that those two factors are rather interesting.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, it’s a it’s a shame. And we’ll probably have to spend another show trying to trying to figure out how to maybe undo or resolve some of that. But I’ve got about two and a half minutes left.
And I want to ask you, we’ve talked about the iPhone technology and some of the newer technologies, technologies. I was talking to someone today about artificial intelligence. I want to get your perception about that, because I could see that as, you know, it’s kind of like friendly, though it’s not human.
It’s human like, but not human. Are we headed towards a world where each of us has our own little AI, large language learning model that we interact with and that becomes our friend and that takes away some of the loneliness?
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
It’s a great question. I mean, I hope we have another chance to talk about that. And so, yeah, the short answer is yes.
I think the short answer is yes. And I say that for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of the largest technology companies seem to be pushing us in that direction.
Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed, I think, last year. He spoke to the loneliness problem specifically. And his solution was to encourage people to have more friends in his metaverse.
So in his AI digital environment, he said, you know, this is where you can have more friends. Now we could get into that. Now is not the time.
But he clearly thinks there’s a technological solution to a social problem. I think the other thing might be slightly more interesting, which is and this is just anecdotal. But how many of the people I know use large language models as their personal therapists?
So they foregone physical therapy, you know, interacting with an actual trained therapist. And they talk to their AI and they train their AI to speak to them in a way that they find comforting. Because what they lack are friends with whom they confide, family members they feel comfortable with.
But the AI is always there. It’s generally very positive. It’s your personal cheerleader.
And it makes them it makes them feel better. Now, there have been all sorts of objections to this kind of technology behaving in this sort of way. I understand that.
That’s something we could talk about another time. But it’s here. It’s very sophisticated.
And I think it provides a great deal of comfort. Now, that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t issues or problems with this, because I think there are. But I think it’s here.
And I think we’re only going to have more of it in the future. Yeah.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And from what I understand, talking to experts, it’s growing exponentially. Like every few months, it gets like super, like twice or four times as smart. So I think we have our work cut out for us.
But look, Dr. Quill, I really appreciate your time. And, you know, we’ll invite you back. We’ll bring you back because I think there’s a lot more to unpack there.
Thanks for joining us. And we look forward to having you back soon, sir.
Lawrence Quill, PhD., , co-director of The Loneliness Project, San Jose State University.
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
