Posted August 19, 2026
This has been termed “the anti-social century.” Solo travel searches on Google hit a record high this year. According to a new Atlantic article, even college students, one of the most socially active demographics in America, spend much less time socializing than past generations did.
The share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the last two decades. Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults and say they have more positive interactions with professors than with peers. Clubs are résumé enhancers more than socializing opportunities.
The US Surgeon General recently warned that our country is facing a “loneliness epidemic.” But the problem is not that we don’t have enough friends—it’s that our friends are not the kind of friends we need.
Social media opens the world to us on our digital devices. We have “friends” on Facebook, “followers” on Instagram and X, and multiple other ways to “know” people. But such friendships are significantly different from friendships in previous generations, the type of close-knit communities formed at church, school, work, and small-town life.
Psychologists call this problem the “friendship depth gap.” They point to the landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies ever conducted on human happiness. Its researchers found that the strongest predictor of a happy, meaningful life is not wealth, success, or physical health—it’s the quality of our relationships.
Here is where so many of us are falling short. We have few friends we would call in a crisis or people who really know what’s happening in our lives. The older we get, the less we are engaged in the kind of community fostered by schools and interactions around children and family.
The key, experts say, is to take the risk to know the people we know on a deeper level, to be willing to share the hard parts of our lives, to step beyond superficial friendships into a place of deeper empathy and compassion.
This discussion calls to mind John Powell’s classic 1969 book, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? The answer is simple: because I’m afraid you won’t like me if I do. So I create various “masks” for the various people and situations in my life. I have a mask for Sunday at church, another for Monday at work or school, another for this group of friends, and yet another for that group of colleagues.
Those who wear such “masks” are working within a construct known as the “idealized self,” the person we wish we were. We get up each day, put on this self, and then strive to convince others that it is who we really are. All the while, we know the truth and fear others will discover it.
One of my great mentors in life was a brilliant attorney who argued several cases before the US Supreme Court and was a pivotal voice in tax legislation across his career. For his seventieth birthday, his firm invited some of the most prestigious legal figures in the country to attend a reception in his honor. My friend invited me to attend as well.
The room was filled with notable leaders who took turns lauding my friend for his many contributions and brilliant career. When they were done, my mentor was pressed to “say a few words,” something he had been told he would not be asked to do. He stepped slowly to the microphone, looked out over the crowded room, and said simply, “For so many friends to know the man I strive to be, know the man I am, and forgive the difference, I am most grateful.”
I shared his words at his memorial service some years later and think of them often. Such transparency is the need of the day and a goal worth pursuing.
In Judges 18, the tribe of Dan attacked the people of Laish and took their land. The writer explains why Laish fell: “There was no deliverer because it was far from Sidon, and they had no dealings with anyone” (v. 28). They were self-sufficient until they were not. When they most needed the help of others, they had not done what was necessary to cultivate such relationships. And so they lost their lives and their land.
We don’t know we need others until we need them. When death strikes and grief overwhelms, when disease afflicts and suffering engulfs, we need help beyond ourselves and a community to share our pain. But our secularized society promotes the myth of the self-made person and rewards self-reliance until it’s too late to foster the relationships we need.
Even those of us who have religious commitments can make them in this context: worshiping God on Sunday so he will bless us on Monday and otherwise doing what he wants so he will do what we want. Then, when (not if) the crisis strikes, we think God has let us down, that he has not kept his side of our bargain, leaving us even more isolated than if we had not made such a bargain at all.
Thus Satan uses for evil what God means for good. I have seen this pattern in my own family and in the churches I served. Any of us can be like Laish today, thinking we are prosperous in our self-reliance until the tribe of Dan attacks and our self-deception is revealed.
It’s been said that the two best times to plant a tree are twenty years ago and today. We can’t do anything about the past except learn from it. But we can plant “trees” of transparent mutuality today. We can seek to deepen the roots of relationships in the soil of honest community. We can answer Jesus’ prayer for the unity of his people (John 17:23) by seeking his leading and then taking the risky step of authenticity.
The counselor Larry Crabb advised,
“God meets us where we are, not where we pretend to be.”
Where will God meet you today?
“A man who stands before God does not mind standing before men. The hiding of one’s sin before a brother is the hiding of one’s sin before God.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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