Be Kind, Everyone is Fighting a Social Atrophy You Know Nothing About

It’s a secret relief when people cancel plans. It should also make us worry.

“I’ve been having a hard time recently,” said my friend. I nodded. A lot of people have. Recently, she’d finally had the energy to reach out to others. But they were relatively unresponsive. Not texting back, not making plans, not showing up to events, not checking in, flaking. She felt annoyed. Didn’t they know she was having a hard time? But then, she’d been the same until recently, having too bad of a time to respond to others. 

Most people I know have been less sociable and indeed less capable of being sociable in the years since the pandemic. Even I have, recently (and I’m usually relentlessly extroverted.) There’s a term for this: social atrophy. 

It sounds extreme or flippant to compare our fraying social connections to muscle-wastage but the neuroscience is there: those who are socially isolated for a while lose some of the energy and capability involved in social life. They have smaller amygdalae (useful bits of the brain involved in emotion, reasoning, and memory) and higher stress levels. The more-isolated are more negative and paranoid, and have poor memory and verbal recall (this makes it harder to answer questions, like “what’s new?” and “how’s work?” and “Still seeing that guy with the mustache? What happened?”) 

In short, our brains’ most complex and difficult task is also what we do best as a species: socialise. When we don’t socialise very much we quickly get worse at it, and it becomes much more stressful. We soon find it less rewarding, and also may become more bitter, resentful, and anxious about other people’s behavior and motivations. Even if we do trust people, we still find being there with them more mental work. Hence the older folks who developed dementia faster in lockdown: their brains were shrinking. Hence my own recent shift to greater introversion as I finished my PhD. I needed solo writing time, sure. But also, even a few weeks more alone and effort began to exceed reward. People simply felt more like a burden, less energising. 

Images from a super cool animation about loneliness that you can and should look at here. 

No wonder we’re sometimes relieved when people cancel. No, seriously, don’t worry about it.

Except, of course, we should worry. Some scientists think the shrinkage in the brain associated with social atrophy can last for years, even as we socialise once again. Researchers also still see higher rates of social anxiety following the pandemic, especially for women and low-income people. 

This sounds like an individual problem, something for therapy maybe. And indeed fashionable psychotherapist Esther Perel has even taken it up as a cause, with suggestions for how to manage it in your life. But of course, it’s not just an individual problem happening to a long list of people, it’s a social, political problem. We are, for complex structural reasons ranging from longer work hours to single unit housing to fewer “third” spaces, more lonely than perhaps ever before. 

This loneliness and isolation makes us die sooner (much sooner!). It also makes communities weaker, more vulnerable in crises and less capable of tolerating diversity.  (Remember the paranoia and anxiety about other people’s intentions that comes with social atrophy?) So while I worry about the atrophy of our individual brains, I also worry about social atrophy at another scale: the social fabric between us, which has been shown to be good for our health and good for our ability to tolerate those different to us and help one another in a crisis.¹ 

This moment of social atrophy is in part the ongoing legacy of those specific few years where we all socialised less.² But that’s not to say there were easy answers when it came to COVID, because of course COVID can also shrink your brain. More to the point, social atrophy is also part of an ongoing trend that started before the pandemic and has only gotten worse during and since. Estrangement, alienation and isolation are part of a trend that has been happening over decades, as we stopped having big strong communities, places to go to belong, and a collective habit of being social with those living near us.³ 

The problem interests me in part because I often like to think about politics in terms of the “affordances” we have access to (the action-possibilities afforded to us by our environment). Currently, we have a world that does not afford us easy ways of joining new communities or belonging over generations. Excluding whatever existing party invitations, how easy would it be for you to go tonight and step into a warm, cheap space where you would be welcomed by people you don’t yet know, and where you could really hear people speak? Could you do this if you had a small child? Could you do it if you were disabled? Could you do it if you earned any less than you do now? How many people in your neighborhood know you and would check in on you if you had gone quiet over the holiday break? 

Social science suggests we aren’t afforded good possibilities for social life compared to previous generations, and neuroscience suggests that as a result we not only lack possibilities but capabilities: we lack ability to make use of the social world that remains. Our affordances and capabilities are always linked, here as elsewhere, individually and collectively.

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Let’s be honest, even if it’s depressing. We’re not just socially atrophied, we’re sort of everything-atrophied, which compounds the problem. We’re not just alone, but burnt-out-sad-and-alone, at least a lot of the time. We’re more cognitively overwhelmed. More exhausted trying to make a living, less hopeful about the state of the world. Almost everyone I know is poorer, or at least more precarious (even my many friends with fancy degrees). There’s the inflation and the lack of good jobs specifically, but also the ongoing sense, in my generation, that anything really desirable or stable is out of reach. Several friends this year have seen their industries simply dissolve. A chunk of friends have also left London and started to live in more remote locations in order to be able to afford things more easily—essentially choosing physical isolation in order to have financial stability. 

All this before we get to the news. Which is always agonising these days. Even if we got together, I sometimes find myself thinking, what is on our minds other than the terrible events on our phone screens? Does anyone really want to share how they are when the answer is…kinda bad?

And then there’s all the downstream mental effects of the above. Everyone seems to have ADHD now, as many commentators have noted. And sure, many people really do. But notice also how hard it is to “function” in an endlessly uncertain world. It makes sense to be restless and distracted and unmotivated and depressed given the ongoing sense of uncertainty and disappointment that so many of us face. Which of course makes it harder for us to show up for other people.

Finally, though, there’s what’s maybe the most excruciating bit: showing up as we really are given how messy many of us really are. The sharing part of being together feels harder somehow now that almost everyone I know is doing badly in some way. Vulnerability is always a prisoner's dilemma, where you have to take a leap and hope the other person is open to being vulnerable too. (Otherwise, how mortifying!) But when both people are suffering, or when one has already been isolated for a while, it’s somehow harder to open up about pain and difficulty. I can fear that my pain will simply intensify if I say it out loud, that it will trigger the other person, that it will seem insensitive given whatever they are dealing with, or that what I say will be ignored to some degree, which itself can become a source of pain and resentment.  (Again—remember the paranoia and anxiety about other people’s intentions that comes with social atrophy?)

And so we struggle to reach out, and to respond with our fragile hurting brains. We want connection, and we also find the possibility potentially very difficult when we’re not doing so well. After all, if you invite someone over, they will see your messy house, and maybe judge you. And everyone’s “house” is a mess right now in one way or another.

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Where does this leave us, any of us?

Firstly, some of you may be familiar with the joyful idea of email forgiveness day, which is today, Dec 31st! As the inventor put it, 

Here at Reply All, we invented a holiday called Email Debt Forgiveness Day - a holiday to erase all the guilt that comes from being bad at email. If there’s an email response you’ve wanted to send but been too anxious to send, you can send it on December 31, without any apologies or explanations for all the time that has lapsed. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. Just include a link to this explainer, the one you’re reading right now, so that your recipient knows what’s going on. Together, we can all make our inboxes less stressful.

Let’s celebrate, shall we? Send someone a message that you accidentally left on read, if you can. Check in on someone who has gone quiet. More to the point, let’s try to not just do things like this on this one weird day: let’s attempt to forgive ourselves and others repeatedly and always start again.

Another probably-valid path of action, albeit one I struggle with, is to see the solution to social atrophy as similar to the solution to muscle atrophy and force ourselves to “exercise” regularly even if we hate it. I chafe at this because honestly it sounds like another hideous self-care task forced on me in this unforgiving world. What, I have make myself to work out regularly, and then stretch and apply retinol, and now also this? There’s something dystopian about having our connections with others, which we’d like to happen naturally and easily due to love and affection, become a chore. There’s a cruelty in having to think of this of all things as a matter of discipline and not spontaneity. 

And, yet. It’s not an entirely new idea that we sometimes have to force ourselves back to social life. It seems to me Jews understood it when it came to mourning rituals and norms. Right after loss, in my culture, you get to be alone and/or surrounded by a cocoon of specifically-instructed people. After thirty days you have to go out in the world, but differently. After a year, you set the stone on the grave and are meant to return to life as normal. Even if you don’t entirely feel like it. The actions come first, and the brain catches up later. This much was understood before neuroscience.

Sometimes when I sit down to write about the social fabric as a political problem I feel a bit sheepish. Am I really effectively suggesting that throwing parties, or showing up to them, is somehow radical? Am I shaming people for struggling to respond to texts? Is this all a bit of a dumb little sermon? I am sorry about this, for what it’s worth. 

On the other hand, I do think that resisting the isolation structurally thrust upon us is important, good work, work that actively helps the people around us, work that doesn’t cost too much, work we can do every day and not just when a protest arises. It’s not as glamorous as a big revolution and it might not feel like an accomplishment. But lots of important things are like this: they are about maintaining, building, continuity of what is good among the bad of the world. At risk of sounding like a pearl-clutching conservative, maybe we have to do a little work to repair what has frayed. If we want to be able to reach other people, and eventually build a better world together, we might first tend to the damage to our brains and communities that has been forced upon us structurally—especially if we can do this to help people with fewer resources than ourselves have a social world again. We can do this individually, and we can do this by trying to change the way our housing, public spaces, working hours, social net, and leisure time work. We should, of course, do both.

Just to start, I try to pick up the less-glamorous but very rewarding work of making a social world in my life that friends and strangers can enter, and checking in on those who might not write me back. I don’t take it personally when they don’t, if I can help it. Everyone is fighting social atrophy, and I know, well, just a little about it. 

1.  A good book on this is Ethan Kleinenberg’s book on social infrastructure, Palaces for the People: How to Build a More Equal and United Society. 

2.  Plus it’s not as if the world returned to the way it was before, either. There’s more working from home, more digital communication and fewer in-person chats.

3.  The most famous sociological text on this is probably Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.