How Do We Prevent Loneliness During COVID-19?

In the middle of a pandemic, loneliness poses an entirely new set of complicated questions: How do we bond when we can’t touch? How do we feel cohesion when we’re physically separate? And how do we start to move toward a system that doesn’t disproportionately punish single-person households and the homeless?

To answer these questions, the entertaining sociologist Dr. Roger Patulny joined me for a chat last week. Patulny has studied trust, vulnerability, volunteering, and social connection—all topics buzzing around us as we struggle to understand how to lift our spirits when our doors are closed.

When faced with the difficult question of what he would do if he were a local government official, Patulny explains that we don’t need a one-size-fits-all approach to the pandemic. We can, for instance, encourage a quarantine for a few weeks and allow individuals in single-person households to see others.

After talking about the pandemic, we delved into some of his research, including a study that looked at whether Americans would be happier if they lived more like Australians. Watch the video below for his surprising findings.