Summarizing the findings of a study published by the journal Aging and Mental Health, Emory University’s Rob Spahr reported that “middle-aged Americans demonstrated higher levels of loneliness than older adults.” This trend is having significant impacts on middle-­ aged men, such that it is even being called by some a public health crisis. UCLA Health, for instance, reports that social isolation raises the risk of men dying from any cause by more than 50 percent.

You may wonder why that is. When men live in relative isolation, they tend to lack the motivation to take care of themselves. They lack the encouragement they might need to go to the doctor and to stay physically active. Lonely men eat more, drink more, are more tempted to abuse drugs, and are more prone to depression and anxiety. Men who feel lonely tend to medicate their loneliness with gluttony, addiction, and laziness. And in the stage of midlife, when health problems usually begin to take a harder toll, loneliness can then constitute a surprising comorbidity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that social isolation can increase a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and suicidality. Lonely people die earlier too.

But if those are the dangerous effects of male loneliness, what are the causes? How do we avoid friendlessness in midlife? Plenty of men don’t imagine they’re at risk for loneliness, because they frequently feel surrounded by people. They’ve got people they pal around with at work. They’ve got dudes they make small talk with at church. They chitchat with the neighborhood bros about their lawns, the weather, the garbage schedule, and local sports. Maybe they’ve got an old friend or two they reconnect with here and there throughout the year. All of this adds up to the illusion of friendship without the true depth.

Most middle-aged men don’t lack for somebody to talk with about work or sports. But a great many of them have nobody they feel allowed to reach out to when they’re sitting in the family room at 2 A.M. with their head in their hands, unsure about how their marriage is going to survive or about how to talk to their kid who just came out as gay or about how to handle their grief and fear over a dying parent.

To make the situation more complex, many middle-aged men spend too much of their free time “relating” to people purely through the internet. We like to joke about all those young people spending their lives on their phones, but we’re deceiving ourselves if we think this is just a young people problem. I’ve noticed recently when out at restaurants that moms and dads are staring at their phones over dinner just as much, if not more, than their kids. I travel a lot, and I’ve become self-­conscious about my own phone use in airports as I’ve begun to notice that nearly every adult male in a gate area has his nose in a screen.

Middle-aged men may not use their phones the same way young people do, but I’m convinced they use them just as much. They may not be on TikTok or Instagram, but they’re scrolling X, Facebook, sports betting apps, and political YouTube channels. They’re firing off irate comments about political correctness or wokeness or those jerks at the IRS or the hardware store down the street. They’re in comments sections and on Facebook and Reddit pages, nursing outrage and provoking arguments. Even this activity contributes to the illusion that the man is not alone, because he can feel like he’s part of a tribe, a teammate in outrage. And that experience can medicate against the nagging reality of real-­life social alienation.

The truth is, men are lonely. They’ve become that way gradually. When my middle-­aged generation was young, we were highly communal. Gen X didn’t invent “hanging out,” but we made it a way of life. Movies like Reality Bites and Singles and TV shows like Friends and all of its imitations portrayed communal life both real and aspirational. Even shows like Cheers and Seinfeld, really products of Boomer culture, were formative media influences on Gen Xers, tapping into our desire to spend all day jawing with our buds. But life doesn’t always imitate art.

Every generation must come to grips with its own inability to live up to its ideals and values. This failure really hit the Baby Boomers hard. You can see it as early as the film The Big Chill, in which the starry-eyed friends once immersed in the counterculture reluctantly discover they’ve become the very kind of people they used to protest. Every generation sells out eventually. Gen Xers sold out their “hang out” lifestyle for the same reason everybody else does: They grew up, got jobs, had kids, and generally discovered that growing up into functional adulthood often doesn’t allow for it.

It just so happens that Gen Xers were going through this at the same time that real-­life social networks began to decline. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam famously used the vanishing of bowling leagues to illustrate the diminishing American social scene since the 1950s. Boomers well into middle age enjoyed lively networks of country clubs, men’s fraternal organizations, parent-teacher associations, flower clubs, high school and college alumni association events, and similar social circles. Younger generations appear to be reviving the spirit of these circles, but there was a notable decline of them for those now middle-­aged.

Exacerbating all of this was the rise of the social internet. Gen X was the first generation to take to online networks, originally proliferating in chat rooms, message boards, and early social platforms like MySpace or the blogosphere. The thing was rudimentary then, and we weren’t yet carrying it around in our pockets, but the pull of cyberspace—as we old-timers used to call it—proved intoxicating. It was new, it was interesting, and it began to frame our vision for relationships around isolation.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other factors contributing to middle-­aged social insularity as well—things like decline among Gen Xers in church attendance and their increased mobility for schooling and jobs. It’s almost as if the cultural forces at work throughout Gen X adulthood served as a tractor beam pulling them away from relational connection.

There is a lot more to say about the problem, and entire books have been written analyzing the forces and trends at work in the loneliness of middle-­aged men. And it’s important to know how we got here. But it’s more important to know how we can get out of it. If midlife has brought you into an isolated season, what can you do?