Modern life has led to greater isolation, which can fuel an array of disorders. If there are medications for social pains like depression and anxiety, why not loneliness?

oneliness is part of the human condition. A primeval warning sign, like hunger or thirst, to seek out a primary resource: connection. Millions of years of evolution have shaped us into creatures who need social bonds in the same way that we need food and water.

And yet we increasingly find ourselves isolated. Loneliness is no longer a powerful enough driver to break us out of the silos created by modern life. Like our insatiable love of high-calorie foods, what was once an adaptive tool has become so misaligned with the way we live that it's causing, in the words of the former surgeon general Vivek H Murthy, an "epidemic".

It's hard to compare our collective loneliness against that of previous generations, as we simply haven't been measuring it consistently, but recent estimates suggest that anywhere from 22% to 75% of American adults are persistently lonely.