Strange, I always thought the epidemic of loneliness in post-industrial countries was attributable to alienation from culture and community, because we'd replaced self-sufficiently interesting forms of life with meaningless jobs in equally meaningless service stores built in meaningless communities by faceless multinational conglomerates, sold with lifestyle ads bundled with meaningless mass entertainment to people lacking a cultural immune response to the siren song of shallow mass culture.

The nuclear suburban household is a manifestation of the soulless, profit-driven mass culture that we've been actively fleeing from ever since we woke up to find ourselves isolated amongst our acquaintances. Every generation in the West since the 1950s has engaged in a desperate scramble to find meaning and connection, because, spoilers, there's something hauntingly awful about eating microwave dinners in front of the television with your family after working 10 hours doing supply chain managment for WhateverCo. with a spouse with whom you never learned to communicate with and children whose only job is to stay on the rails and not get any strange ideas about life.

I don't even think that loneliness is intrinsically a bad thing. Pain is a signal that forces you to adapt.