No coffee, no conversation, no community

On a typical Monday in London, a young software tester arrives home and realizes that she has said just three words all day: “Flat white, please,” mumbled to a barista who barely looks up. The rest of the day is spent coding, headphones on, and algorithms that know her better than her neighbors.

When you finally check your cell phone and see no missed calls, you feel a discomfort that now has a name and statistics: loneliness.

And you're not alone in this.

Loneliness has become a silent epidemic, and for the first time in modern history, governments are beginning to view it not as a mere individual malaise but as a matter of public policy. In 2018, the United Kingdom took the unprecedented step of appointing a Minister for Loneliness, a move that not so long ago would have seemed like something out of a dystopian satire, but which today responds to an urgent reality: almost half of British adults say they feel lonely often. Seven percent say they feel lonely all the time .

The global outlook is no more encouraging. According to a Gallup poll, 23% of people said they had felt lonely “for much of the previous day”. In the United States, one in five adults reported the same in 2024. And, in a particularly disturbing statistic, the proportion of those who say they have no close friends rose from 12% to 17% in just three years. Among young people, paradoxically the most connected, immersed in a constant flow of digital presence, the rate of those who say they are regularly lonely reaches 34%.

Although often associated with mental health, this wave of loneliness reveals something deeper: the emptying of community life. What, after all, has disappeared from urban life to leave so many people adrift?

What we lose when we close the corner cafe

Sociologists define life in three spaces: home, work and so-called third places, an expression coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to designate informal spaces for socializing: cafes, libraries, squares, bars, beauty salons, churches. These are accessible, unpretentious and open environments, where strangers become familiar faces and conversation flows without the need for an invitation or agenda. Spaces where it is not necessary to make an appointment to meet someone.

For much of the twentieth century, such places were abundant, discreet pillars of the urban social fabric. Cafés, parks, taverns: all helped to intertwine strangers in informal and unexpected bonds. Then, almost without us noticing, the fabric began to unravel, quietly eroded by prohibitive rents, restrictive urban regulations, gentrification, pervasive fear, the cult of productivity, and a leisure economy dominated by screens.

In 2024 alone, more than 300 pubs will close in England and Wales, an average of six per week. Since 2016, more than 180 public libraries have been closed or handed over to volunteers in less-resourced neighbourhoods. When the most accessible spaces in the city disappear, so too does the possibility of chance encounters, unexpected conversations, and the discovery of others outside the domain of algorithms.

At the same time, a digitally-driven leisure economy has taken over time previously reserved for public life. Today, an average American adult spends 7 hours and 3 minutes a day in front of screens, an increase of 54 minutes since 2019 and the trend is rising. Remote work has exacerbated this separation: fewer commutes mean fewer opportunities for coffee between tasks, fewer moments of shared relaxation. Friendship has become something that is planned in advance. And most calendars are already full.

Added to this is a culture marked by persistent anxiety about security and a growing individualism. We teach children not to trust strangers, only to be shocked later by adults who fail to be good neighbours. The world of work, shaped by algorithms and metrics, elevates productivity to the status of supreme virtue, while the simple act of resting on a park bench is sometimes viewed with suspicion. Today, only a third of Britons say they trust strangers, a sharp decline since the start of the millennium.

Finally, the short-sightedness of public policies ends this cycle of erosion. Municipal budgets continue to prioritize roads and consumption, while squares, parks and community centers, the true cradles of communal life, are neglected. Urban planning codes still treat conversation as noise to be suppressed, and not as a form of culture to be protected.

These forces do not act in isolation. They are woven into the same historical arc: public spaces where spontaneous solidarity was once cultivated were first commodified, then digitalized and, finally, pathologized.

Health without park benches

Close the corner café, close the library, raise prices at the local pub, and something subtle but devastating begins to creep into the fabric of urban life. Civic trust, that invisible thread that sustains human coexistence, begins to unravel. Where meeting points are scarce, faith in others also diminishes: OECD studies show that, in the absence of common ground, few believe that a neighbour would return a lost wallet. Public debate is retracted into digital bubbles, where echo chambers replace dialogue and polarisation finds fertile ground. Without the chance of informal conversations, there is no longer any neutral ground on which differences can flourish. The city, once a place for encounters, is transformed into a merely functional, useful setting, but devoid of soul.

And this erosion is not limited to the cultural sphere. It goes deeper. It corrodes the body, just as it corrodes the spirit. A landmark study published in JAMA ( Journal of the American Medical Association ) revealed that social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 32%. Chronic loneliness adds another 14%. Recently, the US Director of Public Health put loneliness on a par with heavy smoking: living without connections, without socializing, can be as lethal as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Or, to put it another way: the lack of shared spaces shortens life like a pack of cigarettes a day.

No urban planner would tolerate a drinking water system that killed a third of the population. And yet we continue to design urban landscapes that silently eliminate the collective environments that make physical, mental and social health possible. The result is not just bad moods or a vague sense of emptiness, but high blood pressure, weakened immune systems and increasingly stagnant economic mobility.

Rebuild to reconnect

Loneliness is neither destiny nor a natural condemnation. Rather, it is the result of urban, economic and political choices. And, for this very reason, it can be undone by these same means. Until we recognize coexistence as an integral part of the city’s essential infrastructure, loneliness will continue to act as an invisible, silent but deeply corrosive pollutant that undermines collective health and undoes the bonds that sustain us.

Rebuilding so-called third places , those spaces where people neither live nor work, but where they simply are, has become urgent. And this does not mean opening more cafés or redesigning squares with new benches. It means understanding sociability as a public good. It means designing streets that invite people to stay, and not just pass by quickly. It means creating incentives for neighborhood libraries, true beacons of encounter. It means reviewing planning codes that stifle conversation and exclusively favor commercial logic. Just as we treat sanitation, lighting and transportation as fundamental urban rights, it is time to do the same with human connections.

The young Londoner will continue to order her “ flat white ,” as she has on so many previous mornings. But perhaps, if the city is more generous with its spaces and more open to its own people, someone on the other side of the counter will finally look up and ask, with sincere curiosity: “ How are you?”