On the morning of November 25, 2021, Liya Khaimova toasted two crumpets, brewed a mug of coffee, and sat down in the kitchen of the home she shared with her boyfriend in St. Louis. “I remember waking up and being in a somewhat okay mood,” she says. “But as I was eating breakfast, a wave of sadness hit me. I was sitting there by myself on Thanksgiving morning, which I don’t think I’ve ever done in my life.”
Khaimova’s boyfriend, a musician, was on tour. Her family was in Atlanta, where she grew up. Her friends were scattered; after getting her master’s in music from the University of Southern California, Khaimova moved to the Midwest.
“In St. Louis I now have maybe two solid friends, and family who I see pretty frequently,” she says. Her then boyfriend, now her husband, is often touring. “I am physically alone a lot of the time,” she says. “When he’s home, I have one life. When he’s gone, I have another. And sometimes it’s hard to bring them together.” She pauses. “I still struggle with trying to figure out if I’m feeling lonely or not.”
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An Epidemic of Loneliness
There is surprisingly little quantitative data on who feels lonely during the holidays and what that loneliness means. Much of it, confoundingly, comes from a personal finance company, which for several years commissioned a survey of Americans 18 and over on the topic. In 2021, 55 percent reported experiencing loneliness during the holidays. In 2017, when the AARP Foundation asked the same age group to reflect on the previous five holiday seasons, 31 percent said they had felt lonely sometime. But these numbers lack context. How many of these people were also lonely in October, or January, or July?
“We know that people who feel isolated and lonely around the holidays don’t feel that way only around the holidays,” says Jennifer Raymond, chief strategy officer at AgeSpan, a nonprofit that works to build social connection and food security among residents of northeast Massachusetts.
Maybe someone is feeling lonely in November or December “because they’ve lost a loved one or they have some struggles with their family members,” says Jillian Racoosin Kornmeier, executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection, a Washington, DC, nonprofit. Grief or family conflict don’t necessarily stop when the holidays end. Neither does the sense that some form of social connection is missing from our days.
In this regard, the data is more comprehensive. The American Time Use Survey, published each year by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), presents a detailed account of how people 15 and older spend their days. In 2003, the first year BLS asked Americans to keep time-use diaries, people spent an average of 4 hours 47 minutes a day alone. But in 2023, people spent an average of nearly seven hours a day alone and just about four hours a week socializing.
Isolation is not the same as loneliness, which exists in the space between the social connection a person wants and the social connection they have. A person who spends much of their time alone might do so happily; conversely, it’s possible to feel lonely when surrounded by people. But as social isolation has risen, loneliness has too: A recent study found that people who spent more than 75 percent of their waking hours alone reported the greatest loneliness. Nearly one in three American adults reports feeling lonely at least once a week, according to the American Psychiatric Association. One in 10 say they are lonely every day. Worse, both are linked to the risk of premature death; lack of social connection can be as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness and social isolation, US surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy, MD, declared last year, have become an epidemic.