By PETER SMITH, Associated Press

It’s been called an “epidemic” of loneliness and isolation. The “bowling alone” phenomenon.

By any name, it refers to Americans’ growing social disconnection by many measures.

Americans are less likely to join civic groups, unions and churches than in recent generations. They have fewer friends, are less trusting of each other and less likely to hang out in a local bar or coffee shop, recent polling indicates. Given all that, it’s not surprising that many feel lonely or isolated much of the time.

Such trends form the backdrop to this Associated Press report on small groups working to restore community connections.

They include a ministry pursuing “trauma-informed community development” in Pittsburgh; a cooperative helping small farmers and their communities in Kentucky; an “intentional” community of Baltimore neighbors; and organizations seeking to restore neighborhoods and neighborliness in Akron, Ohio.

Related Articles

You finally got a doctor’s appointment. Here’s how to get the most out of it

Doctor’s orders? ‘Belly laugh at least two to five days a week’

Call 911 or risk losing the baby? Raids force some immigrants to avoid care

Pediatrics group sues HHS for cutting funds for children’s health programs

‘The best gift ever’: Baby is born after the rarest of pregnancies, defying all odds

Loneliness and its health risks

In 2023, then Surgeon General Vivek Murthy reported on an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” similar to his predecessors’ advisories on smoking and obesity.

Isolation and loneliness aren’t identical — isolation is being socially disconnected, loneliness the distress of lacking human connection. One can be alone but not lonely, or lonely in a crowd.

But overall, isolation and loneliness are “risk factors for several major health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and premature mortality,” the report said.

Murthy says he’s encouraged by groups working toward social connection through local initiatives ranging from potluck dinners to service projects. His new Together Project, supported by the Knight Foundation, aims to support such efforts.

“What we have to do now is accelerate that movement,” he said.

The pandemic temporarily exacerbated social isolation. There’s been some rebound, but often not back to where it was before.

Scholars and activists have cited various potential causes — and effects — of disconnection. They range from worsening political polarization to destructive economic forces to rat-race schedules to pervasive social media.

Murthy said for many users, social media has become an endless scroll of performance, provocation and unattainably perfect body types.

“What began perhaps as an effort to build community has rapidly transformed into something that I worry is actually now actively contributing to loneliness,” he said.

Bowling alone, more than ever

Harvard’s Robert Putnam, 25 years ago, described the decline in civic engagement in a widely cited 2000 book “Bowling Alone.” It was so named because the decline even affected bowling leagues. The bowling wasn’t the point. It was people spending time together regularly, making friends, finding romantic partners, helping each other in times of need.

Memberships in many organizations — including service, veterans, scouting, fraternal, religious, parental and civic — have continued their long decline into the 21st century, according to a follow-up analysis in “The Upswing,” a 2020 book by Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

While some organizations have grown in recent years, the authors argue that member participation often tend to be looser — making a contribution, getting a newsletter — than the more intensive groups of the past, with their regular meetings and activities.

A reaction against institutions

Certainly, some forms of social bonds have earned their mistrust. People have been betrayed by organizations, families and religious groups, which can be harshest on their dissenters.

But disconnection has its own costs.

“There’s been such a drive for personal autonomy, but I think we’ve moved so far past wanting not to have any limits on what we can do, what we can believe, that we’ve become allergic to institutions,” said Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute.

“I’m hoping we’re beginning to recognize that unbounded personal autonomy does not make us happier and creates a wealth of social problems,” said Cox, co-author of the 2024 report, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life.”

By the numbers

1. About 16% of adults, including around one-quarter of adults under 30, report feeling lonely or isolated all or most of the time, according to a 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center.
2. Just under half of Americans belonged to a religious congregation in 2023, a low point for Gallup, which has tracking this trend since 1937.
3. About 10% of workers are in a union, down from 20% four decades ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
4. Around half of Americans regularly spent time in a public space in their community in 2025, such as a coffee shop, bar, restaurant or park. That’s down from around two-thirds in 2019, according to “America’s Cultural Crossroads,” another study by the Survey Center on American Life.
5. About two in 10 U.S. adults have no close friends outside of family, according to the “Disconnected” report. In 1990, only 3% said that, according to Gallup. About one-quarter of adults have at least six close friends, down from nearly half in 1990.
6. About 4 in 10 Americans have at most one person they could depend on to lend them $200, offer a place to stay or help find a job, according to “Disconnected.”
7. About one-quarter of Americans say most people can be trusted — down from about half in 1972, according to the General Social Survey.

Exceptions and a stark class divide

Some argue that Putnam and others are using too limited a measurement — that people are finding new ways of connecting to replace the old ones, whether online or other newer forms of networking.

Still, many numbers depict an overall decline in connection.

This hits hardest on those who are already struggling — who could most use a friend, a job referral or a casserole at the door in hard times.

Those with lower educations, which generally translates to lower incomes, tend to report having fewer close friends, fewer civic gathering places in their communities and fewer people who could help out in a pinch, according to “Disconnected.”

Responses to the crisis

Across the country, small organizations and informal groups of people have worked to build community, whether through formal programs or less structured events like potluck dinners.

Murthy will continue to be visiting such local groups in his “Together Project,” supporting such efforts.

Another group, Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute, has a searchable database of volunteer opportunities and an online forum for connecting community builders, which it calls “weavers.” It aims to support and train them in community-building skills.

“Where people are trusting less, where people are getting to know each other less, where people are joining groups less, there are people still in every community who have decided that it’s up to them to bring people together,” said its executive director, Frederick J. Riley.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

There are a lot of reasons, some deserved and some not, for Americans’ distrust of their institutions. Lately I have been thinking about one of the more counterintuitive ones: Our schools, governments and even employers are trying too hard to make things fair.

In so doing, they are not only setting themselves up for failure — and eventually mistrust — but they are also misunderstanding the galvanizing role that unfairness plays in a competitive economy.

Unfairness can be tempered, but it can never be eliminated. The decision of how much unfairness to tolerate is one for society as a whole to make, and we expect our institutions to enforce it. I fear that, in the last decade or so, those institutions went too far in enforcing fairness, without full buy-in from the public and at the expense of other values.

The first question is what fairness means.

It certainly does not require that economic success be equally allocated and that people not be held back by things they cannot control. Some people are better at some things, some work harder, some are less neurotic. And of course a lot of people just get lucky. Where we are born, and the family we are born into, make an enormous difference. Parents who invest more in their kids in terms of time and resources give them a big advantage. This has never been fair but has always been true.

None of this is an argument against institutions intervening to stop discrimination, especially if it is based on a person’s immutable characteristics.

In the past institutions did not do enough about this — or worse, contributed to it. It is also the case that institutional priorities can and should shift over time. In the 20th century, American institutions helped reduce barriers that held many talented people back, improved access to education and basic services, and made the tax code more progressive.

There have been two big changes in the last 20 years, one of them empirical and the other more impressionistic. First, American society has gotten richer, and inequality wider. This made imposing a norm of fairness more critical. Second, younger generations had less unsupervised play time — which meant they often relied on authority figures to settle disagreements instead of doing it themselves. Now they expect institutions to do what authority figures once did for them as children.

That doesn’t always work out, as two recent stories about U.S. universities demonstrate. At the University of California at San Diego, more than 12% of incoming students struggle to do middle-school math — even though many had excellent grades in high school. Meanwhile, an alarming share of students at elite universities have some form of disability accommodation that allows them to take untimed tests.

The goals here are noble: These institutions are trying to make the system more forgiving for people who aren’t great at math, received poor instruction or are bad at taking tests. But the result is unfair. There are a limited number of slots available at California’s public universities, and more qualified students are denied admission. And excess accommodations undermine the rigor and reputation of a university education, hurting all graduates.

What both of these examples show is a U.S. educational system that is less concerned about its primary mission — teaching students — and more focused on leveling the playing field in society. The results are perverse outcomes and less trust.

It does not end in college. There is also an expectation that employers are supposed to promote fairness by more heavily weighing factors that don’t have to do with qualifications or performance when making hiring, promotion and pay decisions. DEI in the workplace certainly started with good intentions — to remove unfair barriers that held women and minorities back. But the implementation was at times clumsy or corrupt, and many came to see it as another form of discrimination.

A fixation on fairness can also explain some governmental failures — such as on immigration. The most unfair advantage on the planet is being born in America. Fairness would dictate that anyone who wants a better life for themselves be allowed to emigrate to the U.S.

But if that impulse goes too far, as it did under President Joe Biden, then native-born workers become resentful. People lost trust that the government could control the border, and the Democrats lost elections. Now President Donald Trump is veering too far in the other direction, rounding up immigrants, which is also eroding trust in government (and support for Republicans). There is less scope for a thoughtful immigration policy that balances fairness to the world with domestic economic priorities.

Don’t get me wrong: Fairness is something every society should strive for. By the same token, no society will ever eradicate unfairness. In some ways, a lack of fairness actually powers the economy forward. Basing decisions on merit — whether in government, schools or the workplace — is more efficient. It is also critical for incentives. People work hard not only for their own success, but also to give their kids every advantage. Take away those advantages, and you also take away those incentives. The end result is distrust of the system.

The problem with fairness isn’t so much with the ideal as the execution: Too many policies that promote fairness also promote zero-sum thinking about the economy, under which more opportunity for the less fortunate means less opportunity for everyone else. But this is not how economies work. If America’s institutions want to regain the public’s trust, they’d be better off focusing on growth than on fairness.

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Related Articles

Lisa Jarvis: Testosterone isn’t a magic cure-all for middle age

Adrian Wooldridge: Political giants and moral degenerates: My five best books of 2025

Joe Palaggi: The season to remember we’re still one nation

Robert Cropf: America’s unnamed crisis

F.D. Flam: The microplastics problem isn’t necessarily in your brain

The countdown to 2026 is on.

There’s no telling what the year will bring. But we do think that, if you’re spending time in St. Paul when 2025 ends, you’ve got a pretty good chance of starting the new year off with some fun.

From music to comedy to larger-than-life objects dropping from the sky Times Square-style, here are some ideas to ring in 2026 in St. Paul.

Dropping Stuff

Minnesota Bobber Drop at Midway Saloon: For the fourth year, a 7-foot fishing bobber will drop at midnight to ring in the new year. Beforehand, at 9 p.m., blues guitarist Dylan Salfer will perform. The event is at the Midway Saloon, 1567 W. University Ave.

Puck Drop and Fireworks at Rice Park: If you’re more of a hockey person than a fisherman — or if you just want to get to sleep earlier than midnight — head over to Rice Park downtown (109 W. Fourth St.) for a 10-foot disco-ball style hockey puck drop at 8 p.m., before a fireworks display. (The puck itself was created at Wonder Studios, also the fabrication hub for Can Can Wonderland’s putt-putt courses.) The puck drop and fireworks, plus live music and the Red Bull DJ Truck, are all part of the Bold North Breakaway Fan Fest, a free festival alongside the IIHF World Junior Championship. Metro Transit is offering free rides to and from the festival starting at 6 p.m.

Comedy Shows

Comedian Jesse the Shrink hosts the weekly comedy open mic at Gambit Brewing in Lowertown. (Courtesy of Jesse the Shrink)

Freshly Squeezed New Year’s Eve at Gambit Brewing: Comic Ali Sultan, who has performed on Comedy Central, “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” and “DryBar Comedy,” headlines a pair of shows at the Lowertown brewery and comedy hotspot, produced by comedian and real-life therapist Jesse the Shrink and musical comic Lefty Crumpet. Other local comics will also perform. Showtimes at 7 and 10 p.m. at Gambit Brewing, 441 E. Fourth St., Suite LL2. Tickets are $25 for general admission or $30 for a reserved seat; online at freshlysqueezednye.eventbrite.com

Maggie Faris at Laugh Camp Comedy Club: Over at Laugh Camp Comedy Club inside Camp Bar, St. Paul comedy staple Maggie Faris headlines an 8 p.m. show. Farris, a St. Paul native, has performed around the country and opened for folks including Fortune Feimster, Michael Che, Daniel Tosh and Lewis Black. Tickets available online for $29.75; camp-bar.net/shows/340117

New Year’s Eve Comedy at Station 10: Another Jesse the Shrink joint: Comedian John DeBoer, who’s been featured on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” Sirius XM and “DryBar Comedy,” headlines two shows at Gatherings at Station 10, the space above A-Side Public House (754 Randolph Ave.). Showtimes at 7 and 9:30 p.m.; tickets are $25 for general admission or $30 for a reserved seat; online at station10nye.eventbrite.com

Music and Celebration

Mini golf at Can Can Wonderland in St. Paul. (Nancy Ngo / Pioneer Press)

Can Can Wonderland: The mini-golf and vintage arcade destination is celebrating its 9th birthday on New Year’s Eve with two DJ stages, tarot readings, a caricature artist, a “glitter bar,” a photobooth and plenty of snacks and drinks. Tickets $25 online at cancanwonderland.com; 755 Prior Ave N.

Mancini’s: At the iconic West Seventh steakhouse, the house band The Midas Touch is playing hits from across the decades. Music from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., no cover; 1400 W. Seventh St.

Patrick McGoverns: The West Seventh pub is hosting a DJ from 9 p.m. onward in a heated atrium area, plus a toast at midnight and other specialty drinks; 225 W. Seventh St.

Pillbox Tavern: If you want to provide the music yourself, the downtown sports bar is hosting karaoke from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Seafood and prime rib specials will be available, and a free champagne toast will be offered at midnight. No cover; 400 N. Wabasha St.

St. Paul Hotel: Class it up with live jazz at the downtown hotel’s lobby bar. From 6 to 10 p.m., vocalist Erin Livingston, bassist Gary Raynor and pianist Larry McDonough will perform. No cover; 350 Market St.

White Squirrel Bar: The West Seventh music lounge is going full bluegrass to close out the year, with Americana “future folk” quartet Seculants headlining alongside The Gated Community and The Ungrateful Little String Band. Music starts at 9 p.m.; no cover; 974 W. Seventh St.

Family Friendly

The New Year’s Eve party at Minnesota Children’s Museum is called Sparklerama. (Courtes of Bruce Silcox)

Related Articles

2025 St. Paul restaurants in review: Openings, closures and coming soon

Five Weeknight Dishes: Beef biryani, green chile bean bake and sheet-pan lemon turmeric chicken

Downtown St. Paul festival will give hockey fans a place to gather between championship games

Readers and writers: Great fiction and a primer on AI

Skywatch: Season’s greetings

Sparklerama at the Minnesota Children’s Museum: If you have kids and don’t want to wait till the 31st to celebrate, the Minnesota Children’s Museum is holding “Sparklerama” from 6 to 9 p.m. on Dec. 30, with family fun music, dancing, crafts and other activities. Tickets are $10 for members and $25 for non-members; https://mcm.org/new-year-party.

Noon Year’s Eve at the Minnesota Zoo: Some animals are nocturnal, but it’s OK if your kids are not: The zoo is throwing a kid-friendly party from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Dec. 31 with a DJ (or a silent dance party if that’s more your speed), a craft lounge and a new year’s countdown to 12 p.m. (not a.m.!). Kids are encouraged to dress like a penguin, or choose their favorite cozy winter outfit. Event is included with zoo admission, 13000 Zoo Blvd., Apple Valley. More info at mnzoo.org/special-events.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has acquired 16,000 acres of forested land across 10 counties in northern Minnesota.

The project is the agency’s largest land acquisition since 2010 and is an effort to protect the forests, lakes and waterways, expand outdoor recreation access and preserve critical habitat, according to Ingrid Johnson, DNR northeast regional information officer.

Combined, the acquisition comprised two transactions totaling more than $17 million that involved a number of partnerships, among them the Conservation Fund, Northern Waters Land Trust and multiple Minnesota counties, Johnson told the Grand Forks Herald.

In the first transaction of $12.6 million, with funding from the Minnesota Legacy Outdoor Heritage Fund, the DNR collaborated with Northern Waters Land Trust and nine counties to select 10,675 acres within Aitkin, Becker, Carlton, Cass, Crow Wing, Hubbard, Itasca, Koochiching and Wadena counties. These lands will expand existing wildlife management areas, scientific and natural areas and state forests.

The second transaction of just over $5 million involved the DNR acquiring 5,120 acres in St. Louis County using Reinvest in Minnesota dollars. These lands will expand and consolidate ownership in existing state forests, creating larger, contiguous blocks of DNR land.

Prior to the acquisitions, the DNR and its partners met to discuss funding, to review portfolios and conservation priorities, and to align goals.

“First and foremost,” Johnson said, “the reason we tried so hard to expand existing state land is because contiguous blocks of land, large blocks of land, are really beneficial to the habitat that live in these areas, especially our big traveling herds like deer and moose. Bear live there too,” Johnson said. “They all really thrive on big tracts of land. Also, it’s easier for us to manage the land for clean water and habitat preservation.”

Each land designation has different rules, some that are still being worked out.

“But,” Johnson said, “the land is available for Minnesotans and anyone else to use immediately. … In scientific and natural areas, you can recreate as long as it doesn’t disturb the natural surroundings.”

Those who use these designated areas must stay on trails, for instance, and there is no hunting on these lands due to them being home to rare plant and animal species. Hunting can occur in wildlife management areas, per state and area hunting regulations.

The land acquisition efforts began with The Conservation Fund purchasing land from PotlatchDeltic Corp. between 2018 and 2022, with the intent of preserving large blocks of forestland. The DNR and counties then worked in collaboration to identify their respective acquisition priorities and secure funding.

DNR Commissioner Sarah Strommen said the acquisition will be a boon to Minnesotans and visitors for years to come, ensuring the lands are protected while also enhancing the local and state economies.

Related Articles

Governor orders flags to half-staff for Monday funeral of recent St. Paul firefighter grad

Minnesota Attorney General’s Office seeks public input on cryptocurrency ATMs

Robber holds up bank in Crow Wing County community of 200

Former MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty says 2026 is ‘best chance’ for GOP to win statewide

Enbridge to pay $2.8M over aquifer breach during pipeline construction

“Public lands are essential to Minnesota’s environmental stewardship, identity, and economy, and we appreciate the collaboration of our partners as we work to steward and conserve these lands for the future,” Strommen said in a statement.

Jason Meyer, St. Louis County director of Land and Minerals, added that the acquisition project, besides protecting wildlife habitat, will benefit the local and regional economies and the public.

“It is projects like these which help strengthen local communities by providing economic, environmental and recreational opportunities for the good of the region,” he said.