What is the story about?
Elizabeth Gilbert, newly divorced and adrift in Rome, sits at a dinner table in Eat Pray Love with people she has only just met and feels, for the first time in years, completely herself. She is not healed yet, not whole, but the warmth of that table, the laughter and the pasta, does something that therapy, travel, and introspection alone cannot. It pulls her back into the world.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, begun in 1938 and still running, has produced one finding that towers above the rest. The quality of our relationships, the emotional warmth, the trust, the sense that someone is genuinely in your corner, is the single most important predictor of long-term happiness and health.
The conversation about friendship is also, necessarily, a conversation about its absence. Loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking or alcoholism, and Waldinger has been saying so for years, loudly enough that people have started to listen. Chronic social isolation is as damaging to the body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Think of Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks's Chuck Noland, stranded on a desert island, paints a face on a volleyball and names it Wilson, and then, when Wilson floats away, grieves as though he has lost a person. Zemeckis framed it as survival drama, but it is really a film about what the absence of friendship does to a person over time. Chuck begins to fall apart without company.
Loneliness, research confirms, is a risk factor for depression, cognitive decline, and early death.
Scientists have found that the experience of loneliness is correlated with the volume of key brain regions involved in social cognition and emotional processing. We talk about loneliness as something that passes, something you push through on a bad weekend.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General formally declared a loneliness epidemic. In 2024, roughly 20 percent of American adults reported feeling lonely for much of the day, which works out to around 52 million people. A 2025 survey by the American Psychological Association found that nearly seven in ten adults said they had needed more emotional support in the past year than they actually received.
The so-called Friendship Recession has hit men particularly hard, with close friendships declining by roughly half since 1990. These are not abstract numbers. They are people eating lunch alone, people who have not had a real conversation in days, people who would struggle to name someone they could call at two in the morning if things went wrong.
Pop culture has always had a sharper read on this than policy ever has. Fleabag is essentially a portrait of a woman who has run out of people. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's protagonist breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience because we are the only ones she has let in, and there is something quietly wrenching about that once you notice it.
Broad City, at the other end of the register, is practically a love letter to female friendship, Abbi and Ilana so completely devoted to each other that the show works as comedy and as something more tender underneath. Both series found obsessive audiences for the same reason: people saw themselves in them.
Research puts the optimal number of close friends for mental and physical wellbeing at around five.
The Neapolitan series is, underneath everything else, about the way one friendship between Elena and Lila shapes two women across an entire lifetime, holds them up and pulls them under by turns. Ferrante knew that friendship is not background to a life. It is one of its load-bearing walls.
Anne of Green Gables circles the same thing, if more joyfully, Anne Shirley arrives in Avonlea with nothing and builds a whole interior world the moment she finds Diana Barry.
A 2025 study from Yale found that friendship is especially protective for people under financial strain, buffering the psychological damage of economic precarity in ways that little else can.
Friendships aren’t usually eroded because of a fight. It is the slow accumulation of busy-ness, the Zoom calls that replaces the coffee, and the text that substitutes for presence. We tell ourselves we will catch up properly soon, and soon becomes a season, and a season becomes a year, and the friendship loses its footing.
Aristotle divided friendship into three types, those of utility, those of pleasure, and those of virtue. The last is the rarest and the most sustaining, built on genuine care and the willingness to stay. Most of us have plenty of the first two and too little of the third, and we feel the difference even when we cannot name it.
Close relationships protect us from life's discontents, delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of a long and happy life than social class, IQ, or genes. The friends we keep are, quite literally, keeping us alive.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, begun in 1938 and still running, has produced one finding that towers above the rest. The quality of our relationships, the emotional warmth, the trust, the sense that someone is genuinely in your corner, is the single most important predictor of long-term happiness and health.
View this post on Instagram
Why the body keeps score on loneliness
The conversation about friendship is also, necessarily, a conversation about its absence. Loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking or alcoholism, and Waldinger has been saying so for years, loudly enough that people have started to listen. Chronic social isolation is as damaging to the body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Think of Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks's Chuck Noland, stranded on a desert island, paints a face on a volleyball and names it Wilson, and then, when Wilson floats away, grieves as though he has lost a person. Zemeckis framed it as survival drama, but it is really a film about what the absence of friendship does to a person over time. Chuck begins to fall apart without company.
Loneliness, research confirms, is a risk factor for depression, cognitive decline, and early death.
Scientists have found that the experience of loneliness is correlated with the volume of key brain regions involved in social cognition and emotional processing. We talk about loneliness as something that passes, something you push through on a bad weekend.
View this post on Instagram
We are, in fact, in the middle of a crisis
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General formally declared a loneliness epidemic. In 2024, roughly 20 percent of American adults reported feeling lonely for much of the day, which works out to around 52 million people. A 2025 survey by the American Psychological Association found that nearly seven in ten adults said they had needed more emotional support in the past year than they actually received.
The so-called Friendship Recession has hit men particularly hard, with close friendships declining by roughly half since 1990. These are not abstract numbers. They are people eating lunch alone, people who have not had a real conversation in days, people who would struggle to name someone they could call at two in the morning if things went wrong.
Pop culture has always had a sharper read on this than policy ever has. Fleabag is essentially a portrait of a woman who has run out of people. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's protagonist breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience because we are the only ones she has let in, and there is something quietly wrenching about that once you notice it.
Broad City, at the other end of the register, is practically a love letter to female friendship, Abbi and Ilana so completely devoted to each other that the show works as comedy and as something more tender underneath. Both series found obsessive audiences for the same reason: people saw themselves in them.
View this post on Instagram
Quality over quantity
Research puts the optimal number of close friends for mental and physical wellbeing at around five.
The Neapolitan series is, underneath everything else, about the way one friendship between Elena and Lila shapes two women across an entire lifetime, holds them up and pulls them under by turns. Ferrante knew that friendship is not background to a life. It is one of its load-bearing walls.
Anne of Green Gables circles the same thing, if more joyfully, Anne Shirley arrives in Avonlea with nothing and builds a whole interior world the moment she finds Diana Barry.
A 2025 study from Yale found that friendship is especially protective for people under financial strain, buffering the psychological damage of economic precarity in ways that little else can.
View this post on Instagram
The art of staying in touch
Friendships aren’t usually eroded because of a fight. It is the slow accumulation of busy-ness, the Zoom calls that replaces the coffee, and the text that substitutes for presence. We tell ourselves we will catch up properly soon, and soon becomes a season, and a season becomes a year, and the friendship loses its footing.
Aristotle divided friendship into three types, those of utility, those of pleasure, and those of virtue. The last is the rarest and the most sustaining, built on genuine care and the willingness to stay. Most of us have plenty of the first two and too little of the third, and we feel the difference even when we cannot name it.
Close relationships protect us from life's discontents, delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of a long and happy life than social class, IQ, or genes. The friends we keep are, quite literally, keeping us alive.
