Don’t Be One of the Lonely People.

By Karen and Erica

Loneliness. An unnerving but real issue.

In 1966, The Beatles asked us two questions that haunt us to this day.

“Ah, look at all the lonely people,” they sang plaintively in “Eleanor Rigby.” “Where do they all come from? Where do they all belong?”

Humanity still has no simple answers to the questions in the song written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. But senior citizens and healthcare and planning professionals who work with them would likely not be surprised to learn that McCartney has said in interviews that the character of Eleanor Rigby was inspired by “the old ladies” he used to chat with when he was a kid.

“They had great stories,” McCartney has said. But, he added, some were lonely, especially the one who was the primary model for the character.

Many people are lonely. But retirement seems to be a real trigger–for obvious reasons. When you retire, you lose your work community. Not only that, you end up on a different time continuum from friends who are working. It will become difficult to see them–as it was difficult for people to see you when you worked 24/7. Loneliness can result.

The transition to retirement represents a critical life event, as it often initiates significant changes across multiple domains of an individual’s life. Newly retired individuals frequently report heightened feelings of loneliness during this period. Loneliness, particularly emotional loneliness, spikes after retirement, while social loneliness increases more gradually. They may feel as though they don’t have any social roles and may have less contact with other people. This is a serious health problem. 

Just being and feeling alone is bad enough, but coping strategies for dealing with those feelings can result in further health issues. 

People who are lonely or socially isolated may get too little exercise, drink too much alcohol, smoke, and sleep poorly, which can further increase the risk of serious health conditions.

People who are lonely experience emotional pain. Losing a sense of connection and community can change the way a person sees the world. Someone experiencing chronic loneliness may feel threatened and mistrustful of others.

Emotional pain can activate the same stress responses in the body as physical pain. When this goes on for a long time, it can lead to chronic inflammation (overactive or prolonged release of factors that can damage tissues) and reduced immunity (ability to fight off disease). This raises your risk of chronic diseases and can leave a person more vulnerable to some infectious diseases.

Social isolation and loneliness may also be bad for brain health. These have been linked to poorer cognitive function and higher risk for dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. 

And for many women, loneliness is exacerbated because they lose their husbands. 

As [the author] noted in an earlier Forbes article, for millions of women, retirement will come in two chapters. The one planned as part of a couple, and the one lived alone. Even as a couple plans retirement together today, they should also plan for her second retirement. Women not only live longer than men but are far more likely to outlive a spouse, experience widowhood, or enter retirement already single.

Today, 27% of women in their sixties live alone, compared with just one in five men. After age 75, that gap widens: 43% of women live solo, while only 21% of men do. The result is that women bear a disproportionate share of the financial, physical, and emotional costs of living and aging alone.

Scary, right? 

Luckily, there are strategies you can use to address loneliness.

• One, of course, is Lustre. Meet women like you, online and in person, and share what you know and how you feel.

And there are others, as many societies have recognized the need to counter loneliness.

• The National Institutes of Health has tips. Other countries have more developed strategies.

• Since 2016, Australia has had a Coalition to End Loneliness. In 2018, alarmed by the results of a parliamentary study on social isolation, the U.K. appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Japan did the same in 2021. Denmark’s government has a loneliness strategy. South Korea, for a time, gave socially isolated people between the ages of nine and 24 a $500 monthly stipend to use for school, work, and play outside of their homes. And several countries have adopted Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench program in which grandmothers trained in attentive listening and talk therapy sit on park benches and offer lonely individuals a listening ear and some warm-hearted conversation.

• Road Scholar, a travel company, has very specific ideas–including, of course, travel the world–but in a group! 

Road Scholar is one of a handful of travel organizations specializing in trips for people over 50; it’s distinguished by its hyper-focus on education, whether that looks like learning how to cook Sicilian specialties or paint in the Poconos or study the fragile ecosystem of Florida’s natural springs. Retired counseling psychologist Mary Fukuyama calls the camaraderie that develops among guided tour participants a byproduct of collective identity—a shared sense of belonging to a community. “For a few days, you’re a member of a group,” she told me. “You’re part of a community that values travel and experiences out in the world.”

• Finally, AI will likely play a role for many of us. Japan is leading the way.

The number of people in Japan aged 65 and above is growing, and this group made up 29.1% of the total population in 2024, more than in any other country in the world. An increasing number of elderly adults are experiencing loneliness compared with 2018, a government white paper on the country’s aging society found.

In 2021, the government appointed a minister responsible for addressing loneliness and social isolation. The following year, legislation was passed formally designating these problems as matters of national concern and obligating local governments to implement countermeasures.

As a result, there is an increasing availability and use in Japan of online chatbots and AI apps that address loneliness, mental health support, and even dementia care. 

Japan has embraced robots, including ElliQ, a robot specifically designed to be a companion to older people. A recent New York Times article painted a surprisingly attractive picture of how ElliQ became friendly with a woman determined to live alone in a remote place. 

Do you want to talk?” ElliQ asked.

“With you?” Jan said.

“I can talk the talk,” ElliQ said. “I just can’t walk the walk. They forgot to build my legs.”

How did ElliQ come to be?

It had been almost a decade since Skuler, a serial entrepreneur, decided to focus his next project on health and longevity. He’d moved his team into a nursing home for several weeks and interviewed geriatricians about the difficulties of aging. Almost every expert told him that isolation and loneliness were the biggest challenges — deeply rooted societal problems they doubted a technologist could solve.

So far, Skuler and his colleagues had spent $60 million trying, designing each evolution of the robot to be more social, more personalized. Now he thought of ElliQ as a teenage granddaughter: smart but slightly subservient, inclined toward gentle humor, doting, inquisitive and unfailingly optimistic.

There are strategies, then, some perhaps more appealing than others. We suspect that, like so many things, we need to address loneliness as we have some of the less pleasant aspects of our lives and our jobs. Ignoring it will not get us where we need to go. Making a plan will. 

Let us know your strategies.