What this is

Be Social is a publication about loneliness and what actually helps with it. Not the abstract version — the specific, practical, slightly awkward business of meeting people when you are an adult and the structures that used to do it for you are gone.

Why it exists

There is a great deal of research on this now, and almost none of it is written for the person experiencing it. There is also a great deal of advice, most of which is either "just put yourself out there" or an ad. We try to sit in the gap: take the research seriously, then say what it means for a Tuesday evening.

What we will not do

We will not tell you loneliness is your fault, or that it is fixed by the right mindset. It is substantially a structural problem — fewer third places, more remote work, longer commutes, and a lot of ordinary social infrastructure that quietly closed. Framing that as a personal failing is both wrong and cruel.

We also will not pretend everything works. The evidence for a lot of popular interventions is thin, and where it is thin we say so. Ourtools directory gives every entry a "where it falls short" section for that reason.

How we handle sources

Everything factual here traces to a published source, and the source is linked so you can check it. We work from a fixed library of 87 reports, studies, and surveys rather than writing from memory, and each article lists what it drew on at the bottom.

An article never cites something published after the article was. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to get wrong in an archive that goes back years, so it is checked automatically rather than by eye.

When we describe a study, we try to describe what it actually found rather than the headline it generated. A lot of loneliness coverage quotes numbers from surveys that measured quite different things, and the numbers are not comparable.

Nothing here is medical advice

Loneliness is linked to serious health outcomes, but a statistical association across a population does not tell you what is happening to you. If you are struggling, a doctor is a better starting point than a website.

Bylines

Articles are published under the Be Social name rather than individual bylines. If we have got something wrong, tell us:hello@be-social.org. Corrections get made.