The loneliness epidemic, wounded masculinity and the crash in media trust

Media trust hits new low

For the third year in a row, the share of Americans who say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in mass media has fallen to a record low, Axios’ Sara Fischer reports from a new Gallup survey.

• Only 28% say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media, down from 68% in 1972.

🗳️ Trump’s 2016 election drove a historically wide gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ trust in mass media.

• That gap has narrowed, as Americans across the spectrum now report record-low trust.

🧒 A steep fall in trust among partisans and younger people has driven most of the overall decline.

• In the past three years, trust in mass media has fallen by 19 percentage points among Democrats and 6 among Republicans.
• The share of Republicans who say they have “no trust at all” in the media has also risen sharply over the past few years, from less than 30% in 2015 to 62% in 2025.

🗞️ While trust in most civic institutions has fallen over the past two decades, media remains the least-trusted institution measured by Gallup.

I think there is an enormous connection between our falling trust in Democratic Institutions, social media hate algorithms and the pandemic of loneliness.

Loneliness spike

Nowhere in the world are young men as lonely in comparison to other people in their country as in the U.S., Axios’ Carly Mallenbaum writes from a new Gallup poll.

• • One in four U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day. That’s a higher proportion than young American women (18%).

We hate each other thanks to social media.

While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.

We are lonelier, more depressed and sicker.

Teen loneliness machine

The tech ecosystem that surrounds today’s teens is fueling loneliness.

• • • Why it matters: It’s a dangerous environment for a generation that’s already sad and stressed. And it’s more difficult than ever for their parents, teachers and coaches to understand and help them, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.

📈 The big picture: Data shows that teens are spending less time hanging out with friends in person, and more time on their devices.

• • • America’s 15- to 24-year-olds spend 35% less time socializing face-to-face than they did 20 years ago, The Atlantic reports.
    • Instead, American kids and teenagers spend nearly six hours a day looking at screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative.

The Psychological Mechanism

When people become chronically lonely, several measurable cognitive and emotional shifts occur:

• Heightened social vigilance: Lonely individuals become more sensitive to threats and less likely to interpret others’ actions as benign. (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2010)

• Reduced empathy and perspective-taking: Prolonged loneliness increases self-focus and reduces trust in others’ intentions.

• Confirmation and conspiracy bias: When social bonds weaken, people are more susceptible to narratives that explain their alienation (e.g., “the system is rigged,” “the media lies,” “politicians don’t care”).

• Identity reinforcement: Loneliness can drive people to seek belonging through ideological or conspiratorial communities online — which often position themselves against mainstream institutions.

So loneliness doesn’t just make you feel bad; it changes how you interpret social information. The lonely brain literally becomes more defensive and suspicious — which translates, at scale, into a collective drop in institutional trust.

Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.

The Societal / Media-Trust Connection

Social scientists have found consistent overlaps between low social capital (few trusted relationships, weak community ties) and low institutional trust:

• Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” (2000) argued that declining civic participation (e.g. church groups, unions, sports clubs) eroded trust in government and media.

• The Edelman Trust Barometer (2024) shows that countries with weaker social cohesion (high polarization, loneliness, economic precarity) have the lowest trust in media and government.

• Studies in Europe and the U.S. (e.g. Foa & Mounk 2019) show that individuals who feel socially disconnected are more likely to endorse anti-democratic views, distrust journalism, and embrace populist or conspiratorial narratives.

Essentially: if people feel no one in their personal life listens to them, they also assume institutions aren’t listening either.

I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000  years of evolution and replaced that  with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.

Feedback Loop: Loneliness → Distrust → More Loneliness

Here’s the cycle that seems to be emerging:

1. Loneliness increases.
   Less social contact → less interpersonal trust.

2. Interpersonal distrust spills upward.
   “If I can’t trust people around me, I can’t trust politicians, journalists, or experts.”

3. Institutional distrust grows.
   People withdraw from civic life, stop voting, or seek “outsider” movements.

4. Polarization deepens.
   Online echo chambers replace physical communities — which amplifies isolation, creating more loneliness.

This loop can become self-sustaining unless deliberately interrupted through rebuilding social capital — face-to-face community engagement, media literacy, and participatory democracy.

Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.

We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.

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