Loneliness isn’t for cowards; It’s for the Institution-less

I spent most of my 30s feeling lonely. Back in 2014, I moved to Los Angeles for a job at BuzzFeed’s fast-growing news division. The job was a dream come true for a young reporter, and the fact that it was in a big and exciting city was icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anyone in L.A., and little by little, that began to wear on me. I was lonely. But was I a coward?

That’s the provocative thesis floated in a viral Wall Street Journal piece from earlier this week. The piece, from Emma Camp, acknowledges that a growing number of people face isolation. But she offers a twist to the classic Bowling Alone argument: “Loneliness isn’t an epidemic, it’s a choice.” In other words, and as Camp’s headline argues, “loneliness is for cowards” because people who really want friends just go out and make them.

Camp then goes on to detail how she put this idea into practice, hosting 27 parties in 2025. Around the New Year, she moved to Brooklyn and started rebuilding her invite list. Her first New York party had 50 attendees. And her point in recounting this tale is that “we can’t let fear of rejection overwhelm us. A life full of friendship and great parties is waiting for you. Don’t be afraid. All you have to do is ask.”

Having passed through some of the same things Camp describes—moving to a new city, seeing a friend list shrink, etc.—I agree that personal choice and getting together with people play a role in dealing with loneliness. That’s a huge part of the equation.  

But Camp makes a critical error: She omits the institutions that have traditionally facilitated relationships. There is no mention of schools or family or church. So her piece implies that the answer to an atomized world is simply more individualism. 

The problem with this thesis is that isn't how deep friendships work. And I can speak to this from firsthand experience, having tried her approach. In the end, it was only by leaning into institutions like family and church that I finally managed to crack the loneliness code. 

I Tried Camp's Approach For Years and Failed

I suspect my journey looks quite similar to Camp’s. In college, I had a strong network of close friends. Near the end of my time in school, I met a girl in an English class, and we discovered we had many overlapping friendships. That shared network helped kickstart a relationship, and as we finished college, we got married. We both began our careers near our university town and maintained our large network of friends. It was a great time.

When we moved to L.A. a few years later, both of us transitioned to fields that required frequent travel. Our relationship remained strong, but day-to-day, our schedules often meant we were ships passing in the night. And with free time and no network in my new city, I realized I had to get proactive to avoid loneliness. To quote Camp, I didn’t want to be a social “coward.” 

So, I became a regular at both a tiny comedy club and a donut shop by my house. I attended small film festivals—think 10 guys in a coffee shop—and concerts for up-and-coming musicians. I frequented art galleries and architecture walks. I started stopping by a delightful pop art junkyard. I invited coworkers to hang out and hosted a few parties at my tiny East Hollywood bungalow. 

I had many wonderful experiences during this time. But I did not gain lasting connections from these experiences. My efforts—to not be a “coward,” to borrow Camp’s phrasing—were a complete and utter failure. This went on for four-and-a-half years while I lived in L.A., and it’s almost comical how bad I was at making friends. 

Camp seems to have been smarter and more strategic, focusing specifically on hosting parties and gradually building her invite list. I admire her tenacity and envy the results.

But will that work for most people? Will it last? I’m skeptical. 

In the end, it was only by leaning into institutions like family and church that I finally managed to crack the loneliness code. 

Community-Building Institutions

In my case, one of the big problems was that friends cycled through a fast-revolving door. They had kids and moved to the suburbs. Or got a job on the other side of the country. Or became management and didn’t have time to socialize. I sometimes consoled myself during this period by remembering that technically, I did have a lot of friends; they were just scattered to the wind. 

But the bigger problem was that I ignored institutions with a proven track record of community-building. For example, we delayed having kids (I was the one dragging my feet, here, not my wife), and moved far from extended family, thinking that a Friends-like existence was just around the corner. And though I had been raised in a very religious family that was part of a vibrant faith community, by the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I had abandoned that faith. Religion felt antiquated, and anyway, it was nice to sleep in on Sundays! 

Sadly, I made an error. Researchers have found that members of religious communities report having more friends, and that non-religious people are more likely to have no friends at all. Churchgoers have more people to count on, are more civically engaged, and describe themselves as happy in larger shares than the unreligious.  

This intuitively makes sense. Research going back decades suggests that friendship emerges via frequent and often casual or unplanned interactions. Institutions—church of course, but also things like civic clubs or PTAs—provide just that. They recur regularly, and while the gathering itself is planned, the interactions with any individual member are often accidental. Over time, often years, a friendly nod turns into a wave, then into a conversation, and finally into a lasting friendship. 

Camp doesn’t mention any institutions in her piece, instead arguing for planned activities such as cocktail parties. Holding those events isn’t a bad idea—I think it’s great, actually—but they look quite different from the kinds of activities researchers have identified as most likely to cultivate deep and lasting social networks. 

It’s not just about finding friends, but about finding a community.

In this way, Camp replicates the same error that I criticized nearly two years ago when now-former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy proposed his own solution to loneliness. In Murthy’s case, that solution involved things like neighborhood potlucks, perhaps facilitated by the federal government. I was baffled at the time that the solution to Murthy’s own loneliness was his family, yet he never recommended family to anyone else. 

What Murthy and Camp both seem to be doing is trying to replicate the outcomes of traditional institutions but without those institutions’ infrastructure. 

I did the same thing, but after several years, I finally had to reckon with failure. Going to comedy clubs was fun but had not meaningfully expanded my social network. I cherished my interactions with the Cambodian man who ran my local donut shop, but I couldn’t ask him for a ride to the airport. We didn’t even speak the same language. If anything, the revolving friendship door meant my network was actually shrinking, year after year, despite what felt like a Herculean attempt to expand it. 

Finally, I pivoted. Facing the biological reality of aging, my wife and I had our first child. Then we switched jobs to avoid spending so much time on the road, and we moved to a city where we had the highest concentration of family. Eventually, we had two more kids and soon discovered that having children plugged us into a network of other parents. I would not suggest having kids just to meet people, of course, but that is a collateral benefit. Suddenly, I was having casual, unplanned interactions with people every day at school drop off.

And then, I went back to church (my wife was already going). Before long, they gave me a job teaching Sunday school for 7-year-olds. I ended up helping people move and distribute food over the holidays. We brought dessert for the Christmas potluck. We became part of a real community. 

Little by little, these choices worked, sometimes in surprising ways. For example, when I recently attended a small concert—the exact same kind of thing I would’ve done in L.A.—I recognized several people from church in the crowd. We struck up a conversation. Maybe we’ll be friends. Belonging to a community adds a critical dimension I overlooked for too many years. 

Faith and Family

Camp suggests that loneliness is a choice. And she’s right that choice matters. But it’s more complex than simply choosing to be social rather than a recluse. Over the years, I learned that choosing sociability is not enough. It’s unlikely to work over the long run. Loneliness isn’t for cowards; it’s for people like me who spend years ignoring the tools that have always existed to help us make meaningful connections. 

Instead, what I learned—and what I think the research suggests—is that the key to a more robust social life is not individuals but institutions. It’s leaning into things like church, family, and school, even if many of us have lately forgotten about these things. The answer is not rugged individualism or assembling a menagerie of party goers and hoping they stick around. It’s not just about finding friends, but about finding a community and subordinating the self. It’s embracing key institutions, and then letting friends find you. 

Jim Dalrymple II is a journalist and author of the Nuclear Meltdown newsletter about families. He also covers housing for Inman and has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and the Salt Lake Tribune.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock