Do Wealth and Education Protect You from Loneliness?

I'm skeptical

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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Ryan Burge

’s Graphs About Religion. I’m constantly finding interesting insights about the state of America and the church in his posts. So I was intrigued when I saw that he was going to tackle a topic I have written about before, the loneliness epidemic. Ryan’s approach was to first examine the relationship between education and self-reported feelings of loneliness, which shows a correlation. The more educated you are, the less likely you are to report feelings of loneliness. If you didn’t finish high school, you are more likely to report feeling lonely. If you finished graduate school, you are least likely to report feeling lonely. But Ryan goes on to note that education might be masking income, and starts pulling those numbers. Once you look at the relationship between income and self-reported loneliness, it becomes clear that the real indicator of loneliness is wealth. As Ryan says, “Rich people are much less lonely than poor people. That’s the only conclusion that makes any sense.”

But whether it’s education or income, it seems to me that despite what the self-reported data says, a lot of well-educated and well-off people are lonely. In private conversations with people who have bachelors and graduate degrees, who have families and good jobs, I’ve known a lot of lonely, friendless people. Many of them pastors (who have their own host of challenges, I recognize). Which made me wonder, why does my lived experience not reflect the data? For example, Ryan notes that only 7% of people with graduate degrees self-report feeling usually or always lonely. That does not comport with my experience in grad school or with those who finished grad school.

Now, I know from a statistical perspective there are lots of explanations for this, including biases (like a selection bias) and incomplete data and so on, which may be what’s going on here. But, of course, it’s also possible that people aren’t entirely honest about their own feelings of loneliness. I don’t just mean that they aren’t honest in a survey, I mean that they aren’t entirely honest to themselves about the emptiness of their social relationships. What if part of our loneliness epidemic is that a certain percentage of people have stopped looking for the kinds of deep friendships that “cure” loneliness? And instead, what if these people fill their lives with superficial relationships (what Aristotle would call friendships of utility or pleasure) that they imagine to be meaningful?

Admittedly, this is entirely speculative. I acknowledge that from the jump. But it does seem to me that a few things are true about those who are wealthy (or at least upper-middle class) and have achieved a high level of educational success.

First, they tend to be driven and high achievers. Which means they absorb themselves in their work or hobbies or parenting or whatever. They are the kinds of people for whom devoting the time to develop deep friendships, what Aristotle would call friendships of virtue, would be very difficult. Friendships that are useful for climbing a ladder or parenting can be justified as serving a purpose; and friendships of pleasure (the person who throws a great party, for instance) are justifiable because they don’t demand anything meaningful of you. But friendships of virtue, where you stand side by side (as C.S. Lewis describes it in The Four Loves) and delight in the same Good thing virtuously across time, demand a great deal of a person. So it may be that they are only not “lonely” because they have redefined friendship down to fit their busy schedule and high-achievement lifestyles.

Second, high education and financial achievement allow a person the illusion of autonomy, whereas friendship is premised on the reality that we need each other. Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics that “no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods,” but I’m not quite certain that’s true, unless we count friendships of utility and pleasure. It seems to me that quite a few people would rather live lives of luxury and radical independence and not risk the vulnerability of deep friendship. They pay therapists for that. Friends are there for fun and utility. My point here is that the wealthier and more educated you are, the more capable you are of positioning yourself as free from the need for friendship, because you are self-reliant and self-made. And if you are free from the need for friendship, naturally you would self-report as not feeling lonely on a survey, even though on a deeper psychological and even metaphysical level you are lonely.

Third, wealth and education may not prevent or protect against loneliness, they may just mask it. The more wealth one has, the more one can afford high quality, engrossing distractions from the loneliness one feels, and therefore report less loneliness. The more education one has, the more one can intellectualize their condition and justify themselves, and therefore report less loneliness.

Fourth, for some high achieving people I think even admitting on a survey that they are experiencing feelings of loneliness would be difficult, because they would have to accept that their lives are not flourishing. This may be a small group, and maybe surveys account for people like this already, but seems to me that the more “successful” you believe your life to be (which would correlate with wealth and education), the more risky it is to admit to yourself that your life isn’t in order, even on a survey.

Now, none of this is to discount Ryan’s conclusion:

We should be especially concerned with those folks at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum. They seem to be falling through the cracks of civilized society, which will make it harder for them to move their way up the economic ladder. And if I’ve learned anything in doing all of this work it’s the poisonous nature of despair. When people feel hopeless and helpless, we all need to start worrying.

I’m confident that however lonely wealthy and educated people are, those lower on the socioeconomic spectrum suffer more. The data backs this up and so does common sense. The more hours you have to work, the more life stressors you have, the more you are exposed to traumas and abuse, the harder it will be for you to have, find, and develop long-term, deep, healthy relationships. I’ve witnessed this many times in people close to me. Wealth and education helps protect you from these barriers to friendship. My point is not that the poor are better off than the data shows, but that the well-off are worse off than the data shows.

Of course, as I said in the beginning, all of this is speculative. On the one hand, it feels arrogant to say that I know better than people who self-reported their own loneliness. Who am I to say that they are lonely if they say they aren’t? On the other hand, anyone who has delved into their own heart knows how deceitful it is, how we lie to ourselves, how we tell ourselves little lies to protect us from unpleasant realities, how we shield ourselves from uncomfortable realities. Why should we simply take self-reported emotions at face value?

What we can say is that the church needs to be doing more to reach out to those in lower socioeconomic conditions to help them holistically. Not just with the gospel, which is necessary; not just financially, which is commanded; but also with companionship, which we all need. And I think we can also say that despite the lower self-reported rates of loneliness among those who have higher income and educational achievement, there are barriers to friendship for these folks as well. Do they need the same level of attention? No, I don’t think so. But we ignore them at our own peril.

And part of the way we help this population is by breaking down the lifestyle of Total Work that drives many high achievers (without denying the goodness of pursuing excellence! I’ll address this in my book, Re-Collecting in the chapter on Fortitude), by teaching people that they are not their own but belong to God, and by inviting people to develop deep, virtuous friendships.