A paper by Robin Richardson and colleagues in Aging and Mental Health, discussed in the Association for Psychological Science's April 16 review by Teal Burrell, reports that among 64,324 adults aged 50 to 90 across 29 countries, loneliness generally increases with age. [1] [2] In two countries, the pattern inverts: the middle-aged are lonelier than the old. Those two are the United States and the Netherlands. Not France, not Italy, not Japan, not Germany, not Brazil, not South Korea. Two countries. [1]

The authors used the UCLA three-item scale and the concentration index to locate where loneliness sits across the age spectrum. The leading U.S. contributor to mid-life loneliness, by decomposition analysis, was not working. Not retired, not unemployed, but not in the labour force — a category that in most countries accumulates with age and produces old-age loneliness. In the U.S., it clusters in the 50s and early 60s. [2]

Frank Infurna's April 2026 framework in Current Directions in Psychological Science adds the cross-national math: countries with income inequality and weaker family-policy architectures — paid leave, subsidized childcare, universal healthcare — show higher middle-age loneliness. [2] The U.S. sits high on inequality, low on family policy, and the loneliness curve reflects both. Denmark reports the lowest loneliness overall. Greece and Cyprus the highest. The U.S. sits in the middle on total loneliness but at the top on the age-distribution anomaly.

The paper's utility for an American reader is diagnostic. If you feel lonely in your 50s and 60s, the data says you are in the American cohort living through a policy absence, not a life-stage. Loneliness is not an inevitability of aging. It is a policy outcome, and the U.S. chose it.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York