My hot take about the loneliness crisis is that the only actual solution to loneliness is family formation. Culturally there’s almost nothing that can make up for the loss of family ties, especially as one approaches middle age. We can talk about friendship and thick communities, and these are good things, but the reality is that no social relationship, regardless of how deep or how regular, can bear the time investment and emotional bandwidth that a household can.

And for the record, I think evangelicals who think highly of the local church need to be a little bit more careful about how we talk about it. The church is a spiritual family. It is not a replacement family. And there are some folks whose hopes and dreams are being dashed pretty hard by the realities of what a church community cannot do.