A Boat Marina Taught Me the Secret to Human Happiness

A new WHO report calls loneliness a global health crisis. We caused it. Which means we can fix it.

Image by sharkolot from Pixabay

Years ago I lived on a forty-six-foot boat in a marina in Washington DC, and one of the things I learned in that strange floating neighborhood was how quickly genuine community springs up when people are forced to depend on each other a little.

My slip-mates and I checked each other’s lines before storms. We loaned tools. We watched each other’s boats when somebody was traveling. When the power went out, we found each other on the dock with flashlights and made sure everyone was warm.

The marina had a covered pavilion with a couple of picnic tables, and on warm nights it would fill up with neighbors who’d brought a bottle of wine or a plate of something. Nobody RSVP’d. You just showed up. If you didn’t show up for a few days running, somebody knocked on your hull to make sure you were all right.

It wasn’t that we were unusually friendly. It was that the architecture of the place made avoidance impossible.

You couldn’t get to your home without walking past several other people’s homes. You couldn’t fix your boat without your neighbor seeing you fix it. You couldn’t ride out a storm without checking on the boat next to yours, because if their lines slipped, your boat was in danger too. Interdependence was built into the bones of the place. And out of interdependence, almost without anyone meaning it, came friendship.

I think about that marina a lot now, because the world we’ve built for most Americans does exactly the opposite job. A landmark report from the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection, released last June, found that one in six people on Earth is now persistently lonely, and that loneliness is contributing to around 871,000 deaths a year, roughly a hundred an hour.

That puts loneliness, the WHO concluded, in the same public-health tier as tobacco, alcohol, and air pollution. The former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who co-chairs the commission, made the same point in a slightly different frame in his 2023 advisory: being chronically lonely is roughly as bad for your body as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Heart disease risk goes up about thirty percent. Stroke risk goes up about thirty-two percent. Older adults who are chronically lonely have about a fifty percent greater risk of developing dementia. And on the mental-health side, lonely people are roughly twice as likely to develop depression as their well-connected peers.

What I find most heartbreaking in the data is the age distribution. Most of us imagine the lonely person as an elderly widow in a small apartment, and certainly that exists. But the WHO found that the loneliest age group on Earth right now is teenagers, with roughly 21 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds reporting that they feel lonely most of the time. Among adolescent girls, the figure rises to nearly a quarter. These are the kids growing up with phones in their pockets that promised infinite connection and delivered the opposite.

Murthy and the commission aren’t subtle about why this is happening. We didn’t fall into loneliness by accident. We engineered it, decision by decision, over the course of about seventy years.

We zoned single-family suburbs that put working adults in cars for two hours a day, alone, with no porch and no sidewalk and no corner store to walk to. We bulldozed the dense, mixed-age neighborhoods where people of different generations lived on top of each other and rebuilt them as office parks and parking lots.

We replaced the corner tavern, the union hall, the church basement, the lodge meeting, the garden club, the bowling league, and the family dinner table with a screen. We made it normal for grandparents to live a thousand miles from their grandkids.

We let the institutions that used to put humans in front of each other on a recurring schedule (small businesses, downtowns, community theatres, public libraries, neighborhood schools) be hollowed out one by one. Robert Putnam laid out most of this in Bowling Alone twenty-five years ago. We’ve spent the time since proving him right.

The good news, and there is some, is that public-health researchers are finally starting to talk about loneliness the way they once talked about tobacco. A team led by Tyler Prochnow at the Texas A&M School of Public Health published a paper in Public Health Reports in January arguing that the same playbook that brought down American smoking rates by sixty percent in fifty years can be applied to loneliness now.

Smoking didn’t decline because individual smokers gritted their teeth harder. It declined because we changed the environment around the smoker. Cigarette ads got banned. Public spaces went smoke-free. Tobacco taxes went up. School curriculums changed. Doctors started asking about it at every visit. Insurers started covering cessation. Most importantly, the cultural meaning of smoking shifted, from sophistication and freedom to a slow, chemical kind of harm.

Prochnow and his colleagues argue we can do exactly the same thing with loneliness now: change the policies, redesign the spaces, screen for it in clinics, fund the helplines, denormalize the digital substitutes, and shift the cultural story from loneliness is a personal failing to loneliness is what happens when human beings are placed in environments human beings were never built to thrive in.

I’m not waiting for the policy. None of us should. The marina taught me that human beings will form a community wherever the architecture allows it, and that the architecture, in our own lives, is mostly something we control.

Most of you reading this can do at least three things this month that will measurably change your own loneliness numbers and somebody else’s.

Eat dinner with another human being three times a week, even if it has to be takeout in their kitchen or yours.

Walk somewhere on foot at least once a day where you might run into a neighbor and have to say hello.

And pick one institution in your life that requires showing up in person on a recurring basis (a Sunday service, a yoga class, a quilting circle, a poker night, a writing group, a community garden, a contra dance, a twelve-step meeting, a softball league, a community choir, an AA meeting, a town meeting) and commit to it for a season the way you’d commit to a job.

Don’t make it conditional on whether you “feel like it” on a given Tuesday. Treat it the way our great-grandparents treated church: as a non-negotiable rhythm that builds the muscle of belonging over time.

And if you have an elderly neighbor, knock on the door. Just knock. Bring a piece of fruit if you need an excuse. The data on what a brief, regular human visit does for an isolated older person’s biomarkers is close to miraculous, and the data on what it does for you is almost as good.

The WHO report is titled From Loneliness to Social Connection. It’s a hopeful title, and I think it earns the hope. We made this. We can unmake it. Loneliness is not a character flaw. It’s a public-health emergency hiding in plain sight, and the cure for it is each other.

Tell me in the comments what you’re going to commit to this month. Or tell me what’s already working in your life, the structure that’s keeping you tied to other humans, so the rest of us can borrow the idea. We’re a wisdom school here, which means our experiments belong to all of us.