I was invited to a conference last week by my former firm and colleagues. It was a thoughtful invitation. But how I felt during and after the event sent me down a path like the one I took when I left my downtown tower for the last time.
To be clear, it was wonderful to see everyone again. The hugs were frequent and lingered just long enough to mean a lot to my aging soul.
So why the sense of loneliness?
I also met with an old friend last week. Fit, accomplished, respected — he sold his company, plays golf three days a week, and has a social calendar that would look full to anyone glancing at it. When I asked him over coffee how he was spending his time in retirement — not the calendar version, but the real version — he paused longer than I expected.
“Honestly?” he grimaced. “Nothing of note. In fact, I’m not sure anyone would notice if I disappeared for a month.”
He wasn’t being dramatic. He was telling the truth. It’s that sense — that you are no longer missed from your former life.
Loneliness. Not the absence of people. The absence of necessity.
The Science Behind the Feelings
In May 2023, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an 82-page advisory declaring loneliness a public health crisis — one he compared directly to the harm caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Not a soft, feelings-based concern. A clinical, mortality-linked emergency. About half of American adults reported measurable loneliness even before COVID-19 made things worse. The pandemic didn’t create the problem. It ripped off the bandage, revealing what was already there.
The picture is consistent on this side of the border, too.
Statistics Canada data indicate that almost one in five Canadian seniors — 19 percent of adults aged 65 and older — reported experiencing loneliness in 2019–2020, a figure researchers believe undercounts the true scope. In Ontario specifically, a 2025 study published in BMJ Open found that loneliness was independently associated with increased healthcare transitions and mortality among older adults. The mechanism is the same whether you are in Toronto or Tampa. The silence around it is the same.
For older adults across North America, the mortality numbers are sobering. A 2025 meta-analysis published in European Psychiatry, drawing on 86 studies, found that loneliness is associated with a 14 percent increase in all-cause mortality risk. Social isolation raises that figure to 35 percent. Living alone bumps mortality risk by 21 percent. These are not marginal findings. This is peer-reviewed, population-level science telling us that disconnection kills.
The fiscal cost is equally striking. Social isolation among older adults accounts for an estimated $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending annually in the US alone, driven by increased hospitalizations and nursing facility use. Canada established its first clinical guidelines on social isolation and loneliness in older adults only in 2024, and still has no comprehensive national strategy to address them at the population level. We have made this a very expensive problem to ignore.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, whose research at Brigham Young University has been foundational to this field, helped catalyze the Surgeon General’s advisory and has influenced public health policy on both sides of the Atlantic. Her conclusion, based on decades of meta-analytic evidence, is that poor social connection is as dangerous as high blood pressure, obesity, and smoking. We spend billions addressing those three. We barely talk about the fourth.
Here is the thing I find most striking about all this research: the men who appear to be fine are often the ones in the most trouble.
We picture lonely people as elderly widows or isolated shut-ins. The reality, increasingly documented by researchers, is that the loneliest people in many communities are recently retired men sitting in coffee shops with impressive résumés and empty calendars. These are the men who had a full life — big titles, corner offices, dinner tables that needed managing, rooms that went quiet when they walked in.
Retirement psychologist Mark Travers has observed that for these men, retirement can feel less like a choice and more like a fall from grace — like losing a title that gave them purpose.
What they built their identity around wasn’t just work. It was the social architecture that worked quietly, provided the lunch meetings, the travel, the team that needed leading, even the complaints about the boss that bonded people together. When work ends, that entire ecosystem evaporates, often faster than anyone anticipated. What’s left is a man who is loved, possibly, but who no longer feels necessary. That distinction matters more than most of us care to admit.
The Canadian data sharpen the picture in ways worth noting. Statistics Canada found that Canadian seniors who were widowed, separated, or divorced were more than twice as likely to be lonely as those who were married or in a common-law relationship — 31 to 32 percent versus 13 percent.
Seniors who reported barriers to social participation were nearly three times as likely to be lonely as those without barriers. While senior women reported loneliness at higher rates than men in Canadian surveys, researchers caution that this gap may reflect underreporting by men rather than genuinely lower rates.
Where is the Applause?
The data on gender and loneliness is more nuanced than the headline suggests. Broad surveys show roughly equal rates of reported loneliness among men and women — but that equality dissolves on closer examination.
AARP’s 2025 survey found that men are more likely to feel lonely among adults over 45. More tellingly, Pew Research found that 74 percent of men would turn first to a spouse or partner for emotional support, reaching out to friends far less often than women. Twenty percent of single men report having no close friends.
Research consistently finds that men are more likely than women to report feeling disconnected and irrelevant — even when their answers to general loneliness questions look similar. The issue isn’t simply that men are lonelier. It’s that their social safety net is thinner, their support is concentrated in one person, and when that person or that career disappears, there is very little underneath.
Psychologists call this an ‘outside-in identity’ — one built from external achievements inward, rather than from internal values outward. It functions brilliantly in high-performance environments. It struggles badly in retirement, which rewards presence over production. The scoreboard is gone. The applause has stopped. And nobody briefed us on what comes next.
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The mortality data on men and loneliness are particularly stark. A meta-analysis examining sex differences found that men who lived alone and felt lonely faced a doubled mortality risk compared with those who were socially connected. Depression, which mediates much of the relationship between loneliness and death in men, is itself dramatically underdiagnosed in this population — in part because men experiencing it often don’t recognize it, and in part because they’ve spent decades not talking about that kind of thing.
Dying From Broken Hearts
Research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health followed more than 2,000 patients hospitalized for heart failure and found that those with high levels of loneliness were more than three times as likely to die within a year as those with strong social connections.
A separate study followed more than 5,000 older Americans for nine years and found that social isolation was associated with nearly a 30 percent higher risk of developing dementia.
These are not marginal associations. These are the kinds of numbers that, if attached to a cholesterol reading or a blood pressure figure, would have us on medication the next morning.
One finding that struck me: studies consistently show that having more friends reduces loneliness, but there appears to be a threshold effect for men. Beyond a certain number, quality matters more than quantity.
What protects men’s health isn’t having dozens of acquaintances. It’s having a handful of relationships with real bonds and conversations.
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Here is what the evidence supports — not the soft version, the practical ones.
Move in groups, not alone.
This one is close to home for me. Cycling has given me something I didn’t fully realize I needed: a community of people who show up at the same time, work hard together, and relate around something shared and physical.
The research consistently backs this up. Group physical activity reduces loneliness more effectively than solo exercise, even when the total movement is identical. The combination of routine, shared effort, and low-stakes conversation creates exactly the kind of repeated, predictable contact that the brain needs to build trust and a sense of belonging. If cycling isn’t your sport, find yours — and then find a group version of it.
Design connection intentionally.
Before retirement, connections happened automatically. After retirement, they must be built intentionally. Neuroscience tells us the brain responds to predictability — the same walking group each week, the same coffee on Tuesday mornings, the same tennis partner. Repeated contact builds neural familiarity, reducing social anxiety and deepening a sense of belonging over time. This isn’t soft advice. It’s biology.
Reassess what friendship means at this stage.
The work friendships were real, but they were also contextual. They needed a shared context to survive. What you’re building now is different — friendships chosen rather than inherited. That takes more effort and more vulnerability than most of us were trained for. Do it anyway.
Don’t confuse proximity with connection.
You can live with others and still be profoundly lonely. You can be surrounded by a full life and still feel unnecessary. The Surgeon General’s advisory defines loneliness not as being alone, but as the gap between the connection you have and the connection you need. If that gap exists, it matters — regardless of how full your calendar looks.
Talk to your doctor.
Social isolation and loneliness are now recognised as independent risk factors for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and premature mortality on both sides of the border. They belong in a clinical conversation alongside your blood pressure and cholesterol. If your physician isn’t asking, bring it up yourself.
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I think about that conference. I think about my friend over coffee. I’ve known a few versions of him over the years — including, if I’m honest, an earlier version of myself. The one who thought that building something and riding alone were the same as being fine.
They’re not.
The ride is better with others. The coffee tastes better with company. Research says so. And if you’ve been doing it alone for a while, it might be worth asking yourself why.
If you are experiencing persistent loneliness or social isolation that is affecting your mental or physical health, speak with your physician. In Canada, the Canadian Mental Health Association offers resources at cmha.ca. In the US, AARP’s Connect2Affect programme provides tools and referrals at connect2affect.org.
Research & sources referenced in this piece
Nakou et al. (2025). Loneliness, social isolation, and living alone: a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry / Aging Clinical and Experimental Research.
Office of the US Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. HHS.
Statistics Canada (2023). A look at loneliness among seniors. statcan.gc.ca
Gilmour, H. & Ramage-Morin, P.L. (2020). Social isolation and mortality among Canadian seniors. Health Reports, Statistics Canada.
Savage, R.D. et al. (2025). Association of loneliness with healthcare transitions and mortality in older adults in Ontario, Canada. BMJ Open.
Holt-Lunstad, J. (2021). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.
Cudjoe, T. et al. (2022). Social isolation and dementia risk. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
AARP (December 2025). Disconnected: The Escalating Challenge of Loneliness Among Adults 45-Plus. Choi-Allum, L. & Rainville, C.
Pew Research Center (January 2025). Men, Women and Social Connections. Goddard, I. & Parker, K.
Generalizing: we have not been given the instructions on how to grieve the loss of our career and our identity that's attached to that career.
Perhaps we need to write a proper eulogy to ourselves about how you contributed to the industry for years and your accomplishments. Tuck it away, burn it, mail it to yourself. Whatever it is, close that chapter and formally start writing a new one.
What is the solution in your opinion?