I care deeply about this because I almost fell into the loneliness chasm.
I was lucky, though, because ~25 years ago I took a college course for an easy A that covered the negative health effects of loneliness. And I remembered it.
There is not a single person on Earth who cannot spare one hour per week, which is all it takes.
One hour per week very quickly snowballs into buying monthly planners and constantly saying "I can't because I'm busy <doing something else with a group of people> that day".
When you tell people that every single zip code in the entire United States is full of groups of people who are doing things and constantly looking for new members to join, they will make ten thousand excuses before googling "upcoming events in my area" and putting a single one-hour thing on their calendar.
They refuse to accept the irrefutable fact that someone is out there looking for them.
edit: What pisses me off the most about articles like that are the pop pysch-/soci-ology bullshit statements about places like libraries being less accessible. There are more public libraries today than there were in the 1980s. They're being used at roughly the same rate. That makes them either equally or more accessible: not less.
