Why Senior Loneliness Matters

There is a senior loneliness epidemic in the United States. 28% of seniors — defined as adults over the age of 65 — live by themselves (source). In other words, there are 5 million men and 9.7 million women who do not have another person to regularly interact with on a day-to-day basis in their own home.

And even more actually feel lonely — in a poll conducted in 2023, 34% of seniors stated that they “sometimes” or “often” feel lonely. (source)

Take a moment to imagine the lived experience of a senior I know -

You’ve lived a full life, full of ups and downs. You’ve successfully made it to retirement age, and you have wide-open days to do what your heart desires! But one-by-one, your friends start to not be there anymore. Your children are busy with their kids and their careers. And then, one day, your spouse’s battle with Alzheimer’s takes a turn for the worse. He starts to wander away from the house, but you can’t do much about it, because your mobility is limited. In-home services come to help, but there’s not much to do at this point. Then he goes to the hospital. He never comes home.

Now your house is empty, devoid of the life that once was. That life that you built over all those decades is no longer. How could you not feel alone?

It can be hard for younger generations to understand what life can look like as a senior, especially one living alone. Senior loneliness isn’t talked about enough partially because seniors often aren’t in the forums where conversation takes place. Our current generation of seniors are very intelligent, but are sometimes less tech-savvy or are unaware of the platforms where they can make themselves heard. This gap represents an opportunity, which we’ll return to later.

There’s also the money. Beyond the feel-good reasons for wanting to solve this problem, solving senior loneliness can also be good business. Senior healthcare makes up ~37% of the $4.5 trillion healthcare spending in the US. This is despite seniors only being 17% of the population. (source)

Loneliness contributes significantly to this expenditure. When a senior is lonely, they experience increased risk of many of the most prevalent diseases that kill seniors in the United States: dementia (loneliness increases risk by 50%), stroke (32%), heart disease (29%), mental health disorders (26%), and premature mortality (26%), to name a few. (source)

Solving senior loneliness represents a massive financial opportunity, both for our healthcare system at large and for those individuals creating the solutions to solve this problem.

I am ready to be a part of the solution to this problem. Having seen multiple grandparents deal with living alone and struggling to stay in close contact with family and friends, I feel personally motivated to work in this space. I also think there is opportunity to create a large business that can continue to have impact over a long period of time.

In the short term, I have been hacking on a couple personal projects that may serve as a starting point for a more robust solution to senior loneliness:

• An iOS app for my own grandmother to stay a bit more closely connected to our family — watch the demo here. I am still actively getting my grandmother’s feedback and also check the analytics to understand how she is using the product in order to keep improving it.
• An AI companion web app, which I built during a one-day hackathon — check out the code and actual end product here. This initial prototype is designed for chatting with historical figures, but future directions could include 1) AR/VR app to speak verbally with an AI companion, or 2) an app where the user can load transcripts and voice recordings of a loved one and have the ability to chat with a bot version of that family member

To me, senior loneliness is a problem worth solving, for both personal reasons and financial ones. I’m excited to get going — if you’re passionate about improving the lives of seniors, let’s connect! Whether as collaborators, investors, or supporters, I would love your input as we tackle senior loneliness together.