Belonging Together: Friendship, Hope, and Well-Being Among Young Adults

ABSTRACT:Preventing and reducing loneliness is crucial to well-being and good health. While long thought to be a problem specific to the elderly or infirm, over the past decade the prevalence of loneliness across age cohorts has become increasingly apparent, and calls for a systematic public health approach to the problem have grown louder. This essay uses Vivek Murthy’s Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World (2020) as a point of departure to explore the value of human connection in general—and friendship in particular—as a means to both abating the pernicious individual and societal impact of loneliness and building a foundation for a renewal of the common good. Friendship as a form of human connection is then applied to understanding and addressing the overlapping mental health challenges of American college students and resettled refugee youth.