“I heard a stat that almost one in ten men are on antidepressants now, and almost one in five women. Which was shocking because—”
“It’s so low.”
“I know, right! I don’t have any friends who aren’t on an antidepressant, or an antipsychotic, or something. I was like, where is this well-adjusted majority?”

[…] “I heard that the average number of close friends has dropped over the last thirty years,” said Ether. “It used to be that the number of loners who literally had no friends was tiny, like three percent of the population. That’s quadrupled since then; now twelve percent of us have nobody. […] I’m telling you, it’s a crisis. Humans need friends every bit as much as we need food. But because this kind of starvation is invisible, and because we’re all physically really fat, nobody sees it. Then, every ten minutes or so, somebody sticks a gun in their mouth.”

— Ether and Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 79-84