Much of that is economic. Our society places no value on most people that age. If you have a family they may value you enough to spend their time with you, but that’s giving. Most people have 0 economic value at that age, our political elites excluded.
> Much of that is economic. Our society places no value on most people that age.
this feels like a theory in search of facts. are your friends hanging out with you simply because of your economic value to them? or weirder, hanging out with you because of your economic value to your employer?
there might be a correlation between someone's "economic value" being zero, and them being lonely, but there are a lot of ways that can happen, and direct causation probably isn't one of them.
This is a good (often overlooked) point, but I do think there are also real physical constraints (limited mobility, injury risk, lowered energy) as well as mental ones (including just being from different generations) that increase the difficulty of elders participating fully in society.
