Stewardship of Loneliness

In August 2026, California's Governor's Office announced it had identified a psychological condition afflicting a large share of the state's population, and that it was standing up an apparatus to manage it.

The condition is loneliness.

The apparatus was the California Social Health Council, a thirty-one-member body launched by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom — the Governor's wife, not an elected or Senate-confirmed official — with State Health and Human Services Secretary Kim Johnson and Chief Service Officer Josh Fryday as co-chairs.

Its stated mission is to "elevate loneliness as a public health priority" and build out a state roadmap following the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection. It is the institutional expression of California Love, California Strong, an initiative the First Partner had already launched earlier in the year around belonging, self-care, and social connection.

None of this implies bad intent to be worth examining closely. The same question worth asking of every mythical stewardship claim: who holds the outcome.

What the state has already tried to steward

California doesn't have to speculate about how this kind of stewardship performs, because it has already run the experiment on an adjacent problem at a much larger scale. Since 2021, the state has spent more than $4 billion through the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative on the psychological wellbeing of Californians under twenty-five — the same broad category of interior, hard-to-verify human experience the new loneliness council is now taking on for the population at large.

The reporting on that initiative is a study in what an agency measures when nobody can hold it to an outcome. The state's own figures: more than 500,000 children, youth, and families "received support" through digital behavioral health services; over 70,000 people moved through professional development pathways; more than 4,000 people became certified as wellness coaches; upwards of 1,600 organizations ran more than 2,000 activities statewide.

Absent from that list is any figure answering the question that actually matters — are young Californians measurably less depressed, less anxious, less suicidal than they were in 2021 because of this spending?

The metrics on offer are activity counts: people touched, coaches certified, organizations enlisted, dollars deployed.

None of them are outcome counts. A private actor spending $4 billion and unable to show what it bought would not survive the next funding round. A government initiative spending $4 billion and unable to show what it bought gets to announce a sequel.

This is the same clock mismatch The Myth of the Public Steward traced through elephants, cod, and Soviet wheat fields, transposed onto a domain with no deed and no balance sheet at all.

A rancher who degrades the range discovers the cost the day the herd doesn't recover. A state initiative that fails to move the actual mental health needle discovers nothing, because nobody on the org chart is the residual claimant on Californians' psychological outcomes.

The people who run CYBHI keep their jobs whether teen suicide rates move or not. The activity metrics are not a smokescreen so much as the only kind of report an unaccountable agent is structurally capable of producing: the thing it can count is the thing it did, not the thing that happened as a result.

Loneliness is a harder resource to steward than a forest

If the state's own track record on youth mental health spending is a caution, loneliness is a harder resource to manage well than almost anything the "public stewardship" model has previously been asked to hold, for a reason specific to what it is: nobody, including the person feeling it, can produce a reliable, falsifiable measurement of it.

A fish stock can be counted by trawl survey. An elk population can be counted by aerial census. Soil carbon can be assayed. But Loneliness is self-reported, culturally inflected, and — per the WHO Commission's own framing this initiative is built on — treated as a spectrum rather than a diagnosis, which means the state's benchmark for whether the problem is improving is, in the end, a survey instrument measuring how people describe their own feelings in a given week.

That's a genuinely hard problem for anyone to solve, including a well-meaning private actor.

It's a much harder one for a government council to solve credibly, because the two things that make the private-ownership incentive work — a measurable outcome and a party whose fortunes track it — are both absent by the nature of the resource.

There's no title on a feeling. There's no sale price on a Tuesday spent less alone. And a body with no elected mandate, chaired by someone who holds her position by marriage rather than by any test of competence or accountability the public had a vote in, is being asked to set the roadmap for addressing it anyway — with a co-chair structure that includes the same CalHHS apparatus that produced the activity-metric report on CYBHI, working from the same institutional muscle memory.

The morality of a state-defined psychological norm

Then the problems of emotional stewardship. Set the measurement problem aside entirely — grant, for the sake of argument, that loneliness could be tracked as cleanly as fish. A harder question survives that concession: should a state get to decide, for a population it did not individually examine, what counts as a psychological condition worth mobilizing public institutions to correct?

This is not a new question, and the historical record on it is not comforting. Twentieth-century psychiatry, practiced top-down at state scale, produced some of its worst chapters exactly where it was most confident it was helping: involuntary commitment used to warehouse the merely inconvenient, "sluggish schizophrenia" invented in the Soviet Union as a diagnosis specifically elastic enough to cover political dissent, homosexuality carried in the American psychiatric canon as a disorder to be corrected well into living memory.

None of those episodes required a villain. They required an institution empowered to define a deviation from a psychological norm it had set through some mysterious process, and then vested with the authority and the funding to act on that definition at scale. Thomas Szasz built a career-long critique out of exactly this pattern: that "mental illness" invoked by institutions rather than diagnosed doctor to patient tends to function less like a diagnosis and more like a permission slip for intervention the state has already decided it wants to make.

None of this requires believing California's Social Health Council will attempt to do anything of that magnitude. But it requires noticing that the moral safeguard against that whole category of error was never better measurement — Soviet psychiatrists were confident their diagnoses were rigorous — it was the principle that a psychiatric or psychological determination is legitimate only when it runs through informed consent between a specific clinician and a specific patient, not when it's asserted at the population level by an agency that examined no one.

A doctor diagnosing a patient who walked into the office answers to that patient, who can leave, seek a second opinion, or refuse treatment. A state council diagnosing "many Californians" as suffering a condition answers to no one it has diagnosed, because it never opened a file on any of them individually — it inferred the condition from a survey instrument and moved directly to public strategy.

That's not medicine done badly. It's medicine's authority claimed without medicine's actual relationship to the person being treated, and history's worst uses of top-down psychiatry all ran through exactly that gap.

What this looks like from a social-libertarian view

Part of what "social liberty" means is a specific insistence that the social dimension of a person's life — their relationships, their sense of belonging, the texture of their private and communal ties — is not a neutral backdrop to politics but one of the things a state is most prone to overreach into, and one of the areas where that overreach does the most damage precisely because it's the hardest to see coming.

Most stewardship debates on are about tangible things: land, forests, a tree, fish, a herd. This one is about something closer to the core of the concern than any of those — not a resource the state manages badly, but the social fabric of citizens' own lives, which a social libertarian holds should be built by the people -- families, neighbors, and communites -- living inside it, not administered by an agency several layers removed from it. A loneliness council is a far sharper test case than a mismanaged fishery, and a metaphor for a way the rulers are seeing us.

The CYBHI comparison above is an efficacy argument: the state is bad at this stewardship job for the same structural reason it's bad at every stewardship job, incentive misalignment between the agent managing the resource and whoever bears the consequences. The consent argument above is a moral one, about who a psychological determination has to run through to be legitimate at all. A social libertarian reading rests on a third claim underneath both, because neither efficacy nor consent is quite the load-bearing objection here.

Legitimate state authority runs to actions that affect others — property, contract, force, fraud — and stops at the boundary of a person's own mind, body, and private life.

A government can rightly tax an unearned land-value increment, because that value was created by the community and the community has a claim on it. A government cannot, on the same theory, claim a stake in whether a citizen feels connected to their neighbors, because a feeling isn't a resource anyone else has a claim on, and there is no boundary condition under which one citizen's loneliness becomes another citizen's problem to be jointly managed by the state.

Land stewardship failures are illegitimate as bad management of something the public does have a stake in. A state council chartered to manage the psychological emotional state of its population is a different kind of beast: it's a claim of jurisdiction over something the public was never owed a say in to begin with, dressed in exactly the same "stewardship" language used for forests and fisheries specifically because that language sounds virtuous rather than expansive.

Now expand the metaphor to see the meaning of the degree of involvement here: it isn't just an unaccountable agent doing a resource-management job badly, the way CYBHI's activity metrics show it doing youth mental health spending badly. It's the state's management apparatus extending its own logic — the same co-chair, same agency, same reporting style — into a domain a social libertarian holds should never have been on the state's ledger or province in the first place. It is doing a job that morally and practically cannot be done right. Good execution wouldn't fix that. A council that hit every WHO benchmark and moved every survey number in the right direction would still be a body exercising a jurisdiction it was never granted, over something a resident's own life is the only legitimate authority on.

What this isn't an argument against

Despite what the governor's agents will try to convince everyone of, this isn't an argument that loneliness is fake, that the WHO's underlying research is wrong, or that no one should try to do anything about it. Isolation has real, well-documented health costs — the same body of evidence that produced the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on the subject is not junk science, and libraries, park programs, and civic service infrastructure are perfectly legitimate things for a state to invest in regardless of who chairs the committee that recommends it. A local senior center that gets more funding to run a weekly game night is a straightforwardly good outcome whether or not the person who announced it holds elected office.

The problem is narrower: it's the gap between announcing a stewardship mandate and holding the position that makes stewardship actually work. A government initiative that can spend $4 billion on youth mental health and report activity instead of outcomes has already shown what its reporting looks like when nobody's tenure depends on the number moving.

Handing the same institutional structure a mandate over a still-less-measurable feeling, chaired by someone whose position exists independent of any electoral or performance test, isn't stewardship in the sense the word implies. It's the declaration of a mandate without the accountability that would make the mandate mean anything — a council that can claim credit if loneliness statistics improve for reasons that have nothing to do with it, and pay no price if they don't, because nobody designed a mechanism by which they would.

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is mine — I chose the facts, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. I'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.