No, there is no epidemic of loneliness 8 years ago
The blog post was crappy and seems the bulk of the context was shitting on the shitty journalist, rather than debunking thoroughly and straight-forwardly the claim at hand. I find the claim on loniness as more aparent on a global scale and demogralhically varying than in one single nation and a single demograph, so the post seems not only obnoxious but narrow too.