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There’s a do-it-yourself movement that’s been spreading across the United Kingdom, but it’s not led by artisan hipsters or first-time homeowners. It’s part of the country’s nationwide campaign to address loneliness, and experts think it may hold some important clues for fixing a tricky and potentially life-threatening problem.

As experts in the Midwest and around the world work to address loneliness, one tricky question keeps popping up: even if loneliness is bad for our physical and mental health, what if people just don’t want to be social?

To a lot of people in the U.S., the idea of a government loneliness program sounds like something out of a free-spending European dreamland, like locally sourced organic school lunches in Italy or months of paid paternity leave in Sweden . Nice, if you don’t mind high taxes. But in the United Kingdom, just such a campaign was introduced by a Conservative British prime minister whose government has been scaling back public spending for years, and that’s led critics to call loneliness a self-inflicted wound.

Hundreds of young German football fans in blue jerseys dance and sing in the streets before a soccer match in Manchester, England. This rainy northwestern city is the third largest in the United Kingdom. Known for its music scene and soccer, it’s a city brimming with young people . But for many of those young people, like 17-year-old Lee Smelhurst-Hudson, life in Greater Manchester can be tough.

In the heart of London, at Buckingham Palace, the daily changing of the guard reminds crowds of tourists that the United Kingdom is a country with staying power. Over the centuries, the British have fought off famine, plague, economic depression and the Nazis. More recently, a few blocks away at Ten Downing Street, Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to take on a new threat to the lives of Britons.