Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) (Photo: Screen capture)

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) was invited to discuss his new book -- Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal -- on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

"We're living through a digital revolution, which is undermining place," Sasse told host John Dickerson. "I think the biggest problem in America right now is loneliness. And the good news is, it's fixable. But it requires friendship. It requires more attention to place and family and shared vocation and work and neighborhood and worshipping communities."

Dickerson asked Sasse what he means by "place."

"So where you live is where you actually love," Sasse replied. "And communities of love are the center of what really keeps people happy. There's a ton of literature now that shows, we're the richest people in the history of humanity, and yet we're some of the most dissatisfied people in the history of humanity. How do you make sense of that?

"And it didn't start two years ago. It starts because the digital revolution is really undermining that sense of local community and neighborhood."

Sasse said cell phones and social media are "a huge part of it."

"It turns out, if you go from 200 to 500 social media friends, or 500 to 1,000, you don't get happier. But if you know the neighbor who lives two doors away from you, statistically, you're more likely to be happy. We need to attend those kinds of things. It's a big deal."

Sasse called it "stunning" that people have half as many friends now as they did 27 years ago.

"Nomadic tribes, agrarian history, industrial economics, people have always known their neighbors and known their co-workers. Increasingly, we don't know those things. We have gone from three-and-a-half friends per American 27 years ago to about 1.8 friends today.

"President Trump can't fix this. He didn't cause this. Politics can't fix this. Politics didn't cause this.

"But it's true that our political tribalism is filling that vacuum, that loneliness that's coming from all these other institutions. We have a decline of the nuclear family structure a lot the last 25 years. And politics is a place people look to try to find meaning in the absence of these other communities that actually can make you happy."

'Frenzied media circus'

Sasse said the "frenzied media circus" is contributing to the problem of political polarization:

"The Senate should be an institution of 100 people who get sent from their communities, where they really are from and want to return to, and they go and have to build relationships and build a temporary community in the Senate of people who actually listen to one another.

"We don't do that very much right now, because cable TV news has swallowed the Senate whole. Right now, we live this sort of frenzied media circus. That's not to beat up on the media. That's to beat up on the Senate as a place that people are more thinking about those distant tribes and the things we're screaming at each other against, rather than the things we should be for together.

"You should be for the place where you're from, the neighborhood and the city or the small town farming community where I'm from. But when you are temporarily thrown together in a new community, the Senate should be a place that actually does some empathy. And we're pretty crappy at that right now."

Sasse said the solution to the loneliness/disconnection problem is to "rediscover plural vocations."

"Work is statistically one of the most significant drivers of whether or not people are happy. And part of that's because we like to do stuff together. We like to have shared projects.

"I was born in the 1970s. Average duration at a firm was two-and-a-half decades for a primary breadwinner. Average duration at a firm today for an American is 4.2 years, and getting shorter."

He said Americans are not "lifelong learners," which means we should be "rethinking job retraining for the age of disruption.

"McKinsey, a company that I used to work for, says that 50 percent of Americans are going to be primarily freelancers in three years. We're not at all prepared for (that). That has huge downstream implications for shared work together."

Politicians should think less about right vs. left and more about "past vs. future," Sasse said.

"There aren't going to be lifelong jobs anymore. And we shouldn't be lying to the American people about it. We should be thinking about, what does it look like to help people get back to work, back to meaningful employment, back to shared labor with their neighbors when they're 35 and 40 and 45? We can't say, I, politician, am going to protect your jobs forever, because it's not true."

Sasse said Americans must break their tech addictions and concentrate on "flesh and blood neighbors" who "actually matter a lot."

Sasse, no fan of President Trump, has not ruled out a run for president some day.