Lonely? You are not alone...
But how do you confront it?
Loneliness is an unlikely 21st century plague.
There have never been more people on the planet. It has never been easier for them to connect. People live closer together than ever, piled on top of one another in great people heaps, or else sown madly in long narrow drills, side by side.
They cram into trains, bars, festivals and stadiums, touch shoulders on aircraft. Ask yourself now: where is the nearest person? I bet they are close enough for you to whisper: “I adore the sight of sunlight bouncing off a bald man’s head.”
And yet people have never been this lonely. According to a World Health Organisation report published this week, one in six people - more than a billion souls - have experienced loneliness in the past decade. No country or region is spared. Young people and minority communities are particularly hard hit.
And loneliness is bad for us, particularly for our mental health. “Loneliness and social isolation are major public health challenges, and they must be addressed now,” the WHO report said, estimating that it was responsible for more than 800,000 deaths each year.
The reasons for the trend are fairly obvious: a couple of hundred years ago, few people lived alone; now more than 8 million do in the UK alone. The collapse of organised religion, the dereliction of local communities, the rise of anonymous, disembodied digital life, the atomisation of work, the ageing - and ageist - society: the things that divide us are multiplying.
This creeping epidemic begs a slew of questions. Why is loneliness bad? Why does it lead to mental anguish1? And what can be done about it? This week I speak to a professor who contributed to the WHO report. And next week I’ll be talking to a writer and author about living alone, feeling lonely - and why the two are different things.
If you have a perspective on this issue, please add it to the comments, or write to me directly so that I can incorporate your thoughts into next week’s essay. I love doing that: getting other people to do the work for me.
Historians of loneliness insist that it is a rather modern idea, the suggestion being that medieval peasants and artful vagabonds had far more pressing things on their mind than worrying about solitude.
In her book ‘A biography of Loneliness,’2 Fay Bound Alberti writes that it “emerged as both a term and a recognisable experience around 1800,” when Wordsworth was shambling around the Lake District and the Enlightenment was encouraging greater introspection, individualism and self-awareness.
Literary movements that followed - Romantic, Naturalist, Existentialist - are littered with the loneliest protagonists, isolated by circumstance, alienated by modernity, and put on the page by writers like Zola and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Twain, Camus and Sartre3.
After 100+ years of writing about loneliness, people started singing about it too. As social isolation became more of an issue in the postwar years, it provided the perfect material for the new tunesmiths of the rock and pop explosion. Soon enough, everyone from Elvis to Elton and Abba to Sting were singing their solitude. (Eclectic playlist here!)
Nowadays, more than 3m people in Britain say they feel alone often or always4. It’s not just those that live alone. You can be lonely in a crowd or a capital or a couple. You can be lonely if you are poor and can’t afford inclusive activities, if you are widowed, or face exclusion because you are different. You can be lonely if you are young and your connections are limited to social media.
And the problem is that loneliness can generate a range of mental and physical ailments which then exacerbate loneliness. A vicious circle.
“You can’t always address it because you don’t have the resources,” says Manuela Barreto, a psychology professor at Exeter university who contributed to the WHO report. “And if you can’t address it, that’s where the cycle is never-ending. This is why people talk about chronic loneliness being problematic.”
The loneliest I have ever felt was not living abroad on my own or starting a new school or university, but languishing in the vale of woe, baffled and awake in the slowest hours of the night, no one able to help.
For me, that sense of being utterly alone just made the mental anguish worse.
I ask Manuela why loneliness feels so bad.
“The narrative in evolutionary theory is that loneliness functions like thirst or hunger, to alert you that something fundamental and important is amiss,” she says, adding that it has to be an unpleasant feeling so that the message gets through. And of course, people with mental health problems are more likely to end up lonely - while lonely people are more like to end up with mental health problems.
“They feed each other,” says Manuela. “It’s a vicious cycle. We need to break it.”
And so I ask the question that I often ask in this column. What is to be done? Manuela says that we’ve got it wrong in the past by putting it all on the person who is lonely. Come on! Get out more! Make friends! Join things. Stop moping around at home!
“I think a lot of loneliness comes from being excluded,” she said, “not being recognised as equally valuable. There is quite a lot of research on this.5”
She says local authorities, organisations, schools, clubs, neighbourhoods and programmes need to be far more open and welcoming to all. When unwell, I was hugely grateful to Mind for a weekly walk for everyone that they organise in my town. I managed to volunteer for a very welcoming environmental charity called the Real Junk Food Project. But then I am white and privileged and accustomed to being accepted wherever I turn up.
“If you know that the problem is because communities do not cater for everybody, clearly that is the place to start,” Manuela said. “We need to make communities more inclusive.”
Braindrops (9)
These words are spelled identically. Can you guess them from the clues?
_ _ _ _ _ _ Faster (6)
_ _ _ _ _ _ First name (6)
Last week’s palindromes.
Croatian tennis player (5) CILIC
South African cricketer (7) MARKRAM
Ex-footballer, current manager (3) PEP
Romanian marathon runner (5,6) ANUTA CATUNA
Until next week
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9636084/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230510203_4
https://journalofsocialinclusion.com/articles/10.36251/josi247
Great article, Mark, as always! There is so much work behind your writing each week. Thank you. Such an important perspective here - that society often victim-blames people for their loneliness, having first excluded them. I find it's especially hard for people living with trauma and the consequences of abuse. Always having to get back into the world from the outside of things. And it's hard to get back in. People almost seem to guard conviviality as a resource. I guess we can all do more to share ours.
Loneliness and isolation is also a huge issue for those with chronic health issues, physical or mental. Our culture almost demands that we be high functioning to be able to participate.