“Loneliness was the smoking gun”: Noreena Hertz’s new book identifies how the lonely show us what’s societally broken, and how to fix it
Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash
One of our earliest themes in The Alternative UK, which emerged out of many of our early collaboratories, was loneliness. Ministers for loneliness have come and gone, and the pandemic - pushing us into our isolated spaces - have made what was an interesting emergent issue, now a centre-stage phenomenon.
Into this space, with admirable prescience, has come the economist Noreena Hertz’s new book, The Lonely Century: Coming Together in a World that's Pulling Apart.
Here’s two excerpts from some recent interviews with Noreen, the key points in bold.
First from The Times (UK):
To Hertz, quarantine simply accelerated a universal sense of isolation that she had long been observing, especially in the under-30s — dubbed by her Generation K, after the dystopian Hunger Games heroine Katniss — who have never known a time without the internet and see the world as a “Hobbesian nightmare”.
With increasingly limited career prospects, many work in the gig economy, working antisocial hours and having no meaningful interaction with colleagues. One in five US millennials says they have no friends.
“I’ve been teaching for quite a few years and I realised my students were much lonelier than they had been in the past. They were coming into my office to complain about it, but I also saw it in the way they were so uncomfortable interacting with each other face to face. Group assignments were very awkward.”
The president of one of the US’s most prestigious Ivy League universities told Hertz that so many of its new intake was so bad at interpreting face-to-face conversations it was implementing classes in “how to read a face in real life”. “They were literally having to be told, ‘If someone is frowning, that’s a bad thing.’”
While isolation for the elderly has always been an issue, Hertz was still astonished to learn that in Japan, where 14 per cent of elderly men can go a fortnight without speaking to a soul, crimes committed by people over 65 — especially women — have quadrupled in the past two decades. Their goal is to be sent to prison, which in the words of one 78-year-old inmate, is “an oasis . . . with many people to talk to”.
These stories aren’t just heart-rending; from Hertz’s academic perspective they are key to understanding the worldwide rise of far-right, nationalist movements.
“Loneliness isn’t just about craving company, it’s also about feeling unsupported by your neighbours, colleagues, government,” she says.
“People who had joined organisations like France’s Front National or Italy’s League, who have maybe lost jobs, liked the sense of community these parties offered them.”
Donald Trump, she acknowledges, “redrew the political map” by making people who had previously felt abandoned and unheard feel heard.
This isn’t cheery stuff, but Hertz is resolutely optimistic, filling her book with advice on how governments can create more connected societies through actions such as better regulation of social media and imaginative city planning.
“We’ve built a lonely world, but, post-Covid, people have revalued community, so we have a chance to rebuild with compassion and care. Writing the book could have been depressing, but it left me feeling empowered.”
And here’s more from the Sydney Morning Herald:
Hertz had glimpsed a broader theme, one she has come to see as a through line in all her work. “I have always looked at marginalisation: people feeling disconnected economically, people feeling disconnected politically, people feeling alienated at work, people versus big corporations. I’ve always been interested in where the personal, and the political, and the economic kind of rub up against each other,” she tells us via Zoom from London.
Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash
“And loneliness is very much at that point of intersection. I came to realise loneliness was the lens through which one could understand the seismic political and societal changes we’d witnessed in recent years, as well as the profound sense of disconnection so many feel from each other and the state. It was almost like loneliness was the smoking gun.”
As the title underlines, its big, bold thesis is that coalescing currents have driven the developed world to ever-greater levels of isolation over recent decades. Longer term, those currents have included post-war demographic trends such as increasing migration, urbanisation and affluence.
The medium-term catalyst, however, Hertz argues, has been more ideological: the triumph of neoliberalism and free-market capitalism, from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s through to their “Third Way” successors, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Two years after former UK prime minister Theresa May appointed the world’s first minister for loneliness – declaring the “hidden epidemic” affecting nine million UK citizens “one of the great public health challenges of our time” – Hertz argues that loneliness is the near-inevitable consequence of long-term, systemic insistence on economies over societies; freedoms – individual and market – over community.
A consequence she traces right back to Thatcher’s ’80s pronouncements that “there’s no such thing as society”, that economics is merely a means to change “the heart and soul of the nation” from “the collectivist” to “the personal”.
Over the past decade, smartphones and social media have added a whole new layer of isolation to that evolving equation. “Suddenly we had these devices which constantly distract us from engaging face-to-face, being present with those around us, and that encourage a more adversarial, hostile online existence as well,” Hertz says.
To which might be added a host of other factors, from broader technological and economic disruption to the rise of the gig economy, workforce casualisation and falling marriage and participation rates in unions, churches and clubs.
And living alone. For much of the 20th century, lone households have been a privilege of growing affluence, urbanisation and individualism. But 2020 has brought home to millions just how lonely a lone household can be. How debilitating it can be to have no contact with another human, let alone touch, skin-to-skin, for weeks. To buy a single piece of fish, two carrots and a head of broccoli for dinner or hear the strangeness of your own voice as it emerges for the first time in days.
By 2019, single-person households without kids had become the most common kind in Sweden, accounting for 40 per cent of homes, a similar percentage to Denmark and Germany.
They are also the fastest growing type in Japan, where they are expected to account for 35 per cent of households this year, while in Australia a quarter of households were single-person when the last Australian Institute of Family Studies report was done in 2015, a figure that had tripled since World War II. Interestingly, that growth has stalled since 2001, presumably as a result of rising housing costs and young adults staying at home longer.
To Hertz, isolation and alienation have fuelled polarisation, populism and extremism, not to mention the stridency of current debate. “The contemporary manifestation of loneliness goes beyond our yearning for connection with those physically around us,” she writes in The Lonely Century.
“[Loneliness] also incorporates how disconnected we feel from politicians and politics, how cut off we feel from our work and our workplace, how excluded many of us feel from society’s gains, and how powerless, invisible and voiceless so many of us feel ourselves to be.”
…Into that already atomised world arrived a virus whose survival was premised on what was left of human connection. As Hertz recalls, “I’d been in my room for two years writing a book about how lonely, isolated and disconnected we’d all become, then we went into lockdown and it became the biggest story in the world.”
Within weeks, the Belgian psychologist Dr Elke Van Hoof had declared the lockdown the world’s greatest “psychological experiment” yet, an event unprecedented in speed – days and weeks – and scale, affecting an estimated 2.6 billion people, or a third of the global population.
Van Hoof, an expert in stress, burnout and trauma who chairs the Belgian Superior Health Council’s corona mental health working group, warned on April 9 of a looming secondary mental health crisis in an article published on the World Economic Forum website.
That article drew on a review of 24 studies on the psychological impact of quarantine, confirming “a wide range of symptoms of psychological stress and disorder” among the quarantined, “including low mood, insomnia, stress, anxiety, anger, irritability, emotional exhaustion, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms”.
Photo by Samuel Austin on Unsplash
But the lockdowns have also, by definition, been one vast, fast and largely improvised experiment in mass isolation. An experiment marked, at every turn, by serendipity, as an epidemic coming of age collided with the pandemic that may yet define it.
In late March, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US posted the initial findings of a study begun three years earlier, which confirmed for the first time that the analogy between loneliness and hunger was literal rather than figurative.
Quarantining subjects from food and company in separate, 10-hour sessions, researchers found loneliness – often defined as the difference between the relationships you have and the relationships you want to have – actually triggers the same neural pathways as hunger.
While those findings are yet to be peer-reviewed, they suggest our need to connect may be as fundamental as our need to feed; a similarly visceral indicator of existential threat. “Chronic social isolation might be something like long-term undernourishment, producing steady, aversive need that wears away at our wellbeing,” noted Stanford University’s Jamil Zaki, author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, in an article in Scientific American. “These findings give a name to what countless people are experiencing right now.”
As soon as the lockdown began, those manning German helplines did indeed begin to report people ringing in saying they were more scared of isolation than COVID-19, Hertz says. In Australia, by late April, loneliness was the most commonly reported COVID-related personal stress among those the Australian Bureau of Statistics put to more than 1000 Australians, including rent, mortgage, financial or relationship difficulties. Overall, 22 per cent of people were affected, and many more women (28 per cent), who were likely to be home and caring for children, than men (16 per cent).
Two excellent podcast interviews with Noreena can be found on the RSA’s Bridges to the Future, and the LRB’s Talking Politics podcast.