“We are facing an epidemic of loneliness – and individualism is to blame”

The WHO has declared loneliness a global public health concern. To address it, we need to reconsider the way we structure our lives and our families.

In November of last year, the WHO made headlines by declaring loneliness to be a “pressing health threat”. According to US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, the health risks of loneliness are as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with those lacking social connection being as vulnerable to the heightened risk for diseases like stroke, anxiety, dementia, depression and suicide as alcoholics or the obese.

The Loneliness Epidemic

At the same time, 47% of UK adults will experience some level of loneliness in their lives. This is particularly acute amongst younger people; 10% of those aged 16 to 24 said that they often or always felt lonely, a figure which is more than twice that of the over 70 age group. Research from the US suggests that levels of adolescent and young adult loneliness have risen over time. With loneliness being catastrophic for our physical and mental health, rising levels are a cause for serious concern.

Yet there is no drug to cure loneliness, nor can it be fixed with a simple lifestyle change – its causes are at the root of the way our society is organised. Sheila Liming, in her book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, blames social isolation on “the expansion of digital technologies and our increasing reliance on them; the growth of the private sector and accompanying diminishment of the public sphere; policies and social practices that champion individualism and make social connection more difficult; and an ethos of do-it-yourself ruggedness that has taken the place of shared support structures.”. What Liming argues is that humans naturally want to spend time with others, yet we have structured our society in such a way that makes this exceedingly difficult.

Is the way society is organised ruining our ability to connect?

Let’s unpack this idea a bit – what aspects of our social organisation are proving so damaging for our social lives? Digital technology is one culprit. Whilst tech may have been invented to make social interaction easier, digital communication is worsening our ability to socialise face-to-face. It does this in two major ways; first by converting all time into work time, which reduces the amount of time available for crucial face-to-face “hanging out”. We have also gained the ability to “curate” our interactions using technology. We can talk to whoever we want online and ignore those we don’t want to talk to, as well as escaping unwanted interactions in the real world by putting headphones on or texting instead of talking to the person sat next to you. Whilst it is tempting in the short term to avoid awkward situations, we are seriously limiting our potential for positive interactions too.

Digital technology diverts our attention away from face-to-face interaction, but what also underlies our current crisis is the lack of spaces in which this interaction can take place. Liming puts the blame on our obsession with private property and home ownership, and I entirely agree.  Societal expectations encourage us to live in small nuclear family units, each owning their own home. Living with parents or extended family or being in a flatshare are considered childish and undesirable. But are we condemning ourselves to isolation by living so far (physically and metaphorically) apart? David Brooks, in his 2020 article The Nuclear Family was A Mistake, argues that presenting the nuclear family – owning a private property shared only with a small family group – as the ideal mode of living is misguided for this very reason.

Most people, both historically and globally, do not live like this – and for good reason – larger households and extended families provide much more mutual support and many more opportunities for socialisation.  Brooks argues that social norms like expecting children to move out of their parents’ homes at eighteen are actively damaging our social lives, encouraging people to live in excessively small and isolated family units. He gives clear examples of where more communal styles of living have proven significantly beneficial, from helping released prisoners in Salt Lake City to providing support networks to children in areas marked by high levels of gang violence. Socialisation needs us to exist in the same place, and by retreating further and further into our own private spaces, inhabited only by us and small groups of immediate family, we make this increasingly difficult for ourselves.

Underlying all this is the ultimate culprit for social isolation: an individual-centred, atomised society. Focus on our personal goals is leading us to neglect relationship building activities as our professional lives place constant constraints on our time. We also seek private over public space; home ownership within small family units becoming desirable over more communal styles of living. Such is the link between this individualist way of thinking and social isolation, that a 2021 study found a clear link between society’s “neoliberal” characteristics – free markets and competition-based approach to the distribution of resources and jobs for example – and the prevalence of social isolation. Those who felt most lonely in the study, were the most likely to have had experiences characteristic of a “neoliberal” society.

Our twenty-first century loneliness can be solved.

So, what should we do? The loneliness epidemic requires a rethink of how we live our lives. We should abandon our obsession with private space, looking to establish community initiatives aimed at developing relationships between people as well as destigmatising extended family and friendship groups living together. We also need to put more effort into building social relationships. We must make ‘hanging out’, which Liming refers to as “daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, daring to do it in the company of others”, a priority. But, more than anything else, we need to recognise that humans are social animals, and living in an atomised society is seriously bad for our health.