Chapter 10
The Loneliness Epidemic
The Loneliness Epidemic
“The most expensive disease of the twenty-first century is the one no insurance policy covers:
the daily, unnoticed cost of belonging to nothing.”
In 2018, the United Kingdom appointed a minister for loneliness. Three years later, Japan did the same. The fact that two of the most advanced industrial democracies on earth concluded, within a short span of time, that loneliness had become a sufficiently severe public-policy problem to require a cabinet portfolio is one of the more telling diagnostic signals of the late-modern condition. The minister-for-loneliness phenomenon is, in essence, the wealthy world’s confession that something has gone wrong at a level its other ministries cannot reach.
The empirical literature on loneliness is now substantial enough that it cannot be dismissed as anecdotal. Studies in cardiology have demonstrated that chronic loneliness is comparable, in its biological effects, to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Studies in immunology have shown measurable degradation in immune function in chronically isolated individuals. Studies in geriatrics have documented increased mortality, accelerated cognitive decline, and elevated incidence of dementia in elderly individuals who lack regular human contact. Studies in adolescent psychiatry have documented sharp increases, over the past fifteen years, in rates of anxiety and depression among teenagers whose social lives have migrated from physical to digital environments. The pattern is consistent across continents, across income levels, and across cultural backgrounds: when human beings are denied sustained, embodied human connection, they suffer measurable physical, mental, and emotional harm.
This is not a soft finding. This is one of the more robust empirical findings in contemporary social science.
And yet — and this is the strange feature of the present moment — our economic and policy systems remain almost entirely blind to this finding. We measure inflation in monthly cycles. We measure employment in monthly cycles. We measure trade balances, currency reserves, equity indices, consumer confidence. We do not, in any nation I am aware of, measure social fabric integrity in monthly cycles. We do not have a loneliness index. We do not have a belonging index. We do not have a regularly published statistical measure of whether the citizens of a society have, in any meaningful sense, the human relationships that human beings biologically require.
This is not because the data is unavailable. The data is collectible. The methodology exists. The political will to make it routine, however, does not. We have, in effect, decided as a global culture that the architecture of human connection is not a thing governments are accountable for. It is something we have privatized, individualized, and pushed downstream into the personal problems of citizens who are then advised to “self-care” or “seek therapy” or “use the app.” The unspoken philosophical position is that loneliness is the citizen’s responsibility. The biological evidence, however, is unambiguous: loneliness is systemic. It is produced by the architecture of the society. It can be reduced or worsened by the design of that architecture. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the same kind of evidence we would never ignore if it concerned, say, air pollution or water contamination.
What, exactly, produces loneliness at population scale?
There is no single cause. There is an architecture — and the architecture has identifiable beams, just as the architecture of African interruption has identifiable beams. Let me name the principal beams of the loneliness architecture, drawing on the research literature and on my own observations across many wealthy cities.
Beam one: the privatization of housing. Modern wealthy societies have, over the past century, organized the bulk of their housing stock around the single-family unit, the apartment building, and increasingly the single-occupant unit. The communal forms of housing that, throughout most of human history, were the default — extended family compounds, village clusters, multi-generational households, courtyard arrangements — have been replaced with arrangements optimized for privacy, which has the unintended effect of also being optimized for isolation. A young professional living in a small apartment in a major city may go entire days without unplanned face-to-face encounters with anyone they know. This was inconceivable for most of human history.
Beam two: the financialization of time. As an hour of human time has become more valuable in the formal labour market — and as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education has risen disproportionately — the unstructured, uncompensated hours that human beings used to spend in communal life have become scarce. The hours that were once given to neighbourhood associations, religious congregations, civic clubs, family meals, and informal community gatherings have been progressively reallocated to paid work, to commuting, to the maintenance of professional networks, and to digital consumption. The financialization of time is not, by itself, evil. It has produced enormous material gain. It has also produced a time scarcity in the social commons that no individual citizen, however well-intentioned, can fix alone.
Beam three: the redesign of communication. The communication technologies of the twenty-first century have, on the one hand, made it possible for human beings to remain in contact across enormous geographic distances. This is a true gain. On the other hand, the same technologies have substituted thin communication — the text message, the video call, the social media interaction — for thick communication, the embodied, shared-space, multi-sensory presence that is the substrate of meaningful human connection. Thin communication maintains relationships. Thick communication creates and deepens them. A relationship that is sustained only by thin communication will, on average, not produce the biological signals — the gentle synchronization of heart rates, the mutual regulation of stress, the small unconscious mirroring — that the human nervous system requires for what we might call belonging-level attachment.
Beam four: the optimization of attention. The contemporary digital environment is, by design, optimized to capture and hold the attention of its users for the longest possible periods. This optimization is the basis of an enormous industry. It is not, however, optimized for the wellbeing of the user. The result is that a significant fraction of the waking hours of citizens in wealthy societies — and increasingly in developing societies — is spent inside attention-capturing environments that produce, on net, reduced social satisfaction, reduced sleep quality, reduced mood stability, and reduced capacity for the patient, undirected attention that genuine human relationship requires. The economic incentive of the platforms and the psychological need of the citizen are, currently, misaligned. This is the deepest structural cause of much of the contemporary loneliness phenomenon, and it is one of the focal subjects of the Tech-Yes-Logy chapter later in this book.
Beam five: the unbundling of meaning. For most of human history, large institutions — religious, civic, familial, vocational — bundled together the human needs for community, meaning, identity, ritual, and purpose. To belong to a parish or a temple was to belong to a bundle of relationships, beliefs, obligations, rituals, and shared narratives that, in aggregate, structured a life. Modern citizenship has progressively unbundled these. The contemporary citizen is invited to construct, individually, a customized portfolio of meaning from a marketplace of options. This is, in many ways, a great civilizational gain — it has expanded human freedom — but it has also produced a cognitive load of self-construction that is exhausting and, for many citizens, beyond their available time and energy. The unbundled citizen, in effect, must now build, alone, what was previously inherited as a complete structure.
These five beams produce, together, the architecture of contemporary loneliness. None of them is the result of any single villain. All of them are the cumulative result of legitimate, often well-intentioned, social and economic developments. To name them is not to condemn them. It is to make them visible, so that the question of what to do about them can be honestly engaged.
The good news is that the architecture is reformable.
The privatization of housing can be partially reversed through urban design that re-introduces communal spaces, cohousing arrangements, intergenerational neighbourhoods, courtyard arrangements, and the deliberate inclusion of small public gathering spaces in residential planning. The Nordic countries, parts of Germany, Singapore, and several other jurisdictions have begun to experiment with such designs. The early evidence is encouraging.
The financialization of time can be partially reversed through public-policy choices that protect, in legal and administrative ways, the time available for non-paid community participation. The four-day work week experiments in several wealthy nations are early signals. So are the public holidays that, in some countries, deliberately encourage extended family gatherings. So is the slow recognition that the productivity gains of late-modern industry can be returned to citizens as time rather than only as money.
The redesign of communication can be partially reversed through cultural choices that re-elevate the prestige of thick communication. Some of this is already happening. The contemporary resurgence of book clubs, dinner parties, religious revivals, community singing, hiking groups, board game nights, and small-group gathering of every kind is, in part, a population-level corrective response to the over-saturation of thin communication. The corrective response is partial. It can be deliberately strengthened by public investment in the infrastructure of gathering — community halls, public squares, accessible parks, civic centres, libraries that function as third places rather than merely as book repositories.
The optimization of attention is, in many respects, the hardest beam to reform, because it is the most deeply linked to the dominant business models of the contemporary digital economy. But it is reformable. The regulatory frameworks of the European Union — and the early experiments in product design that prioritize time-well-spent over time-on-site — are first steps. The discussion of Tech-Yes-Logy later in this book will engage the deeper reforms that this beam requires.
The unbundling of meaning is, in some sense, the beam that this book itself is attempting to address. The book argues, in its closing chapters, that we need new institutions of bundled meaning for the twenty-first century — institutions that combine, in new forms, what religious, civic, and familial institutions used to combine, while remaining open to the pluralism of the present age. The Vocational Renaissance Centers, the Peace Artists Foundation programmes, and the Divine Peace civilization architecture described later in this book are, in part, attempts at such re-bundling. The reader will judge, when they reach those chapters, whether the attempts are persuasive.
I want to close this chapter with a story.
A friend of mine, a Norwegian psychologist who has worked for thirty years in Oslo and has, in that time, treated thousands of patients, once said to me, in a quiet conversation on the deck of a small boat in a fjord I do not have the language to properly name: “The patients I see today are not, on average, sicker than the patients I saw thirty years ago. They are more alone. They have fewer people to whom they can simply exist without performance. That is the difference. The medication helps less than it used to, because the medication was never designed to substitute for that.”
I have thought about that sentence many times.
“Fewer people to whom they can simply exist without performance.”
That is, in a single sentence, the deepest cost of late-modern affluence. The accumulation of friends without intimacy, of contacts without contact, of presences without presence. The minister for loneliness was appointed because a society finally noticed what its psychologists had been saying for decades: the medication is not the bottleneck. The relationship architecture is the bottleneck. And the relationship architecture is something a society chooses, every year, through the design of its housing, its work, its time, its communication, its attention, and its institutions of meaning.
This is good news, because it means the bottleneck is reformable.
It is also a warning, because it means the bottleneck is also re-producible — and is currently being reproduced by the rest of the world as it follows, uncritically, the developmental path of the wealthy world.
The lesson of the kingdom of ice is not that the children of the sun should refuse to migrate. The lesson is that whatever civilization the children of the sun end up building, wherever they end up building it, they should not reproduce the loneliness epidemic. The future African city, the future Asian city, the future Latin American city, the future digital civilization of the twenty-second century — these can and must be built on different beams. The wealthy world’s loneliness is not the price of affluence. It is the price of one specific design of affluence. Other designs are possible. The remainder of this book will sketch some of them.
The cure for loneliness is not, in the end, a pill or an app or a minister. The cure is the deliberate, conscious, public reconstruction of the architecture of human connection. It can be done. It will be done by the civilizations that take it seriously. It will not be done by the ones that do not.