LONELINESS IS A SINISTER, capricious sneak. It wraps itself around the hearts of all sorts of people, from every demographic, from every walk of life. In fact its very mundanity is its best disguise; it gets away with taunting people for ages before it’s properly detected. That, and there’s the shame that cleaves to loneliness like a pilot fish. What has struck me most, after talking to so many generous people about their loneliness, is just how tenacious it can be. And how common. We often think of loneliness as an affliction of old age; something the elderly must confront the closer they get to death. It is, of course, a very real and disturbing problem for old people, particularly as their mobility, mental alertness, confidence and actual number of living friends diminish. But actually, we are vulnerable to loneliness at any age. The tenderness of youth seems to be a particular trigger for loneliness, as kids, teenagers and young adults struggle to establish who they are in the world and end up doing so on their own. We’re susceptible in middle-age too. Well after we’ve gone through the initial rounds of identity building we are so often struck with some kind of existential crisis: have we ever truly known who we are? Truth be told, we can get hit by loneliness at any stage from birth until death. Frankly, it seems loneliness can get to anyone, regardless of how buoyed by Facebook friendships they are, regardless of how outwardly confident they may seem, regardless of how often they venture outside the house. Loneliness does not discriminate.
‘Hello, I’d like to speak to people about loneliness. If you’ve ever been lonely, please get in touch. #journorequest,’ I write in a tweet. The 140-character limit isn’t quite enough room to make the appeal properly though, so I do another couple: ‘I promise to be gentle about it and we can talk on whatever platform suits you. #thefriendshipcure.’ And then, finally: ‘Lonely, unable to make friends, isolated, feeling alone. I know it’s a tricky, vulnerable one but I’d like to chat to you.’ What happens next is both heartening and devastating. I get an influx of tweets from brave lonely people who want to talk about their experiences. It is exactly what I need and just what I asked for, obviously, but I am instantly saddened by the sheer volume of people ready to speak. Not just ready, some of them, but needing to speak. The candour and generosity with which some of my interviewees talk makes me think this might be the first time they’ve opened up about their loneliness. That’s not surprising, really, because we certainly do not make it easy to talk with any degree of honesty about feeling lonely. We are, generally speaking, made to feel like social pariahs if we utter the words ‘I am lonely’ in any company except the most empathetic. So I am extremely grateful to the people who come forward, volunteering to speak to me about one of the most intimate emotional experiences you can have. I’m impressed, too, because it takes a level of courage to talk to a stranger about it. During the week after my initial tweets, I speak to people on the phone, by email and in person, and as I listen to their stories of loneliness I am truly taken aback by how common the experience is, how varied and how persistent. I am also deeply moved by the tenderness and insight with which they tell me their stories.
Amy says loneliness hit her hardest just after the birth of her second son, Joe. He’s six and a half months old when we speak, and probably extremely sweet, as children of that age tend to be. But the sweetness of a baby is not enough to quell loneliness; in fact, their silent presence seems to be, by so many accounts, a lonely sort of company to be in. Around the time Amy fell pregnant with Joe, she and her partner Tim had just moved from Melbourne to the Surf Coast of Victoria in Australia, to a little beach house by the ocean. They moved away from their parents, who had helped so much with the first baby, and all their friends. It was beautiful, but isolating. When Joe arrived, Amy started feeling anxious and sad in a way she just hadn’t the first time around, when she had her son, Alfie. She felt so distraught, so little like herself, that she thought perhaps she had postnatal depression. In a teary conversation with her partner, Tim, one day, Amy was really trying to get to the bottom of why she was feeling so utterly awful. She’d had a difficult pregnancy — the kind where you alternate between vomiting enthusiastically and feeling violently nauseated for the majority of nine months. She was away from her people, her tribe, her family. ‘I’m just really, really lonely,’ she told Tim, through sobs. It was a light-bulb moment for them both, to give her anguish a label. Amy was, and still is, quite isolated. She hadn’t been doing the school pick-ups or drop-offs for Alfie because she’d been too ill with the pregnancy, so she didn’t even have those 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. interactions at the school gate. Tim did; he started accumulating some friendships from school. Whenever Amy joined in or spent time with some of the kinder mums, she ended up feeling even lonelier, in that peculiar way the wrong company can actually make you feel even more alone. She’d come home from a night out with the local mums, burst into tears and tell Tim, ‘They’re not my people!’ Amy’s people were in Melbourne. She had a few close friends back there, but as a general rule, she’d always struggled to make decent female friendships. She used to have a lot of best friends, but they were more like whirlwind romances that burnt themselves out than real, lasting, friendships. She has a friend called Mim, whom she adores. She and Mim lift each other up, support each other and make each other better. Amy’s other people are sort of drifting away from her, distracted by their own lives. One of her closest friends has been trying to have a baby, with no success, so she’s particularly sensitive about spending time with families. Another has started having an affair, which has really put a strain on the friendship, as poor romantic decisions and infidelity can.
When I ask Amy to describe loneliness to me as though I’m someone who has never experienced it myself, she asks if I’ve ever been to a silent disco. Yes, I have, I say. Hundreds of people turn up at a big venue and dance, only they’re all wearing headphones and dancing to the music that blares through them. So you can have this eerie experience where you slip your headphones down around your neck, away from your ears, and watch people dancing in the silence. Amy says she saw one once, at a festival, and it made her feel brittle and sick because it reminded her so strongly of how she feels in all social situations. Loneliness, to Amy, is like going to a silent disco, but she’s the only one without any music playing in her headphones. It’s alienating, it’s isolating, it makes her the only person unable to sway or swing or boogie to the same beat as everyone else. I love this description of loneliness; it’s so perfectly bleak. Imagine the sort of panic you’d feel if you were the only one in a room of hundreds unable to hear what everyone else is hearing.
Amy isn’t the only mum stuck in a silent disco sort of purgatory. Ella came to me with a similar distress. She has a five-year-old son and she left her husband when the little one was just four months old. Ella’s loneliness is compounded by the looming guilt that being a mother isn’t enough. She loves her son, but she’s lonely with him and lonely without him. When he goes to stay with his dad some weekends, Ella sits at home with this yawning stretch of time to fill, and she only ever really sees her mother. ‘I often think I might as well be dead,’ she says to me. ‘Every day is the same, I’m just marking time until I die.’ What exacerbates the whole thing is how alone Ella is in her own loneliness; she can’t really talk to anyone about it. She tried, once, but it didn’t exactly work out. She mentioned how she was feeling to her brother, but he just said, ‘You have a lovely son and a great job, you should be thankful.’ She never brought it up again. Now, just like when her son was a baby, the highlight of Ella’s week is her trip to the supermarket. For some people it’s a chore, but for her, it’s the only time she really has a chance to interact with other people.
Dave can actually pinpoint a moment of extreme loneliness in his life: it was 23 April 2009. He was at a hostel in Portugal and someone had just teased him about reading David Beckham’s book. He remembers lying back on his little bunk bed and feeling utterly alone and ‘like an imposter’. I jump on that phrase when he says it because that’s an important part of the loneliness experience, feeling like you don’t belong, like you’re an imposter in your own life. The way Dave explains it, loneliness is a void, an emptiness, a hollowness. It’s that sense of languishing in the space between the versions of ourselves we save for other people. Dave actually feels pangs of loneliness most days. Usually when he’s sitting on the train on the way home from work, in between being ‘work Dave’ and ‘home Dave’. I love that he makes that distinction between Daves because it makes loneliness out to be this strange space we occupy when we’re not performing our public and private selves. It’s what happens when we press pause on our identities and we don’t know, for a moment, who we are. ‘I feel like everyone’s watching but no one is paying attention,’ Dave says, rather aptly describing the feelings of paranoia and negligence that so often accompany loneliness. It’s the silent disco scenario all over again.
The people who talked to me kept echoing the same sentiments: loneliness is emptiness, loneliness is rejection, loneliness happens just as often in the presence of other people as it does when you’re alone. Lauren is particularly lonely at the moment because she just lost her beloved gran, her flatmate has started dating someone she had feelings for and sometimes she doesn’t leave the house because she hates the way she looks. She says loneliness hits her most when she’s actually with other people, like their company only isolates her more. When her gran was still alive, she’d come home after a night out and complain to her that she’d had an awful time. ‘Why do you go out with them, then?’ her gran would ask. All Lauren could say was, ‘I’d rather go out with them than be alone.’ And therein lies the great conundrum of loneliness: how can you keep yourself motivated to seek out social interaction when it only makes you prefer to curl up inside your loneliness? What sort of incentive do we have to spend time with friends, if they only make us feel lonelier? And what the very hell is loneliness, if we still feel it in the presence of other people?
There’s a difference between social isolation and loneliness. A difference between not being able to make real friends and losing the ability to connect with the ones you have. Steph told me about the time she moved from London to Exeter to write her PhD. She was 22 years old and let’s just say Exeter is not exactly an early-twenties paradise. She was friendly with some of the other students, but she just didn’t feel like she was with her people. Her people were back in London. She made an effort to socialise, but every time she did she just felt the distance from home all the more keenly. She shared an office with people she refers to as profoundly lovely, but hanging out with them was confronting: it just made her ache for the friends she’d left behind and the person she could be with them. Loneliness made her angry and she started to doubt her own academic abilities. She ended up spending most of her scholarship money on trains back to London to see her real mates and when it all became too much, she decided to move back after six months. Being reunited with her tribe calmed the loneliness but didn’t dissipate it altogether. Even back in her city with her people, something like a strange man shouting at her on the street can make Steph feel alone in her own existence. She suspects most people get little pangs of loneliness like that and I’m inclined to agree.
Becky told me a similar story of circumstantial loneliness. She left school and got a job in her home town straightaway, so she skipped university, where so many of her friends made new friends. She has a few close friends, maybe three or four, but beyond that she just feels like there’s a gaping chasm between her life and the life promised to her by the sitcom Friends. She has no omnipresent gang of buddies to get giant cups of coffee with every day and debrief about life, and I think she feels betrayed by that somehow, like popular culture promised her a form of friendship that just doesn’t exist in real life. The friends she does have are disparate by circumstance: one is planning a wedding, one has just bought a house with her long-term boyfriend, one is a shift worker and one lives in Australia. They talk on WhatsApp, but that doesn’t mean that when Becky buys tickets to see the band Paramore, she’ll actually have someone to go with. She technically has friends, but she doesn’t feel like she actually gets to see them often enough and that distance hurts. And so Becky does things on her own: dances at Paramore with thousands of strangers, goes to the movies, eats dinner in restaurants, goes on organised group trips to America with other people who like to travel solo. She’s learnt to enjoy her own company by necessity, and I think that’s a really great thing. It doesn’t abate the loneliness, but it gives her something to do with her time.
And that’s where I have to emphasise a really important point: I think it’s vital that we know how to exist on our own. I think so many of us have lost the ability to be on our own healthily, or perhaps never had it at all. Being in our own company comfortably is crucial if we’re going to survive the disparate nature of modern existence. You can actually be on your own without being lonely, and that’s one of the most important skills you can have as a grown-up human being. Loneliness can still infiltrate our alone time, but it’s not necessarily caused by it. It’s a complex social emotion, loneliness, brought on by a culture of individualism we don’t know how to actually inhabit. We don’t truly know how to be on our own or with people, and we get stuck somewhere awkwardly between the two, unsure how to proceed with our own lives. We are both frightened of the possibility of loneliness and already very much in its clutches. The people I’ve spoken to about loneliness have simply confirmed something I’ve always suspected: that loneliness is one of the most frightening certainties of the human experience. Very few people are immune, and those who claim never to have experienced it are most likely unwilling or unsure how to identify it. Let me be honest with you: I’ve always been scared of loneliness, my whole life.
When I was little, my sweet, fabulous first grade teacher got us to cut paper into little shapes and write the personality trait we most valued on it, over and over. She got us to store those little cut-outs in a box of our choice, kept somewhere special so that when we needed our chosen quality, we could take out the box and sprinkle the pieces of paper over our heads and bodies, like magic confetti. I cut my paper into stars and scribbled the word ‘courage’ on them, and I kept them in a little box, inside a slightly larger box, in the bottom drawer of my bedside table. In fact, I suspect they’re still there. They survived several rounds of clearing out childhood belongings, because who can bring themselves to throw out homemade courage? Everyone needs it, at some time or another. As I grew up and started keeping diaries, a single fear started to emerge, the one thing that most frightened me about becoming an adult, the one thing that may require me to inoculate myself with my secret stash of cut-out courage. ‘Please let me never be lonely,’ I’d write in my early teenage diaries. I’d wish the same for my parents, my grandparents, my sister, my friends. It became like a persistent little atheist prayer, to nobody in particular: please let me never be lonely. Several times, I used my confetti of courage to try and protect myself from the impending feeling of loneliness. I sat on the edge of my bed or stood alone in my bedroom, reverent, and emptied those little scraps of paper over my head, my eyes closed with the significance of it. It felt necessary, even important, and I was still enough a child to have the placebo of sheer imagination. I needed it then: we are, of course, strangely alone when we make our way into adolescence. I felt the sting of loneliness first then and it only exacerbated my fear of feeling it for the rest of my life. It occurred to me then that adults are in no way immune to loneliness; in fact, the more I saw of adult life, the more I suspected everyone was moving about their lives, secretly paralysed by loneliness, or the fear of its arrival. I thought a lot about loneliness and what it was to be alone, so much so that a psychiatrist chided me for worrying too much when I was 12 and forbade me from watching the news. She suspected my tender almost-teenage soul couldn’t take the constant coverage of atrocities across the world, but she wasn’t quite right. The thing that frightened me most was more private and less obvious than bad news on the telly. It was loneliness. I started seeing it everywhere: in my parents, in my schoolteachers, in my classmates at school.
When my beloved Papa died and left my grandma on her own in their home with only the dog for company, I started seeing it in her. I started smelling it, this entirely tangible feeling of being alone in the world, but for an American cocker spaniel with ears long enough to fall into his food. Perhaps that’s when I truly fell in love with dogs; that stout, blond creature seemed to be the one thing between my grandma and an all-consuming loneliness, the encroachment of which even we, her family who adored her more than we could ever say, could not stop. It is not always within our power to eradicate loneliness for other people, not always. Grief steals something from a person, something that cannot truly be replaced. Becoming a widow is an experience of acute, excruciating loneliness. The person you chose to accompany you through life is gone, and no matter who else is still around, there’s a conspicuous emptiness you can’t shift, a deep sense of emotional isolation that sets in and never gives up on you. Loneliness, strangely, becomes your greatest companion.
But loneliness is not just a companion to grief. Loneliness can slip into our lives, undetected for some time, for all sorts of reasons. It could slither in alongside tragedy or trauma. Profound distress has a way of making you feel like you could be the only person who has ever been through such pain, and it can leave you alone just when you need people the most. Loneliness can strike when you literally remove yourself from the people you know and adore: when you move to a new city, go to a new school, start at university or get a new job. There’s something particularly vulnerable about young adulthood, just when you’re trying to work out who you are. Loneliness can accompany chronic illness, mental illness and disability. It can hit you when you’re down and out, when you’ve lost your job, when you’ve broken up with someone, when you’re addicted. It might be chronic; a feeling of being alone in the world that’s been there as long as you can remember. It could be fleeting; an ephemeral sense of existential dread. It might arrive as you age and your friends start to die. It might hit you young or middle-aged. Whenever it comes and whatever it looks like, it hurts. It hurts in that numb, melancholy, empty sort of way that makes you believe in having a soul just so you can explain where the pain is.
The scariest thing about loneliness is that it can exist in the presence of love. Loneliness isn’t frightened of company; it doesn’t scamper at the sound of another human’s voice or disappear in the company of others. Loneliness is perfectly happy to come to a party with you, pleased as punch to accompany you on outings with people you know and perhaps even adore. Loneliness is audacious like that: it doesn’t care who you’re with and it doesn’t care what you’re doing. It will tag along on any outing, then stay, nuzzled into your psyche, when you’re physically alone at night. And that’s the most important thing there is to understand about loneliness: loneliness doesn’t always mean you’re alone. Solitude is a deeply necessary part of being human; there are things you simply cannot know about yourself without the space to see it on your own. No, loneliness doesn’t always accompany solitude. It’s a lot sneakier than that.
Loneliness exists in the gap between company and companionship. It lurks in between the quantity and quality of our relationships. It comes for us when we leave enough emotional space unoccupied in our lives. It feeds on our insecurities and it echoes our greatest fears back to us in the quiet. It is cruel and unforgiving, opportunistic and greedy. On its kinder days, loneliness will whisper to you all the reasons you might be alone forever. On its crueller days, it will take you by the hand and lead you to the precipice of life. We have long suspected that loneliness shortens our days on Earth; that heartbreak and grief and unwanted solitude could bring us ever closer to death. We have played with this idea a long time, the idea that emotional distress can inflict physical pain. Poems and ballads have toyed with the notion of psychosomatic pain for as long as we’ve analysed the human condition in prose. We’ve sensed, without proof, that something like loneliness could harm us irreparably, perhaps more seriously than any purely physical ailment. And now we have the evidence to back it up. The science is here to validate those suspicions and to prove how deadly loneliness can be.
Researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah, USA, looked back over the scientific literature on loneliness from the years 1980 to 2014. The studies they reviewed covered 3.4 million people all up, which of course is a stunning sample size. Pulling all this research together, they concluded loneliness can increase the risk of death by at least 30 per cent — although some estimates are as high as 60 per cent. This hastened mortality rate applies to people experiencing both actual and perceived social isolation. It is a complex thing, to break down the lethality of loneliness. For a start, there are practicalities. Lonely people are less likely to seek help if they need it, for either mental or physical problems. They’re less accountable to others for their behaviour and so more likely to hold onto bad habits. And then there’s the rather bleak scenario that something happens to them, and there’s literally nobody there to call emergency services. It’s what Bridget Jones famously worried about: being found alone, partly devoured by Alsatians. But loneliness is much more insidious than that, too. Scientists are just beginning to understand that loneliness has a direct physiological effect on the body. It’s not merely the circumstances of loneliness that cause us bodily harm; it’s loneliness itself.
Loneliness is more dangerous than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and deadlier than obesity. It might be the most significant threat to our health since the discovery that cigarettes blacken our lungs and line our insides with tar; it is the new smoking. Loneliness can increase our chances of developing clinical dementia by 64 per cent. It can tighten our arteries, raise our blood pressure, increase our rates of infection, diminish our heart health, and lead to higher rates of cancer. Lonely people develop tumours faster, have weaker immune systems and lower thresholds for pain. Loneliness raises the level of the stress hormone cortisol in our blood, which puts us at a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. When we’re lonely, we wake up every day with higher levels of morning cortisol because we are bracing for yet another stressful day of feeling alone. Loneliness disrupts our sleep and makes us prone to depression. Lonely people over the age of 55 die at twice the rate of people who have regular contact with friends and family. Loneliness is associated with accelerated cognitive decline in older adults. It is, unequivocally, a very real danger to us all.
Loneliness is the next great public health epidemic, unfurling faster than we can keep up with and getting stronger the longer we let it fester. Loneliness is killing people the world over and we have barely stopped to work out how to halt it, how to cure it, how to prevent it. Psychologists and biologists are starting to argue that we should treat loneliness like any chronic illness. John Cacioppo — Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Chicago — says the effects of loneliness, social isolation and rejection are ‘as real as thirst, hunger or pain’. Professor Cacioppo has been studying loneliness since the early ’90s and is now an authoritative voice in the fight to have it taken seriously as a major health risk. He is convinced it is the feeling of loneliness that does such damage to the body. Some scientists do not agree an emotion could be so potent, but I think you only have to look at the ways in which heartbreak, grief and depression ravage our bodies to know that Professor Cacioppo is absolutely, chillingly correct.
Back in the early ’90s, Professor Cacioppo did a loneliness study on his undergraduate students. He started by asking how lonely they felt and splitting them into three categories: the lonely, the sometimes sort-of lonely and the not lonely. He strapped blood pressure cuffs, biosensors and beepers to all of them. Nine times a day for seven days, the students were contacted on those beepers and prompted to fill out a questionnaire about how they felt. They stayed overnight in a hospital so Professor Cacioppo could monitor their sleep patterns. He took regular saliva samples to measure the students’ levels of cortisol, the infamous stress hormone. As it turned out, the students who slept poorly and had higher levels of cortisol were also the ones who said they were unhappy because they hadn’t made close friends. They also had higher than normal vascular resistance, which is when the arteries narrow because tissue is inflamed. All of this led Professor Cacioppo to the conclusion that the lonely kids were in survival mode.
Loneliness raises our levels of cortisol because the perception that we are unworthy of social contact is deeply distressing. And that’s what loneliness is, amongst other things: the persistent belief that we either have been or will be rejected. That’s why the feeling comes laced with such shame; we associate the state of loneliness with inferiority, undesirability and worthlessness. That’s why it’s a silent killer; people are too ashamed to talk about it, to even consider it could be loneliness they’re experiencing. We are hardwired as a species to seek out social contact — we are social animals and we have always had our greatest chances of survival in a group. Human beings have evolved to need social interaction to survive. So if we are isolating ourselves or feeling profoundly dissatisfied with our connections to other people, then we are naturally put on high alert. We know instinctively that it is dangerous to be alone, so feelings of loneliness can make us hyperaware of our own mortality. This is a state psychologists call hypervigilance, and in the case of loneliness, people become hypervigilant to signs of rejection.
A study conducted at the Centre for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and published in the journal Cortex tested this idea. Dr Stephanie Cacioppo (John’s wife, as it happens) enlisted a group of healthy young volunteers and asked them to complete a loneliness questionnaire. Thirty-two of the group were classified as socially well integrated and 38 as lonely. All participants were hooked up to sensors that register electrical activity in the brain and sat in front of computer screens. They watched as words in various colours flashed onto those screens: ‘misery’, ‘pleasure’, ‘unwanted’, ‘accepted’. The experiment was designed to test the students’ reactions to words that were associated with social acceptance or rejection. When the lonely participants saw words relating to social exclusion — things like ‘detached’, ‘unwanted’ or ‘excluded’ — the area in their brains related to attention lit up faster than those students who did not identify as lonely. The lonely students’ brains were less affected by happy words like ‘accepted’. This showed, say both Cacioppos, that lonely people are preoccupied with the idea of social rejection. The ever-present fear of being rejected tends to make lonely people behave in a more hostile manner, which starts off a vicious cycle of loneliness, whereby the lonely get lonelier because they rebuff social interaction and make it difficult for people to get close. Lonely people are more likely to interpret the actions of others as being hostile or unkind, because they are in a state of constant suspicion and fear. Loneliness is cruel that way: it taints the actions of the very people who could infiltrate the solitude. It puts us in a state of short-term self-preservation, and that can include keeping people at a distance for fear of their rejecting us.
Most people are, to some extent, concerned about social rejection. Every interaction with another human being is darkened, initially, by the possibility they could reject us. Even worse, that someone could move from being a stranger to being a friend, and still find reason to reject us. We are powerfully hardwired to avoid social rejection, which means protecting ourselves from situations in which it may be likely. If you started looking at the world like it’s an obstacle course of possible social rejection, you’d never leave the house — and indeed, some people do not, for this very reason. Loneliness breeds a fear of social rejection, which in some cases can cause agoraphobia or coax people into staying inside their loneliness. Some people feel lonely for long enough and find social interaction difficult enough, that they come to prefer their own loneliness to the possibility of company. It is easier, for some, to nestle further into their loneliness than it is to venture out of it, to make friends, to see people. And if you find yourself feeling alone even in the company of other people, then where exactly is the imperative to change? If contact with other human beings makes you feel even more alone, why not simply settle into the loneliness you know so well? I believe that is happening in households and hearts the world over and, to be frank with you, I’m not entirely sure how we tackle the problem. The only thing we can conceivably do is launch such an aggressive campaign of kindness that it overwhelms the fear of social rejection long enough to allow people to make real connections again. But more on the treatment for loneliness later; for now, a little more about the pain of social rejection.
You see, as it turns out, social rejection can cause us physical pain. If you’ve ever felt the sting of being excluded from a group of people you like, admire or respect, then perhaps you know precisely how visceral it can be. Let me tell you about a now-famous experiment by Professor Naomi Eisenberger at the University of California, Los Angeles. To test how social rejection affects us, Eisenberger hooked people up to sensors and had them play a game called Cyberball. Participants in the study would start playing the game, where they threw a virtual ball between themselves and two other virtual people. As the game progressed, the virtual people started leaving out the participant, instead just throwing the ball between themselves. This feeling of being excluded lit up the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the brains of the participants — the very same area of the brain that registers physical pain. Physical pain lights up other parts of the brain too; this area is specifically to do with the emotional fact that pain is distressing. Social exclusion alerted that part of the brain because the feeling of being unwanted or ignored is like physical pain; it’s that powerful. It’s no wonder we avoid it at any cost.
Social rejection feels deeply shameful, too. Loneliness has this veneer of shame because we tend to think it’s caused by our being unlovable in some way. We very much frame loneliness as a personal failing, rather than the result of a cultural malaise or a side-effect of modernity. Richard S. Schwartz — Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, senior consultant at McLean Hospital and author of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century — has been preoccupied with the social problem of loneliness for many years. Long ago, as he tells me, he and his wife, Dr Jacqueline Olds, began to notice that patients who came to see them were struggling with social isolation and loneliness. Curiously, people were more inclined to say they were depressed than lonely. As Schwartz and Olds got to know their patients better, they started to see signs of profound loneliness, rather than depression. But of course, as we’ve discussed, loneliness often comes with great shame and secrecy. Schwartz says he thinks his patients believed loneliness made them a ‘loser’, rather than, say, someone who is simply experiencing a volatile, common part of human existence. That really got Schwartz and Olds thinking about loneliness and how important it is to bring it out into the open. Since then, they’ve researched and written a lot on the topic of social isolation and they truly believe it is a major global problem.
‘Why are people so lonely?’ I ask Professor Schwartz, with more than a trace of desperation in my voice because I’d just spent the past six hours pulling up stats about how lonely we all are. He sighs — a sweet sigh, the sigh of someone who has spent many years trying to answer precisely this question with some semblance of hope and certainty. In short, he thinks we are doing it to ourselves. We have become obsessed with work and productivity, and come to define ourselves by those things, so much so that at the end of a long work day, we tend to step back voluntarily from other people. We retreat into our home lives, whatever they may be. And that becomes a trap: we start out isolating ourselves but then we notice socialising going on without us and we begin to feel left out. But so often our reaction to feelings of exclusion is to isolate ourselves further, to retreat further from the possibility of outright rejection. We get demoralised, Professor Schwartz says, and pull back further into ourselves. He thinks we are meeting less and less face to face, and that it’s that much easier to disappear when you’ve only got social media to keep you accountable for interacting with someone. We have lost the quality of our connections to other people and we are not quite sure how to get that back.
‘What do you tell your patients?’ I ask. ‘What do you tell them to do about their loneliness?’ The answer sounds relatively simple, but is no doubt more difficult than it appears: first, Professor Schwartz tells his patients to recognise what is going on. He says to pay attention to the loneliness, to acknowledge it is there. Then he urges people to redefine their experiences of it. It is not, as we first suspect, a personal failure to be lonely. It is a complex state with many factors, but a significant one is actually the current state of our society as a whole, and there’s very little point internalising guilt over that. So he says to look at the changes you can make in your life to reconnect with other human beings and allay those fears of social rejection. Look at how you might meet new people or revive friendships you once had and abandoned. That could simply be reaching out to someone you know for a phone conversation that leads to a coffee that leads to a more regular sort of contact that might constitute friendship. It could be joining a chess club or a netball team or a local choir; something that literally gets you out of the house and into physical proximity with other people. But I think what’s so interesting about Professor Schwartz’s take on this whole thing is that before we can sign up to any kind of organised fun, we have to get past this deep-set idea that loneliness is somehow shameful. We have to wriggle out of any feelings of guilt, shame and discomfort with ourselves if we are going to have any hope of addressing loneliness in any real way. Nothing, Schwartz says, is a complete solution. You could start going to Salsa-dancing lessons every Tuesday and still come home with a gnawing sense of being alone in the world; you could strike up a sweet conversation with someone at Spanish class and still feel that hollowness in your heart. The point is, these are little steps you can take towards regaining a sense of genuine social connectedness. The real danger is in the self-perpetuating nature of loneliness, its tendency to cycle back on itself and get more ferocious the longer you leave it unattended. The most chronically lonely among us have reached a stage where they are actively resisting company and connection with other people, so surely the simplest and most powerful first step anyone can take is to literally place themselves in the presence of other human beings. It’s not a perfect balm for loneliness, but it’s a step in the right direction.
So, I hear you ask, what the bloody hell do we do? How do we solve the global epidemic of loneliness? Whose responsibility is it to act? There are organisations, clubs, groups, charities, business and initiatives popping up all over the place, happily. Progress is being made in the United Kingdom, where several key organisations have made research and awareness a priority. Jo Cox, the genuinely inspiring British Labour minister who was murdered in 2016, started The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness just months before she died. She was devoted to helping the lonely, and that’s just one of the things that made her extraordinary. The continuation of the Commission, which is chaired by both a Labour and a Conservative minister, is just part of Jo’s remarkable legacy. Apparently, she first became invested in the plight of lonely people when she was little and she’d do the mail rounds with her grandfather, who was a postman. She realised some people actually went days without seeing anyone and their only interaction was with their postman. This idea distressed Jo so much that, as an adult, she did what she always did: she took real action to make people’s lives better. She would no doubt have been thrilled that in January 2018 the UK got its very own minister for loneliness. And so, 13 charities across the UK came together to form her Commission on Loneliness, and their mission is first to break down the stigma of loneliness. The Commission tries to shine a light on different groups of lonely people each month: the elderly, men, people living with disabilities, carers, refugees, parents and children. They recognise better than anyone that loneliness is becoming alarmingly prevalent. A study by Co-op and the Red Cross revealed that nine million people in the UK are always or often lonely. According to Action for Children, 43 per cent of 17- to 25-year-olds experience loneliness and less than half of them feel loved. Twenty-four per cent of parents always or often feel lonely. The charity Sense claims 50 per cent of disabled people feel lonely on any given day and The Forum says 58 per cent of migrants and refugees do. Carers UK says that eight out of 10 carers feel lonely while looking after a loved one and Age UK says 3.6 million people over the age of 65 identify television as their main form of company. In an Australian study by Lifeline, 60 per cent of more than 3,000 people said they ‘often felt lonely’ and 82.5 per cent said that loneliness was increasing in society.
The Commission on Loneliness is working within the community and with government bodies to address loneliness on an individual and a state level. The Commission has seen some endearing success handing out badges that say ‘Happy to chat’ and they’ve spoken to health services about helping the chronically lonely re-enter community life. Jo’s legacy is bigger than that, though. She wanted to ask the big, awkward questions about loneliness: Should the government be measuring our levels of happiness, as well as the gross domestic product? Should GPs be prescribing social interaction for people who need it? Has modernity caused loneliness? The Commission is hard at work trying to answer these questions and we may not see results for years to come. But at least we know the work has been started. Hopefully other countries will follow suit.
There are other people who recognise that loneliness is an urgent social issue, to be ignored at our own peril. In the UK, Executive Director of The Campaign to End Loneliness, Laura Alcock-Ferguson, has been doggedly working on it for about seven years. When we speak, her determination practically reverberates down the phone line and I become fond of her very quickly. She, like Jo Cox, is an ambassador for the lonely among us and I cannot help but feel a little better that people like her are on the case. Laura’s mission is to make people understand that loneliness is a major public health issue, one that needs to be addressed urgently. She has issued a critical call to action to business, statutory bodies and members of the public because she believes solving loneliness is everybody’s business. She wants to launch a campaign of kindness, pleading with people to perform even small acts of kindness towards their fellow human beings. While she is busy putting out the message that we need an assault on loneliness and a surge in kindness, she is also targeting community and national leaders to take action on behalf of the lonely among us. And this is where we get closer to talking about some practical action: first, there’s this idea that we need micro actions of kindness from every single person in society. Then, there’s the action we need from small businesses and corporations, who have a responsibility to make their interactions with customers and employees more inclusive and socially fulfilling. Laura wants to make it a corporate responsibility to create spaces of social inclusion and friendship.
There are, you’ll be pleased to know, already places that take this responsibility seriously. There’s a café in Cardiff in the UK that offers free tea and coffee every Tuesday to people who might like to make friends with strangers on their premises. There’s a retirement village and elderly services community across England that run activities like ‘craft and chatter’ and ‘knit and natter’ for old people to make friends. There’s an organisation that started in Australia and now operates across England, Scotland and Ireland called Men’s Sheds that sets up workshops for men to hang out in and make mates. There’s a supermarket in the UK that does ‘slow shopping Sundays’, where they switch off the automated machines and allow shoppers to actually interact with each other and the checkout staff. There are groups that organise choir practice, sport, chess, afternoon tea, supper or breakfast clubs, lunches, language classes, sewing classes and book clubs all over the place to encourage new and strengthening friendship. Laura Alcock-Ferguson is heartened by all of this, as am I. But it’s not enough; Laura’s not satisfied and neither am I. Getting down to your local netball club requires a certain level of motivation, one that many severely lonely people simply do not have. And who is to say you won’t feel that gnawing sense of aloneness exactly at the moment you swivel and throw the ball? Social clubs and befriending services are lovely and charming and helpful, but they’re not reaching the people who are so tightly encased in their own loneliness, they don’t even know how to leave the house, let alone play sport or knit in the presence of strangers. Groups can solve social isolation, perhaps, but not necessarily loneliness.
To solve loneliness, I think we need a major overhaul of how we interact as a species. We need a global uptake in kindness so dramatic, it alters our capacity to fully experience each other’s company. We need to value and invest in the friendships we already have, as well as making new ones when the opportunity arises. We need to teach ourselves and each other how to be resilient in our own company. We need to revive our attention to our emotional needs and decide to actively define ourselves by our character, not just by what we do for a living or how hard we can work or how much success we can accrue in a lifetime. We need to prioritise compassion over fame, empathy over ambition and kindness over wealth. That’s a series of decisions we can each make on our own time and with our own consciences. Until we work out how to make human connection a priority again, both in our personal and public lives, we will continue to be plagued by loneliness. Go to any party or concert or club meeting of your choice to remind yourself what it is to be with other human beings. Do whatever you can and whatever you like to ease the feelings of loneliness. But please, take the time to acknowledge what loneliness is and how your actions affect other people. Increase your quota of kindness and deliberately implement a policy of empathy in your life. Be the friend you wish you had in this world, and maybe we will start to chip away at this epidemic of loneliness.
That, and please consider adopting a dog. They are the single greatest companions you could want. Or a cat, I suppose, if you’re into that kind of thing.