The phrase ‘the loneliness epidemic’ went viral long before lockdowns isolated us even further
It’s always been a malaise seen most sharply in the very old, those 80 and over, and more recently in university-aged young people transitioning to adulthood. But it is now rampant throughout demographic cohorts in economically advanced countries. In 2018, independent surveys conducted in the U.S. and U.K. found 40 per cent of 20,000 American respondents lacking a meaningful relationship and experiencing social isolation, while a third of 55,000 Britons said they often felt lonely.
WoodGreen’s crisis helpline has exploded in use. “There are people who are calling every day and some do have levels of distress,” McAlister says, “but most are just reaching out because they want to hear a human voice.” The staff has had to put restrictions on those who call too often: shorter calls or requests to call only every second day.
Alberti pushes the origin of the loneliness crisis back two centuries, to around 1800, when the word “lonely,” previously far more akin to the neutral “solitary” than it is now, first became a negative emotive word. When the poet William Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud,” he was not expressing pain. The standard word at the time for the state of being alone was “oneliness,” likewise an unemotional statement of fact.
Another development was the way being entrenched at home , working on her book, Hertz found herself thinking of Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa “in increasingly affectionate terms.” That led her into one of the most fascinating parts of—its exploration of the loneliness economy. During the first COVID lockdown, as Hertz suffered through her own bout with the virus—an experience that has left “all berries tasting of chemicals”—the economist noted that the U.K.
Source: Financial Digest (financialdigest.net)