There is so much talk of all the lonely people in the world right now that the pervasive state of loneliness is being called an epidemic.
I don’t think that is an overstatement. I see loneliness around me all of the time. Everywhere. Not just in the faces of rough sleepers who look up at passers-by in the hope of finding eye contact and a little empathy – but also in the faces of those who rush past avoiding them, their heads wired or aired to their phones.
I see it on the faces in the bus glued to screens or zoned out in the bubbles of their cars on the freeway.
Academic research all over the world, including here in Australia, indicates young people are especially prone to loneliness and its perilous repercussions for mental and physical health. Many will find this counterintuitive. Surely those of older cohorts – facing the deaths of partners, friends and siblings, the prospect of living alone or shifting into care or already there – would be experiencing more isolation?
But much about the young and loneliness makes perfect sense to me. “The young” – people up to say 25 (who I could also call super-young given the demographic precipice where I hover) are the generation of hyper-connectivity. Most of us are unhealthily yet necessarily reliant on our phones (as recent network outages illustrate too well). But it’s no stretch to say that those up to 25 (I base this partly on the unreliable science of familial observation) are, if not quite born hyper-connected then develop reliance, soon too become an addiction, to hyper-connectivity prodigiously early.
Notwithstanding the questionable efficacy of Australia’s purported under-16 social media ban, myriad are the e-ways – through gaming and countless apps – that the young have grown up communicating through and that the rest of us use routinely. But hyper-connection (like mistaking for the real deal virtual friends you’ll never meet over a cup of tea or a beer; we’ve all done it) has actually led to a global state of emotionally tactile, under-connection.
Forget the young for a minute while I consider others who might be the old. I mean people like me. For large periods of the past almost 20 years I’ve been alone (dogs aside) in a room with my thoughts and my research and keyboard for eight or 10 hours a day. But the only times I’ve tended to feel lonely has been when I’ve been tuned into social media.
The scroll leaves me dead inside. Empty. Often angry.
Yes, I have made some friends and contacts on social media. I have marketed my writing and done events about it online. But I have had an at best ambivalent – and at worst deleterious – relationship with two social media platforms that I’ve had to quit cold turkey. They only served to isolate me psychologically, emotionally and professionally.
I now find that I’m close to ditching another because my user experience has become the same. My good, by many rationales successful and privileged life (no matter how rationally, how positively, my prefrontal cortex processes it as such) always pales compared with so many of the heavily curated best and happiest and out of the park professionally winning lives in my feed. If I get jammed in that scroll, the isolation begins to creep. The loneliness takes its grip.
And I am not a heavy user. So, this is where I say (again), “Damn it, I’ll get off.” If it can make me feel this type of lonely, what’s it doing to the more vulnerable? Especially children I know who are transported to unknown, potentially dangerous places when online, and bored when they are not.
Well, we already know: the more extreme forms of harm include algorithmic encouragement to suicide and diet dangerously, and for others to commit violent acts of extremism as a way of “belonging”. And yet something (FOMO, a way to chat with the small communities of the genuinely like-minded I’ve met online) keeps me hanging on to a product that makes people I loathe more super-rich while they trash the world.
Of course, the other side of my brain challenges me: what other highly addictive malevolent product – one that allows the wilful encouragement of suicide and violence, especially in the young, that feeds on isolation and loneliness, yet only makes it worse – would I keep subscribing to?
For the truth is that the nearer I am to an unattainable analogue life, the further I feel away from loneliness.
Alone, with a book – or better, a book and a dog – feels like a near perfect state of connectivity. So, too, the communal space: the museum, the gallery, the theatre, the silent shared knowing of the library … among strangers. In real life awe. With phones on silent. Momentarily e-disconnected.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor.
