Pretty in Pink

September 24, 2019. I am waiting, seated at the window, my back against the pretty-in-pink wall.

My phone pings. It’s Brittany—she’s running a few minutes late.

“No worries,” I message back. “Cool choice of place.” And it is. The effortlessly beautiful, gazellelike clientele, with their fashion-model portfolios under their arms, hint at just how hip Cha Cha Matcha in Manhattan’s NoHo district feels.

A few beats later, she arrives. Long-limbed, athletic, she scans the room, her smile widening as I come into her gaze. “Hey, love your dress,” she says.

For forty dollars an hour, I’d expect no less. For Brittany is the “friend” I have rented for the afternoon from a company called RentAFriend. Founded by New Jersey entrepreneur Scott Rosenbaum, who had seen the concept take off in Japan, and now operating in dozens of countries around the world, the company offers over 620,000 platonic friends for hire online.

This wasn’t the career path Brittany, a twenty-three-year-old small-town Floridian, had intended when she won her place at Brown. Yet, having been unable to secure a job in environmental science (the subject she majored in at university) and anxious about her levels of student debt, she explains her decision to rent out her company as a pragmatic one, her emotional labor as just another monetizable string to her bow. When she’s not renting herself out—on average she does so a few times a week—she helps start-ups with their social media postings and offers executive assistant services via TaskRabbit.

Before we met up I was pretty nervous, not sure if friend was covert speak for sexual partner, or even if I’d recognize her from her profile picture. But within minutes I feel reassured that this is friends-without-benefits territory. And over the next few hours, as we wander around downtown Manhattan chatting about #MeToo, her heroine Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and, at McNally Jackson, our favorite books, at times I even forget I am paying for Brittany’s company. Although she doesn’t feel like an old friend, she does feel like a fun new prospect.

But it is at Urban Outfitters on Broadway that she really ramps up the charm, just as the meter on our encounter begins to run out. Smile now perma-fixed, banter upped, she joshes with me as we rummage through a pile of T-shirts and gamely joins me in trying on Crayola-colored bucket hats. Apparently they really suit me. Although presumably she would tell me that whether it was true or not.

I ask Brittany about the others who’ve hired her, my fellow friendship-consumers. She tells me of the soft-spoken woman who didn’t want to show up at a party alone; the techie from Delhi who had moved to Manhattan for work, didn’t know anyone in town, and wanted company at dinner; the banker who offered to come over with chicken soup when she was sick. If you had to sum up your typical clientele, what would you say, I ask her. Her answer: “Lonely, thirty-to-forty-year-old professionals. The kind of people who work long hours and don’t seem to have time to make many friends.”

It’s a sign of our times that today I can order companionship as easily as I can a cheeseburger with just a few taps on my phone, that what I call a Loneliness Economy has emerged to support—and in some cases exploit—those who feel alone. But in the twenty-first century, the loneliest century we have known, Brittany’s overworked professionals are not the only ones suffering; the tentacles of loneliness reach much further.

Even before the coronavirus triggered a “social recession” with its toxification of face-to-face contact, three in five U.S. adults considered themselves lonely.5

In Europe, it was a similar story. In Germany, two-thirds of the population believed loneliness to be a serious problem.6 Almost a third of Dutch nationals admitted to being lonely, one in ten severely so.7 In Sweden, up to a quarter of the population said that they were frequently lonely.8 In Switzerland, two out of every five people reported sometimes, often, or always feeling so.9

In the United Kingdom, the problem had become so significant that in 2018 the prime minister went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness.10 One in eight Brits did not have even a single close friend they could rely on, up from one in ten just five years before.11 Three-quarters of citizens did not know their neighbors’ names, while 60 percent of U.K. employees felt lonely at work.12 The data for Asia, Australia, South America, and Africa was similarly troubling.13

Inevitably, months of lockdowns, self-isolation, and social distancing have made this problem even worse.

Young and old, male and female, single and married, rich and poor.14 All over the world people are feeling lonely, disconnected, and alienated. We are in the midst of a global loneliness crisis. None of us, anywhere, is immune.

Six thousand miles from Manhattan’s NoHo district, Saito-san is waking up. Round-cheeked and small, a genial twinkle in her eye, this widowed mother of two knows all too well what it feels like to be lonely. Burdened with considerable financial worries, her pension not covering her living costs, bereft of support, and her children too busy to care, she frequently felt very much on her own. Before, that is, she took a radical, if not unprecedented, step.

Incarcerated now in Tochigi prison, a facility for female offenders, Saito-san is one of numerous elderly Japanese who have made jail an active life choice. In Japan, crimes committed by people over the age of sixty-five have quadrupled over the past two decades.15 Within this age group, 70 percent reoffend within five years. Prison warden Junko Ageno has no doubt that loneliness is a key driver of this trend—her charges have told her as much.16 Ryukoku University professor Koichi Hamai, who has studied the phenomenon of elderly prisoners, agrees. He believes that significant numbers of elderly women choose prison as a way to escape how socially isolated they feel.17 Jailed typically for minor offenses such as petty shoplifting—one of the easiest crimes you can commit if going to jail is your goal—40 percent of such prisoners report rarely speaking to their family or not having one at all; half of the seniors incarcerated for shoplifting in recent years were living alone prior to going to prison.

Many describe jail as a way of creating for themselves a “community that [they] can’t get at home.” A place where, as one octogenarian inmate explains, “There are always people around, and I don’t feel lonely.”18 An environment that seventy-eight-year-old prisoner Ms. O describes as “an oasis” where “there are many people to talk to.” A sanctuary that provides not only company but also support and care.19

The elderly are the group we are prone to think of first when we consider who is loneliest among us. And indeed, this cohort is lonelier than average.

Already by 2010, 60 percent of U.S. nursing home residents said they never have any visitors.20 In the United Kingdom, two-fifths of all older people reported in 2014 that television was their main company.21 Meanwhile, in Tianjin, China, an eighty-five-year-old grandfather, one of China’s millions of lonely elderly, gained international fame in 2017 when he posted a notice on his local bus shelter. “Lonely man in his 80s,” it read. “My hope is that a kindhearted person or family will adopt me.” Tragically, within three months he was dead. It took many of his neighbors two weeks to notice he was no longer around.22

Such stories make hard reading. And they raise huge questions about how we as a society care for our oldest citizens. Yet it is actually, and perhaps surprisingly, the youngest among us who are the loneliest.

I first became aware of this a few years back when I was teaching graduate university students.23 For not only was it obvious to me, when I saw how they interacted during group assignments, that they found their face-to-face interactions considerably more challenging than previous generations, but as they plumped themselves down in my office full of anxiety about their coursework and their future job prospects, I was struck by how many confided in me how lonely and isolated they felt.

My students weren’t outliers.

In the United States, slightly more than one in five millennials say they have no friends at all.24 In the United Kingdom, three in five 18-to-34-year-olds and nearly half of children aged between 10 and 15 say they are lonely often or sometimes.25

Again, this disturbing picture is a global one that in recent years has gotten progressively worse. Across nearly every country in the OECD (which includes most of Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia) the percentage of fifteen-year-olds who say they feel lonely at school rose between 2003 and 2015.26 Again, in the wake of COVID-19 the numbers are likely to be significantly higher.

This isn’t just a mental health crisis. It’s a crisis that’s making us physically ill. The research shows that loneliness is worse for our health than not exercising, as harmful as being an alcoholic, and twice as harmful as being obese.27 Statistically, loneliness is equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.28 Crucially, this is regardless of what we earn, our gender, age, or nationality.29

It’s also an economic crisis. Even prior to COVID-19 in the United States, social isolation was estimated to cost Medicare nearly $7 billion every year, more than it spends on arthritis and almost as much as it does on high blood pressure—and that’s just among elderly people.30 In the United Kingdom, lonely over-50s were estimated to cost the National Health Service £1.8 billion ($2.2 billion) per year, about the same as spent annually by the entire Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government.31 Meanwhile, U.K. employers were losing £800 million ($994 million) each year due to loneliness-related sick days, significantly more when productivity losses were also taken into account.32

And it’s a political crisis too, fueling divisiveness and extremism in the United States, Europe, and across the globe. Loneliness and right-wing populism are, as we will see, close bedfellows.

Especially concerning is that we are very likely to be underestimating the true extent of the problem. In part this is because of the stigma associated with loneliness. For some, admitting they are lonely is a hard thing to do: a third of U.K. employees who feel lonely at work have never told anyone.33 Others may find it difficult to admit even to themselves, believing it to suggest a personal failure, rather than a consequence of life circumstances and a whole range of social, cultural, and economic factors outside of one’s individual control.

But more than this, the problem is underestimated because of how loneliness is defined. For not only is loneliness not the same as being alone—you can be physically surrounded by people and still feel lonely, or you can be alone and not experience loneliness—it has also typically been defined too narrowly. The loneliness we are experiencing in the twenty-first century is much broader in scope than its traditional definition.

What Is Loneliness?

The UCLA Loneliness Scale was first developed in 1978 by a trio of researchers who sought to create a quantitative tool to measure one’s subjective feelings of loneliness. It takes the form of twenty questions designed to ascertain not only how connected, supported, and cared for respondents feel, but also how excluded, isolated, and misunderstood. It remains to this day the gold standard in loneliness research.34 Most of the studies on loneliness cited in this book use this scale, or a variant of it, to assess a respondent’s loneliness.

Please take a few minutes to complete it yourself. Circle your answer for each statement; at the end, add the numbers together. 35

[Q] Never Rarely Sometimes Often

1. How often do you feel that you are “in tune” with the people around you? 4 3 2 1

2. How often do you feel that you lack companionship? 1 2 3 4

3. How often do you feel that there is no one you can turn to? 1 2 3 4

4. How often do you feel alone? 1 2 3 4

5. How often do you feel part of a group of friends? 4 3 2 1

6. How often do you feel that you have a lot in common with the people around you? 4 3 2 1

7. How often do you feel that you are no longer close to anyone? 1 2 3 4

8. How often do you feel that your interests and ideas are not shared by those around you? 1 2 3 4

9. How often do you feel outgoing and friendly? 4 3 2 1

10. How often do you feel close to people? 4 3 2 1

11. How often do you feel left out? 1 2 3 4

12. How often do you feel that your relationships with others are not meaningful? 1 2 3 4

13. How often do you feel that no one really knows you well? 1 2 3 4

14. How often do you feel isolated from others? 1 2 3 4

15. How often do you feel you can find companionship when you want it? 4 3 2 1

16. How often do you feel that there are people who really understand you? 4 3 2 1

17. How often do you feel shy? 1 2 3 4

18. How often do you feel that people are around you but not with you? 1 2 3 4

19. How often do you feel that there are people you can talk to? 4 3 2 1

20. How often do you feel that there are people you can turn to? 4 3 2 1

How did you do? If you scored over 43 you’d be considered lonely.36 But if you were to retake the quiz using a wider definition of loneliness—one that encompasses not only your relationships with friends, family, work colleagues, and neighbors (those the UCLA scale more typically considers) but also your relationships with your employer, fellow citizens, politicians, and the state—how would that affect your score?

A key difference between my definition of loneliness (the one that will be used throughout this book) and the traditional one is that I do not define loneliness only as feeling bereft of love, company, or intimacy. Nor is it just about feeling ignored, unseen, or uncared for by those with whom we interact on a regular basis: our partner, family, friends, and neighbors. It’s also about feeling unsupported and uncared for by our fellow citizens, our employers, our community, our government. It’s about feeling disconnected not only from those we are meant to feel intimate with but also from ourselves. It’s about not only lacking support in a social or familial context but feeling politically and economically excluded as well.

I define loneliness as both an internal state and an existential one—personal, societal, economic, and political.

As such my definition is closer to that envisaged by thinkers like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Carl Jung, and Hannah Arendt and writers as various as Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, George Eliot, and, more recently, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker.37

Reshaped by globalization, urbanization, growing inequality and power asymmetries, by demographic change, increased mobility, technological disruption, austerity, and now by the corona too, I believe the contemporary manifestation of loneliness goes beyond our yearning for connection with those physically around us, our craving for love and being loved, and the sadness we feel when we consider ourselves to be bereft of friends. It also incorporates how disconnected we feel from politicians and politics, how cut off we feel from our work and our workplace, how excluded many of us feel from society’s gains, and how powerless, invisible, and voiceless so many of us believe ourselves to be. It’s a loneliness that includes but is also greater than our desire to feel close to others because it is also a manifestation of our need to be heard, to be seen, to be cared for, to have agency, to be treated fairly, kindly, and with respect. Traditional measures of loneliness capture only a part of this.

With that definition in mind, ask yourself: When did you last feel disconnected from those around you, whether family, friends, neighbors, or your fellow citizens? When did you last feel uncared for or unheard by your elected politicians or think that no one in a position of authority cared about your struggles? When did you last feel powerless or invisible at work?

You are not alone.

In the years preceding the coronavirus pandemic, two-thirds of those living in democracies did not think their government acted in their interests.38 Eighty-five percent of employees globally felt disconnected from their company and their work.39 Only 30 percent of Americans believed that most other people could be trusted, a very substantial drop since 1984, when around 50 percent did.40 And when it comes to feeling disconnected from each other, can you remember a time when the world has felt this polarized, fractured, and divided?

How We Got Here

This state of affairs didn’t just happen by chance. Nor did it emerge overnight. There is a backdrop, a fusion of causes and events that explains why we have become so lonely and atomized, both personally and as a society.

As you might have suspected, our smartphones and in particular social media have played an integral role: stealing our attention away from those around us; fueling the worst within us so that we become ever angrier and more tribal; making us behave ever more performatively and compulsively in pursuit of likes, retweets, and follows; and eroding our ability to communicate effectively or empathetically. This held true even during the coronavirus lockdown. For alongside the Pope live-streaming his daily Mass on Facebook; DJ D-Nice throwing a dance party attended by more than one hundred thousand people on Instagram; the springing up of local Facebook groups in which neighbors who’d never spoken to each other before shared “how to stay sane” tips, Wi-Fi passwords, and baby milk, racist attacks and hate speech escalated on social media, conspiracy theories circulated ever faster, and marriage guidance counselors told me of a spike in clients feeling lonely because their partners were now even more consumed than usual by their phones.41

To be sure, structural and institutional discrimination remain factors; a 2019 U.K. study of nearly a thousand people found that experiencing racial, ethnic, or xenophobic discrimination at work or in your local neighborhood increases your chance of loneliness by 21 percent. Meanwhile, a 2020 survey of over ten thousand Americans established that Black and Hispanic people feel lonelier than their white peers, and also significantly more alienated in their workplaces. Gender discrimination, too, can play a role, with sexist behavior having been linked to increased loneliness.42

But on top of these longstanding structural failings, other new drivers of loneliness have emerged.

Our smartphones and social media are just two pieces of the puzzle though. The causes of today’s loneliness crisis are numerous and diverse. Large-scale migration to cities, the radical reorganization of the workplace, and fundamental changes to how we live are critical factors as well. It’s not just that we “bowl alone” more often than when the political scientist Robert Putnam published his landmark book about everyday American life in 2000. We now do ever less with each other, at least when it comes to traditional ways to commune. In much of the world, people are less likely to go to church or synagogue, belong to a parent-teachers association or a trade union, eat or live with others, or have a close friend than even a decade ago.43 We’ve also been having less contact physically: touching each other less, and having less sex.44

And the trend for some time now has been that even when we do stuff “together,” for increasing numbers of us this isn’t in the physical presence of another person: we “attend” yoga class on an app, “speak” to a customer service chatbot instead of a human salesperson, livestream a religious service from our living room, or shop at Amazon Go, the tech giant’s new chain of grocery stores where you can leave with your shopping without having had any contact with another human being. Even before the coronavirus struck, contactless was starting to become our way of life, our active choice.

At the same time, the infrastructure of community—by which I mean those shared physical spaces where people of all stripes can come together, interact, and form bonds—has been severely neglected at best and at worst actively destroyed. It’s a process that began in many places before the 2008 financial crisis but accelerated markedly in its aftermath as government policies of austerity took a sledgehammer to libraries, public parks, playgrounds, and youth and community centers across much of the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, a third of youth clubs and nearly 800 public libraries were shut down between 2008 and 2018, while in the United States, federal library funding decreased by more than 40 percent between 2008 and 2019.45 Why this matters so profoundly is because such places are not only where we come together but also where we learn how to do so, places where we practice civility and also democracy, in its inclusive form, by learning how to peacefully coexist with people different from us and how to manage different points of view. Without such spaces that bring us together, it’s inevitable that we will pull ever further apart.

Dog-Eat-Dog

The way we now live, the changing nature of work, the changing nature of relationships, the way our cities are now built and our offices designed, the way we treat each other and the way our government treats us, our smartphone addiction, and even the way we now love are all contributing to how lonely we have become. But we must go back further to fully understand how we became so disconnected, siloed, and isolated. For the ideological underpinnings of the twenty-first century’s loneliness crisis predate digital technology, the most recent wave of urbanization, this century’s profound changes to the workplace, and the 2008 financial crisis, as well as, of course, the coronavirus pandemic.

They go back instead to the 1980s, when a particularly harsh form of capitalism took hold: neoliberalism, an ideology with an overriding emphasis on freedom—“free” choice, “free” markets, “freedom” from government or trade union interference. One that prized an idealized form of self-reliance, small government, and a brutal competitive mindset that placed self-interest above community and the collective good. Championed initially by both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and later embraced by “Third Way” politicians such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Gerard Schröder, this political project has dominated commercial and government practices over the past few decades.

It has played a fundamental role in today’s loneliness crisis in large part because it has precipitated a significant rise in income and wealth gaps within countries across many parts of the world.46 In the United States, CEOs in 1989 earned on average fifty-eight times the average worker’s salary, but by 2018 they made 278 times as much.47 In the United Kingdom, the share of income going to the top 1 percent of households has tripled in the last forty years, with the wealthiest 10 percent now owning five times as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent.48 As a result, significant swathes of the population have, for a considerable time, felt left behind, branded as losers in a society that has time only for the winners, left to fend for themselves in a world in which their traditional moorings of work and community are disintegrating, social safety nets eroding, and their status in society diminishing. While those in higher income brackets can also be lonely, those who have less in economic terms are disproportionately so.49 Given contemporary levels of unemployment and economic hardship, we need to be especially mindful of this.

Second, because neoliberalism has given ever more power and freer rein to big business and big finance, allowing shareholders and financial markets to shape the rules of the game and conditions of employment, even when this comes at an excessively high cost to workers and society at large. At the turn of the decade, record numbers of people globally believed that capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good. In Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, around half the population believed this to be the case, with many feeling that the state was so in thrall to the market that it wasn’t watching their backs or looking out for their needs.50 It’s lonely to feel uncared for, invisible, and powerless in this way. The huge interventions governments made to support their citizens during 2020 were completely at odds with the economic ethos of the previous forty years, embodied by comments made by Ronald Reagan in 1986: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” Even if the various coronavirus stimuli do signal the dawning of a new approach, the long-term social and economic impact of neoliberalism will inevitably take a long time to unwind.

Third, because it profoundly reshaped not only economic relationships, but also our relationships with each other. For neoliberal capitalism was never just an economic policy, as Margaret Thatcher made clear in 1981 when she told The Sunday Times, “Economics is the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”51 And in many ways, neoliberalism succeeded in this aim. For it fundamentally changed how we saw each other and the obligations to each other that we felt, with its valorizing of qualities such as hypercompetitiveness and the pursuit of self-interest, regardless of the wider consequences.

It is not that humans are essentially selfish—research in evolutionary biology makes clear that we are not.52 But with politicians actively championing a self-seeking, dog-eat-dog mindset, and “Greed is good” (the maxim Gordon Gekko famously uttered in the 1987 movie Wall Street) serving as neoliberalism’s bumper sticker, qualities such as solidarity, kindness, and caring for each other were not only undervalued but deemed to be irrelevant human traits. Under neoliberalism we were reduced to homo economicus, rational humans consumed only by our own self-interest.

We have even seen this play out in how our language has evolved. Collectivist words like belong, duty, share, and together have since the 1960s been increasingly supplanted by individualistic words and phrases such as achieve, own, personal, and special.53 Even pop song lyrics have become ever more individualistic over the past forty years, as pronouns such as we and us have been replaced by I and me in this generation’s lyrical imagination.54 In 1977, Queen told us that “we are the champions” and Bowie that “we could be heroes.” In 2013 Kanye West told us, “I am a God,” while Ariana Grande’s 2018 record-breaking “thank u, next” was written as a love song to herself.

It is not just in the West that we see this. When researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Singapore’s Nanyang Business School analyzed China’s ten most popular songs every year from 1970 to 2010, they discovered that first-person pronouns such as I, me, and mine were increasingly used in songs over the decades, while uses of we, us, and ours diminished.55 Even in a country traditionally defined by mass solidarity and collectivism in which the state remains firmly in control, what we may think of as a super-individualistic neoliberal mindset has firmly taken hold.

Neoliberalism has made us see ourselves as competitors not collaborators, consumers not citizens, hoarders not sharers, takers not givers, hustlers not helpers, people who are not only too busy to be there for our neighbors but don’t even know our neighbors’ names. And we collectively let this happen. In many ways this was a rational response. For under neoliberal capitalism, if I am not for “I,” then who will be? The market? The state? Our employer? Our neighbor? Unlikely. The trouble is that an “all about me” selfish society in which people feel that they have to take care of themselves because no one else will is inevitably a lonely one.

It also fast becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. This is because in order not to feel lonely we need to give as well as take, care as well as be cared for, be kind to each other and respectful of those around us, as well as be treated as such ourselves.

If we are to come together in a world that’s pulling apart, we will need to reconnect capitalism to the pursuit of the common good and put care, compassion, and cooperation at its very heart, with these behaviors extending to people who are different from us. That’s the real challenge: to reconnect not only with those similar to us but also with the much wider community to which we ultimately belong. Post-COVID-19, this is both more urgent than ever and more possible.

The purpose of this book isn’t solely to articulate the scale of the loneliness crisis in the twenty-first century, how we got here, and the ways that it will get worse if we do nothing to respond. It is also a call for action. To governments and business, for sure—loneliness has clear structural drivers that they must address. But also to each of us as individuals.

Because society isn’t only done to us, we “do” society too, we participate in it and shape it. So if we want to stop the destructive path of loneliness and restore the sense of community and cohesion we have lost, we will need to acknowledge that there are steps we must take, as well as tradeoffs we will have to make—between individualism and collectivism, between self-interest and societal good, between anonymity and familiarity, between convenience and caring, between what is right for the self and what is best for the community, between liberty and fraternity. Choices that are not binary, yet will demand the relinquishing of at least some of the freedoms that neoliberalism promised, falsely, that we could have at no cost.

The recognition that each of us has a critical role to play in mitigating the loneliness crisis is central to this book. Reconnecting society cannot only be a top-down initiative driven by governments, institutions, and big business, even if the process of disconnecting society largely was.

So throughout the book I will be including ideas, thoughts, and examples of what we can do to counter the current trajectory of divisiveness, isolation, and loneliness, not only on a political and economic level but on a personal one as well.

This is the Lonely Century, but it doesn’t have to be so.

The future is in our hands.

Lonely Bodies

Think back to the last time you felt lonely. It may have lasted for only a short time. What did it feel like in your body? Where did it live?

We often imagine a lonely person as passive, quiet, muted. Indeed, when many of us remember the loneliest times in our lives, we don’t immediately recall a hammering heart, racing thoughts, or other typical signs of a high-stress situation. Loneliness instead evokes associations of stillness. Yet the chemical presence of loneliness in the body—and the hormones it sends coursing through our veins—are essentially identical to the “fight or flight” reaction we have when we feel under attack.1 It’s this stress response that fuels some of the most insidious health effects of loneliness.2 These can be far-reaching and even, in the worst cases, deadly. So when we are talking about loneliness we are not just talking about lonely minds but also lonely bodies. The two are of course intertwined.

It’s not that our bodies aren’t used to stress responses—we experience them pretty frequently. A big presentation at work, a close call while cycling, watching our football team receive a penalty are all commonplace stress triggers. But typically after the “threat” is over, our vital signs—pulse, blood pressure, breathing—return to baseline. We’re safe. In a lonely body, however, neither the stress response nor, crucially, the reset happens the way it should.

When a lonely body experiences stress, cholesterol levels rise faster than in a non-lonely one; blood pressure rises faster; levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone,” rise faster.3 What’s more, these momentary rises in blood pressure and cholesterol build up over time for those who are chronically lonely, with the amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for these “fight or flight” responses—often keeping a “danger” signal going for far longer than it would otherwise.4 This leads to increased white blood cell production and inflammation, which in times of acute stress can be a powerful boost but when sustained for longer periods of time have devastating side effects.5 For when chronically inflamed, its immune system overworked and underperforming, the lonely body is susceptible to other illnesses that it would normally be much more capable of fighting, including the common cold, the flu, and my old nemesis from 1975, tonsillitis.6

It is also more prone to serious disease. If you are lonely, you have a 29 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease, a 32 percent higher risk of stroke, and a 64 percent higher risk of developing clinical dementia.7 If you feel lonely or are socially isolated, you are almost 30 percent more likely to die prematurely than if you are not.8

Although the longer we are lonely the more damaging the impact on our health, even relatively short periods of loneliness can negatively impact our well-being.9 When a team at Johns Hopkins University ran a study in the 1960s and ’70s that tracked a cohort of medical students for sixteen years, the subject group showed a revealing pattern: the students whose childhoods had been lonely, their parents cold and aloof, were more likely to develop various cancers later in life.10 While a 2010 study of people who had experienced a period of loneliness brought about by a specific event like the death of a partner or a move to a new town found that even though their loneliness was time-bounded (in this case lasting less than two years), their life expectancy was diminished.11 Given the enforced period of isolation most of us experienced in 2020, this rings alarm bells.

We will come back to why loneliness wreaks such havoc on our bodies. But first, let’s consider what is in many ways the antithesis of loneliness—community—and its impact on our health. For if loneliness makes us sick, does feeling connected to others keep us well?

The Haredi Health Puzzle

Buttery, creamy, salty, sweet. The rugalach melts in my mouth. As does my first bite of zserbó, a traditional Jewish-Hungarian cake layered with chocolate, walnuts, and apricot jam. I am at Katz Bakery in Israel’s Bnei Brak, one of the most popular stops on Haredi food tours.

The Haredim are an ultra-orthodox branch of Judaism whose origins go back to the late nineteenth century.12 Today this black-hatted, white-shirted, modest-dressing community make up approximately 12 percent of Israel’s population, a figure projected to rise to 16 percent by 2030.13 I find all of the pastries at Katz utterly delicious. Yet these delicacies are definitely not healthy. Indeed, all that butter, sugar, and fat help explain why the Haredim are seven times more likely to be obese than secular Jewish Israelis.14 When I ask Pini, the jocular Haredi Jew who runs my tour, how much vegetable and fiber is in the traditional Haredi diet, he tells me it is limited.

Their diet isn’t the only unhealthy aspect of their lifestyle. Despite living in a country that has an average of 288 days of sunshine a year, this group is seriously deprived of vitamin D. Their modest dress code means that barely a wrist gets any sun exposure. As for physical exercise? Anything vigorous tends to be avoided.15 By all standard modern counts, Pini and his peers clearly do not live healthy lives.

Nor are they financially secure. Most men opt out of the workforce to study the Torah, and although 63 percent of Haredi women do have a job, often as their families’ breadwinners, they tend to work fewer hours than non-orthodox women due to their considerable responsibilities at home (the average Haredi woman has 6.7 children, three more than the national Israeli average).16 They also typically work in roles such as teaching, where the pay is relatively low.17 As a result, over 54 percent of Haredim live below the poverty line, compared to 9 percent of non-Haredi Jews; their average monthly per capita income (3,500 shekels) is also half that of their less religious Jewish counterparts.18

Given all these indicators, one would expect Haredim to have a shorter life expectancy than that of the general Israeli population. After all, the overwhelming majority of studies around the world show a clear positive correlation between diet and longevity, physical activity and longevity, and socioeconomic status and longevity.

Yet fascinatingly, the Haredim seem to buck this trend; 73.6 percent of Haredim describe their health as “very good,” compared with only 50 percent of other groups.19 This is a statistic we might be tempted to disregard as self-reported and wishful thinking if it weren’t for the fact that their life expectancy is indeed higher than average.20 The three cities in which the majority of Israel’s Haredim live—Beit Shemesh, Bnei Brak, and Jerusalem—are all outliers when it comes to life expectancy.21 In Bnei Brak, whose population is 96 percent Haredi, the life expectancy at birth is a full four years higher than the city’s socioeconomic ranking would predict.22 Overall, Haredi men in these cities live three years longer and women nearly eighteen months longer than one would expect. Other studies have found that they also score higher on self-reported measures of life satisfaction than either secular or moderately observant Israeli Jews or Arab-Israelis.23

Now, of course it could be that this community, many of whom hail from the same shtetls in Poland and Russia and most of whom intermarry, share a particular genetic makeup that predisposes them to good health. But in fact, the limitation of a gene pool over time is much more likely to lead to genetic disorders than to population longevity.

One might also assume that the Haredim are healthier because of their faith, given the multiple studies suggesting that religious belief pays a health dividend. However, it is less the belief itself and more the participation in the associated community that is thought to yield this result.24 As one much-cited study suggests, it is attending religious services, not simply identifying as religious, that may add a whopping seven years to life expectancy.25

Community, the value of which was so repudiated by neoliberal capitalism’s focus on individualism and self-interest, seems to have a health benefit of its very own.

And for the Haredim, community is everything.

This close-knit group spends virtually all their waking hours together praying, volunteering, studying, and working. Their year is punctuated with holy days and festivals, around which the community coalesces. At Sukkot, families welcome guests into their sukkahs, the palm-leaf-roofed temporary structures in which they sleep and eat for a week. At Purim, the streets throng with costumed revelers—the vibe a combination of Mardi Gras and Halloween. At Hanukkah, neighbors, friends, and neighbors’ friends join to light the menorah and eat jam doughnuts. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals draw crowds of people together for days at a time. And of course every Friday evening throngs of grandchildren, cousins, second cousins, and in-laws gather around the dining-room table to break bread and bring in the Sabbath together.

The Haredim don’t only pray together and play together, however. In times of crisis or need they also provide each other with tangible help and support. Whether it is childcare, meals, transportation to medical appointments, advice, even financial aid if need be, they are there for each other when times are tough and life a struggle. As such, it’s no surprise that only 11 percent of Haredim report feeling lonely, compared with 23 percent of the total Israeli population.26

Dov Chernichovsky, professor of health economics and policy at Ben-Gurion University in Israel’s Negev Desert, has been studying the Haredim for a number of years. He believes that while faith plays a role in the Haredim’s above-average life expectancy, their strong familial and community bonds play a more critical one.27 “Loneliness shortens life and friendship reduces pressure,” the professor succinctly puts it. For the Haredim, the care and support they provide one another may indeed be the secret to their longer and healthier lives.

The Health Benefits of Community

The Haredim are not the exception in this regard.

The benefits of community to health were first identified back in the 1950s in the small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, when local physicians noticed that residents were experiencing a much lower rate of heart disease than that found in a similar neighboring town. Upon further investigation they found that Rosetan men over sixty-five were dying at a rate that was half the national average, even though they were working grueling jobs at nearby quarries, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, eating lard-soaked meatballs, and downing wine daily.28 Why? Researchers concluded that it was the rock-solid family ties and community support of the predominantly Italian-American Rosetans that were delivering the superior health dividend. A follow-up study in 1992, which looked at a full fifty years of Rosetan health and social records, found even more evidence for this thesis. By then, the death rate in Roseto had climbed back up to the average due to the “erosion of traditionally cohesive family and community relationships” from the late 1960s and later.29 As the wealthiest among them started to display their riches in ever more ostentatious ways, as local stores closed down due to the arrival of larger “big box” stores out of town, and as single-family homes with fenced yards sprang up to replace the multigenerational living setups, so did the protective health benefits of their community dissipate.30 Other examples of cohesive communities protecting their members’ health include the lifetime residents of Sardinia and Japan’s Okinawa Island, as well as the Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California. Their geographies are known as “Blue Zones”: places where it is not only diet that accounts for the especially long life expectancy but also the fact that social ties are strong and enduring.31 Places like Bnei Brak or Roseto in the 1950s where, as Dan Buettner, the National Geographic Fellow who coined the term, has said, “You can’t walk outside your front door without bumping into somebody you know.”32

It is important not to overly romanticize community. By definition communities are exclusive and as such can be both excessively insular and antagonistic toward outsiders. Often they don’t permit difference or nonconformity, whether we’re talking different interests, nontraditional family structures, or alternative beliefs or lifestyles. In the case of the Haredim and Seventh-day Adventists, for example, those who don’t adhere to the community’s norms can find that excommunication can be both brutal and brutally swift.

Yet for those within the enclave, community clearly does deliver a health dividend. This stems not only from the practical support that community offers or the reassurance provided by knowing that someone has your back, but also from something more fundamental that originates in our deep evolutionary past: the fact that we are hard-wired not to be alone.

Creatures of Togetherness

Like all other primates, humans are social animals. We rely on complex, tight-knit groups to function, from the primordial, chemical bonds between mother and infant to the larger family unit to today’s massive nation-states. Indeed, in many ways the rise of humans to the top of Earth’s planetary food chain can be traced to our enthusiastic togetherness: from our development of sophisticated group hunting-and-gathering techniques for food, to our collective defense strategies for protection.33 Until very recently in the history of our species, a lonely human would have been quite literally at risk of death—vulnerable in a world where the group enabled survival. Being connected to others is our natural and in fact desired state, whether this desire is conscious or not.

This is why not being connected to each other has such a profound negative impact on our health. For in order to disincentivize us from remaining in a state fundamentally at odds with our survival, evolution has equipped our bodies with a biological reaction to being alone that ramps up our alertness and is so physiologically and psychologically unpleasant that we are motivated to end it as quickly as possible.

In some ways our ability to feel lonely, our pain and agitation when we feel distant from other human beings, is a brilliant evolutionary feature. “You would never want to shut off the trigger of loneliness,” said the University of Chicago’s Professor John Cacioppo, one of the pioneers of loneliness research. “It would be like completely shutting down hunger. You’d lack the signals to eat.”34

Yet in today’s world, so different from the landscape in which our ancestors evolved this trigger, it can seem like more of a bug than a positive design feature. For as Professor Anton Emmanuel at University College Hospital in London explained to me, the stress response triggered by loneliness is like putting a car into first gear: it’s the most efficient way to accelerate, and it gets you moving. But when you stay in first gear for your entire journey, or worse, for a number of journeys, the engine will be over-revved, strained, and damaged. A car isn’t designed to stay in first gear, just as our bodies are not designed to be repeatedly lonely. Is it any surprise, then, that bodies exposed to this kind of stress again and again start to show signs of physical damage?

The eminent eighteenth-century Scottish physician William Cullen was one of the first doctors to link loneliness to illness. One of his patients, “Mrs. Rae,” suffered from a mysterious ailment, for which he prescribed cocoa, horse riding, tincture of Mars, and—most significant for our purposes—company. “[H]owever averse she should see her friends both at home and abroad,” he counseled. “Silence & Solitude are to be avoided.”35

By now, the health benefit of good relationships has been established in a number of research projects. In the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, 238 male Harvard sophomores were tracked by researchers for over eighty years from 1938 on. They measured the amount of exercise they did, how their marriages and careers developed, and ultimately their lifespans.36 (The original recruits included future U.S. president John F. Kennedy and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later immortalized by Tom Hanks in the movie The Post.) It turned out that those who were healthiest at eighty were the ones who had been the most satisfied with their relationships thirty years before. This benefit wasn’t restricted to those who had the privilege of attending Harvard in the 1930s. It was reflected, too, in a more diverse group of inner-city Boston residents who were tracked alongside for as long. As Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, noted, “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”37

We can distinguish, of course, between poor relationships and loneliness; as was highlighted earlier, loneliness is not only a reflection of how connected to other individuals we feel but also of how connected we feel to groups of people, institutions, and society as a whole. Yet what is emerging from hundreds of medical studies is that while community and connectedness provide health benefits, loneliness, even when most narrowly defined, can take a dangerous toll.

The question is therefore: is loneliness simply one of many sources of stress in our lives, each contributing to a decline in our physical health, or is there something particular to the stress caused by loneliness that engenders profound long-term health problems? The answer seems to lie somewhere in between.

On the one hand, the lonely body is a stressed body: a body that is easily exhausted and overly inflamed. Not that inflammation is inherently bad. In regular amounts, it is in fact beneficial, part of the body’s defense mechanism against infection and injury, designed to localize any damage and help the body to heal. Indeed, without inflammation—typically characterized by swelling and redness—healing itself would be impossible.38 The problem lies in the fact that normally inflammation dies down when the pathogenic threat is mitigated, or the injury has healed. But with loneliness, especially chronic loneliness, there’s no “off switch” to remind the body to calm down. So loneliness-induced inflammation can become chronic—the new normal.39 And chronic inflammation has been linked to a whole host of afflictions including clogged arteries, heart disease, stroke, depression, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. Indeed, a 2012 review of the medical literature on the subject found that chronic inflammation, long associated with infectious diseases, is now also “intimately linked with a broad range of non-infectious diseases,” adding alarmingly, “perhaps even all of them.”40

On the other hand, loneliness is a type of stress that can massively amplify the effects of other stresses. Take the immune system, for example. A healthy body uses a variety of mechanisms to fight malevolent forces, whether they’re pathogens—bacteria and viruses—or cancerous cells. Loneliness has been shown to reduce the efficacy of the body’s fight against both types of threat: it makes us weaker and more susceptible to disease, especially viruses.41

Moreover, it’s not just by keeping us in a sustained state of “high alert”—the equivalent of the car that’s been driving for eight hours in first gear—that loneliness damages our immune system. It affects us on a cellular and hormonal level too. One influential study has suggested that loneliness impairs the function in several endocrine glands that secrete hormones throughout the body and are connected with our immune response.42 UCLA’s Steve Cole, professor of medicine and psychiatry, meanwhile, has found that the blood of lonely people has a significantly higher level of the hormone norepinephrine, which, in a life-threatening situation, starts to shut down viral defense. Such immune weakening extends to cancer, which the body usually defends against in part by using “natural killer” (NK) cells that destroy tumors and virus-infected cells. A study of first-year medical students has shown NK cell activity to be much lower among the lonelier members of the cohort.43

Just as loneliness seems to contribute to various conditions, if you’re already unwell loneliness is also likely to impede your recovery. As Professor Emmanuel told me, “I am 100 percent unequivocal that loneliness impacts health and recovery. If a lonely patient and non-lonely patient receive the same treatment, the non-lonely one will do better. In the same way that a smoker being treated for Crohn’s disease will do worse than a non-smoker, so too will a lonely patient versus someone who is not.”

The data backs this up. For instance, in socially isolated patients, blood pressure (and in men, cholesterol) takes longer to return to normal following a stressful incident, while a lonely person’s reduced ability to “reset” the body’s inflammation levels after events like strokes, heart attacks, and surgery is thought to be a leading factor in why isolated elderly people have lower life expectancy, on average, than those who have regular social contact.44

As Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, put it at the group’s 2017 annual conference, “Social isolation and loneliness are akin to a chronic long-term condition in terms of the impact they have on our patients’ health and well-being.”45

Alone, Alone, All, All Alone

Of course, it is not just our bodies that loneliness ravages.

“My soul in agony,” said Coleridge’s ancient mariner of how it felt to be “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!” Loneliness can also cause serious mental anguish and pain.

Indeed, literature is populated with lonely people who are also depressed or mentally ill—from the unnamed protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” who as a result of being confined to a single room for “a slight hysterical tendency” (itself now a debunked “condition”)46 slowly develops hallucinatory delusions, to Eleanor Oliphant of Gail Honeyman’s eponymous Costa Award–winning 2017 novel, whose loneliness both compounds itself and frustrates her recovery from a traumatic past.

Rather astonishingly, however, it’s only in the past decade or so that loneliness has begun to be extensively researched within the field of psychiatric medicine as a distinct psychological experience. As such, despite not being classified as a mental health problem in its own right, it is now a recognized correlate for a host of mental illnesses, including anxiety and depression. The relationship runs both ways. A 2012 study of over seven thousand adults in England concluded that those with depression were over ten times more likely to be lonely than those who were not depressed.47 While a landmark U.S. study that tracked participants for five years found that patients who initially reported loneliness were more likely, five years later, to be depressed than those who did not.48

The relationship between loneliness and mental illness is a complex one that we are only starting to understand. Yet it seems to be the case that loneliness and isolation can accelerate genetic or circumstantial depressive tendencies, in part because of their physiological impact—we sleep less when we’re lonely, for example, and a lack of sleep can trigger depressive symptoms. So too can the symptoms of depression themselves fuel loneliness—by making it harder for the depressed person to connect. It can be the chicken and the egg.

The same is true of anxiety, for which isolation can be both a symptom and a cause. “Social anxiety has made my world so much smaller,” says Alex, a teenager in the United Kingdom with social anxiety disorder. “As it got worse, I started to get more insular. The more intense it got, the more I started to feel very lonely and isolated….I would avoid going to the shops or getting the bus during rush hour because there were too many people….The longer it went on, the more it started to affect work, close relationships and friendships…so my social life has…well, I don’t really have one.”49

Even short periods of isolation, such as we collectively experienced during the coronavirus pandemic, can have a marked impact on mental health.50 Sometimes the effect is still apparent years down the line. Researchers found that healthcare workers in Beijing who had been quarantined during the 2003 SARS outbreak were more likely to be suffering serious depression three years later than those who had not been, even though SARS quarantine periods lasted typically less than a month, often less than two weeks.51 Separate studies, also among hospital employees in Beijing, found that three years after the SARS outbreak, alcoholism was higher among those who had been quarantined than those who were not, with significant numbers still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, their symptoms including hypervigilance, nightmares, and flashbacks.52

Such findings should be taken very seriously as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Both governments and we as individuals must be mindful of the likely long-term mental health impacts of our recent forced isolation, and politicians must commit sufficient resources to addressing the fallout.

At the extreme, loneliness can lead to suicide.53

Francie Hart Broghammer, chief psychiatry resident at the UC Irvine Medical Center, recently wrote movingly of two patients she had encountered for whom loneliness had made life feel not worth living. One was a young woman she had recently treated “who had intentionally severed her airway and spinal cord with an eight-inch kitchen knife in an attempt to take her own life.” In interviews she cited “the isolation associated with caring for her ill grandmother and the paucity of individuals with whom she could meaningfully discuss such challenges” as the cause of her despair.54

The other was “Mr. White,” a thirty-eight-year-old man with suicidal ideations whose parents had recently died. He was struggling with employment and finances, had been rejected by his siblings, had no close friends, and was now homeless. It was the loss of his dog—his one remaining companion—that seemed to have tipped him over the edge.

Of his pet, Mr. White said, “She was the only thing in this world that viewed me as someone worth loving. I sleep in the park, and everyone that walks by thinks I am worse than a stray; I am subhuman. No one cares about you when you’re in a situation like mine. Except for her…she cared for me, and my whole life’s purpose was to care for her in return. Now she’s gone, and I have nothing left in this world.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Broghammer treats patients like these far too often.

Her firsthand insights into the link between loneliness and suicide are borne out by the research. There are over 130 studies that have found a link between loneliness and suicide, suicidal ideation, or self-harm.55 It is a link that holds true among all age groups, including the young. A survey of more than five thousand U.S. middle-school pupils found that adolescents who professed a high degree of loneliness were twice as likely as those who didn’t to have suicidal thoughts.56 Such findings are corroborated by research on young adults in places as far afield as Kenya, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, a reminder that loneliness is not only a phenomenon in the developed world.57 Furthermore, these effects can, once again, manifest many years later: one study found that suicidal thoughts in fifteen-year-olds were closely correlated to their self-reported loneliness eight years earlier, that is, at the age of seven.58 Given the high levels of loneliness among children and teenagers, this is especially concerning.

What is important to understand here is that the loneliness that prompts such depths of despair can stem from a wide range of circumstances, from the feelings of social exclusion experienced by a child ostracized on the playground or on social media, through the feelings of physical isolation an elderly person who has not had any visitors for a month may experience, to the feelings of social isolation that an adult whose community has crumbled and support system has broken down is likely to feel. A person like Mr. White.

Indeed, in the United States (and to a lesser degree in the United Kingdom) those places where we’ve seen a spike in what are known as “deaths of despair” in recent years—deaths resulting from drug overdose, alcoholism, or suicide of predominantly working-class middle-aged men—are typically those where traditional social support structures have collapsed. These men are more likely to be divorced, less likely to attend church, and more likely to have lost the brotherhood of the trade union or workplace because they have become unemployed or are doing precarious, nonunionized, and transient work.59

This is why despite Big Pharma’s keenness to develop a loneliness pill (and indeed, one that seeks to reduce perceived loneliness is currently being tested, as are various compounds that seek to counteract some of loneliness’s physiological impacts), we must do more than just try to treat its symptoms—or even worse, attempt simply to dull them.60 The root causes of loneliness must be addressed, with an understanding that solutions will need to be political, economic, and of course societal rather than simply pharmaceutical.

And we must take hope and encouragement from the fact that solutions are possible. For while broken communities lead to lonely and potentially unhealthy lives, as we’ve seen, the converse also holds.

As Edgar says in King Lear: “The mind much sufferance doth o’erskip / When grief hath mates and bearing fellowship.” Even fleeting positive connections with others have a significant health impact: just the presence of a friend in a stressful situation has been associated with calmer physiological responses, such as the lowering of blood pressure and cortisol levels.61 Holding hands with a loved one can provide an analgesic effect that’s comparable to taking a painkiller.62 While recent research into aging has found that even maintaining relatively weak ties with others when we’re elderly—playing in a casual bridge club, exchanging holiday cards, chatting with the postman—may provide a significant bulwark against memory loss and dementia.63

Our health, it seems, is molded not only by community and a feeling of being connected to others but also by kindness. The kindness of friends and family, colleagues, employers, and neighbors but also the kindness of strangers. As we rebuild our post-COVID-19 world, we need to remember this. And also how under neoliberal capitalism, kindness became a currency that we collectively devalued.

The Helper’s High

It makes sense that being on the receiving end of kindness and care both makes us feel less alone and has health benefits.64 But what is less obvious is that being kind and caring and doing small acts for others without expecting anything in return has a similar effect.

There is a significant body of research that backs up the idea that helping others is good for our health, especially if you have direct contact with the person you are helping.65 In the early 2000s, researchers sent questionnaires to 2,016 members of the Presbyterian Church across the United States, inquiring about the participants’ religious habits, their physical and mental health, and their experience of giving and receiving help.66 Even after gender, stressful life events, and general health were accounted for, those participants who were consistently involved in giving help—through volunteering, community activities, and caring for a loved one—experienced significantly better mental health.

A number of other studies have similarly found that helping others directly has a health benefit, both mental and physical. Veterans suffering from PTSD show reduced symptoms after caring for their grandchildren.67 Looking after children at a nursery school reduced the levels of cortisol and epinephrine (another stress hormone) in the saliva of elderly volunteers.68 When adolescents provide help to others, their rates of depression tend to go down.69 And in one study carried out by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, researchers found that people who provided no help to others, logistically or emotionally, were more than twice as likely to die in the five years of the study versus people who were in caring roles, whether for a partner, a relative, a neighbor, or a friend.70 Think of Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, whose transformation from a miserly curmudgeon into a generous benefactor renders him both happy and healthy by the story’s end.

When we help another person, provided that our motivation is not resentment or obligation, we experience a positive physiological reaction.71 It is why helpers often experience what is known as the “helper’s high,” feelings of energy, strength, warmth, and calm.

What this suggests is that in the Lonely Century it is essential not only that people feel cared for and indeed are cared for but also that they have the opportunity to care for others.

So how do we make sure that everyone has the capacity to both give and receive help and care? The solution is partly structural.

For it’s much easier to be helpful to others when you are not working all hours and feeling exhausted; it’s much easier to volunteer if you’re not juggling multiple jobs or if your employer has given you time off to do so. There are steps the state and employers can and must do in this regard, and we cannot allow current economic circumstances to stymie this. In the same way that in the United States after the Great Depression and in the United Kingdom after the Second World War workers were given more rights and protections and a greater commitment was made to the safeguarding of citizens’ welfare,72 we need to see the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to develop new structures and ways of behavior that enable us to better help each other.

There is also a cultural shift that’s needed. Care, kindness, and compassion need to be traits we actively encourage in each other and more clearly reward. In recent decades they have been underappreciated and underpaid. A search on a leading job website in January 2020 revealed that job descriptions specifying kindness paid only around half the average wage.73 Moving forward, we must ensure that kindness and compassion are accorded the value they deserve, their worth not left solely to the market to determine. “The claps for carers” that echoed across the world in the spring of 2020 must be translated into something tangible and permanent.74 For the sake of our physical as well as our mental health and, as we will see, for our future security, we need to ensure that we come together as a cohesive community and retain the benefits of social contact.

Of Mice and Men

There are now numerous scientific studies that link loneliness in humans to feelings of hostility toward others.2

In part this stems from an initial defensive act, a “stepping back,” as Jacqueline Olds, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, explains it. Lonely people will often put up a protective shell that denies the need for human warmth and company. Consciously or not, they “start to send out signals, often non-verbal ones, telling other people to ‘leave me by myself, I don’t need you, go away.’ ”3

There’s also something else at play, something that loneliness does to our brains. Several researchers have found a link between loneliness and reduced levels of empathy, the ability to put oneself in the position of others, to understand their perspective or their pain. This is reflected not just in behavior but also in brain activity.4 Multiple studies have now shown that in the brains of lonely people the level of activation of the temporoparietal junction, the part of the brain most closely linked with empathy, decreases when confronted with the suffering of others, whereas in the non-lonely it rises. At the same time, the lonely person’s visual cortex, the part of the brain that typically processes alertness, attention, and vision, is stimulated.5 What this means is that lonely people typically react more quickly—by several milliseconds, in fact—to the suffering of others, but their response is attentive, not perspectival. Just as the lonely body ramps up its stress response, the lonely mind, anxious and hyperalert, operates in terms of self-preservation, scanning the surroundings for threats rather than trying to see things from the affected person’s point of view.6 “Have you ever taken a walk in the woods and jumped back because you saw a stick on the ground and thought it was a snake?” asks Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo, the director of the University of Chicago’s Brain Dynamics Laboratory. “The lonely mind sees snakes all the time.”7

More recently, researchers have also found this: that loneliness doesn’t only impact how we see the world but also how we categorize it. A 2019 study carried out at King’s College London asked two thousand eighteen-year-olds to describe the friendliness of their local neighborhood. They also asked the participants’ siblings the same question. In short, the lonelier siblings perceived their neighborhoods as less friendly, less cohesive, and less trustworthy than the brother or sister who suffered less from feelings of isolation.8 Loneliness, then, is not simply an individual state. In the words of Professor John Cacioppo, it “operates in part by shaping what people expect and think about other people.”

Anger, hostility, a propensity to perceive one’s environment as threatening and uncaring, diminished empathy—loneliness can engender a dangerous combination of emotions with profound implications for us all. For the loneliness crisis is playing out not only at the doctor’s office but also at the ballot box, with consequences for democracy that are deeply troubling for those who believe in a society based on unity, inclusiveness, and tolerance.

This is because for democracy to function well—by which I mean to fairly reconcile the interests of different groups while ensuring all citizens’ needs and grievances are heard—two sets of ties need to be strong: those that connect the state with the citizen and those that connect citizens to each other. When these bonds of connectivity break down; when people feel they can’t trust or rely upon each other and are disconnected, whether emotionally, economically, socially, or culturally; when people don’t believe the state is looking out for them and feel marginalized or abandoned, not only does society fracture and polarize but people lose faith in politics itself.

This is where we find ourselves today. The ties that connect us to each other and to the state have been fraying in this Lonely Century because a growing number of people feel isolated and alienated, disconnected both from their fellow citizens and from mainstream politicians who they feel have not been listening to them or looking out for their interests.

While this has been the trend for some time, the danger is that the pandemic will exacerbate it. Economic hardship risks creating deeper disenchantment with our political leaders, especially if it is perceived to be inequitably shouldered, while the fear of catching COVID-19 risks making many of us fearful of our fellow citizens in a very visceral, physical way.

This should concern us all because, as we’ve seen in recent times, such conditions provide fertile ground for exploitation by politicians at the extremes, populists with an ear finely tuned to people’s disaffection and an appetite to exploit it for political gain.

By “populists” I mean politicians who explicitly pit the “people,” whom they claim not only to represent but also to be uniquely capable of so doing, against an economic, political, or cultural “elite” that they typically demonize, an “elite” that often includes key institutions that hold a lawful and tolerant society together, whether Congress, the judiciary, or a free press.9 In the case of right-wing populists in particular, their rhetoric typically emphasizes cultural differences and the importance of national identity, often portraying their nation as one under threat of “invasion” by immigrants or those of different ethnicities or religions. In doing so, they pose a very serious threat to a cohesive society in which there is respect for the institutions and norms that help bind us and to a culture of tolerance, understanding, and fairness. They seek to divide society rather than unite it and are willing to stoke racial, religious, and ethnic tensions if it suits their purposes. Lonely people, anxious and untrusting, desperate for belonging yet constantly “seeing snakes,” are their ideal—and most vulnerable—audience.

Loneliness and the Politics of Intolerance

It was Hannah Arendt who first wrote about the link between loneliness and the politics of intolerance. One of the titans of twentieth-century intellectual thought, Arendt grew up in the German city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), the city of one of her greatest philosophical influences, Immanuel Kant. While Kant’s life was one of extreme rootedness—he never left his native city, and a popular story goes that Königsberg’s townsmen would set their clocks by his unfailingly regular walks—Arendt’s life was one of exile and dispossession.

Her parents were assimilated Jews. “The word ‘Jew’ was never mentioned at home,” she later recalled, but the growing tide of anti-Semitic persecution in Germany rapidly made her conscious of her religious identity.10 The turning point was 1933, the year of the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s seizure of power. Arendt was living in Berlin, offering her apartment as a safe house for Hitler’s opponents and conducting illegal research for the Zionist Federation for Germany on the extent of official anti-Semitism. The Gestapo became aware of her activities and imprisoned Arendt and her mother for eight days. After being released to await trial, despite having no legal travel documents the two of them fled Germany; first to Prague via the forests of the Erzgebirge Mountains and a sympathetic German family whose house was crisscrossed by the border; then to Geneva, via a socialist family friend who worked for the League of Nations. Arendt, now stateless, next made her way to Paris, where she stayed for seven years as an “undocumented refugee.”11

When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Arendt was separated from her husband—Heinrich Blücher, an activist who had also fled Hitler’s Germany—and taken to the notorious internment camp of Gurs in the south of France. In the chaos of France’s defeat, she escaped and reunited with her husband in the small town of Montauban. The couple then managed to obtain an emergency visa to the United States, crossed the Spanish border over the Pyrenees, took a train to Lisbon, and, after three months, finally set sail for New York in April 1941.12

It was a lucky escape. In the summer of 1941, the State Department ended its emergency visa program, closing off another exit route for Jews fleeing the Nazis.13 In the eight years that Arendt had lived the life of a fugitive—a life of rootlessness and narrow escapes for no other reason than that she was Jewish—Germans had fallen under the spell of Nazi totalitarianism.

After the war, documentary evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials laid bare the horror of the Nazi machinery of extermination. How could this have happened, Arendt wondered. What drives an ordinary person to participate in or at least tolerate an industrialized plan to commit genocidal murder?14 Arendt sought to “find out the main elements of Nazism, to trace them back and to discover the underlying real political problems.”15 In 1951, she published an iconic and controversial book on the subject: The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s a wide-ranging volume, encompassing the rise of anti-Semitism, the role of propaganda, and imperialism’s fusion of racism and bureaucracy. But at the end of the book, she turns to what appears to be a surprising factor: loneliness. For Arendt, totalitarianism “bases itself on loneliness…which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”16 Finding its adherents in those whose “chief characteristic…is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,” she argues that for those “who feel they have no place in society it is through surrendering their individual selves to ideology, that the lonely rediscover their purpose and self-respect.”17 Loneliness, or “the experience of not belonging to the world at all,” is, she writes, “the essence of totalitarian government, preparation of its executioners and victims.”18

The loneliness Arendt spoke of echoes key aspects of my definition: feelings of marginalization and powerlessness, of being isolated, excluded, and bereft of status and support. And these dimensions of loneliness are a clear and growing danger here and now in the twenty-first century.

Loneliness and the New Age of Populists

To be clear, our world today is not that of 1930s Germany. Despite the rise of populism globally over the past few years and a number of authoritarian leaders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, China’s Xi Jinping, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, using the cloak of COVID-19 to further cement their hold on power and suppress their citizens’ freedoms, we are not experiencing a widespread emergence of totalitarian rule.19

There are, however, warnings from history that we should not ignore. The impact of COVID-19 has led many to compare today to the Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment and poverty surging. And loneliness and diminished economic circumstances are often interlinked: researchers have established both that the unemployed are significantly lonelier than those who have work and also that poverty increases the risk of social isolation.20 Moreover, loneliness had already become “an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses,” as Arendt wrote of prewar Germany, even before the coronavirus struck.21 It is a phenomenon that over recent years has been actively exploited for political gain by right-wing populist leaders and extremist forces at the democratic margins.

Loneliness is not, of course, populism’s only driver. The rise of contemporary populism has cultural, societal, and technological antecedents as well as economic causes. These include the rapid spread of misinformation and divisiveness on social media, the clash between liberal and conservative, progressive and traditional values, and demographic changes.22 Moreover, different countries’ experiences of populism may have different combinations of causes. Nor would it be right to say that everyone who feels lonely or marginalized votes for populists of either the right or left, in the same way that not everyone who is lonely gets ill. Even among those who feel socially, politically, or economically marginalized, there are clearly large numbers who continue to hope that mainstream parties will respond to their needs, while others choose to ignore the ballot box entirely.

But a major and often overlooked driver for why so many people have voted for populist leaders in recent years—and right-wing populists in particular—is loneliness. As we will see, a growing body of data reveals the significant role that feelings of isolation and alienation have played in transforming our political landscape, with disturbing echoes of Arendt’s findings.

Loneliness and the Politics of Distrust

As early as 1992, researchers began to pick up on a correlation between social isolation and votes for the far-right Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.23 In the Netherlands, researchers crunching data gathered from over five thousand participants in 2008 found that the less people trusted that those around them would look after their interests and not deliberately do them harm, the more likely they were to vote for PVV, the Netherlands’ nationalist right-wing populist party.24

Across the Atlantic, a 2016 poll by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy asked three thousand Americans whom they would turn to first if they needed help with challenges ranging from childcare to financial assistance, to advice on relationships, to getting a ride. The results were revealing. Donald Trump voters were significantly more likely than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to have replied not with reference to neighbors, community organizations, or friends but simply with “I just rely on myself.”25 They were also more likely to report having fewer close friends and fewer acquaintances, and spending fewer hours a week with both. Other researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute investigating the traits of Republican supporters in the final stages of the Republican primaries in 2016 found that supporters of Donald Trump were twice as likely as those of his main opponent, Ted Cruz, to have seldom or never participated in community activities like sports teams, book clubs, or parent-teacher organizations.26

The corollary also holds true. A major study that looked at sixty thousand individuals in seventeen European countries over the course of fifteen years found that people who were members of “civic associations”—things like volunteer groups and neighborhood associations—were significantly less likely to vote for their country’s right-wing populist party than people who were not. The researchers drew similar conclusions for Latin America.27

It seems that the more enmeshed we are in our wider community, the more we feel we have people around us who we can rely on, the less likely we are to heed the siren call of right-wing populists. And while correlation does not necessarily mean causation, there is a logic for why this would be so. For it is through joining local associations, volunteering, taking on community leadership roles, or simply taking part in community activities or maintaining our friendships that we are able to practice inclusive democracy—to learn not only how to come together but also how to manage and reconcile our differences.28 Conversely, the fewer social ties we have, the more isolated we feel, and the less practice we have at managing difference and behaving civilly and cooperatively with each other, the less we are likely to trust our fellow citizens and the more appealing we may find the exclusionary and divisive form of community that populists peddle.

The Loneliness of Marginalization

Being lonely is not simply about feeling socially isolated or lacking communal ties, however. It also encompasses not being heard and understood. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had this insight: “[L]oneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding views which others find inadmissible.”29

As we have seen in recent times, it is economic pain and the consequent feelings of marginalization and isolation that many supporters of populists have been especially desperate to be heard on by those in political power—and have felt very strongly that they were not. Testimonies of U.S. railroad workers prior to the 2016 presidential election show how Donald Trump redrew the political map by actively playing to this, making many of those who felt economically abandoned and unheard—especially people who historically had not felt that way—feel like they were being listened to. It is a sentiment that endured among vast numbers of this constituency in the 2020 presidential election.

Rusty is a fortysomething locomotive engineer from Etowah, in eastern Tennessee’s McMinn County. His grandfather and father both worked for the railroad and voted Democrat their entire lives. He did too—until 2016, that is. “Growing up I was just kind of taught that if you’re going to be a union man and you’re going to be a blue-collar worker and get down there and get your hands dirty, you need to be a Democrat,” he said. But “to be honest, the harder I work, the less I see, you know, I don’t see myself getting any better off.” For Rusty and his fellow engineers, whose labor is essential for transporting billions of tons of coal each year, Obama-era regulations resulted in more than penny-pinching. They were a kind of betrayal. “I just feel like he’s come in with his Clean Coal Act and some of his policies, that he’s hurt me,” Rusty said. His voice caught. Obama “hurt me personally,” caused major “hardship.” In contrast, Donald Trump was the only candidate that was “telling it like it is,” the only one who cared about how Rusty was feeling and wanted to hear about his problems.

Fellow railroader and erstwhile Democrat Gary, a resident of South Charleston, West Virginia, put similar faith in the perma-tanned presidential candidate: “When Trump said he was going to bring our jobs back to the United States and he was going to renegotiate trade deals, that’s when I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to vote for Trump.’ ” Gary continued: “Trump’s the only one for the poor and the middle-class people. He’s the only one who seems to be interested in helping the working people. He’s our only hope.”

Terry, another erstwhile Democratic voter, concurred.30 This father of eight from east Tennessee with twenty years’ railroad service, who found himself living “paycheck to paycheck” instead of the “pretty good life” he had lived before, used similar language to both Gary and Rusty—“Trump will take care of his people,” he said, while previous political leaders had, in his mind, ignored their needs when it came to protecting their employment and ensuring they retained a decent standard of living.

Where once the Democratic Party or at the very least the trade union might have provided hope, many of those feeling marginalized both in 2016 and in 2020 vested all their faith in Trump, particularly white working class voters. This was especially so in places where the infrastructure of community was weak, social ties had been eroded, and citizens felt economically vulnerable.31 In places like Terry’s and Rusty’s home, east Tennessee, where the previous decade had seen coal mines closing32 and the wounds from the 2008 financial crisis still gaped—all contributed to the belief that the powerful people in Washington couldn’t be bothered with the needs of everyday workers.

Whether or not Trump’s policies would actually improve the lives of his supporters almost seemed to matter less than the fact that he appeared to be listening when other politicians seemed deaf to their cries and the needs of their economically ravaged communities. It was an “I’m the only one who truly cares” strategy that Trump doubled down on during his re-election bid. “Nancy Pelosi is only interested in bailing out badly run, crime-ridden Democrat cities and states. That’s all she is interested in. She is not interested in helping the people,” he claimed on the 2020 campaign trail. While Joe Biden actively sought to counter this narrative by campaigning on a message of restoring jobs, reminding working class voters of his record as an ally of organized labor, and making much of his own working class roots, for many Trump voters this was not enough.33

It’s lonely to feel economically insecure. But it’s even lonelier to feel that no one cares about your struggles, particularly those in positions of power who you believe should be providing help and support. That was Trump’s great accomplishment, convincing so many that he cared.

It is not just in the United States that populists continue to prove convincing to many. Eric is a young Parisian baker who loves Scottish reel dancing, rap, and video games. When I conversed with him in 2019, I found him earnest, direct, and very polite. He talked openly about the pain and frustration of working hard and yet still living just above the minimum wage. Like many young people, Eric feels that society’s cards are strongly stacked against him. “The economic system is unfair,” he explained. “It’s not enough to work hard, you have to work extra hard. If you’re good, it’s not enough. You have to be super-good and know the right people—otherwise you won’t earn enough to live.” And he shared with me the extent to which he felt “abandoned” to a painful degree, telling me, his voice both sad and angry, of how he doesn’t believe the state will be there for him if he is sick or when he is old, and how alone this makes him feel.

Eric is a prominent member of the youth wing of Rassemblement National (National Rally). Formerly known as the Front National, this right-wing populist party with a long history of xenophobia was rebranded in 2018 and remains one of France’s most popular political parties. Under its previous incarnation it was associated with attempts to undermine the horrors of the Holocaust, with its founder and then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen referring to the Nazi gas chambers as “a point of detail in the history of the Second World War.”34 More recently, under Le Pen’s daughter Marine, the party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been directed toward France’s Muslim community, which she portrays as the inherent host of radical Islam, “an octopus with tentacles everywhere, in the [immigrant] neighborhoods, the associations, the sports clubs.”35 Marine Le Pen was prosecuted by human rights groups in 2015 for inciting hatred with her comments comparing Muslim prayers on the streets to the Nazi occupation. Though she was ultimately acquitted, her rhetoric has not strayed far.36

Whereas it might once have been in France’s left-wing Socialist Party that Eric would have found his political home, today it’s in this radical right nationalist and populist party that he has found a place to belong. For like the erstwhile Democratic railroad workers who turned to Trump in 2016, Eric believes it is only Rassemblement National that “protects the little people,” of which he is proud to be one, people whom other parties have “abandoned.” The failure of the left is, of course, that in the eyes of many it stopped being seen as the political grouping that had the interests of the “forgotten” and “abandoned” at heart.

Such feelings of abandonment are echoed in more wide-reaching studies across Europe. Researchers analyzed five hundred interviews with people in right-wing strongholds in France and Germany, places such as Gelsenkirchen-Ost, a down-at-heel suburb northeast of Essen blighted with high levels of unemployment and where anti-immigrant party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) garnered nearly a third of the vote in the 2017 elections (three times the vote it got nationally); or the Les Kempes neighborhood of Loon-Plage, in northern France, where 42.5 percent of voters in the 2017 French presidential election chose Marine Le Pen.37 What they found was that pervasive feelings of “abandonment” were a dominant and recurring theme among the interviewees.

Across the globe, those who feel socially and economically marginalized, who feel that the traditional political parties that once championed them have now cast them aside and are not listening to their concerns or providing answers to their grievances, have been turning out in disproportionately high numbers in the first decades of the twenty-first century for parties at the political extremes. It makes sense why this would be so. If you feel marginalized, ignored, and invisible and someone appears who promises to see and hear you, it’s understandably going to have allure. Whether it’s Trump’s rallying cry that “The forgotten men and women of the USA are forgotten no more!” or Marine Le Pen’s oath to serve “a forgotten France, a France abandoned by the self-appointed elite,” such carefully chosen messaging may well be enticing.38 And the reality was that many had been forgotten for decades as neoliberal capitalism and deindustrialization was then followed by the 2008 financial crisis and a subsequent recession, coupled with policies of austerity. These collectively took an asymmetric economic toll, with lower-skilled men among those who felt they were suffering most—the target market for right-wing populists.39

Loneliness and the Loss of Status and Esteem

Many populist leaders understand something else too: that loneliness is not just about feeling forgotten or socially isolated or feeling bereft of voice, it’s also a feeling of loss. Loss of community for sure. Loss of economic security as well. But also, crucially, loss of social standing. Remember Arendt’s definition of the lonely as those who “have no place in society”? And social standing is inexorably linked, especially for men, with the fellowship, pride, and status that come with not only having a job but a decent job, with history, solidarity, and purpose.40 Indeed, in Trumpian rhetoric, to “Make America Great Again” is to restore an old-world order in which traditional industries are at the heart of neighborhoods, providing employment that creates both a powerful sense of self-worth and a strong sense of community spirit. Remember his oft-repeated pledge to get “our great coal miners back to work”?41 In a world in which “I produce therefore I am,” in which it feels shameful not to be employed or to have a low-status job, the promise of a revitalized community and renewed social standing is particularly welcomed.

As such, it is not surprising that Trump’s promises appealed so much to railroad workers like Terry, who lamented the way that “we used to be proud of working on the railroad, proud of what we did, and now nobody is.” Or to Gary, who chronicled a litany of factories in his area that had been shut down in recent years, factories that made things—whether the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass factory, Union Carbide, True Temper, or the former Naval Ordnance Plant near his hometown of South Charleston. Gary went on to explain that although “there are other jobs one can get…a job at a fast-food chain or grocery store or in a Walmart, it’s all low-pay jobs.”

Whether such jobs inevitably pay less than the old factory jobs is debatable. But it’s not just that these “new” jobs are low-paid. The bigger issue is that they are jobs that are deemed to be of diminished social status and standing, jobs that one may not feel as proud to find oneself doing. Even before the coronavirus pandemic sent unemployment soaring, such “low-status jobs” were the only ones available for increasing numbers of people, especially in former manufacturing hubs and deindustrialized regions. The low unemployment figures obscured the discontent and disaffection that lurked beneath the statistics.

Indeed, it is a sense of diminished status, even more perhaps than low earnings per se, that sociologists Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall believe underlies why so many white working-class men in particular—men like Gary, Rusty, Terry, and Eric—have turned to right-wing populists over the past years, not only in the United States. In a 2017 paper in which they analyzed the relationship between feelings of a loss of social standing and voting preferences in twelve developed democracies between 1987 and 2013, they found that white men without a college degree who felt they lacked social status—either because of the poor quality of work available to them or because they didn’t have a job or because they felt their standing had been diminished by the rise in status of college graduates, people of color, and women—were significantly more likely to vote for right-wing populist parties than those who did not.42 For these parties promised them respect and a restoration of status.

As Donald Trump laid out on the campaign trail in 2016: “While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hardworking American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people. You are…soldiers and sailors, carpenters and welders….You are Americans and you are entitled to leadership that honors you, cherishes you, and defends you. Every American is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect in our country.”43

Returning to this theme in 2020, Trump chose again to energize his base by appealing to their desire for status and self-worth: “Proud citizens like you helped build this Country,” the president tweeted in October 2020, continuing, “and together, we are taking back our Country. We are returning the power to YOU, the American people!”44

The Peddling of Community

There is something else populists proffer too: belonging. For a cadre that had lost not only status but also the community that their work and their trade unions had hitherto provided and who were disproportionately isolated and lacking in social ties, this was also extremely important.45 The loss of “brotherhood,” now that he and his fellow engineers were pitted against each other for ever fewer jobs, was something Rusty among others especially mourned.

It is into this void of community and mutuality that populists like Trump so successfully and purposefully stepped with their own very clear and vibrant take on belonging.

Think about Trump’s rallies, which were a staple of his offering throughout his political career, not only before he won the presidency but after; he held nearly seventy in the first three years of his term, and continued to hold them even during the height of the pandemic.46 While of course other American politicians hold rallies too, Trump’s were qualitatively different. They drew people not only as political displays but as massive community rituals at which people felt part of a fellowship. They were family affairs, with three generations regularly turning out, mothers and sons, grannies and grandpas in tow. Unlike at his political rivals’ rallies, where people typically showed up in their everyday clothes, at Trump’s rallies you saw a sea of red-clad folk, sporting matching “Make America Great Again” hats, pins, and T-shirts.47 Repetitive playlists (“Proud to Be an American,” sometimes on a loop) meant that people could sing along to familiar music as it filled the background with patriotic mantras.48 The same chants and applause lines meant that each audience member felt in sync with thousands of others.49 While Hillary Clinton’s election rallies were serious and some might say somewhat dull affairs, and Biden’s were both restrained and constrained given his commitment to following COVID safety and prevention protocols, Trump’s remained more akin to the theatrics and fandom of a World Wrestling Entertainment event even as COVID raged.50

Then there were the linguistic choices, the rhetoric Trump used to reinforce this sense of togetherness, of unity. Trump predominantly spoke in the first-person plural, repeatedly using we and us to forge a relational bond, though of course he has next to nothing in common with many of his supporters.51 This “makes the people feel like they’re included in what’s really happening,” said one rally attendee—simultaneously connected to each other and to Trump.52 At the same time, he repeatedly invoked “the people”: “the beautiful people,” “amazing people,” “great people.” In fact, “people” was the most common word used in his speeches.53

These techniques—the branded gear, the chants, the we statements and endless appeals to the collective—characterized a political showmanship and savviness that arguably traces its roots back to American megachurches and, even further, to the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century. As such, Trump’s rallies were far more than stump speeches and hand-shaking. They were what author Johnny Dwyer has called “a kind of Communion.”54 Trump himself has remarked on their heated, quasi-religious atmosphere. At the opening of his first rally, on August 21, 2015, he beamed out at the crowd and invoked America’s most famous evangelist. “So beautiful,” he said. “Now I know how the great Billy Graham felt.”55

Trump was able to make people feel that they mattered in a way that felt almost unique in American politics. He satisfied a hunger to belong, to feel part of something for many of those for whom the traditional bonds of the workplace and the wider community had broken down, speaking directly to our basic evolutionary need to be part of something greater than ourselves.56

In Europe, the dynamic has been very similar, with rallies-cum-social-gatherings used effectively to draw people toward populist parties and their leaders. In Belgium at festivals sponsored by right-wing populist party Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest)—a nationalist party with anti-immigration a key tenet57—supporters “split their time between anti-immigration speeches inside and an outside festival that included face-painting, bouncy castles, and a stand for the book The Kidnapping of Europe.”58 Across the border in Germany, AfD rallies have much in common with Donald Trump’s: families come holding balloons, sharing drinks on picnic tables, and clasping homemade signs with messages like “Björn Höcke: Kanzler der Herzen” (“Chancellor of the Heart”).59 In Spain, meanwhile, the right-wing populist party Vox draws people together at youth-targeted beer nights that it holds at nightclubs and bars at which no one over the age of twenty-five is allowed entry.60

And again, the language deployed is that of community, the intention to create a sense of belonging that supporters have been unable to find elsewhere in the twenty-first century. “The League is a big family,” repeat Italy’s right populist League politicians time and time again at their rallies.61 Originally a regionalist party claiming to represent the north of the country, the League (formerly Lega Nord) has become powerful on the national stage, having swung to the right in the past decade. Rather than championing northern secession, it now campaigns against immigration, the EU, and LGBTQ+ rights and has built a very significant political base.62 In the 2019 European Union elections, the League commanded over a third of Italy’s votes.63 Like Trump, the party’s leader, Matteo Salvini, wields language like a sword, often invoking intimate words like Mamma, Papà, and friends to endear his supporters and reinforce his proffering of community.64

It is not just at these large gatherings that populist parties offer belonging. League supporter Giorgio, a dapper small businessman from Milan with a penchant for paddle tennis who proudly shared with me his selfie with Salvini, described in 2019 the way the party has made him feel less alone. Thanks to the League, “a year and a half ago I started going to dinners and parties—they’re called committees, they’re like get-togethers for people in the party. And they’re very nice, actually. You can meet a lot of people. We sing, and there’s a really strong feeling of tradition. And everyone’s singing in dialects from the north. And everyone’s so happy with that because they feel like a part of the community.”

Eric in Paris similarly talked of the joy he derives from his regular Wednesday political gatherings, of afterward going out for a drink together, of handing out posters and flyers together, of how “hard it is to find people to have solidarity and community with” and how he has found it in Rassemblement National. And he lucidly admitted that had he not joined the party, he would have been profoundly lonely. It has given him the purpose and community he craves. A community that might once have been provided by a trade union, a traditional political party, the church, or even a vibrant community center or neighborhood café.65

It’s too early to gauge whether support for populist politicians has been diminished by the months in which face-to-face gatherings of their supporters were restricted by rules on social distancing. Around 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020, after all, even more than in 2016. How they fare in the future will depend to a considerable extent on the position they held when the music stopped—economic crises tend to be bad for governing parties—and there will be questions in every nation as to how competent those holding office were deemed to have been at saving not only jobs but also lives.66 Their popularity will be influenced too by the extent to which they are able to control the media narrative and whether their followers buy into their version of the post-crisis analysis. But during the lockdown, it was striking how quickly populists ramped up their online community offering, as their ability to commune in person waned. As well as the president’s personally taking center stage at the daily television press briefings with overt messages to his “tribe” (including repeated condemnation of the “fake news” media and denouncements of global institutions), Trump’s campaign, already sitting on a massive social media following, upped its Facebook presence and escalated its digital offerings, running massive volunteer trainings via Zoom and launching a digital-only campaign with a “virtual rally” that garnered nearly a million livestreams.67 The League, Spain’s Vox, and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, masters of social media too, also ramped up their offerings.68

The Weaponization of Immigration

Whether the community being proffered is online or in person, it shares of course a particular characteristic: the overt exclusion of others. For alongside right-wing populist parties’ focus on belonging, with their beer nights and bouncy castles, has always been a clear message about who is not invited in. Think, for example, of the thousands of voices, chanting hymnlike at Trump rallies, “Build the wall.” The subtext of the right-wing populist’s message of togetherness is one of racial, religious, or nationalist exclusion. Of “us” and “them,” “we” and “they.” This is where their greatest danger lies.

In targeting those who feel lonely and abandoned and creating community along nationalist or racial lines, populist leaders weaponize their tribalism against people who are different. These politicians have realized that for those who feel excluded, left behind, and lonely, for those who are unused to managing difference and whose traditional sources of identity—whether class, employment, or church—are no longer as strong or secure as they once were, “social identities such as nationality, ethnicity, language and gender become,” as professors Mikko Salmela and Christian von Scheve have written, “more attractive as sources of meaning [and] self-esteem.”69 I would add to those “sources” the allure of belonging.

It is here that the manipulation of loneliness and isolation by populists takes on its ugliest and most divisive form. For remember how lonely people tend to see their neighborhoods as more hostile and threatening. Remember our lonely mouse and how aggressive he became when another mouse came to share his space. And remember how our brains’ capacity to feel empathy can be inhibited by loneliness. By reinforcing their followers’ sense of abandonment and marginalization and setting this against an apparent political favoring of people unlike them—typically immigrants—right-wing populists’ fearmongering revs up the emotions, anxiety, and insecurity of their followers and manipulates ethnic and religious difference to garner allegiance and support. They combine this with an appeal to the nostalgia of a bygone era in which people were—according to this version of history—more connected, happier, and better off before “those immigrants arrived and stole your benefits and jobs.”

Now of course right-wing populists add to this—“before those foreigners infected you with a deadly virus.” When the pandemic hit, it did not take long for a number of populist politicians to use the crisis to stoke racial, ethnic, and religious tensions and to demonize those who are different.

In the United States, Donald Trump’s predilection for calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus” encouraged a spate of attacks on Asian-Americans.70 In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán segued from holding culpable a group of Iranian students who were quarantined and later tested positive for Hungary’s incidences of the virus to declaring all universities virus-prone, as “there are lots of foreigners there.”71 In Italy, Matteo Salvini was quick to link the spread of the disease to asylum-seekers who had crossed the Mediterranean to Italy from North Africa. He provided no evidence for this claim.72 The use of disease as a weapon of racial divisiveness and nationalistic fervor of course has long-standing historical precedent. The Jews were blamed for the Black Death epidemic that swept through Europe in the fourteenth century, with thousands massacred as a consequence. “Foreigners” were attacked by mobs during Milan’s plague of 1629–31, with Spaniards particularly vulnerable, and Irish immigrants were held responsible for outbreaks of cholera in American cities such as New York and Boston during the 1830s.73 Pandemics and xenophobia have ever been interlinked.

Yet even before the coronavirus pandemic provided a new line of anti-other attack, League supporter Giorgio in Italy had evidently absorbed these messages of antagonistic tribalism. “The government has been putting its own citizens in second place after the immigrants that are coming from Africa,” he told me, “people who come here and have a vacation while a lot of native Italians are working in the fields with no social rights. You have to look out for your community and the people that already live in your country, not the people that are coming from Africa.”

Matthias, a twenty-nine-year-old logistics expert in Berlin, formerly a center-left voter, had turned to the AfD for similar reasons.74 “It’s just a fact that more is done for refugees than for us,” he said in 2017, a year after Germany had accepted one million refugees as part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “we can do it” pro-refugee policy.75 “A lot of my friends are still looking for work. Refugees just get money for free. They even get preferential treatment when it comes to apartments—everything is paid for them.”76

Trump-supporting Terry from east Tennessee meanwhile railed against “people who shouldn’t be here, who are taking benefits and finances and jobs away from people here who fought for our country. We have veterans that are homeless, and they want to bring in refugees from other countries. We need to take care of our own people.”

Like coronavirus conspiracy theories, these are not the facts. Refugees in Germany do not get “money for free” beyond the same public welfare payments every citizen receives, and they actually face housing discrimination in many places; in the United States, veterans and citizens are eligible for far more benefits than refugees and undocumented immigrants. But for those who feel abandoned, alone, and ignored; for those who no longer feel bound either to fellow citizens or to the state; for those who are already more prone to seeing their environments as frightening and hostile, full of snakes not sticks, and are more likely to be receptive to conspiracy theories (as recent research has established those who feel socially excluded or ostracized are), such narratives promulgated by right-wing populists are clearly attractive.77

Indeed, a recent analysis of over thirty thousand people recruited as part of the European Social Survey (an intensive questionnaire used by many social scientists) found that those who expressed the most extreme anti-immigrant views were distinguished not by basic demographics such as gender and age, but instead by financial insecurity, low levels of trust in their fellow citizens and government, and by social isolation.78 “All in all,” concluded researchers, “people who feel politically disempowered, financially insecure and without social support are the most likely to become extremely negative toward migrants.” And what are those three characteristics? All of them are key drivers of loneliness.

Providing someone else to blame, someone depicted as different from you, someone you don’t actually know—for typically the very greatest anti-immigrant fervor is in places with low levels of immigration79—has proven to be a winning strategy. In many cases, it has been more effective than casting the blame on the global economy, neoliberalism, automation, cuts in public spending, or misaligned government spending priorities, even if these are more accurate explanations for why many people feel marginalized. Right-wing populists understand better than anyone else the extent to which emotions trump rationality and complexity and how powerful a tool fear can be. And they exploit this by repeating again and again their anti-other messages. Even if over the next few years support for right-wing populists wanes, it would be premature to sound the death-knell of populism. Its grip on the imaginations, emotions, and voting intentions of a considerable proportion of citizens is likely to endure.

Of additional concern is that divisive race-tinged rhetoric is often contagious in its own right. In an incendiary attempt to fend off a populist challenge from right-wing populist candidate Geert Wilders, the non-populist center-right prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, ran a newspaper ad in 2017 that instructed immigrants to “Be Normal, or Be Gone.”80 Denmark’s center-left Social Democrats were victorious in the 2019 general election with a manifesto that was disturbingly redolent of the far right when it came to issues of immigration.81 Indeed, in many ways the greatest danger associated with the rise in populism in recent years is how it has pushed traditional parties of both the right and the left ever further to the extremes and normalized a discourse of divisiveness, distrust, and hate.

My fear is that in a post-COVID-19 world, these instincts will be further amplified, and that the health and biological security of individual nations will not only be seen by populists as fertile ground to exploit but that more centrist politicians will seek political capital by calling for the building of walls and blaming and demonizing “others.”

This is not to dismiss people’s individual accountability. Often it can be difficult to be sure what comes first: racist sentiment, the xenophobic messaging of populist leaders—and its amplification on social media—or the economic, cultural, and societal shifts that have led so many people to feeling marginalized, unsupported, unheard, and afraid. But what’s clear is that for those who feel that they have no place in the world anymore, who feel a lack of belonging and absence of solidarity, for those who fear for their futures and feel abandoned and alone, hatred of others can become as Hannah Arendt saw in Nazi Germany “a means of self-definition” that mitigates their sense of aloneness and “restore[s] some of the self-respect…formerly derived from their function in society.”82 Especially, I would argue, in times of economic crisis.

What Arendt describes here unites the sentiments of the lonely and dispossessed across generations, from those in 1930s Germany to those right now, in the twenty-first century. They are typified by one young man, Wilhelm, whose words suggest he could be living in the Germany of the Third Reich or in any economically ravaged state today. This “handsome young man of just under six feet in height, slender in build, with dark hair and eyes and extremely intelligent face”83 had been unemployed for a number of years after the economic downturn and explained how he felt like this: “There wasn’t room for any of us. My generation that worked so hard and with such terrible suffering just was not wanted. At the end of my time in university I was unemployed for a year…for five years I remained unemployed and was broken in body and spirit. I was not wanted [by Germany] and certainly if I was not wanted here I was not wanted anywhere in the world….Life for me became completely hopeless.”

In Wilhelm’s case, he was in fact describing his feelings in the 1930s. He continued:

“Just then I was introduced to Hitler….Life for me took on a tremendous new significance. I have since committed myself body, soul and spirit to this movement for the resurrection of Germany.”

The causes and consequences of loneliness are right at the heart of the biggest political and social questions our society faces. In recent times it has been populist politicians who have tended to understand this best, in particular those on the right. But we cannot allow them to be perceived as the only politicians who proffer solutions to those experiencing loneliness. There’s too much at stake.

This means that politicians of every hue will need to find answers to some very demanding questions. How do we ensure that already vulnerable groups in society are not further marginalized? How do we make people feel supported and cared for in an age when resources are ever scarcer? And, importantly, how do we get people to care not only for those who look like them with the same history and cultures and backgrounds but also for those who don’t? How do we bring people together in a world that’s been pulling apart?

Just as critically, our leaders must find ways to make all their citizens feel that they are heard and seen. And they must make sure that people have enough opportunity to practice inclusivity, civility, and tolerance in their day-to-day lives. Now more than ever, we need politicians to put at the heart of their projects a credible commitment to the rebuilding of community at a local, national, and international level. And it’s encouraging that the Biden Administration has so explicitly committed to this.

But to understand how we can effectively turn the tide against loneliness, reinvigorate citizens’ sense of community, and start to repair the fissures between us, we need to dig deeper. We need to understand more granularly why this is the Lonely Century not just for those heeding the siren call of populists but for all of us. And this work starts with our cities, for they are increasingly becoming epicenters of isolation.

New York, 2019

Every time he goes out of town, Frank takes down the photo of his late father and locks it away in a cupboard along with his other valuables to “protect” them from the Airbnb guest who will be sleeping in his bed a few hours later.

This wasn’t what thirty-two-year-old Frank envisaged when he moved to Manhattan a few years earlier, with hopes of a glittering career in graphic design. However, the rise of digitally delivered content and subsequent cuts to print media and advertising budgets led to drastic layoffs in his field. So in 2018, somewhat reluctantly, he joined the gig economy, securing his jobs on Upwork or Fiverr, or sometimes through word of mouth. Having strangers stay in his home via Airbnb was the only way he could afford to take a vacation. His worries about the insecurity of his work and whether he would be able to keep paying his rent were constant.

This kind of economic precarity would be challenging for anyone, but for Frank what made life feel tougher was living in the city itself. At first, he had been very proud to put down a deposit on his first property, a tiny midtown high-rise studio apartment. But soon, returning to his empty place in the evenings, or worse, stuck there all day working on his own, he confided that all too often it felt more coffin than cozy. Especially as there wasn’t a single person in his building he knew well enough to pop over to for a coffee, let alone anyone he could unwind with over a beer when the day’s work was done. For despite having lived in the building for a couple of years, it wasn’t “just that no neighbor knows my name” but that “each time I pass them in the corridors or elevator it’s as if they’ve never seen me before.”

The cold anonymity of Frank’s apartment building seemed to me a microcosm of his experience of big-city living more generally. “No one smiles here,” he says of Manhattan. Heads in their phones, Fitbits monitoring their pace, grimaces or game faces on, the city felt to him unrelenting, hostile, and harsh. If it wasn’t for the friendly Sudanese server at his local café where he sometimes took his laptop to work, he told me, he’d probably speak to no one at all some days.

Frank also talked about how hard it was to make friends in a city where everyone seemed to be so busy, in such a hurry, so intent on their self-advancement that they didn’t appear to have time to stop and chat, let alone make new friends or nurture existing relationships. As a result, all too often he would spend evenings messaging “some random woman on Tinder,” not because he actually wanted to go and meet her—that felt like too much effort—but just to have someone to “talk to,” some human contact to help alleviate the loneliness he felt. And even though the small Midwestern town where he’d lived before had felt stifling and even though New York was where he felt he “had to be” to have a chance of “making it” career-wise, it was clear when we spoke that he felt a sense of loss now that he lived someplace where he knew nothing about the people he resided cheek-by-jowl with and where countless others walked past him on the pavement every day without any acknowledgment of his existence. For when he talked about “the good bits of back home” and most of all when he reminisced about his time in a leadership role in his local youth club, what came across through his energized voice and enthusiasm was that for Frank, that sense of feeling part of a community was something he had lost in moving to the city and deeply missed.

No One Smiles Here

That cities can be lonely places is of course not new. As the essayist Thomas De Quincey wrote, “No man ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets of London, but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion, and utter loneliness, which belongs to his situation…faces never-ending, without voice or utterance for him; eyes innumerable…and hurrying figures of men weaving to and fro…seeming like a mask of maniacs, or oftentimes, like a pageant of phantoms.”1

De Quincey was writing about nineteenth-century London, but he could have been describing any city in today’s Lonely Century. Even before the coronavirus struck and social distancing and masked encounters became the norm, 56 percent of Londoners said they felt lonely and 52 percent of New Yorkers said their city was “a lonely place to live.”2 Looking globally, that number was 50 percent for Dubai, 46 percent for Hong Kong, and 46 percent for São Paulo. Even in Paris and Sydney, respectively numbers 11 and 12 on the City Index Survey’s list of loneliest cities, we’re still talking about over a third of respondents flagging urban loneliness in the place they call home.3

Not that loneliness is solely an urban problem.4 While city dwellers tend to be lonelier than their rural counterparts, those living in rural areas can experience their own particular and profound forms of loneliness:5 a relative lack of public transport means those without cars can feel very isolated; the migration of young people to cities far from family results in significant numbers of rural elderly left without nearby support structures;6 the fact that government spending in many places tends to favor urban centers7 means rural dwellers are more likely to feel marginalized when it comes to government priorities. Yet understanding the unique characteristics and causes of loneliness in the contemporary city is of particular importance here and now, given the extent to which the world is urbanizing. By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s people will be living in cities, more than one in ten of whom will live in cities of over 10 million inhabitants. As increasing numbers of people flood toward ever more densely packed urban spaces (albeit perhaps at a slower rate than before the pandemic), understanding the impact of cities on our emotional health has never been more critical, especially as we make choices about how we live our lives post-COVID-19.

Ruder, Curter, Colder

So what is it about contemporary cities that can make them feel so cold and lonely?

If you live or work in the city, think of the typical twenty-first-century daily commute. The shoving to get onto a packed train, the aggressive honking of fellow drivers if you travel by car, the anonymous hordes of unsmiling people rushing by oblivious to your existence.

The image of a rude, curt, self-absorbed urbanite is no mere stereotype.8 Studies have shown that not only is civility lower in cities but also that the more densely populated a city, the less civil it is.9 This is partly a matter of scale; when we know we are much less likely to see a passerby ever again, we feel we can get away with a certain lack of courtesy (perhaps bumping into them and not apologizing, or maybe even leaving a door to slam in their face). Anonymity breeds hostility and carelessness, and the city, filled with millions of strangers, is all too anonymous.

“How often do you feel that people are around you but not with you?” asks the UCLA Loneliness Scale we looked at earlier. In the city, people are always around but seldom does it feel like they are “with you.”

The size of the city not only breeds brusqueness; it also imposes on many of us a kind of coping mechanism. In the same way that when we are confronted with twenty choices of jam in a supermarket our default is to buy none at all, so too when confronted with all those people our response is often to withdraw.10 It’s a rational response to avoid feeling overwhelmed. For although engaging with others as full, vibrant human beings is something many of us aspire toward or tell ourselves we do, the reality is that city living requires us to share space with so many people that were we to extend each passerby a full dollop of humanity it would exhaust our social resources.11 As Shannon Deep writes of her experiences in New York, “If we said hello to everyone we passed, we’d be hoarse by noon. You can’t be ‘friendly’ to all seventy-five people on all ten blocks between your apartment and the subway.”12

So instead, all too often we do the opposite. Overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of the city, its noise and the constant bombardment of visual stimuli, the propensity for city dwellers even before the coronavirus was to effectively socially distance—not physically but psychologically—by creating our own personal walking cocoons whether by covering our ears with headphones, wearing sunglasses, or burying ourselves in the isolation of our phones.13 Courtesy of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Samsung, it has never been easier to switch off from the people and places around us and create our own socially counterproductive digital privacy bubbles. The irony of course is that as we zone out from the mass of humanity around us in the real world, we tap into an alternative virtual version as we scroll through images of people’s lives on Instagram or their thoughts on Twitter.

Some social theorists and semioticians even go so far as to say that cities have evolved “negative politeness cultures,” social norms in which it is considered rude to impose on someone’s physical or emotional space without cause, although there are of course geographic and cultural differences.14 On the London Tube, for instance, most would consider it odd to receive a warm greeting from a passerby and would be surprised or even annoyed if a stranger tried to strike up a conversation. The well-established social convention is to read our newspapers and stare at our phones in silence.

I understand the importance of privacy. I get too why the twitching of net curtains in rural communities drives great numbers to urban spaces and their environs, places where they can live how they want to, free from social disapprobation. Yet stories of urban estrangement during lockdown throw into even starker relief the consequences of the anonymity of city life. For amidst the heartwarming tales of solidarity and cooperation there were also heartbreaking ones that made all too clear that urban privacy comes at a cost. Hazel Feldman, a seventy-year-old who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Manhattan, described very movingly how during lockdown she found herself with no neighbor she could rely upon to help her with her grocery shopping: “The news keeps saying, ‘People are coming together.’ They might be coming together, but not here. Not in these types of buildings.” Just like Frank, while she regularly saw other residents in the corridors and elevators of her one-hundred-apartment building, she didn’t really “know” any of them, let alone consider any to be friends.

Our culture of self-reliance and hustle, so valorized by neoliberal capitalism, comes at a significant cost. For when neighbors are strangers and friendliness and connection are far from the norm, the danger is that at those times that we most need community it simply isn’t there.

The norms around how we interact with those around us in cities have not been serving us well, and it will be some time before we know whether the impact of the coronavirus will change our behaviors in the long term, for better or worse. If people in cities already resist friendly overtures due to “negative politeness culture,” what happens when fear of infection gets layered on top? Will spontaneous chat with strangers become ever more alien? Will those of us who offered to buy our elderly neighbors groceries and leave them outside their door continue to check in on them once the danger is over? Or will we go back to simply being indifferent to them?

Antisocial

Then there is the speed of the city.

City dwellers have always moved fast. But in the Lonely Century they move even faster. Urban walking speeds are on average 10 percent higher than they were in the early 1990s, even more so in the Far East.15 A study comparing walking speeds in the early 1990s with 2007 in thirty-two global cities found the pace of life in Guangzhou in China had increased by over 20 percent, with Singapore showing a 30 percent increase.16 And the wealthier a city becomes, the faster our pace.17 In the wealthiest cities in the world, people walk several times faster than they do in cities that are less well off.18 Time is money, especially in the city, whose citizens typically work longer hours than those living in less urbanized areas. Racing past each other, texting on the go, overworked, and time-poor, wearing our busy-ness with pride, it’s easy not to notice those around us. One morning, making my way into London’s Euston Station, I counted the number of people who walked by without looking at me. After fifty I stopped counting. Although rationally I knew that this was a by-product of their own level of distraction rather than an act of aggression, it still felt painful to feel so invisible, as if my existence didn’t matter at all.

The fast pace of city life doesn’t just make us unsocial, however; it also makes us antisocial.

In a seminal 1973 study, American sociologists John Darley and Daniel Batson assigned young pastors a sermon to give, either on the parable of the Good Samaritan or another randomly selected biblical passage.19 On their way to deliver it, the pastors walked by a man slumped on the sidewalk, coughing—an actor whom the researchers had surreptitiously placed there. Batson and Darley assumed that the pastors who had been assigned the Good Samaritan sermon would be more likely to stop and help. But as it turned out, it made no difference what passage the pastor had been studying—the most significant factor that predicted whether the pastor would be a Good Samaritan himself was whether or not he believed he was running late. If he knew he was ahead of schedule, he would stop. But if he was pressed for time, well, so much for good deeds. Perhaps this resonates with many of us who live in urban spaces. Fast-paced and self-absorbed, it’s not just that we can often rush by without even noticing the color of human life around us, we’ll often not even see those who are in obvious need.

In my own case, researching this book made me aware how rarely I smiled at strangers as I passed them, or how infrequently I found a moment to chat to the postman or someone walking by with their dog. Every day in London, I would behave just like all of those people in Euston Station who didn’t have a moment to spare for me. Does it matter? There is thought-provoking evidence that it does.

Why You Should Chat with Your Barista

Although brief encounters with strangers cannot offer the kind of emotional satisfaction we get from more intimate conversations, it turns out that even passing connections can make a real difference in how lonely or otherwise we might feel.20

In 2013, University of British Columbia sociologists Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn ran a study to investigate whether “micro-interactions” had a quantifiable effect on people’s well-being. Staking out the front of a Starbucks in a busy urban area, they recruited arriving customers to take part in an experiment: half of the customers were instructed to be friendly and make small talk with the barista, while the other half were told to be “efficient” and “avoid unnecessary conversation.”21 Even though the interaction lasted just thirty seconds, the researchers found those who had been randomly assigned to the “friendly” group reported higher levels of happiness, as well as a greater sense of connection to those around them, after the exchange than those who were curt.

It is understandable to have some cynicism about this. After all, how connected could you really feel to someone whose friendliness is mandated by the Starbucks employee manual or whose “Have a nice day” has been scripted by Walmart HQ? Or indeed, to a server at the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, the “politest chain in America,” who is trained to say “my pleasure” instead of “you’re welcome”—but is it really their pleasure?22

Yet these kinds of scripted micro-interactions can have a more significant impact than many of us realize. Not only because when we are friendly to someone they are more likely to be friendlier to us in return, or because the act of being friendly in itself delivers an emotional boost, although both of these are true. But also because we’re actually pretty bad at differentiating between performative friendliness and the real deal, as long as the performance is decent. Take smiles: a number of studies have revealed that we are surprisingly poor at identifying fake ones.23

There’s something else inevitably at play here too, something more profound. By acting friendly to others, or by being on the receiving end of such friendliness, whether it is genuine or performative even for very brief moments, we are reminded of what we have in common, our shared humanity. As such we are less likely to feel so alone.24

This may contribute to why life during the COVID-19 pandemic has felt so disconnected and isolating. For not only have we been experiencing many less of those boosting daily micro-exchanges, but when we have them, they are often conducted while we are wearing masks. This means that we can’t tell if someone is smiling at us, and they can’t tell if we are smiling at them. (At a social distance of two meters, most people can’t even make out the smiles around people’s eyes above their masks.) In covering our faces, we conceal our compassion. The irony is that our motivation for doing so may well stem less from self-interest and more from the responsibility we feel to protect others.

Rootless Neighborhoods

It’s not just how we behave that impacts our emotions, however. As we’ve seen, loneliness has structural components too. Take the transience of life in many big cities—the constant comings and goings and endless churn. In many major metropolises, this is largely a factor of renters now outnumbering homeowners, as renters tend to move around significantly more than those who own.25 In London, for example, where renters edged past owners in 2016, the average tenancy is only about twenty months.26 In New York, where the vast majority rent, nearly a third of the population in 2014 had moved in the preceding three years.27

This matters when it comes to social cohesion because whether you are the one who is always moving or the one who stays in place, the consequences are equally problematic: you are less likely to know your neighbors and as a result are likely to feel more isolated. You’re hardly going to knock on your neighbor’s door to borrow milk or offer to pick up groceries for them during lockdown if you don’t even know their name. Nor will you be likely to want to put time and effort into building ties and contributing to a community if you think you’re out the door and heading for another new neighborhood again soon.

For many urban dwellers, escalating rents and unaffordable house prices have made putting down roots in a community and making an emotional investment there an increasingly unviable economic option. Again, this is a problem for all of us. For neighborhoods need nurturing and above all participating in if they are to be vibrant communities and not just bricks, tarmac, and paving slabs. And this takes trust. The trouble is when you don’t know your neighbors, you’re less likely to trust them. Which helps account for why in the United States, fewer than half of city dwellers say they have a neighbor they would trust with the keys to their home, compared with 61 percent of rural dwellers.28

So one important step to take if we want our neighborhoods to feel more connected and ourselves to feel less lonely is to reduce the churn. Governments, on a national and local level, can play a role here. This is partly a matter of making rental costs more stable, and some are already tackling this head-on. In Berlin, for example, the local government announced in October 2019 that it was going to enforce a five-year freeze on rents.29 Other cities already either imposing some sort of rent stabilization measures or contemplating their introduction include Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and Los Angeles.30

It’s too early to know whether such initiatives will have the desired impact. Economic theory suggests that because rent controls reduce incentives to build new housing, they can end up exacerbating housing supply shortages and thereby lead to price increases.31 It may therefore be that other forms of intervention would produce better outcomes, such as the granting of longer leases, or even leases with an indefinite time period, so that tenants know they can build a long-term home in a neighborhood—although even these would presumably also need some kind of associated rent stabilization measures if they were to work. A number of cities have also introduced limits on the number of days a year that a property can be rented out on Airbnb or similar short-term rental platforms so as to disincentivize the conveyor belt of inhabitants they set in motion.32 Whichever of these is best, all are examples of a dawning recognition by governments and local authorities that housing is one area where market forces need to be mediated for our collective good.

Living Alone…

The kind of roof over our head is only one structural factor that impacts how lonely urban life can feel. Another component of the isolation of city life is that urbanites increasingly live on their own.

This was once a more rural phenomenon. In the United States in 1950, it was in sprawling western states like Alaska, Montana, and Nevada that those living alone were predominant because it was to these late-developing, land-rich states that single migrant men went to seek fortune, adventure, or a steady job as a laborer.33 Today, however, solo living is most common in big cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh.34 In Manhattan, over half of residents live on their own.35 It’s a similar story in cities like Tokyo, Munich, Paris, and Oslo, where about half of all residents also live solo.36 In China, a whopping fifty-eight million young, unmarried urban singles—known as “empty-nest youths”—live alone, while in London the number of people living alone is expected to rise by 30 percent within the next twenty years.37

For some, solo living is undoubtedly an active choice, a mark of independence and economic self-sufficiency.38 It’s only relatively recently that marriage was no longer an economic necessity for women, meaning that more could choose to live on their own.39 It was a choice I made myself for a number of years. But for many, living alone is less choice, more circumstance, perhaps the result of bereavement or divorce. Others may very much want to live with a partner but have not yet met the “right one,” possibly because of the long hours they work, their feelings around financial insecurity, or the challenges of dating in the digital age. Some may even have put themselves forward as a housemate but found themselves unable to “pass” the house-share “screening process,” because they are elderly, unwell, or introverted, and as such deemed “unsuitable.”

Whatever the reasons, not everyone living alone is lonely.40 In fact, living alone can provide an impetus to get out and interact that those living with others don’t necessarily have.41 I definitely felt much more of a push to go out with friends in the evenings before I met my husband than I do now. Furthermore, living with someone is no guarantee of meaningful companionship. It can feel extremely lonely, as those who’ve experienced the isolation of living with a partner with dementia or those who have been trapped in an abusive relationship will testify.

Yet the data is unambiguous: people who live alone are at greater risk of feeling lonely than those who live with others by nearly ten percentage points, according to the European Commission’s 2018 Report on Loneliness.42 Moreover, people living on their own feel lonely more frequently than people living with others, especially during life’s most difficult or vulnerable times.43 As Sheila, a seventy-year-old English divorcee who’d recently recovered from the flu explained to me, her eyes filling with tears, “It’s lonely to be sick and to have no one around to even bring you a cup of tea.”

…Eating Alone

Sipping tea alone can be lonely. So too can supping be.

Yet eating alone has been an inevitable consequence of the rise in solo living. Look at how the sales of single-portion meals have skyrocketed in recent years.44 And mealtimes are often the moment in the day when those living on their own feel most acutely aware of their isolation and loneliness. Some of them are going to remarkable lengths to try to mitigate this.

This is especially true in South Korea, where a market is exploding for what is known as mukbang: the practice of watching someone else eat (copious amounts of) food on-screen, while you have your meal alongside them.45 While this may sound improbable, it has been a fast-growing trend globally for the past decade and is increasingly popular in Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, India, and the United States.46 In Malaysia, watch time for mukbang grew by 50 percent in 2019.47

The most popular mukbang stars have over 2 million followers and can make six figures a year from the ads that play before and during their videos.48 The most successful have even begun to court sponsorship opportunities. Indonesian mukbanger Kim Thai has partnered rather appropriately with digestion aid Pepto-Bismol, while the American star Nikocado Avocado advertises the computer game Cooking Diary.49

The audience is predominantly people who live on their own. “Facing the computer screen, with mukbang serving as their ‘meal mate’ and ‘chatting’ with them, soothes one’s sense of loneliness during mealtimes,” says Sojeong Park, a researcher at Seoul National University who co-authored a report on mukbang in 2017.50 Indeed, a study released in January 2020 that reviewed thirty-three articles on the impact of watching mukbang found that watching it significantly decreased how lonely people felt.51

The experience of watching your mukbanger eat is not a passive one. If anything, it’s a social one—or at least a simulation thereof. For a price, viewers can send their favorite mukbangers “star balloons” that pop up on the screen for all to see. As each “balloon” floats into the public chat bar, the mukbanger will typically pause in their chewing and even acknowledge the donor by username, “Thanks for the ten star balloons….Thank you, hbhy815….What should I eat first? Mozzarella croquette, OK?”52 These online eating stars acknowledge the sense of companionship they provide their followers. “I’ve become a friend to them,” says Kim Thai.53 But just like my encounter with rent-a-friend Brittany, the friendship comes at a price. For the balloons, unlike “likes” or “hearts,” are purchased with cold hard cash. One mukbang star who goes by the name Haekjji received 120,000 balloons during a single broadcast, worth roughly $100,000.54

I understand that eating with Kim Thai or Haekjji might well be preferable to eating alone, yet I worry about the societal consequences of these kinds of commercialized and commoditized relationships, in the same way I worry about the consequences of paid friendships like I experienced with Brittany. This is not because such transactional relationships can’t alleviate loneliness: to a considerable degree they can, at least for some. The danger is that because transacted relationships require so little of us emotionally (while bought, they are not earned) they may end up becoming our preference. Humans after all default toward what’s easiest, as research in both anthropology and business has shown for decades.55 Indeed, Brittany tells me that several of her clients have told her that they are much happier renting her than “having to put effort and time into someone who might burden them with their problems.”

Perhaps this is why some mukbang fans report finding “real” friendships burdensome—like the woman who described her irritation when her old roommate from college called just as she was preparing dinner. “I was ready to sit down and have my YouTube time. [Instead] I had to eat while I was talking to her, and that really annoyed me.”56 Yes, this young woman would prefer to sit alone, watching Nikocado Avocado consume four thousand calories than speak to a friend—someone who actually knows her personally.

These may be extreme cases, but the point is a broader one that, again, has implications for society. For the more we either engage in paid-for relationships (whether virtual or in person) or remain on our own, the less we get to practice the skills that build community and underpin an inclusive democracy.57

Honing Our Democratic Skills

That living or eating with others enables us to practice democracy sounds like a big claim. But it’s through these smaller interactions that we learn the skills we need to be part of something bigger.

We can all think of a time when we’ve run into some difficulty in our living situation. Perhaps it’s been over something as small as who is responsible for taking out the garbage and recycling bins or whose turn it is to cook dinner. Living with others—for many of us starting with our parents and siblings, and later expanding to roommates, partners, spouses, children—is how we learn to resolve such issues, to balance our desires against those of others, to compromise, to manage our differences, to peacefully coexist. Not having to do these things—being able to do things our own way all the time—is perhaps one of the things we are buying when we pay that extra 20 percent for a single-person studio apartment or that $40 an hour to rent a friend. We are buying self-determination, but our chance to further hone our prosocial democratic instincts may be part of the price we pay.

For whether it is discussing, deliberating, or indeed learning how to respectfully disagree with your housemates or neighbors or partner, all these are important skills we need to practice if we are to learn one of the key tenets of inclusive democracy: that sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

What’s more, these skills are best practiced in person, face-to-face. It was not a coincidence that six thousand Athenian citizens would congregate in person on a hill near the center of the city in democracy’s earliest days, or that the agora—an open space near the center of the city—assumed such a critical role in democracy’s taking of shape.58 Physically coming together engenders something very precious that digital relationships and even talking on video services like Zoom can only ever be poor facsimiles of. For it is when we can see the whites of each other’s eyes and pick up on nonverbal cues such as body language or even scent that we are best able to experience empathy and practice reciprocity and cooperation. It’s also much harder to walk away when you disagree with someone than it is to log off or hang up. This is why preserving face-to-face interactions in our digitally dominated lives is so important, especially (as we’ll see in the next chapter) in the contactless age.

Hostile Architecture

At first sight, it’s just what it seems: a shapeless, concrete, oblong bench. If you’re seeking a place to sit only briefly, you can do so on one of its slightly slanted, tiered surfaces. But if you’re looking to do anything else, its shapelessness starts to seem conniving. Try to lie down and a corner will always be poking into your side. After fifteen minutes or so, even sitting feels not quite right. It’s known as the “Camden Bench,” and science writer and critic Frank Swain has called it “the ultimate non-object”; the podcast 99% Invisible describes it as a “highly refined work of unpleasant design.”5

It is no coincidence that this bench is hard to feel comfortable on. That’s the entire point. If you make it difficult for a homeless person to get rest; difficult for a skater to try a trick; difficult, even, for a group of young people to hang out without their knees and backs beginning to ache, then people will simply have to look elsewhere for a place to congregate.

The Camden Bench is not an anomaly: more and more, our cities are being designed to keep those deemed as “undesirables” out. By its very nature, this is “hostile architecture”—urban design with a focus on exclusion, design that inhibits community and tells us who is welcome and who is not.

Look around where you live and you’re likely to see many examples: “seats” in bus stations that are barely wide enough to perch on, public benches with multiple armrests, metal grates on the pavement outside shops from which spikes emerge at night, public park fences with castle-like defenses. You might ask—what’s wrong with an armrest? True, it’s sometimes nice to have something to lean on, but the real reason for these bench dividers is more insidious. Armrests make it impossible to lie down, most particularly for rough sleepers who have nowhere else to go.

Like many trends in the Lonely Century, this is a global problem. In Accra, Ghana, massive stones have been placed under bridges to prevent the homeless from finding shelter; in Seattle, gleaming bike racks were installed to block a flat sheltered area previously used by rough sleepers, a move the municipal government later admitted was not inspired out of care for cyclists but instead was “part of the homelessness emergency response effort,” made “to prevent the area from being re-camped.”6 In Hong Kong, where the homeless population has tripled since 2004, public spaces were deliberately designed with barely any seating in order to repel loiterers and the homeless alike.7 Perhaps most nefariously, in San Francisco in 2015 the Cathedral of St. Mary’s took the very un-Christian step of installing a sprinkler system that doused rough sleepers in its entryways (unsurprisingly, to massive public outcry).8

Hostile architecture is not limited to anti-homeless strategies. In Philadelphia and in twenty other U.S. metropolitan areas, streetlights outside recreation centers are fitted with small devices, aptly named Mosquitoes, which emit an unpleasant high-pitched sound that can be heard only by young people, as the frequencies are no longer audible to their elders (this is due to a process called presbycusis, in which certain ear cells die off over time).9 The goal of these Mosquito devices is, according to the president of the company that makes them, to “ward off” unruly, “loitering” teenagers while conveniently keeping areas pleasant for adults.10 It’s for similar reasons that pink lights designed to highlight uneven skin and acne have been installed in public places around the United Kingdom—an “anti-loitering strategy” designed with the hope that vain teenagers will disperse once their pimples and blemishes are exposed.11 According to one resident who was at first “dubious” of the concept, “It’s done the trick.”12

Although one can argue that hostile architecture is not a new phenomenon—think of moats around castles and ancient cities’ defensive walls—its modern incarnation has its roots in the “broken windows” policing of the 1980s, when everyday activities such as standing, waiting, and sleeping (especially when “committed” by people of color) began to be criminalized as “disorderly” and “antisocial.”13 Preventing these behaviors, the logic went, would make a space more “orderly” and, in convincing locals to “claim their public spaces,” would also prevent crime.14 Hence, hanging out became “loitering”; sleeping on the street became “improper lodging”; dawdling became “loafing”; people-watching became “lurking.”15 The fact that the broken-windows theory has been revealed to be highly flawed—responsible for the over-policing of minorities16 and an ineffective deterrent for more serious crimes—has not stopped many cities from continuing to rely on its strategies.17 The result is that over the past fifteen years, cities around the globe are increasingly sprouting spikes.

In some ways this is surprising. Cities overwhelmingly skew toward socially liberal policies, compared to more rural areas. Historically, their municipal governments tend to spend more per capita on social programs such as welfare and food stamps, even if poverty is less prevalent,18 and their elected officials typically lean more to the left.19 Given all this, we might expect to find higher levels of empathy in urban settings—after all, a vote to actively support people in poverty (via the left’s welfare agenda) is presumably motivated by care and compassion, a recognition that those in need should be helped out. Yet these empathetic ideas, however ardently held, do not necessarily translate to more empathy in practice toward those who share our public spaces.20

If anything, some urban dwellers who vote for social programs are outsourcing their compassion to the government, appearing to be all for progressive social programs until they feel that their own quality of life is being threatened. The “not in my backyard” mindset of many supposedly liberal urban dwellers is well chronicled.21 Moreover, research by political scientist Meri T. Long suggests that in the United States, while Democrats are more likely to “vote with their hearts,” there’s no evidence that they behave more compassionately in their daily lives.22 Ergo San Francisco, leading the way in the United States when it comes to both homelessness and hostile architecture, despite being a city that has elected a Democratic mayor since 1964 and contains the home district of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.23

Hostile environments don’t only exacerbate the loneliness of already marginalized groups such as the homeless, a group we surely should be helping, rather than keeping off benches.24 We all pay the price for this architecture of exclusion. For that same park bench that’s been designed to deter rough sleeping makes you less likely to suggest meeting your friend at it for a casual chat. That sloping bus-shelter seat is not just inhospitable to “loiterers,” it also makes it a lot harder for the person with MS who uses a walking stick to take the bus to go shopping or meet friends. The Camden Bench that repels skateboarders also repels the elderly person who might in the past have spent a pleasant afternoon sitting in the sun, chatting with shopkeepers on their lunch breaks or passing children—those stalwart figures of community that urban-planning activist Jane Jacobs called our “eyes on the street.”25

In taking up the morally dubious task of protecting neighborhoods from those deemed “undesirable,” hostile architecture denies us all shared spaces in which to sit together, hang out together, come together. It’s ironic that a strategy aimed to protect community may well do the very opposite.

Hidden Exclusion

High-pitched sonic deterrents in shopping malls, concrete slabs masquerading as benches, and water sprinklers assaulting the homeless outside churches send a very clear message about who is invited in and who is not. But the modes of exclusion in our cities need not be so obvious in order to provoke feelings of unease, alienation, and, ultimately, loneliness.

Sleek and graceful, the Royal Wharf development in the London borough of Newham claims “to harness the river, the cityscape and open space that surrounds us and offer brilliantly designed houses and apartments that allow for individuality and change.”26 Its glossy marketing pamphlets advertise a swimming pool, sauna, clubhouse, and “technogym” staffed by personal trainers, touting the amenities as “a perfect platform for bringing people together.”

From the outside, this verdant riverside neighborhood, “designed from the inside out, to make life function better,” certainly appears to be a luxurious haven. The developers, Ballymore Group, have clearly put an emphasis on creating community spaces, with a quaint “main street” area—“Corinthian Square”—and a boardwalk along the Thames. The trouble is—as became painfully obvious to the low-income tenants participating in the affordable-housing program that Ballymore incorporated into the complex—that community was not available for all to use.

Ade Eros moved into a three-bedroom flat with his two sons in 2018 and was very much looking forward to teaching them how to swim in the Royal Wharf pool. Yet he soon learned that his family, like the other 17 percent of tenants receiving rent subsidies, would not have access to the clubhouse or its amenities.27 “We’re like the poor relations,” said another resident.

Over at the Baylis Old School complex in South London, a similar form of segregation was occurring. This time, it was the playground from which the lower-income residents were being denied entry, thanks to the thicket of impassable hedges separating the properties designated for social housing from the “communal” play spaces. Parents like Salvatore Rea, a resident who lives in the affordable block, experienced the pain of watching other children play in a space that was forbidden to his, simply because of where his family lived in the building. “My children are friends with all the other children on this development [but] they can’t join them,” he explained.28

In both these cases, after a significant public backlash, the policy of segregation was reversed.29 Yet in many instances, measures to invisibly exclude certain residents, including children, remain firmly in place.

At the Westbourne Place complex across town, subsidized tenants, some of whom are survivors of the tragic Grenfell Tower blaze, were, at the time of writing, still being excluded from the communal gardens that their own flats overlook.30 “My seven-year-old has a best friend in his class who lives on that private side,” says resident Ahmed Ali. “They sit in school together but can’t play together. Private residents have access to everything, they can use all the gates and they walk through our side all the time, they exercise their dogs over here. This is open discrimination. We work, we pay service charges, we pay rent, we don’t deserve to be treated like this.”

This is not just a British phenomenon. “Poor doors”—separate entrances for residents of affordable-housing units within a more affluent complex—have cropped up in New York and Washington as well as London.31 Up until 2015, real-estate developers in those American cities actually received a tax break or relaxed zoning restrictions for renting out a certain percentage of their market-rate apartments as subsidized low-income housing, even when their buildings segregated tenants and even though the supposed aim of such developments was greater integration and inclusion.32 Developments with separate play areas for market-rate and public-housing tenants have also been found in Vancouver, the second most expensive city in North America for housing.33 In this case, after a backlash, the developers made a concession: not to integrate the playgrounds (which, they maintained, was “not feasible”) but to separate them in such a way that children playing in one could not see into the other.34

There’s something particularly shocking about children being physically prohibited from playing together. Indeed, it evokes disturbing images, both historical and contemporary—from apartheid South Africa to the children we saw on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to play together on seesaws that spanned the chain-link and barbed-wire fencing between them.35 The trouble is that unless explicitly forbidden or penalized for doing so, the market’s impetus will often be to segregate. Think of the perennial popularity of private schools, private universities, private estates, private limousines, “fast passes” at amusement parks, exclusive tiers of service in restaurants and hotels, first-class travel, and VIP sections of clubs. The reality is that the wealthy will often pay a premium to separate themselves from the masses. It has always been so.

The question we have to ask ourselves is under what circumstances are such exclusionary measures unacceptable? Both morally, but also for reasons of self-interest. For as we saw earlier, we all pay the price when people feel left out. We saw too how when people don’t know each other, hatred and fear are more likely to develop. It is well known that the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment is often found in areas with the fewest immigrants—areas where people are much less likely to encounter an immigrant in person, interact with them, form a relationship with them. If children of different income groups, backgrounds, and ethnicities are not able to play together even within their own blocks, are we not therefore setting ourselves up for ever more fragmentation and social division?

There has long been a prevailing belief in sociology that the more diverse a community is, the less its members trust each other, but recent research on London—“possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet”—has laid this myth to rest.36 For while this impact on levels of trust may occur when smaller subsets of these communities do not interact with each other, the researchers found that the more that different ethnic groups come into contact with each other, the stronger social cohesion becomes.37 In fact, in “ethnically diverse neighborhoods,” the researchers concluded, “those who report having frequent contact with people in their neighborhood are considerably more trusting of people in general, including strangers, not only people in their immediate locale” than those who have little or no interpersonal contact, irrespective of which ethnic group they belong to.38

In short, those daily, face-to-face interactions with people different from us make it easier to see what it is we have in common, rather than what sets us apart. For this Lonely Century to become less so, we need more contact, not less.

This is why one of the most worrying trends when it comes to our urban environments in recent years has been the slashing of public funds for places where we all can commune, whether youth centers, libraries, community centers, parks, or playgrounds, a trend that accelerated as governments cut spending in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent downturn.

In the United Kingdom, a third of youth clubs and nearly eight hundred public libraries39 have shut down since the 2008 financial crisis.40 Across the nation, 41 percent of adult day-care centers—a lifeline for the elderly and vulnerable, some of the loneliest in society—have closed in the decade since the crisis.41 Public parks, spaces in which for over a century people of all stripes perambulated and mingled, lost £15 million ($18 millon) in local funding between 2017 and 2019 alone.42

It’s a similar picture elsewhere. From Bolton to Barcelona, from Houston to le Havre, from Kansas to California, across the world communities have been starved of their necessary social infrastructure.43 And this problem is typically worse in cities than elsewhere.44

For people to feel united there need to be well-funded and cherished public spaces where relationships can develop, evolve, cement, including with people different from us, spaces where we all can interact, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background. We can’t join together if we don’t interact with each other. We can’t find common ground if there is no ground for us to share.

This needs underlining because the temptation for governments and local municipalities over the coming months and years will be to further decrease public spending on such spaces, given the new wave of economic constraints we face. If we want to start to repair the social divides that became ever more visible during the coronavirus pandemic, we cannot let this happen. The refunding and re-energizing of public spaces that have had the life sucked out of them since the 2008 economic downturn must be nonnegotiable. And this isn’t simply about refunding existing public spaces. Governments local and national must commit to putting inclusivity at the heart of new building projects.

A Chicago initiative spearheaded by Mayor Rahm Emanuel during his tenure provides an inspiring example of what local municipalities can do. There, three new public housing developments have been designed to incorporate branches of the Chicago Public Library. The library serves as a community gathering place, an intergenerational nexus, and a space where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds come together to read, be read to, watch films, and simply enjoy being part of a community environment. Children whose parents are on government assistance are just as welcome in these spaces as those whose families are living in market-rate apartments—potentially even right next door. “Chicago is breaking the mold,” Emanuel said when the commissions were announced. “Bringing world-class libraries together with housing builds strong neighborhoods and provides a place for all community residents to gather, share and succeed.”45

Indeed, the presence of the library is already having a positive impact on social cohesion, for instead of resenting the sudden appearance of new “housing projects” in their midst, the existing (usually relatively affluent) residents actively see the development as a boon for their own community, their children, their space.

“Sometimes, whenever you hear about affordable housing coming into your neighborhood, some people can be very, ‘Well, yes that’s all right to provide someplace else, but not in my backyard.’ But the community was very supportive,” says Doug Smith, the managing principal of the architecture firm that designed the space.46 “I hope it will help people who don’t have financial security [to] better their circumstances,” agrees Shelley McDowell, a frequent Chicago Public Library user as a home-schooling mother. “And for the people who are more affluent, I hope it educates them about other communities and builds bridges between those different social statuses and communities.”47

The library developments in Chicago are powerful indicators of hope. They show that there are ways we can overcome the atomization of the city and that the physical environment can have a massive impact both on how we interact and who we interact with.

There is another way governments can intervene: recognize the critical role that local stores and cafés play as community hubs and centers of gravity for our neighborhoods. While we can’t leave it to the market to be the sole custodian of society—especially as inclusivity is, as we’ve seen, not its concern—it’s important to acknowledge the vital role that local businesses play in mitigating our collective loneliness. I will come back to the role the private sector can play in revitalizing community in more detail later, but what’s clear is that given how devastating the coronavirus pandemic was to the local business district, governments will need to provide neighborhood stores with very meaningful support if they are to survive.

Again, there are precedents to draw upon. In Roeselare in Belgium, for example, an “empty shops tax” placed on landlords (that kicks in once an outlet has been left empty for over a year and gets more onerous the longer it remains unoccupied), introduced in 2015, had a significant impact on vacancy rates by discouraging landlords from holding out for higher rent at a level that small businesses can’t afford. The local authority also introduced a policy of turning down any new applications for retail space outside the town’s limits to prevent out-of-town malls and superstores from opening and drawing consumers away from the town center.

Meanwhile, if there was ever a time to take up former U.K. Sainsbury’s supermarket chief Jasper King’s call for a halving of business rates for “high street stores,” it’s now. Especially given that it’s not just social distancing and an economic downturn that local stores are having to contend with but also the dramatic shift toward online shopping that recent events catalyzed. The United Kingdom’s decision to waive business rates for high street stores for 2020–21 should be viewed as precedential.

Clearly there are a raft of fiscal and zoning policies that governments can initiate to help our local businesses survive. But there’s more still that our political leaders can do.

For imagine if cities were actively designed to be welcoming, rather than hostile. If instead of erecting spikes and concrete blobs masquerading as benches, city planners were channeling that ingenuity toward figuring out how to bring us together, rather than how to keep us apart.

In a pandemic-dominated world, calling for such an agenda may seem pie-in-the-sky. And of course the reality is that governments and municipalities are, if anything, likely to move in the opposite direction in the short term because of the ongoing fears of contagion. “Form,” as architecture critic Oliver Wainwright has written, “has always followed fear of infection, just as much as function.”48 Indeed, at the time of writing, some sidewalks have been expanded so that people can keep their distance.

Yet it is essential that our current state of fear does not determine the shape our cities take in the long term and that future generations don’t pay a price for our contemporary ills. We may have built ourselves a lonely world, but now we have an opportunity to reset our thinking and our obligations to each other and build one with inclusion and community at its heart.

Again, there are inspiring urban planning projects to learn from. Barcelona’s city government, for example, has embarked on an ambitious urban planning project to turn neighborhoods into “superblocks,” areas in which vehicle through-traffic is banned and the space has been reclaimed for free communal areas such as playgrounds, parks, and open-air performance venues.49 The vision is that residents will no longer have to endure traffic noise or exhaust fumes, and neighborhoods will become more hospitable to pedestrians and cyclists who may “loaf,” “loiter,” and “lurk” to their hearts’ desire. Six of those planned 503 superblocks are already in place.

Many residents initially resisted the first, in the El Poblenou neighborhood, which seemed to appear virtually overnight.50 It’s easy to sympathize: those who still relied on cars found their commutes tripled in length, and parking was suddenly impossible to find for businesses hoping to unload goods. But as locals came to appreciate their new public parks and playgrounds and as the city made good on its promises to invest in high-quality infrastructure, attitudes shifted. Salvador Rueda, the mastermind urban planner behind the superblocks project, noted that in the decade since 2007, foot traffic had increased by 10 percent and cycling by 30 percent in the Gràcia superblock across town.51 “It’s a slower rhythm of life,” says Carles Peña, a Barcelona resident. “You rediscover your area, and your neighbors.”52

Indeed, the data bears this out in a striking way. Researchers have found more generally that those who live on streets with low volumes of road traffic have three times as many social connections, friends, and acquaintances as people who live on more heavily traveled streets.53 What’s more, their “home territory”—the stretch of road to which they feel a sense of ownership, investment, and belonging—expands. It’s not difficult to imagine why. Residents in low-traffic areas feel their streets, and by extension their neighborhoods, are safer; the air is less polluted; their children are less likely to be hit by a car if they play outside; it is more pleasant for people to hang out locally. As such, they are less likely to retreat into buildings, away from the public realm, and more likely to engage with each other.

Urbanites, having become accustomed during lockdown to living without the constant noise of city traffic and with noticeably cleaner air, may well have a significantly stronger appetite for this kind of urban planning now than they might have had in the past. For what recent events made clear, even to those city dwellers who might identify as citizens of nowhere, is the extent to which our well-being is determined by our local geography and neighborhoods.

Of course, the loneliness of the city cannot be fixed simply by what governments, architects, developers, or city planners decide from on high. It’s policy, bricks, and people together that determine how the city makes us feel.

This struck home very clearly for many of us during the lockdown. For alongside stories of loneliness and isolation like that of Hazel Feldman in Manhattan, or of selfishness like that of shoppers brawling over toilet paper in Sydney, were also those of the coronavirus bringing urban communities together in ways they often had never experienced before.

In Kennington, London, fitness enthusiast Simon Garner initiated daily exercise sessions on his street. Neighbors who had been stuck indoors united on their doorsteps, stretching in synchronicity, their “weights” brooms and tins of baked beans. In Houston, Texas, as news broke that restaurants would only be allowed to provide takeout and delivery, an anonymous couple showed real solidarity by leaving a whopping $9,400 tip on a bill totaling $90. A note was attached: “hold tip to pay your guys over the next few weeks.”54 In Madrid, a taxi driver was lauded for ferrying patients to the local hospital, without charge.55 And in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere across the globe, many of us stood once a week outside our front doors, on our balconies, or at our windows, united in our clapping and whooping and beating of pots and pans to express gratitude to those battling on the front line against COVID-19.

We must never forget that even in a globalized world, we need the roots of our local communities to be strong.

If we want to build upon the solidarity so many of us experienced in our neighborhoods during the pandemic and also express gratitude to all those local traders who fed and nourished us during lockdown, there are commitments we will have to make. Community is something we have to actively co-create in order for all of us to feel the benefits.

We need to support our local cafés, even if that means paying a little more, seeing this as akin to a community tax, a small price to pay to help protect and nourish our neighborhoods. We need to commit to shopping, at least some of the time, in local stores rather than online, with the knowledge that without our patronage it will be impossible for them to stay afloat. And if we want our locale to feel more cohesive, we need to commit to actively engaging with people who are different from us. Neither our local community center nor our local business district will ever be able to deliver on their community promise if we don’t all take advantage of the opportunities they provide to engage with our broader community. This is something I know I need to get better at myself.

More generally, if we want our local environment to feel alive and welcoming, we need to interact more with those around us physically, face-to-face. Slow down. Take that beat, that pause. Smile. Chat. Even if, as is the case at the time of writing, we still have to be socially distanced as we do so, even if our smiles are still occluded by our masks, even if in-person human interaction now scares us. Now more than ever, we must be prepared to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of bolstering our communities and the people in them and make a conscious effort to reach out to those in our midst who are most lonely.

We can draw inspiration here from people like Allison Owen-Jones, who in May 2019 noticed an elderly man sitting alone on a park bench in her hometown of Cardiff. For forty minutes, people went about their city business, ignoring him. “There was some of that British reserve that made me think he may think me weird if I sat next to him,” she later told the BBC. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to let people know you’re open to a chat, I thought. So I came up with the idea of tying a sign that would open the avenues for people. It read: ‘Happy to chat bench. Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello.’ ”56

And people did. Not only that, Owen-Jones ended up working with a local charity and police force to set up permanent “Happy to chat” benches all over Cardiff. This was more than just a way to get people to talk to one another: it helped people feel listened to and seen—especially those who are normally looked right through. As Owen-Jones put it, “All of a sudden, you’re not invisible anymore.”

Kaleidoscomania on Steroids

Two hundred twenty-one. That’s the number of times we check our phones on average each day.10 This adds up to three hours and fifteen minutes of average daily use, almost 1,200 hours a year.11 Around half of teens are now online “almost constantly.”12 A third of adults across the globe check their phones within five minutes of waking up; many of us (we know who we are) do so if we wake up in the middle of the night, too.13

Digital distraction has become so bad that in Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Seoul, cities with particularly high smartphone usage, urban planners have taken drastic steps to manage public safety.14 “Stop/Go” lights have been installed into the sidewalks, so that pedestrians can see whether it is safe to cross without having to look up from their screens. One road in Seoul is even deploying lasers at intersections that trigger a notification on the “zombie” pedestrian’s smartphone, warning them that they are about to step into traffic. It is an innovation undoubtedly inspired by the fact that in a five-year trial of Stop/Go lights in South Korea, pedestrian injuries fell by 20 percent and fatalities by 40 percent.15 It seems that for some of us, the never-ending content streams on our smartphones are more compelling than ensuring we don’t get hit by a car.

Of course, I’m not the first person to highlight the amount of time we are spending on our phones. Nor is this a blanket Luddite attack on those little computers in our pockets. The questions I am posing are particular ones: how central are these devices to the loneliness crisis of the twenty-first century? And what makes this twenty-first-century innovation in communication so different from those that came before?

After all, each major development in communication technology, from Gutenberg’s printing press to the smartphone, has both transformed how we interact with each other and not always been well received. In ancient Greece, Socrates warned that the act of writing would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”16 In the fifteenth century, the Benedictine abbot and polymath Johannes Trithemius scolded monks for abandoning hand-copying in favor of Gutenberg’s press in the belief that rigor and knowledge would vanish as a consequence (his own opprobrium, however, he printed—it was the only way to get anyone to read it).17 In 1907 a New York Times writer lamented that “the general use of the telephone, instead of promoting civility and courtesy, is the means of the fast dying out of what little we have left.”18

There is, though, a fundamental difference between our present-day smartphone usage and the communication innovations of previous centuries. Put simply, it is the extent to which we are glued to them. In the past, we might have picked up the telephone, what, a handful of times a day? Today, like a pair of glasses on our face whose presence we no longer notice, our phones have effectively become a part of us.19 As we will see, this is no “happy accident.” The big corporate beasts of our digital age have worked very hard to ensure this is so.

Together, Yet Alone

It’s this state of perma-connection that makes our phone and social media usage like nothing else in human history, and it is contributing in very profound ways to the unique nature of this century’s loneliness crisis.

For it is not just the busy-ness and pace of urban living that stymies us from smiling at a fellow patient at the doctor’s surgery or nodding to another passenger on the bus, nor even contemporary social norms. Every moment in which we are on our phones, scrolling, watching videos, reading tweets, commenting on pictures, we are not present with those around us, depriving ourselves of the multiple daily social interactions that make us feel part of a wider society—those small moments of feeling seen and validated that, as we saw, really do matter. Just having a smartphone with us changes our behavior and the way we interact with the world around us. In a recent study, researchers found that strangers smile significantly less at each other when they have their smartphones with them.20

Even more worrying is the extent to which our devices estrange us from people we already know, including those we love and care for. For all the time we are on our devices is also time we’re not present with our friends, our colleagues, our lovers, our children. Never before have we been so continuously distracted and never before have so many of us been simultaneously afflicted. More and more we are in the company of others but really on our own.

At the extreme, the consequences of this constant partial attention can be tragic. There have been several cases in recent years of babies dying because their parents were distracted by their phones.21 In one case in Parker County, Texas, a distraught mother claimed that she’d left her eight-month-old daughter in the bath “for only a couple of minutes” while attending to another child.22 When the police analyzed her phone they discovered that she had also spent over eighteen minutes on Facebook while her child was lying dead in the bathtub.

These are of course cases of extreme neglect, but we’ve all seen young children ignored while their caregiver texts, plays games, or swipes through their social media. We’ve all seen the weekend fathers in the park, ignoring their kids on the swing while they are on their phone, we’ve all seen families in restaurants not speaking to each other because each is so wholly consumed by his or her own device. Such behavior has far-reaching consequences.

Look at That Dog

Chris Calland is a leading child development expert. A former teacher, she now advises schools across the United Kingdom and has a particular interest in parenting. Calland’s work has led her to a concerning conclusion: that a growing proportion of children entering school today are increasingly deficient in fundamental interpersonal skills, while also lacking basic language abilities for their age. She believes that phones are at the heart of the problem: constant scrolling distracts parents from interacting with their children and in turn prevents them from imparting vital communication skills.

Calland’s efforts to redress this are quite astounding. At one preschool, she even handed out scripts for parents to follow to help them engage with their kids. “Tell me one nice thing you’ve done today” is one distressingly obvious cue; “Look at that dog” is another. She also suggested putting up pictures around the preschool of phones with red lines through them, a warning to parents to rethink their relationship with technology and control their usage when onsite.23

It’s not just children’s communication skills that are impaired. Preliminary studies suggest that children of device-distracted parents are more likely to be picky eaters or to overeat and more likely to have delayed motor skills as well. Less routinely measured aspects of child development have been found to be affected too, from emotional attachment (“why does Mummy love her phone more than me?”) to emotional resilience.24 Early evidence suggests that children whose parents are distracted by phones are more likely to act out, have trouble controlling strong negative feelings such as anger, or exhibit sulking behaviors when their requests are not met.25 Like linguistic competence, these emotional effects last long past those early years when children are learning how to navigate the parent-child relationship: teens who perceive their parents as more distracted by digital devices report less parental “warmth” and are more likely to develop anxiety and depression.26

Of course, children aren’t the only ones being ignored. Think how many times you’ve been in bed next to your partner, each of you scrolling on your phone. Or those work calls you’ve been on while simultaneously checking Twitter. Or those times you’ve chosen to watch Netflix with headphones rather than talk with your roommate, or all that time and effort you put into creating the perfect vacation Instagram photo—time you could actually have spent interacting with whoever it was you were vacationing with, creating memories that would bond you and help build long-term connection.

I am as guilty as anyone else. The phone is our mistress and our lover. Nowadays we cheat on those around us in plain sight, and somehow we have all come to accept the infidelity. We are present and yet we are not, together and yet alone.27

The Splintered Self

As for our ability to feel empathy, the distracting nature of smartphones significantly erodes this crucial skill that helps us understand and connect with each other. This is because they fragment our attention, creating a splintered self, caught between the physical reality of an intimate in-person conversation and the tens, maybe even hundreds, of text- and image-based conversations happening simultaneously on our screens. When we’re pulled in so many different directions, it’s nearly impossible to give those in front of us the full weight of our attention and compassion or see things from their point of view.

What’s astonishing is that we don’t even have to be using our phones for them to have this effect. An observational study of one hundred couples chatting in cafés in Washington, D.C., found that when a smartphone was placed between a couple on a table—or even just held in one of their hands—couples felt less close to each other, less empathetic.28 Strikingly, the more intimate the relationship, the more detrimental the phone’s effect on the couple’s mutual empathy and the less each person felt understood, supported, and valued. This is particularly worrying because empathy, like democracy, needs to be practiced. Without regular use, it atrophies.

It is not just their attention-sapping quality that puts smartphones at odds with empathy. When people were asked, as part of a 2017 University of California at Berkeley study, to evaluate how “human” others were on the basis of their opinions on controversial political topics, researchers found that their assessments were determined not only by whether the evaluators agreed with the posited opinion but also to a significant degree by the medium—video, audio, or text—in which the opinion was expressed.29 The more that the human form and voice were stripped away, the more likely evaluators were to dehumanize the person. This was most stark when all the evaluator had to go on was a written transcript of the speaker’s views. As Stanford professor Jamil Zaki puts it, “Thinned-out interactions [make] empathy harder to access.”30

This is concerning because the clear trend over the past decade has been in one direction only: toward ever more thinned-out interactions. This has been especially true of the young. A 2018 global survey of four thousand 18-to-34-year-olds in the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Australia, and Japan found that 75 percent prefer communicating by text, rather than phone calls, with these exchanges themselves increasingly circumscribed, largely a function of design.31 The relative difficulty of typing on a smartphone (despite autocorrect and predictive text) encourages us to be ever shorter in our missives. The character limit on Twitter demands we speak in loud, brief, and unnuanced statements. The fact that when we post shorter messages on Facebook we are more likely to get a response (posts of under eighty characters get 66 percent more “interaction”) encourages us to self-edit. And if you can express yourself with a single tap to “like” a post, why bother expending energy with words at all?32

Lockdown changed this. Overnight the humble phone call surged in popularity. In the United States, the volume of daily calls in April 2020 doubled compared to recent averages; the average length of a call shot up by 33 percent.33 Even the young changed tack. Emily Lancia, a junior at college, described how, walking on campus, she was inspired to call her best friend from childhood, someone who she texts with almost daily but had never once called before.34 In the United Kingdom, the mobile phone operator O2 revealed that a quarter of its clients aged between eighteen and twenty-four phoned a friend for the first time ever after lockdown began in March.35

Video-calling was of course the other big beneficiary of the lockdown. Global downloads of Zoom, Houseparty, and Skype increased exponentially in March 2020 as parties, quiz nights, and business meetings migrated onto video. Microsoft Teams saw the number of video calls grow by more than 1,000 percent that month. Some couples even began to date on video, having only ever “seen” each other on-screen.

The extent to which our appetite for voice- and video-based exchanges persists beyond the immediate crisis is impossible to predict with any certainty at this point, although it’s likely that business-oriented video meetings will continue for some time, given social distancing requirements and restrictions on travel. But as we make choices about how we interact moving beyond the pandemic crisis, it’s important to reflect upon what we lose when we make brevity our goal, text exchanges our default, and more broadly choose to communicate virtually rather than in person. For as many of us discovered during lockdown, even video—the least thinned-out form of virtual interaction—though better than nothing, is still strikingly unsatisfying.

This is essentially because of the crucial role our faces play in building empathy and connection. Not only are they the most important source of nonverbal information we have when interacting with other human beings (our emotions, our thoughts, our intentions are all displayed there), but evolutionary biologists believe that our face’s plasticity—its ability to convey nuanced facial expression using hundreds of muscles—evolved precisely so that early primates would cooperate and help each other more.36

The science backs this up: fMRI scans reveal that when communicating in person, we don’t just mimic each other subconsciously, but electronic waves in parts of our brains actually synchronize.37 As Dr. Helen Riess, the author of The Empathy Effect, explains: “[W]hen we are in the presence of someone who’s experiencing an emotion, we pick up on that because other people’s emotions and facial expressions and experiences of pain are actually mapped onto an observer’s brain, onto our own brains.” For instance, when we see someone else crying, this activates, if only mildly, the same area of our brain that activates when we experience sadness. “That is why we feel sad when we’re in the presence of someone who’s very tearful or sorrowful, or why positive feelings like excitement are contagious. There’s actually a neurobiological grounding for saying that ‘most feelings are mutual.’ ”38

This mirroring is essential to connection and empathy. The trouble is that video, at least in its current frequently jerky, out of sync, freezing, and blurred form, denies us both the ability to properly see each other—therapists who give online sessions have been known to ask their clients to exaggerate their nonverbal behaviors in order to communicate more effectively—and to seamlessly synchronize.39 This is especially the case as all too often those we are communicating with aren’t even looking us in the eye—either because of their camera angle or because they’re looking at themselves on-screen instead.

No wonder, therefore, after a video exchange we may feel somehow dissatisfied and, in some cases, even more isolated or disconnected than before. As Cheryl Brahnam, a professor in the department of information technology and cybersecurity at Missouri State University in Springfield, puts it: “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that contains not a single blueberry but artificial flavors, textures and preservatives. You eat too many and you’re not going to feel very good.”40

Add to this the fact that email and text are petri dishes of misunderstanding. A 2016 study by the University of Minnesota found that people looking at the same emoji disagreed strongly on its meaning a quarter of the time, opening the floodgates to miscommunication. While a series of studies have shown that sarcasm in emails is frequently taken for earnestness, and enthusiasm often comes across as mocking.41 Even anger, the most recognizable of textual emotions, is hard to pin down precisely, including in exchanges with close friends.42

It seems, then, that when it comes to delivering on emotional engagement, empathy, and understanding, this century’s new digital forms of communication have serious flaws and shortcomings that undermine the quality of our dialogue and, consequently, the quality of our relationships. They are a degraded substitute for talking and spending time in person with the people we care about and play a significant role in our collective state of disconnection.

How to Read a Face

In many ways, what’s more troubling is that the impact of our smartphones is increasingly compromising our communication skills even when we are face-to-face with each other. This is especially so for the young.

It was at a dinner, sitting next to the president of one of the Ivy League universities a few years ago, that I first became aware of this. To my astonishment, he told me that he had grown so concerned about how many of his incoming students were arriving at college unable to read even the most obvious cues in face-to-face conversations that he had decided to introduce remedial “How to Read Faces” classes.

At Boston College, one insightful professor adopted a different strategy. Also concerned that her students were increasingly finding face-to-face interactions challenging, Kerry Cronin came up with a unique way for them to improve upon these skills. She assigned them the opportunity to earn extra credit if they asked someone out on a date in person.

Cronin, who teaches courses on relationships, spirituality, ethics, and personal development, came up with the idea after a lecture on campus hookup culture when, instead of asking the kind of questions she’d anticipated on sex and intimacy, students expressed curiosity about something much simpler: “How do you ask someone out on a date?”43 She realized that dating was “a lost social script”: her students literally asked her what words to use to ask someone out “IRL” (in real life). So she decided to step in.

Cronin provided her students with twenty-two bullet-point rules they had to adhere to in order to successfully complete the assignment.44 Rules that were designed to help her students connect with their date without the digital crutch of dating apps, social media, or the anonymous hookup culture that had become so familiar. The students had to ask someone on a date in person—not over text—and actually go through with it, no ghosting (abruptly stopping all contact) allowed. The date could not be at the cinema, nor could it involve alcohol or physical touching beyond a friendly hug. In other words, no running away from really communicating: no hiding yourself in a darkened theater, arming yourself with “liquid courage” or forgoing conversation by simply “hooking up.” The date had to involve actually talking to someone, awkwardness, butterflies, and nerves included.

Cronin also recommended that students prepare in advance with a list of three or four questions, plus two or three topics to aid conversation. She was keen to impress upon them too that a lull in the conversation is natural—for a generation for whom communication and entertainment on social media are constant and on-demand, she needed to explain that in real life there are also spaces for silence.

The challenge of in-person dating for a generation so used to communicating via smartphones that they are, as one student put it, “afraid of human interaction” is not a problem confined to Boston College students.45 WikiHow, the site that typically delivers a series of concrete steps for problems such as “How to write an essay,” “What to do if you’ve been food-poisoned,” or “How to keep pets off furniture,” now also provides a brief tutorial on “How to ask someone out in real life”…in 12 steps (complete with pictures).46

In the same way that the calculator destroyed our collective ability to do mental arithmetic, so too does the digital communication revolution risk leaving us ill-equipped to communicate effectively in person. It turns out Socrates’s “use it or lose it” warning had something to it after all.

There are signs that this deficit in communication skills is setting in at an even younger age. Children are not just being affected by their parents’ smartphone use, as Chris Calland found. As early as 2010, the PEACH project at the University of Bristol established that in a group of one thousand ten- and eleven-year-olds, those children who spent more than two hours per day watching a screen (either a television or a computer) were more likely to have difficulties expressing their emotions.47 In 2011, New York–based child psychologist Melissa Ortega noticed that her young patients were using their phones as an avoidance strategy, deflecting from her questions about how they were feeling by constantly checking for text messages.48 In 2012, an observational study of over six hundred teachers from kindergarten through high school in the United States reported that high media use (with media defined as TV shows, music, video games, texting, iPods, mobile phone games, social networking sites, apps, computer programs, online videos, and websites students use for fun) was affecting pupils’ behavior and attitudes. Even at the kindergarten stage, children “lack in social and play skills because they are so busy with media use that they do not know how to interact face to face with others,” reported one teacher.49 More recently, in a 2019 Canadian study that tracked 251 children between the ages of one and four, researchers found that the more time the children spent on their screens, the less capable they were of understanding other children’s feelings, the less helpful they were toward other children, and the more disruptive they also were.50 Another 2019 study, this time Norwegian, which tracked one thousand children aged between four and eight, found that high screen use at age four predicted a lower level of emotional understanding when these children reached age six, compared to children who had not used screens as much.51

While inevitably much depends on the extent to which screen time crowds out quality human interaction and what a child is using their device for, and as ever there are some conflicting views,52 there is also evidence that time spent away from screens enhances how children are able to relate.

In a study conducted by researchers at UCLA, a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds spent five days at an outdoor nature camp where they had no access to digital media—smartphones, TV, or the internet. Both before and after, they were given some simple tests, such as identifying the emotions expressed by people in photos and videos. After just five screen-free days, they showed marked improvements at recognizing nonverbal emotional cues such as facial expressions, body language, and gestures, and at discerning how people in the photos and videos were feeling, both compared to their prior performance and also compared to a group of peers who had stayed at home on screens.53 The researchers believe this was because, deprived of their screens, the children had to spend considerably more time interacting with their peers and the adults face-to-face. “You can’t learn non-verbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication,” lead author Yalda T. Uhls explained.54

While cautionary warnings about children and screens have been issued ever since the 1950s, when televisions entered people’s homes, the problem again is likely to be one of scale. Whereas in the past, children’s screen access was time-bound, today half of children by the age of ten have a smartphone of their own.55 More than half of five- to sixteen-year-olds sleep with their phone by their bed. (This is U.K. data, but it’s a similar picture in other high-income countries.)56 It’s the omnipresence as well as the omnipotence of our devices that’s the problem, coupled with the fact that the compelling nature of our screens often crowds out the higher-quality in-person interactions we could be having instead.

Screen-Free Lives

It’s with such insights in mind that some parents are actively promoting screen-free lives for their kids. Ironically, it is Silicon Valley parents leading the way. They are one of the groups most likely to prohibit smartphone usage among their children and send them to screen-free schools. Steve Jobs notoriously limited how much technology his kids used at home, while Bill Gates didn’t allow his kids to get mobile phones until they were fourteen and even then set strict screen-time limits.57 As early as 2011, The New York Times reported on the growing popularity of screen-free, experiential learning education systems such as Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley and other areas densely populated with tech executives and their families.58 Many self-respecting Silicon Valley parents nowadays go as far as to include in their nannies’ contracts a clause in which they promise not to use their phones for personal use in front of their charges. The hypocrisy is, of course, all too clear—not only do some of these parents work at the companies responsible for making these devices so addictive, many parents “come home, and they’re still glued to their phones, and they’re not listening to a word these kids are saying,” says Shannon Zimmerman, who works as a nanny in San Jose.59

While the wealthiest can pay for their children to lead screen-limited lives by employing human caregivers rather than putting their kids in front of a tablet, for the vast majority of families this is not a viable option.60 Lower-income American teens and tweens (eight-to-twelve-year-olds) unable to afford after-school activities and extracurricular classes rack up around two hours more screen time per day than their affluent peers.61 Conversations with teachers in the United Kingdom reveal a similar dynamic at play there too.62

At a time that the very wealthiest parents are actively trying to reduce the amount of screen time their kids are subject to and the most prestigious colleges are running how-to-read-faces classes, we cannot allow a new divide to emerge whereby rich children become better skilled in empathy and communication and poor children risk being ever less able to communicate effectively. It’s absolutely vital for our collective futures that all children retain these critical skills. This means ensuring that after-school activities are available to children of all income brackets and also that the trend toward screen-based learning at school does not come at the expense of in-person lessons, support, and interactions.

Digital Slot Machines

Too much time spent on our screens clearly isn’t good for us. The trouble is that even if we know this, resisting the urge to pick up our phones takes a level of commitment and willpower that many of us struggle to find. This is because of the extent to which we are addicted to our digital devices.

It’s among children that the addiction is perhaps most obvious. One teacher in Indianapolis now keeps students’ confiscated phones in a clear plastic bag around her waist, in full view, to ease the symptoms of their separation anxiety; others have set up charging stations in the classroom to encourage students to part with their devices, secure that they remain in their sight line. A pupil’s ability to control his or her smartphone addiction during lessons can even lead to special benefits, with some teachers rewarding students with extra credit or Starbucks gift cards when they avoid touching their phones during class.63

Yet we as adults are often in denial about how addicted we are. Consider these questions. Have you ever felt you should cut down on the amount of time you’re on your phone? Have people ever annoyed you by criticizing the amount of time you are on your phone? Have you ever felt bad or guilty about how much time you are on your phone? Do you reach for your phone first thing when you wake up? If you’ve answered yes to at least two of these questions, addiction may well be an appropriate term for what you are experiencing. For these questions are based on the CAGE questionnaire—a four-question screening tool widely used in hospitals, primary care centers, and rehab clinics to check for potential alcohol problems.64

But why exactly are we so addicted to our phones? It is time to put the social media giants of Silicon Valley on the witness stand. For like slot machines, social media platforms have been consciously designed to keep us constantly scrolling, watching, liking, and refreshing in the hope of finding affirmation, echoes, confidence boosts, mutual attraction, even love.65 Every serif, every screen layout, every focus-grouped hue, every barely perceptible animation, every pixel of what we see on-screen has been actively configured to keep us always-on and hooked.66 In fact in 2017, former Facebook president Sean Parker told news media company Axios point-blank that the central question driving Facebook in its early days was “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” “We knew our creation was addictive,” he said. “And we did it anyway.” He added, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”67

It’s an addiction that is making us lonely, although of course not in all cases. It’s important to acknowledge that for some people these lower-quality virtual exchanges are still better than those that they can access nearby in person. Whether it’s the LGBTQ+ kid in a small town in Idaho who thanks to new friends in faraway places on Twitter doesn’t feel so alone, the Filipino migrant worker who uses Facebook every day to stay connected to her kids back home, the cystic-fibrosis sufferer who knows no one in his area with the condition but has found solace in online support groups, or the grandmother who thanks to Instagram is able to stay connected to her grandchildren in a way that she couldn’t before, social media can provide some with a community they might not otherwise have had. And as we saw during lockdown, at times it can provide crucial lifelines and take the edge off of isolation.

Yet numerous studies over the past decade have established a clear link between social media usage and loneliness. One study found, for example, that adolescents with higher social media use reported more loneliness than their peers.68 Another discovered that for every 10 percent rise in negative experiences on social media, college students reported a 13 percent increase in loneliness.69 A third study found that in the 2010s, American adolescents socialized in person for a full hour less every day (on average) than they had in the 1980s, a trend the researchers linked explicitly to the increase in social media usage.70 Adolescent loneliness, they also noted, had ballooned after 2011—the same year that the number of teens owning a smartphone began to skyrocket. Whereas in 2011 only 23 percent of U.S. teens owned a smartphone, by 2018 this had risen to 95 percent.71

The challenge was that although these studies demonstrated that social media use and loneliness were connected, almost every one of them struggled to determine causation. In other words, do lonely people use social media more or does social media actually cause loneliness?

Two landmark studies recently set out to answer that very question. Crucially, in these, the participants weren’t simply asked to report their social media habits; instead, they were directed by the researchers to actively change them. This meant that the effects of those changes on their behavior and mood could be directly observed and compared, and causality could be established.72

The results were enlightening. One of the studies found that limiting Snapchat and Instagram along with Facebook to ten minutes per platform per day produced a significant reduction in loneliness.73 The other, a gold standard of a study of nearly three thousand people in which over a two-month period half of the participants used Facebook as normal and the other half—the “Treatment” group—fully deactivated their Facebook accounts, found that the group that had deactivated Facebook didn’t simply use the time they would have spent on that platform on other websites. Instead they used the internet less overall and spent more time socializing with friends and family in person. And as for how they felt? They reported more happiness, more life satisfaction, less anxiety, and, to a moderate yet statistically significant degree, less loneliness, too. When it came to improving subjective well-being, deleting Facebook was up to 40 percent as effective as attending therapy.74

Meaner

The problematic impact of social media runs even deeper. It’s not simply driving us into isolated digital bubbles that crowd out richer in-person interactions. It is also making the world feel more hostile, less empathetic, and less kind. And this is taking a significant toll on our collective well-being.

Trolling—posting deliberately offensive or provocative content; doxxing—spreading personal information, such as a home address, in order to enable harassment; swatting—using doxxed information to call in a false hostage situation that prompts police to send a SWAT team and potentially arrest the person in their own home: a twenty-first-century vernacular has developed to describe a whole host of new and insidious online behaviors.75 For while social media platforms do enable us to share moments of happiness, their design has also made them conducive to some of the worst elements of human nature: abuse, bullying, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia. All such behaviors are on the rise. In 2018, over half of adult U.K. internet users reported having seen hateful content online, a 6 percent increase from the year before.76 In the U.K. one in three women have experienced abuse on Facebook and among 18-to-25-year-olds that increases to 57 percent. Over the course of 2016 (the most recent year for which there is verified data), an anti-Semitic post appeared on social media on average every eighty-three seconds. Eighty percent of these were on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.77

There’s no sign that any of this is slowing down anytime soon.

Of course, hatred and abuse are not new phenomena. But what’s different is that social media pumps them into our lives in new and uniquely disturbing ways, at a scale that again is simply unprecedented. And what’s so frightening is that it rewards users for doing so. For each retweet we get provides us with a dopamine hit, the same neurotransmitter associated with heroin and morphine. It’s a tiny dose, to be sure, but enough to keep us coming back for more. And you know what kind of posts typically engender the most retweets? The most outlandish, extreme, and hateful ones. Put a word like kill, destroy, attack, or murder in your post and it’ll be retweeted nearly 20 percent more.78

While it is unlikely that stimulating toxic behavior was the intention of the founders of these platforms, what is clear is that it fast became something they tolerated. For the fact is that outrage and anger are better for business. More addictive emotions than kindness or positivity, they keep traffic and through-flow high, thereby increasing the likely number of ad clicks, which is how the social media companies make their money.79 It’s this impact on the bottom line that helps explain why pretty much anything that will attract eyeballs is tolerated on these platforms, however dark, dangerous, or polarizing.80 It’s the amorality of the unregulated market in action. Twitter notably did draw a line in the sand on May 29, 2020, when it hid President Trump’s now-infamous “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”81 tweet behind a warning message on the basis that it glorified violence.82 Facebook, however, left the very same post up on its platform.83 Their rationale—this wasn’t about morality; it was about freedom of expression.

It is not only adults being affected by a design ethic that both incentivizes us to deliver ever more outraged and divisive messages and enables us to so easily find community in hate. For children, social media has also become home to abuse and bullying on a distressing scale. In Singapore, three-quarters of teenagers say that they have been bullied online.84 In the United Kingdom, 65 percent of students have experienced a form of cyberbullying, with 7 percent experiencing it “regularly.”85 While in a recent U.K. survey of more than ten thousand young people aged twelve to twenty, nearly 70 percent admitted to being abusive to another person online—whether sending a nasty message, posting hateful comments under a fake username, or sharing something with the intention of mocking someone else.86

Such abuse can have a devastating impact, but many of us failed to appreciate just how devastating until the highly publicized death of twelve-year-old British cyberbullying victim Jessica Scatterson, who killed herself in 2019 in the wake of a spate of abusive messages on social media. As the coroner said at the inquest, “The level and the intensity of her activity on social media platforms, particularly in the build-up to her death, cannot have failed to have influenced her thinking, her state of mind.”87

Children have of course always bullied and been bullied. Yet once again it’s a matter of scale. For while in the past this psychological abuse was typically confined to the playground, park, and classroom, today it follows them around inescapably 24/7, streamed into their homes and bedrooms. Moreover, while bullying used to be public only to the extent that others witnessed it directly in real time, today the victim’s shame is there for all to see, permanently etched into their digital footprint.

Social media is making us lonelier not only because all that time we are spending on it leaves us feeling less connected to those around us, but also because it is making society as a whole meaner and crueler. And a mean and cruel world is a lonely one.

Most obviously, the loneliness is felt by those in the line of fire who feel both the pain of the abuse and the sense of powerlessness that comes with it, as digital bystanders fail to come to their aid and social media platforms do nothing to protect them.88 But it is lonelier for all of us, too. For in the same way that children who witness their parents arguing—or worse, episodes of domestic violence—are likely to become withdrawn, socially anxious, and self-isolating, the same applies here.89 Spend too much time scrolling in an angry and toxic environment, and you risk feeling ever more alone, even if you’re not directly under attack. Moreover, the more toxicity we witness, the less faith we have in society at large.90 As we have seen, this also has wider societal and political ramifications. For the less we trust each other, the more selfish and divided we become.

BOMP: A Belief That Others Are More Popular Than You

Our experience of social media even on an everyday level can make us feel lonely, as Claudia’s story shows.

Senior year. The homecoming dance. Claudia sits on her couch at home in her pajamas, scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. Her friends had said they weren’t going. “Overrated,” they had agreed. Then the photos popped up on her feed. Her friends, dressed to the nines for homecoming, laughing, hanging out, having fun without her. Never before had she felt so awful about herself, “so insignificant and alone.” She felt so depressed that she refused to go to school for a week, hiding instead in her room on her own. Grades, school activities, even the prospect of college felt secondary to the pain of her all-too-public exclusion. Facing her friends felt simply impossible. “Why go to school if I was invisible to everyone?” she said.

You are probably already familiar with the term FOMO—fear of missing out, that nagging sense that others are somewhere else having fun while you are sitting at home on your own. But Claudia’s story is about something arguably much more painful: the fear that she was friendless in a world where everyone else has friends. It’s a phenomenon so prevalent that psychologists are beginning to study it.91 I call it “BOMP”: a Belief that Others are More Popular. Like FOMO, it’s a feeling exacerbated by social media—and one that is all too common.

BOMP can feel distressing, whatever one’s age. It is never nice to feel socially inferior or excluded. Indeed, in my research I’ve come across numerous adults who’ve felt unpopular because they’ve experienced an adult version of Claudia’s homecoming trial, seen online evidence of old schoolmates having drinks that they weren’t invited to, or a family get-together that no one had included them in. Whereas once we might never have discovered that we’d been left out of such gatherings, today our exclusion smacks us in the face, in real time, in technicolor, with filters, lenses, and sound effects.

For children and adolescents, this is especially painful. As one British teenage boy told the U.K. charity ChildLine: “I see all my friends having a good time on social media and it gets me down, I feel like no one cares enough to invite me. My mood is getting worse and now I’m just upset all the time and can’t stop crying.”92 Or as one American parent told me, “You have no idea how painful it is to see your teenage child in distress as they sit at home looking at posts from people that they thought were friends, having a party without them. It feels really cruel.”

But social media does more than provide a real-time window to experiences we have been excluded from—because the platforms themselves are being used as weapons of exclusion even more directly.

I think of WhatsApp primarily as a useful way of staying in touch with friends and family overseas or with my fellow performers in my weekly improv group. My husband is in a WhatsApp group with his siblings where everything from family meals to parental care is discussed, and another with his friends that dissects football matches with a level of detail I find hard to fathom. These all seem like positive uses of social media’s messaging apps in one way or another. Among many teens and twentysomethings, however, this kind of group chat is now a primary way to communicate, with 30 percent using some form of group chat—whether WhatsApp, Houseparty, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat—multiple times per day (usage was even higher of course during lockdown).93 So what, you may ask? Well, becoming aware that you are being excluded from these groups has become a new form of painful isolation. And it’s an experience increasing numbers of young people are having. Jamie, a sixteen-year-old from Oxford, explained to me how lonely it felt to find out that her classmates were in a group she hadn’t been invited to join, to realize that entire conversations were taking place—even at times when she was physically in the room—that she was excluded from.

Another parent I spoke to showed distress when he told me about the time his daughter was with five or six friends in a café when all of a sudden phones started pinging. It turned out to be a group message inviting them to a party that weekend—all of them, that is, except his daughter. To get through it, she pretended that she had also received an invite. It felt better to lie than to feel humiliated. It was lonely to feel excluded, yet it would have felt lonelier still to be seen to be so.

Both teachers and parents have become acutely aware of these new forms of social exclusion and their consequences, along with the challenges of managing them. Oliver Blond, the headmaster of the U.K. girls’ boarding school Roedean, explained to me that because digital exclusion is typically invisible, teachers find it very difficult to tackle. For whereas in the past a teacher could see exclusion taking place—a child sitting on their own at lunch or a group turning their backs on one of their peers—today many of these interactions are taking place in the virtual sphere. And because they are not witnessed, adults can’t intervene, meaning that the excluded child is even more alone in their suffering.

Public Rejection and Shame

There’s something else social media does that perniciously contributes to contemporary loneliness: it makes our social status public, and therefore our unpopularity or rejection by our peer group. With even the most banal of social gatherings likely to be memorialized on Instagram or beamed out on a Snap Story, our absence is easily noted. More than this, the new social currency of retweets, likes, and shares means that each time we post and our posts are ignored, we risk feeling not only rejected or valueless but also ashamed, because we experience our rejection in public.

It is this fear of being so visibly ignored that can make otherwise confident, successful adults like a leading U.K. politics professor I know spend, as he confided in me, hours at a time trying to craft the perfect tweet: tweaking it, refining it, hours that he knows would be better served on his research. It’s this fear too that makes graduate student Jennifer spend so long on perfecting her Instagram shots that she often doesn’t have time to experience what she is documenting. On a recent holiday to Costa Rica she spent so much time on her “Jen goes ziplining” post that she didn’t actually go ziplining, ironically missing out on a memorable bonding experience with her IRL friends.

Again, it’s the youngest among us for whom the fear of being visibly unpopular is most painful and anxiety-provoking. One parent told me of the pain he felt watching his daughter manically “liking” every post of every person on her feed to try and ensure a reciprocal response when she posted herself. Peter, a four-foot-nothing, bespectacled eighth grade student from London, described to me the “agony” he felt “posting, waiting, and hoping and no one replying and then asking myself again and again, Why am I not liked? What am I doing wrong?” And Jamie told me of how the thought of any of her Snapchat streaks ending sent her into a panic. “It makes me feel physically sick,” she explained.

It’s not that being popular wasn’t always important to the young. Indeed, it’s the theme at the heart of most high school dramas. What is different is, once again, the powerful and inescapable impact that social media has brought to these dynamics. “Social media marks a new era in the intensity, density, and pervasiveness of social comparison processes, especially for the youngest among us, who are ‘almost constantly online’ at a time of life when one’s own identity, voice, and moral agency are a work in progress,” writes the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, adding that the “psychological tsunami of social comparison triggered by the social media experience is considered unprecedented.”94 It’s this constant process of having to sell oneself—and the constant fear that no one will want to buy—that’s the problem.

Some social media companies are beginning to acknowledge the problem they’ve created here, at least tacitly. Facebook has beta-tested versions of its own platform, as well as that of Instagram (which it owns), in which public “likes” are suppressed—the user can see how many “likes” a post has garnered, but no one else can.95 The man behind the initiative at Instagram, Facebook veteran Adam Mosseri, admits that it was spurred in part by an episode of Charlie Brooker’s dystopic sci-fi TV series Black Mirror, in which omnipresent social media ratings send the protagonist spiraling toward disaster.96 I appreciate these efforts (which of course came only after sustained concern and backlash), but the question is whether these changes—even if implemented after the pilot project—will really make a difference. Won’t our dopamine-craving brains just find other metrics—comments or shares or reposts, tags on others’ posts—to compare ourselves against? And won’t we still chase the affirmation that each like provides, even if no one else sees it? Our relationship with social media and how deeply we’ve absorbed its architecture psychologically makes it likely that the conditions of our engagement are already set.

Love My Avatar

By turning us into ever more insecure hustlers intensely pursuing likes, follows, and online social kudos, social media also encourages us to do something else: to present ever less authentic versions of ourselves online. I mean, nobody puts on Facebook “I have just spent the whole weekend in my pajamas eating ten packages of Mrs. Fields and watching Friends.” Instead, the lives we share online are a curated series of aspirational highlights and happy moments, parties and celebrations, sandy white beaches and mouthwatering food porn. The trouble is that such Photoshopped, filtered versions of ourselves are all too often fundamentally disconnected from our own authentic being.

Who am I, actually? The always happy, successful, sociable person I put on Instagram or someone who at times fails, falters, and feels unsure? And what happens if the fake me is the one that my friends online prefer? The more carefully we curate our social media lives, the more we commodify ourselves, the more we risk feeling that no one either knows or likes the “real” person behind the profile. It’s an isolating and disconnecting feeling. As Tessa, an intelligent and artistic seventeen-year-old from California so aptly put it, “We are increasingly living our lives like avatars in an online video game.” Picture-perfect avatars, that is. In 2016, when the market research firm Custard surveyed two thousand people in the United Kingdom, it found that only 18 percent of them said their Facebook profile accurately represented them.97

Maybe it is human nature to work desperately hard on our outward presentation and even at times fall into a kind of performance that makes us seem other than who we really are. It was more than four hundred years ago, after all, that Shakespeare declared, “All the world’s a stage.” Teenagers have always been especially prone to this; black cat’s-eye makeup, micro miniskirts, biker boots, and Nietzsche’s opus Thus Spoke Zarathustra in my bag was my carefully crafted fourteen-year-old persona.

However, the age of social media marks a shift from traditional human behavior in this key aspect: in the past, we could regularly take a break from acting and revert to some sense of our private and authentic selves. Once a week, without fail, my fourteen-year-old self would take off the warpaint, put on pajamas, and snuggle up with my family to watch the American TV soap opera Dallas. But now, as we constantly prod at our smartphones and every moment of life is a potential photo opportunity, when does the performing ever stop?

It’s a question that applies to all of us. Think about the last time you took a selfie. What went through your mind? Were you looking at your own face, or were you trying to look at your face “through the eyes” of whatever social media followers would eventually see it? Was it you taking the picture at all?

What, too, does it do to our relationships with others if they transmute into interactions between idealized avatars? Inevitably, it renders them necessarily shallower and hollower as well as weirdly competitive. Increasingly detached from our online personas, we are performing the act of sharing, rather than truly sharing ourselves. As one sixteen-year-old who has now quit social media eloquently said: “I was presenting this dishonest version of myself, on a platform where most people were presenting dishonest versions of themselves.”98

Right from the start, the design of social media encouraged people to distort their true selves in exchange for social validation. Take Facebook: in its earliest days in the mid-2000s when it was still called “TheFacebook” and available only to college students, its users started curating their profiles with surgical precision, from regularly updated profile pictures—posed but not too posed—to witty descriptions of their clubs and activities, to even changing their academic course schedules (which were public) to “project a certain image of themselves,” says David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect.99 Did Mark Zuckerberg et al. care about what they were unleashing? Again, seemingly not. Connecting the world may be their goal, but it seems that if in the process connections become shallower, crueler, or increasingly distorted, so be it.

At the extreme, some come to prefer their digital self to their authentic one. It can start, innocently enough, with an Instagram selfie filter that adds floppy ears and a cartoonish nose to your face. But soon you discover another filter that can also smooth skin, define cheekbones, and magnify your eyes, providing you with an ever-so-enhanced version of your face under the veneer of a cutesy selfie. Perhaps you then graduate to a self-editing app that goes even further, brightening your skin, elongating your jaw and thereby further slimming your cheeks, whitening your teeth, reshaping your jawline and the width of your face and your nose.100 These are all things you can do on an app like FaceTune, consistently one of the bestsellers in Apple’s App Store.101 Inevitably, the face that stares back at you from the mirror starts to look so much less…polished than your digitized one. So you take your FaceTuned version of your face to a plastic surgeon and ask for the relevant nips and tucks to create the version of yourself you have edited online.102

This might sound extreme, but it isn’t an imaginary scenario. Increasing numbers of young people are approaching plastic surgeons with photos of their Photoshopped, filtered, digitally altered selves. In 2017, 55 percent of the surgeons of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery had at least one patient bring in a Photoshopped selfie and ask them to re-create it, a 42 percent increase over the year before.103 The AAFPRS expects this trend only to grow.

Social media is not only turning us into salespeople, with our product being our commoditized and repackaged self—it’s also internalizing BOMP, making many of us feel not only less popular than those around us but also that our real selves are less popular than our digitally enhanced ones. And that is fundamentally alienating.

Change Is Possible

So what can we do about the deleterious effects of social media and the role it is playing in the twenty-first century’s loneliness crisis?

Clearly, spending less time on these platforms is key. And in researching this book, I’ve come across a number of people who’ve gone so far as to log off entirely. People like Sammy, the fifteen-year-old debater, who decided he just didn’t want to be part of the toxicity anymore and has left social media for good. Or Peter, the twenty-two-year-old graduate, who told me he’s taken himself off Instagram and can see a really significant improvement in his happiness and emotional health. Or Maxine, the forty-year-old finance professional who left Facebook because she felt she just couldn’t take reading another “smug post” from a friend about their domestic or professional bliss. These, however, remain the exceptions. The mass migration to social media and its utility as messaging services means that those who defect can feel markedly excluded. This is especially true of the young. If your entire class “hangs out” on Instagram, staying offline will for most feel simply untenable. Unless new social norms emerge in which being present in person has greater cachet than being always on social media, this is unlikely to change.

Even for those who want to reduce their time on these platforms, logging off is extremely challenging because of their addictive nature. There are, however, practical hacks we can all try to mitigate this. Commit to digital-free days. Deploy “nudges” that might help curb your cravings—such as putting all your social media in an inconveniently placed smartphone folder, or even deleting your social media apps on your smartphone. Ask your partner, even your kids, to ruthlessly remind you not to be “a droid” (although you might want to come up with less pejorative phrasing). Or how about handing over to a friend or family member a significant sum or “deposit” that’s only returned to you if you reduce your social media use by a certain amount over a six-month period? It’s a strategy that has seen considerable success when it comes to helping smokers put an end to their addiction.104

You might even want to consider junking your smartphones and instead buying a Light Phone, an intentionally “low-tech” device bereft of social media and email, designed to be used as little as possible.105

Yet this is not a battle we can fight on our own. To curb our digital addiction at a significant scale, decisive government intervention is essential. Think of the measures governments use to discourage the use of tobacco, such as mandating that warnings be printed on all tobacco packaging. Given social media’s similarly addictive properties, is it time for warnings about the dangers of these platforms to become mandatory, too? Pop-up messages each time we open an app, banners on websites, stickers on smartphone packaging with a photo of a scrambled brain, perhaps? Such steps would build our daily awareness of the risks. Each time we deploy these technologies, we need to be reminded of their potential for harm. And like smokers being encouraged to quit, public health campaigns to encourage us to reduce our time on our phones and on social media should also be considered. Especially as, unlike sugar—an addictive drug that harms only the user—social media, like tobacco, has a significant network effect potentially damaging not only to ourselves but all too often to those around us as well.106

When it comes to children, we need to go further still. When children as young as nine are “increasingly anxious about their online image” and becoming “addicted to likes as a form of social validation,” as Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, has said, we cannot accept the harm social media is causing so many young people as “just the way the world is now.”107

As such, addictive social media platforms should be banned for children under the age of adult consent (sixteen in the United Kingdom, eighteen in the United States). While some may cry out that this will stymie children’s freedom of expression and personal independence, note that I’m not proposing a blanket ban on social media for this age group but instead a ban on addictive social media. And the burden of proof should be on the social media platform to provide compelling scientific evidence that they are not causing addiction in children. Where they are not able to, the platform should be forced to establish truly effective identification systems for proving that users are over the allowable age.108

The onus would therefore be on the platforms to innovate new forms of social media that are less addictive or remove the addictive elements they currently deploy, whether likes, streaks, or the endless scroll, if they want to be able to target this demographic.

While this approach may seem to some quite draconian, one need only look back at history to see how attitudes toward such interventions can change. I recall the shock and surprise many in the United Kingdom felt when in 1989 seatbelts became compulsory for children to wear in the backseats of cars.109 At the time, it felt both unnecessary and an assault on personal freedom, yet of course it has saved countless young lives and it would now seem reckless not to secure a child in a car. Likewise, smoking in a car carrying children was once commonplace and is now not just widely frowned upon, but illegal in the United Kingdom, some states and cities in the United States, and in many other places around the world.110 On a precautionary basis alone, the case for the prohibition of addictive social media until the age of adult consent is strong.

When it comes to the most egregious examples of toxic discourse, such as hate speech and the sharing of violent content on these platforms—there needs to be zero tolerance. And while I understand the reluctance of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg to take on the role of arbiter, especially given the tradition of free speech that surrounds the First Amendment in the United States, social media platforms can’t market themselves as public squares, yet at the same time insist they have only limited responsibility for what goes on inside them. Especially as the big players already do make editorial decisions and are willing to impose a value judgment on some issues. For example, Facebook bans nudity, often to absurd degrees.111

I understand, too, of course, that there is a legitimate challenge when it comes to monitoring the hundreds of millions of posts uploaded on social media every day, and that automated mechanisms for flagging hateful content are likely to be insufficiently nuanced. But what this suggests is that as well as investing considerably more in technological fixes to the problem—using the engineering skills that are of course in abundance at these companies—the platforms also need to deploy a much larger number of human moderators to assist in this task. In doing so, they must recognize that content moderating is a challenging job, both intellectually and emotionally, and that training moderators well, paying them decently, and providing them with sufficient emotional support is a necessity. At present not enough is being done. If even 10 percent of the energy Big Tech devotes to corporate growth and expansion were dedicated to finding more ingenious solutions to content moderation, the world would be a lot further ahead in addressing online poison, polarization, alienation, and disconnection.

It is not that they can’t afford to do more. With their tens of billions of dollars of revenue and mountains of cash reserves, social media companies have immense capability and power to bring about change. Ultimately, it seems that they just don’t want to invest the money, manpower, and focus that really effective solutions require. Indeed, it appears that some of the world’s tech leaders have accepted that a certain volume of complaints, a certain level of fines, maybe even a certain number of deaths, is something they can tolerate when the prize is so big and so many billions of dollars in annual profits are at stake.112 In the same way that Big Tobacco determined it was acceptable to peddle a harmful product because the profits were so large, it seems that the social media giants have determined that the collateral damage they cause is an acceptable by-product of their business model. As Professor Jamil Zaki observed, “Mark Zuckerberg famously exhorted his employees to ‘move fast and break things.’ By now, it’s clear they’ve broken quite a lot.”113

Leaving it to the platforms to self-regulate toxic content clearly hasn’t worked, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has now acknowledged.114 We need regulation with teeth to compel Big Tech to reform. The penalties handed out to date for failing to immediately remove unambiguously hateful content have been so low as to be meaningless in the context of Big Tech’s gargantuan, record-breaking profits. Major offenders need to be fined sums of money that really do impact their bottom line.

Perhaps at last change is on the horizon. In the wake of the livestreaming on Facebook of the 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which fifty-one people at two mosques were killed, Australia introduced the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material Act, which levies fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s global turnover should it fail to remove “abhorrent violent” material “expeditiously” enough.115 While this law covers the sharing of only the most extreme content (“murder or attempted murder, a terrorist act, torture, rape or kidnapping”), it is a landmark piece of legislation with regard to the size of the penalty the offending platforms would have to pay. It even proposes jail sentences of up to three years for tech executives if they fail to comply.116

When it comes to the kind of toxic speech that circulates on these platforms that does not obviously rise to the level of hate speech, incitement to violence, or abhorrent material but is still highly distressing—such as bullying—the challenge is admittedly even more complex. A bullying post, for example, can be surprisingly hard to identify, given how quickly vernacular changes and how humor can be used as a sword. “Paula is so cool!” might sound like a positive post, but if Paula is an overweight geeky girl with no friends it could actually be a form of bullying. Ascertaining what qualifies as offensive via an algorithm is almost impossible, which is why effective reporting systems and human content moderators are so necessary.

This isn’t to say that there are no technological fixes when it comes to online civility. Social media platforms could adjust their algorithms to reward kindness over anger, or to ensure that “open-minded, positive posts rise more quickly,” as Zaki suggests.117 At the least they could tweak their algorithms so that rage and anger did not rise so fast to the top. Or how about social media companies asking people to think twice before posting something bullying or toxic?118 This is something Instagram has begun to test in a few markets with pop-ups prompting users to think twice before posting comments that AI flags as hurtful (such as “You are so ugly and stupid”). But again, without regulation’s Damoclean sword hanging over them, it’s hard to believe the platforms will take sufficient steps, given their lackluster track record and the fortunes at stake.

Here, too, legal change seems to be on the horizon. Rules proposed in January 2020 by the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office to safeguard children online require companies to ensure that “children are not served content which is detrimental to their physical or mental health or wellbeing.”119 If implemented, companies that do not comply will face a fine “proportionate to potential or actual damage caused and the size and revenue of the company.”120

At the very least, tech companies should have a statutory “duty of care” to their customers that legally obliges them to take reasonable steps to ensure their platforms don’t cause significant harm. This would be similar to the duty of care that employers have to ensure their workplace is safe for their employees. And if they were found not to uphold this, again, they should face significant fines and punishment.

This is something a group of British MPs has recently argued for with specific reference to social media and children, suggesting in a 2019 report that along with mandating a “duty of care,” the government should also hold directors of tech companies personally liable for the harms caused by their products, echoing the recent legislation in Australia.121

There clearly are steps our governments can and should take. We don’t have to accept that the digital train has left the station, and there’s nothing we can do to change its destination. There’s much that can be done to protect ourselves and our communities in the face of Big Tech—if the political will and the political pressure is there. And while I welcome Facebook’s newfound cheerleading for regulation, we should have a healthy dose of skepticism about their proactive moves to shape the nature of this regulation. After all, calling for more regulation—in a form that works best for itself—was a long-standing strategy of Big Tobacco.122 Ensuring that social media companies do not enjoy excessive voice in the shaping of the new rules of the game is more critical now than ever, given their immense economic and media power.

And as individuals, what more can we do, beyond acknowledging how addicted to our devices we are and attempting to restrict our usage and push through the pain of withdrawal ourselves? At the very least, if we choose to remain on social media, we need to be mindful of the potentially harmful consequences of our posts and be kinder when it comes to our own comments or shares. We must try to refocus our online engagement away from voices of anger and division, resist the urge to “like” or share posts that are cruel, and spend more time promoting ideas and sentiments that express what unites us all. And of course, we shouldn’t hesitate to block, unfollow, or unfriend anyone who makes us feel bad or enhances our sense of disconnection. Schools have a role here too in educating students in social media civility and equipping them with the tools to engage with it in a healthy way, as indeed do parents. This may seem a little “happy-clappy” to some, but if social media is causing widespread loneliness and unhappiness, don’t we all have a responsibility to try at least to counter some of its impact ourselves?

In addition, we could also exert pressure on the brands that advertise on these platforms to demand that social media companies do substantially more when it comes to tackling hate and bullying. The decision made in the summer of 2020 by a number of leading brands, including Unilever, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Ford to suspend advertising on Facebook for a period as part of the #StopHateForProfit campaign demonstrates that brands are willing to intervene in this way and take a stand against hate speech and divisive content.123 What is essential is that their commitment to reform must endure until there is meaningful change.124 This is where we as consumers come in: by exercising the power of our wallets, we can make clear to brands that unless they maintain the pressure on social media companies, they may lose our business. No matter our age, if we commit to mobilizing our communities and making our objections noisily enough, change is possible.

What is encouraging is that I have found in my interviews with young adults—the generation born between 1994 and 2004, which I have called Generation K, whose lives have been documented by digital cameras since birth and are entering secondary school and university with the specter of doxxing and leaked nude images hanging over their heads—that many are extremely cognizant of the flaws and indeed the dangers of their so-called “native” digital territory, perhaps even more so than their elders. As Generation K makes a name for itself in activism—from Greta Thunberg to Malala Yousafzai to the survivors of the Parkland shooting who rallied more than a million people worldwide in protest of gun violence—perhaps they will also lead the charge when it comes to holding social media to account and recognizing the profound dangers of tech addiction.

Open-Plan and Lonely

A space with no dividing walls or cubicles, workers sitting at long rows of desks, pecking away at their keyboards, all breathing in the same recycled air: welcome to the open-plan office.

In recent times, most of the concern about open-plan offices has centered, understandably, on their biohazardous nature. A study conducted by Korea’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention that tracked a coronavirus outbreak at a call center in Seoul in February 2020 showed how within just over two weeks of the first worker becoming infected, more than ninety others who worked on the same open-plan office floor also tested positive for COVID-19.13 But it’s not just our physical health that this design choice endangers. One of the reasons so many office workers feel alienated from each other is because they spend their days in large open-plan layouts.

This may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, when open-plan offices were first introduced in the 1960s, they were heralded as a progressive, near utopian design concept that would—or so the theory went—create a more sociable and collaborative working environment where people and ideas could more naturally mix and mingle. Its advocates today make the same claims. Yet, as we’ve seen in the context of cities, our physical space can significantly impact how connected or disconnected we feel. And it turns out that the open-plan office—by far the most common type of layout nowadays, with about half of offices in Europe and two-thirds of offices in the U.S. using the open plan—is especially alienating.14

In a recently published landmark Harvard Business School study that tracked what happened to employees when they moved from cubicles to open-plan offices, researchers found that rather than “prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration and deeper relationships,” the open architecture seemed to “trigger a response to socially withdraw” from colleagues, as people opted for email and messaging instead of talking.15

Why people pull back is in part down to the natural human response to the excess noise, distraction, or unwelcome disruptions that are traditionally part and parcel of the open-plan office. We saw a similar phenomenon play out in cities, where, feeling overwhelmed by the mass of people around us and the cacophonous sounds, our tendency can be to withdraw into our own personal bubbles. It’s also an act of self-care. Studies have found that noise over fifty-five decibels—roughly the sound of a loud phone call—arouses our central nervous system and triggers a measurable increase in stress.16 In many open-plan offices, noise levels are consistently higher than this, as people speak ever louder just to be heard.17

It’s not just the volume level that is problematic. Just as Amazon’s Alexa is always listening, waiting for a command to which to respond, our brains in an open-plan office work in a similar way—constantly monitoring the noise around us, the typing of someone else’s keyboard, the conversation at the next desk, that ringing phone.18 As a result, not only is it more difficult to concentrate, but we have to work harder to complete tasks because we’re trying to simultaneously listen to and ignore all the ambient sound. When I worked in an open-plan office I would put on my noise-canceling headphones before I’d even swiped myself into the building. Blocking out the incessant noise was the only way I could manage to focus on my work, even if it meant I was less attuned to what was going on in the workplace around me. I felt I had no choice but to isolate myself from my colleagues if I was going to be productive and get my work done. As psychologist Nick Perham, who has researched this phenomenon extensively, explains, “Most people work best when it’s quiet, despite what they think.” Indeed, studies have found that just one nearby conversation can reduce worker productivity by up to 66 percent.19

We may be entering an age in which less densely populated open-plan offices become the norm. But although this may mean some reduction in noise, the incessant barrage of sound is not the only thing that makes us want to withdraw; it’s also the lack of privacy. Researchers have written of “a feeling of insecurity” pervading open-plan offices because everyone can see and hear what you are doing.20 This, they found, leads to a lack of expressive conversations and a “sort of uncomfortable uneasiness” that “discourages prolonged conversations,” engenders “shorter and more superficial discussions,” and leads to self-censorship.21 This also resonates with my experience; it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation with a colleague—let alone make a call to your doctor’s office or check in with your partner—when you know you’re being overheard by anyone who happens to be around.

In the same way that teenagers’ conversations on social media tend toward being both performative and shallow because they are taking place within a public forum, so too does the behavior of the open-plan office worker change when he or she knows that their behavior is being watched. For the office is now the stage upon which one is constantly observed, constantly has to perform, and can never let down one’s guard. Cognitively and emotionally, this is not only exhausting, it is also alienating: our avatar is now hard at work for us in the real world, too.

This sense of alienation is even worse if your office has bought into the idea of “hot-desking.” Employers have tried to sell this as the epitome of workplace freedom and choice—each day you get to decide where to sit. The reality, however, is that without a workspace of your own and somewhere to stick up a photo of your child or partner, never able to sit next to anyone for long enough to strike up a friendship, and in a daily battle over which desk you’ll get to occupy, it can also be a pretty isolating existence: in a 2019 U.K. survey 19 percent of hot-deskers said they felt alienated from colleagues, and 22 percent that they found it difficult to bond as a team.22 Hot-deskers are the workplace equivalent of the renters who’ve never met their neighbors. More vagrants than nomads, the hot-desker inevitably feels ever more expendable and disregarded and ever less visible. When Carla, a facilities manager at a major U.K. corporation, had to take a month off work after an unexpected operation, it took most of her hot-desking colleagues weeks to notice that she wasn’t there.23

Some employers, recognizing that a stressed and distracted workforce who feel disconnected and alienated from each other isn’t good for efficiency, productivity, or deep thought, had begun to modify their design choices, even before coronavirus made sneeze guards de rigueur. Prefabricated, portable, soundproof privacy pods that can easily be placed into open-plan offices, such as ROOM, Zenbooth, and Cubicall, were already seeing an uptick in trade.24 In January 2020 on Cubicall’s website, their phone-booth-style pod—the solo one so small that the occupant can only use it standing up—was being actively marketed as “the efficient solution for the shortcomings of modern interior design—increasing productivity and morale by providing offices and common spaces a place for privacy and focus.”25 Elsewhere, employers have been taking even more radical steps. In some workplaces red, yellow, and green lights have been placed on desks so that their occupants can indicate whether colleagues can interrupt them or not. In others, a device that resembles a cross between “headphones and horse blinders” is being used to help keep workers focused on their own tasks.26 Such responses would be comical if they weren’t all too real.

Now, one might have thought that the combination of these shortcomings with the new health risks would mean that the era of the open-plan office is coming to an end. Yet rumors of its demise may well be premature. For whatever the “official” story as to why your company moved to open-plan in the first place and however the strategy was spun—the reality is that it was almost certainly to do with costs. Open-plan offices cost as much as 50 percent less per employee than more traditional office layouts because each employee takes up less square footage.27 Hot-desks provide even greater “efficiencies”: given that each desk is more likely to be in constant use, they deliver considerably more bang per employee’s butt.28 With the economic damage caused by COVID-19 and companies now under even greater pressure to reduce overheads and keep them low—even though infection and open-plan are partners in crime, and even if open-plan offices are recognized as contributing to staff discontent—not only is there unlikely to be budget available for a fundamental office redesign in many organizations but hot-desking may well re-emerge as a trend despite its coronavirus-associated risk. Remember, after all, when it was that open-plan offices came back into fashion: just after the 2008 financial crisis. Although it wouldn’t be inconceivable that in some companies what will emerge will be a two-tier system, with management safely sequestered in offices and those lower down the organization only provided with screens, if that.

It is not only morally objectionable to subordinate employees’ emotional and physical health to metrics like overhead per employee, it is also commercially short-sighted. It speaks more broadly to a myopic approach in which people are all too reflexively subordinated to profit and their emotions and health needs deemed immaterial to success, despite the fact that well-being and satisfaction are fundamentally linked to productivity and in turn to overall corporate performance.

Visionary employers need to acknowledge this, even at this time of budget constraints and downsizing. Companies that are perceived as ignoring their employees’ needs are likely to be penalized both in terms of the quality of staff they can attract and how much effort their workers put in. You’re hardly going to be willing to go that extra mile if you believe your employer doesn’t care about your basic needs or your physical safety.

The Digital Takeover of the Workplace

It is not, of course, just our physical environment that has been eroding our relationships at work and making us feel lonely. Part of the reason many of us feel so detached from our colleagues today is because the quality of our communication with them is so much shallower than in the past.

Think back just a decade. If you needed to discuss something with a colleague, you’d probably have walked over to their desk. Nowadays, how often do you do that? This is not just a function of social distancing. A 2018 global study found that employees typically spent nearly half their entire day sending emails and messages to one another, often to people within a radius of just a few desks.29 At work as in our personal lives, talking to each other has been increasingly replaced by the tapping of keys, even when it would be easier and quicker to communicate in person. This also contributes to workplace loneliness. As many as 40 percent of workers report that communicating with colleagues over email makes them “very often” or “always” lonely.30

This is not surprising, given the quality of exchanges in the typical work email: transactional rather than conversational, efficient rather than affable, sterile rather than warm. Please and thank you were early casualties of our go-go-go 24/7 information-overloaded work lives. Under ever greater time pressures, our inboxes constantly replenishing, our emails, like our texts, have become ever shorter and terser. And the greater our workload, the less civil our emails.31

The rise of remote working—it is estimated that by 2023 over 40 percent of the workforce will be working remotely the majority of the time—risks making worker loneliness significantly worse.32 This is because most remote workers rely on email or other text-based communication tools as their primary way to interact.33 It’s part of the reason why, despite the initial enthusiasm felt by some for working from home during the pandemic, within weeks workers were reporting significantly increased levels of loneliness.34 Indeed, as we’ve known for some time, loneliness can be remote workers’ toughest challenge.35

When Ryan Hoover, a blogger and founder of the review site Product Hunt, posted on Twitter in March 2019 that he was writing a blog post about remote working and wanted to know “For those that work from home, what’s your biggest frustration?” loneliness was the most common issue cited by the 1,500-plus people who replied, with many remarking on the isolation of working without face-to-face interaction.36 “Missing out on office social interaction” was how management consultant Eraldo Cavalli described it.37 Others chimed in to express yearning for “fluid and dedicated conversation on the fly,” the type of passive water-cooler chat that allows you to “develop in-person friendships” that “migrate out of work,” as California-based music software engineer and venture capitalist Seth Sandler lamented.38 “I can’t get up from my desk and be social with co-workers,” wrote engineer John Osborn, continuing, “And it’s just lonely as all hell.”39 Eric Nakagawa, who works on open-source software, put it most bluntly: “The isolation can break you. Wolfman beard and all.”40

Most alarming, though not surprising given our “use it or lose it” propensity, was that several of the respondents had noticed the impact of remote working creeping into their daily lives. “When I stay alone in front of the laptop for a long time and then go out somewhere—I feel like I forgot how to talk and communicate with people properly for a couple of hours until recovered,” posted Ahmed Sulajman, a software engineer and startup CEO in Ukraine. “I find it’s hard to switch between messages and real-world communication.”41

Remote working is not fundamentally bad. Many remote workers cherish the autonomy and flexibility it provides, subscribe to the “I’ll work where I want, when I want” ideal, and benefit from avoiding a long commute. Moreover, a policy that encourages remote working not only gives companies a much larger pool of potential hires to choose from but can be a powerful equalizer, offering groups such as new mothers, employees caring for an aging parent, and the injured or disabled who might absent themselves otherwise from the workforce better opportunities to manage work and family demands.

But while all this can be true, so too is the fact that remote working exacerbates feelings of isolation and loneliness. Gossip, laughter, small talk, and hugs were just some of the things people shared that they missed when forced out of the office during lockdown. Stanford professor Nicolas Bloom, one of the world’s leading researchers into home working, has found that “it’s very easy for remote workers to get depressed and uninspired at home.”42 In fact, in an experiment he ran, published in 2014, in which half of a Chinese company’s sixteen thousand employees were randomly assigned to work at home for nine months, at the end of that time period, half of them opted to return to the office, even though they had an average commute of forty minutes each way. Working at home had left them missing the social interactions of the office so much that they were willing to sacrifice more than an hour of their own time every day to get it back.43

What this suggests is that employers should resist the cost-cutting temptation to significantly ramp up and institutionalize remote working after the pandemic, while at the same time think carefully about how to mitigate its emotional downside for those who do find themselves working from home.

Increased use of video rather than relying exclusively on audio or text for inter-employee communication could be part of the strategy here. It’s one that, somewhat strangely, Tokyo’s Sumida Aquarium deployed during lockdown to try to mitigate the loneliness of its tiny spotted eels. Bereft of human visitors, the eels had started acting oddly, burrowing themselves in the sand when the keepers tried to check on their health.44 Much like Ahmed Sulajman, they had quickly forgotten how to be social. So keepers asked the public to FaceTime the aquarium and, once connected, wave or call out to the eels (not too loudly) for five minutes at a time. The extent to which this helped is, at the time of writing, unknown. But as we saw in the previous chapter, and as most of us humans who Zoomed our way through lockdown came quickly to realize, communicating via screens, while better than communicating exclusively by email or text, is still a limiting and limited experience, at least compared to face-to-face interactions. The loss of full-body gestures, physical closeness, and subtler cues like scent makes communication more prone to misunderstandings and the bonds between us less strong. And challenges with internet connection speeds mean that video chat can not only often be a somewhat fraught experience, with repeated frozen images and problems with sync, but at times feel actively disconnecting.

This is why most companies that successfully deployed remote working before the pandemic were ones that circumscribed the amount of days an employee worked remotely. Laszlo Bock, the former head of human resources at Google, has investigated the optimal amount of “work from home” time.45 He found it to be one and a half days a week. With this combination, employees both have time to connect and build bonds with each other and also time on their own to do deeper, undistracted work.

Pioneers in successful remote working also did this: made sure that they institutionalized regular, structured opportunities for their employees to meet up and socialize in person, whether we’re talking “in-office pizza Thursdays,” or regular gatherings, conferences, or events. And they consciously designed their offices so that when people were there they wanted to socialize, not only to alleviate employee loneliness but for more pragmatic purposes, too. “The reason tech companies have micro-kitchens and free snacks is not because they think people are going to starve between 9 a.m. and noon,” Bock told The New York Times’s Kevin Roose, “it’s because that’s where you get those moments of serendipity.”46

At work as in our private lives, contact beats contactless and physical proximity is crucial for creating a sense and spirit of community.

Incentivizing Kindness

Of course, being in the office doesn’t necessarily mean being more sociable. And it’s not just our reliance on email or the panopticon nature of our workplace that’s the limiting factor.

A number of reasons—businesses’ ever-greater emphasis on productivity and efficiency, post-#MeToo changes in workplace culture, the erosion of trade unions and the socializing that came with them, ever longer commutes—have combined and conspired to make hanging out with a co-worker either during or after work ever less the norm.47 The upshot is that many social practices that were commonplace only a couple of decades ago—such as a mid-morning coffee break with colleagues, after-work drinks at the pub, or a work mate invited home for a meal—are becoming ever less typical.

Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to eating at work.

The office lunch. Not too long ago, it was a time each day when we would bond with colleagues, have an opportunity to discover shared interests and passions, chat, and seek out support. Today, eating with our fellow workers is increasingly obsolete, and we can’t place the blame on social distancing requirements.

Sarah, a producer at a major news corporation, told me in 2019 that despite having worked at her company for four years, she had eaten lunch with colleagues only a handful of times. When she did, the rarity of the occasion made it feel like a group of strangers trying to find out about each other for the first time, rather than a community who actually spent dozens of hours a week in each other’s company. I remember when I held a professorship in Amsterdam in 2011 how none of the staff ever ate together and how lonely eating on my own every day felt.

Survey data makes clear how commonplace such experiences are. In a 2016 U.K. survey, more than 50 percent of respondents reported never or rarely eating lunch with colleagues.48 A snatched sandwich at their desks—usually eaten while simultaneously scrolling through Instagram, shopping on Amazon, or watching Netflix—had replaced an hour that once provided time to bond with co-workers as well as recharge. It was a similar situation in the United States, where 62 percent of professionals said they ate “al desko,” but less than half of them actually wanted to do so.49 Even in France, where a long lunch break with colleagues was for many years almost sacrosanct, market realities had begun to kick in. “The days of one-and-a-half or two-hour lunches are gone,” noted Stéphane Klein, head of Pret A Manger for France.50

It’s not just office workers eating alone. Mo, a burly South Londoner who had been working as an Uber driver since his previous employer, a local minicab company, shut down (because it was unable to compete with Uber), told me in late 2019 how much he missed the solidarity that eating with his fellow drivers at his old company had provided. There, “drivers would hang out in its big living room, with microwave and fridge and Muslims and Christians would bring their food there and eat together” as “a community.” “It was somewhere,” he explained, “I knew you, you knew me, if I hadn’t seen you for a week I’d call you, check all was OK.” And he contrasted this with his experience as an Uber driver, where with nowhere to gather and everyone eating on their own “there’s no solidarity: if I were to break down, I know that no Uber driver would stop and help me.”

It makes sense that we are likely to feel lonelier at work if we eat alone, just as those living on their own are likely to feel most lonely when eating without company. We’re also less likely to feel connected to colleagues. Preparing, serving, and consuming food and drink together is a core ritual of human cultures worldwide, from nightly family dinners to Japanese tea ceremonies to Thanksgiving in the United States or Midsummer’s Eve in Sweden.51 Not only do these moments provide an opportunity for the chitchat that we’ve seen helps people feel less alone, they also provide a stepping stone to the more meaningful conversations and relationships that bind colleagues more closely.

Dr. Nicholas Beecroft is a military psychiatrist with the British armed forces. He is convinced that a change in eating arrangements from communal eating to a pay-as-you-dine model—made essentially to save money as well as provide more freedom and choice—is one of the key reasons he sees “much less camaraderie and togetherness” among soldiers than he did in the past and many more soldiers telling him they feel lonely. And his concerns run deeper. For in his mind, it’s by sitting side by side, chatting, and cracking jokes while eating together that the foundations for a strong community are forged. “On the battlefield, such bonds are what gets soldiers through extreme situations of stress,” he says. Indeed, Dr. Beecroft believes that whether or not soldiers feel part of a close team is one of the key factors that account for why some soldiers suffer from PTSD and others do not—and that “eating together helps cement that.” Academic research backs this up: social support or lack thereof is one of the strongest predictors of whether a given person will develop PTSD following a traumatic experience.52

Researchers studying the impact of eating together of a not dissimilar group—firefighters—came to a similar conclusion. When Kevin Kniffin and colleagues at Cornell University spent nearly a year and a half observing thirteen fire stations in a major American city, they found that companies of firefighters who planned their meals together, cooked together, and ate together performed twice as well on the job as those who did not, because they collaborated and cooperated more.53

In the case of firefighting, this is likely to mean more lives saved: better cooperation on even basic tasks like hosing down buildings and moving debris can make a huge difference when life and death are decided in a matter of minutes. Eating together, Kniffin hypothesized, was a type of “social glue” that sparked friendships, mutual concern, and teamwork.54 And it seems that the firefighters themselves realized just how important this informal bonding was. The daily meal was a core part of their shift, firefighters said. So important, in fact, that some would eat two dinners, one at home and another at the firehouse, feeling that refusing a meal prepared by a fellow firefighter was essentially a sign of disrespect. When researchers spoke to firefighters who didn’t eat together, their subjects seemed embarrassed. “It was basically a signal that something deeper was wrong with the way the group worked,” Kniffin said.55

Whether you are on a real battlefield or your work environment just feels like one, eating together is one of the easiest ways of building a greater sense of community and team spirit in the workplace. So as companies seek to rebuild a sense of community and help their staff to reconnect after months of forced distancing, reinstituting a formal lunch break—ideally at a set time—and encouraging workers to eat together should form part of their strategy. Especially as it has a clear business benefit.

I’m not suggesting a full-out Big Tech approach, with in-house cafeterias serving anything from fresh-caught Half Moon Bay rockfish to cayenne pepper ginger shots to beer-braised short ribs—most companies can’t afford that,56 and local cafés and grocery stores need customers. Even simple measures like providing a cozy room or outdoor space with a long communal table, or team leaders ordering take-out food in a conference room or organizing group trips to a nearby lunch spot can make a difference.57

More than anything, clear messaging from management to staff that a proper lunch break is not only permissible but actively encouraged will create conditions by which the long primal tradition of eating together becomes a regular part of working life again.

Just taking a break at the same time as other employees, whether for lunch or at another time, can make a big difference, for both morale and productivity. When MIT professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland conducted a detailed study of a U.S. bank’s call center, he found that the most productive teams were those who talked to each other the most outside of formal meetings, with face-to-face interactions being the most valuable. So he advised the center’s manager to revise the employees’ coffee-break schedule to ensure that everyone on a team could take their break at the same time and thereby have an opportunity to socialize with their teammates away from their workstations. The strategy paid off. Not only did the employees feel happier but the average handling time per call—a key metric of success in that sector—fell by one-fifth among lower-performing teams and around 8 percent overall. Interspersed with their social chat it turned out employees also shared effective work-related tips and hacks. As a result, the bank is now implementing this more-aligned break schedule across all ten of its call centers, a shift in strategy that will impact twenty-five thousand employees and is expected to result in $15 million of productivity gains as well as improved employee morale. Already where this simple change in approach has been tried, employee satisfaction has risen in some cases by more than 10 percent.58

Creating opportunities for informal socializing while social distancing is still required is of course a real challenge. It’s hard to have those water-cooler moments if the water cooler has been taped up and virtual breaks and hangouts don’t quite cut it in the same way. But as workplaces move beyond the coronavirus, it’s imperative that they recognize how compelling the business case for doing so is. Not only because connected employees are more productive, more committed, and less likely to leave but also because in the battle for the best talent—which won’t disappear even as higher unemployment levels endure—a workplace with the reputation for feeling friendly will stand out. This is especially so for Generation K, the next generation of employees, who are the loneliest in society and also the group craving connection the most.

But here’s the catch. While the majority of employees would rather work in a place where everyone’s kind and nice, in our neoliberal capitalist system kindness and niceness are, as we have seen, traits that are significantly undervalued: jobs that actively solicit such qualities, such as teaching, nursing, and social work, pay significantly below average.59 At the same time, women who are perceived as warm and friendly at work can find themselves “side-lined pretty easily, not be seen as power players or go-to people,” and “their skills can be overlooked,” according to Stanford senior research scholar Marianne Cooper, who has studied this phenomenon extensively.60

So if we want the workplace to feel less lonely, part of the challenge is explicitly valuing qualities such as kindness, cooperation, and collaboration. And not just saying that one does, but actually finding ways to reward and incentivize such behavior. One idea, recently adopted by Australian software company Atlassian, is to base employee evaluations not only on personal performance but also on how collaborative they are, the extent to which they actively seek out opportunities to help others, and how well they treat colleagues.61

Such an approach doesn’t entirely remove potential gender biases, however.62 Women are typically held to higher standards than men when it comes to helpfulness, especially for “office housework” such as organizing gatherings and clearing up, so being attuned to such biases is key.63 But placing an emphasis on these qualities when evaluating employee performance is an important step toward a more inclusive, warmer, and therefore more collaborative and less lonely workplace.

The global technology company Cisco takes this approach even further. They deploy two strategies, both to encourage collaboration and kindness and to actively reward these behaviors. The first, which they’ve been running for a number of years, is an initiative whereby any employee at any level in the company, from cleaner to CEO, can nominate another employee for a cash bonus ranging from $100 to $10,000 as recognition for being particularly helpful, kind, or collaborative.

One employee I spoke to, Emma, told me how she recently nominated one of her new hires simply for coming into the office each day with a big smile on her face. Tom, a manager based in Stowe, Vermont, told me of how he rewarded one of his team for helping new hires feel especially welcome, by spending time with them explaining the ropes. More recently, the company has also introduced “tokens of appreciation.” Again employee-driven, this program encourages digital tokens to be passed from employee to employee for acts of kindness or helpfulness or just to say thanks, a kind of virtual pat on the back. There’s no direct monetary reward here, but each time a token is passed on, a donation is made to charity.

A workplace in which people feel more appreciated for what they bring culturally as well as the hard dollars they contribute to the bottom line and one that actively encourages people to acknowledge and thank each other is inevitably one in which employees feel more connected—to their employer and to each other. Their pro-kindness schemes have undoubtedly played a part in Cisco being recently voted the best company in the world to work for.64

Making employees feel cared for, acknowledged as human beings, and not simply seen as cogs in the corporate machine is a strategy that clearly goes a long way. Especially as we derive much of our self-respect from the recognition that we receive from others, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown.65 And it doesn’t take much to achieve this. Even very small initiatives can make a real difference. A book editor at a major publishing house told me of an “amazing” manager who’d bring chocolate cookies to meetings with his team. Another publisher told me of a manager who stood out because he began each meeting acknowledging successes anyone in the team had had in the previous week and explicitly thanking them for this in the room. It was striking to me, and depressing, to see how out of the ordinary such behavior has become in the workplace.

All Work, No Play

Feelings of loneliness in our working lives can be traced to reasons beyond our physical environment or company culture, however. Many of us feel lonely at work because we’re lonely outside of it. After all, we don’t leave our feelings at home when we arrive at work. The trouble is that one of the reasons we’re so lonely is the long hours many of us now spend working. It’s a vicious cycle.

It is true that across whole populations, the average number of hours worked today is less in most places than it was a few decades ago.66 Yet certain groups are working significantly longer hours now. These include professionals, often with university educations.

In nearly every Western European country “extreme working hours” (more than fifty hours per week) has significantly increased among this group since 1990.67 In the United Kingdom, the longest hours are now worked by the most qualified.68 In Japan, so many white-collar workers have worked themselves to death—literally—that there’s even a name for it: karoshi.69 Meanwhile in China, starting work at 9 a.m., leaving at 9 p.m., and working six days a week is now so normal, especially among finance, tech, and e-commerce professionals, that there is a name for it too: “996.”70

With the cost of a middle-class existence significantly higher today than it was twenty years ago, for many these long hours are about making ends meet.71 Indeed, working long hours and juggling multiple jobs72 is increasingly commonplace among what we might think of as the vocational class, with many such professionals having no choice but to take on second or even third jobs. In the United Kingdom, a quarter of Royal College of Nursing members surveyed said they had taken an “additional paid job” to help pay everyday bills and living expenses.73 In the United States, one in five nurses do.74 Almost one in six U.S. teachers now has a second job, not just in the summer.75 While in Oregon, Uber now has so many teachers working for the company that it notifies riders on the app when their driver is an “UberEducator,” with a book emoji by the driver’s name.76 If the COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything, it is that moving forward it is essential that those who care for others are not only better appreciated for what they do but also paid considerably more.

Yet there are others for whom the motivation to work long hours is driven less by necessity and more by cultural or social norms. Take China’s “996” practice. It’s one that Chinese billionaire and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma actively endorses. “I personally think that 996 is a huge blessing,” posted Ma on Alibaba’s WeChat account. “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?” Ma went on to add that those who work shorter hours “won’t taste the happiness and rewards of hard work.”

I hear what Ma is saying. I’m no slacker. And putting in the hours can pay off for people, not only financially—in the United States, over a third of those earning $110,000 and above work at least a sixty-hour week—but also in terms of personal satisfaction and fulfillment.77 Yet the trouble with all these long hours, whether they are out of necessity or choice, is that they do more than exhaust us. They also make us lonely.

For all that, time at work or working at home means ever less time to spend with loved ones and friends, and fewer opportunities to connect with and contribute to our communities; less time, energy, or bandwidth to invest in relationships, enjoy our neighborhoods, or care for our loved ones, even in times of need. In the United Kingdom, 22 percent of people say they have missed special occasions due to being too busy working.78 In the United States, almost 50 percent of people describe being so exhausted by their work that they are unmotivated to socialize after hours.79

The losers in all of this are of course our families. Typical is Colorado high school teacher Kelsey Brown. “Burnt out” by her own admission, up most days at 4 a.m., she coaches lacrosse, runs an exchange program, and works at a summer camp, all on top of her day job, just so she can pay her bills. Brown is often still at school until 8 p.m. This means that despite being recently married, she finds herself able to spend only half an hour every evening with her husband, if that.80

The same goes for many people’s relationships with their parents. “We all know to cherish our elderly parents, but sometimes we are just too busy trying to make a living,” wrote one Chinese professional on the social media site Weibo. He is not alone; by 2013 this phenomenon had become so pervasive that the Chinese government made “parental neglect” a punishable offense in response to so few working adult children visiting their elderly parents.

Always On

Even if we don’t physically stay at work all those hours, this problem is likely to still hold true. For many of us, our jobs have become inescapable on the weekends, in the evenings, and even on vacation, because of that repeat offender, our smartphones. Paul, a private equity fund manager, tells me of how it would simply be “impossible” for him not to check his emails every day, even when he’s on a long-planned family holiday in the Caribbean. Claudia, a cleaner who juggles forty homes across North London, tells me her clients will regularly call as late as 2 a.m., with such “urgent” missives as “Could you take in my coat to the dry cleaner’s tomorrow?” or “Remember to clean the oven.”

For the self-employed worker whose earning power is increasingly precarious, there’s often no choice but to respond, while in some companies the corporate culture is such that everyone’s expected to be “always on.” During the busy holiday season at trendy luggage start-up Away, according to one highly publicized story, a customer experience manager asked her team to send her a selfie of themselves working. She sent this request at 1 a.m.81 While the media backlash against the culture at Away was fierce, the reality is that this type of behavior is celebrated at many companies.

Digital technology has collapsed the boundaries between our working and personal lives, with many workers feeling that they have to go along with these new rules of engagement or risk the disappointment or disapproval of their bosses. Yet many of us must also ask questions of ourselves when it comes to how complicit we are in this always-on, always-working culture that the digital age has enabled. Is it our demanding boss that’s “making us” open that email at the dinner table or our own digital addiction and dopamine craving? And could it be that sometimes we do have a choice, it’s just that we are wary of exercising it? Perhaps we mistakenly think we would look less than committed if we didn’t answer that email out of hours; or maybe in an age in which slogans such as “hustle harder” and “rise and grind” are not ironic but aspirational, it’s that many of us have come to see our own worth as being so fundamentally intertwined with our productivity and how much we earn that we put the demands of our workplace before everything else.82

Whatever the reason, the upshot is that many of us find ourselves responding to bosses, clients, and colleagues during family time, school plays, and even in bed late at night, when in reality our reply could wait until we are back at work the following day—and despite the fact that this disruption of our precious time with family and friends renders us more disconnected, not only at work but in our private lives, too. Relationships take time to nurture. Care can’t be delivered on the fly. And to feel part of a community, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, one has to actively engage with it. The pressures of twenty-first-century work combined with the ubiquity of digital communications means that all this is ever harder to realize.

And those of us—mea culpa—for whom work and our emails have the habit of taking over all God-given hours but do have a meaningful choice as to whether we allow them to need to at least acknowledge that by doing so we’re making a tradeoff—and ask ourselves whether it’s a tradeoff really worth making. At times it may be, but always?

We need to become more acutely aware of the high cost of our digital addictions, just as our employers need to see the consequences of an always-on work culture: for employees’ mental health, for productivity, for decision-making, and for creativity.83

At some innovative companies, management and workers are trying to draw some lines at least. As early as 2011, Volkswagen employees’ work council (similar to union reps) successfully campaigned for the company to program its BlackBerry servers to stop routing emails half an hour after work-shift end times.84 In 2014, Daimler, another German car company, instituted a policy whereby emails sent to employees on vacation would be automatically deleted.85 While in 2018, the European bargain supermarket chain Lidl banned work emails from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. and over the weekend in some of its markets in a bid to improve its employees’ work-life balance.

In the U.K. offices of Warner Music Group, a global recorded music company with over four thousand employees whose artists include Ed Sheeran, Lizzo, Coldplay, and Bruno Mars, management took a different tack.86 Concerned at how the always-on culture was not only potentially zapping creativity but also stopping employees from interacting with one another face-to-face, the company instigated a program of events in 2015 to educate staff on the downside of their excessive digital communications. After an internal audit of email traffic found that around 40 percent of emails came from inside the building, staff were actively encouraged to email less and speak to each other more. Signs signaling that mobile phones were not permitted to be out in meetings were pasted on walls, and drawers with charging stations were provided for mobile phones to be placed in during meetings. Training was provided to the younger, Generation K employees to help them better organize their work before they went on vacation, so that they would be less likely to be needed when they were off. It turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that for a generation used to being always-on, planning for being uncontactable was simply not something they’d ever thought about—or been trained to do. And management set the tone from the top, with senior leaders encouraged to explicitly state they were on vacation on their out-of-office email messages and to provide alternative contacts for the duration of their time off.

In some places, the government has even weighed in. In France, for example, workers at companies with more than fifty employees have a “right to disconnect” that has been legally guaranteed since January 1, 2017.87 In practice what this means is that businesses must negotiate with their employees about after-hours availability and face fines if they require employees to respond to communications after regular or stipulated working hours or retaliate against workers who fail to do so.88 Spain adopted similar legislation in 2018 and legislatures in the Philippines, the Netherlands, India, Canada, and New York City are considering various versions.89 While advocates of such laws see them as a welcome and necessary step to help stymie employee burnout, they are undeniably a blunt response. Some workers fear that they will result in them having to stay even longer in the office; others that they would feel more anxious trying to keep up with emails during their workday; a few consider this degree of micromanagement disempowering.90 And of course, the privilege of “disconnection” is yet another benefit unavailable to the growing swathe of gig economy workers—by which I mean those whose employ is facilitated via apps or online platforms, companies as various as TaskRabbit or Uber—for whom every hour disconnected means an hour with no chance to earn.91 Just as screen-free schools and phone-free nannies epitomize the new digital divide between wealthy and poor children, guaranteeing the “right to disconnect” for employees with stable, high-paying jobs does nothing for the self-employed, who are often the ones whose very livelihood is dependent on constant connection.

Paid to Care

Recognizing the interplay between loneliness at work and loneliness at home, employers could also do a much better job of acknowledging their employees as human beings with responsibilities outside of the workplace, whose mental and physical health is significantly affected by their ability to nurture and retain their external relationships and bonds. This has not been the general direction of travel.

Justin Kwan, a former analyst in Barclays’ Global Power and Utilities Group in New York, recalled the time an intern requested a weekend off for a family reunion. He was permitted to go. But that was not the end of the story. “He was also asked to hand in his BlackBerry and pack up his desk.”92 In the United Kingdom, a report by the Trades Union Congress found that two in five young parents who ask for flexible work arrangements are “penalized” with fewer hours, less desirable shifts, or even the loss of their job, and that many parents have been told to take sick leave or holiday days to cover childcare and have been refused leave even to cover an emergency.93

Looking after ourselves, let alone others, is challenging in a neoliberal world. In the United States, nearly a quarter of adults have been fired or threatened with unemployment for taking time off to recover from illness or to care for a sick loved one.94 Employers have to rethink as a matter of urgent priority how it is that all their employees, not just those in the office, are enabled to deliver support, kindness, and care. And the current economic climate cannot be used as a justification for retaining the status quo or even going backward.

Again, it doesn’t have to be this way, and there are some examples already out there of companies helping employees manage their dual roles as workers and family caregivers by offering more flexible working arrangements and increasing opportunities for part-time work. Although this may not always be the best solution. There is a significant body of research that shows that part-time workers are less likely to be promoted than their full-time colleagues.95 Given women make up the majority of part-time workers, what seems on the surface like a positive move can therefore end up being another blow to gender equality.96

Perhaps instead of focusing on the provision of part-time employment as the way forward, companies could provide a number of paid “care” days for any employee to take, much as new mothers and fathers in many companies are given paid parental leave. These days could be used to care for a child or a friend or a relative, or even to do something to contribute to the local community. There is precedent here. In 2019 the United Kingdom’s biggest energy company, Centrica, introduced an additional ten days of paid leave for its employees who are caring for their aging parents or other loved ones with disabilities.97 Such moves can serve a financial purpose as well as a compassionate one: the company estimates that such policies would save the United Kingdom’s largest companies £4.8 billion ($5.9 billion) that they would otherwise lose to unplanned absences when caregivers need to deal with emergencies. Nationwide Building Society offers its employees two days a year to dedicate to helping their local communities. The U.S.-based technology giant Salesforce goes even further—its staff are provided up to seven days of paid volunteer time per year.98

Meanwhile, in 2019, Microsoft ran an experiment in its Japan office in which it gave the entire 2,300-person workforce five Fridays off in a row, without decreasing pay. It also provided each employee with financial support of up to 100,000 yen (about $940) to spend on taking a family trip. The results were astounding. Not only were workers happier but meetings became more efficient, absenteeism fell by 25 percent, and productivity shot up a staggering 40 percent. At the same time, fewer workers in the office meant significant cost savings and environmental benefits: during the trial period, electricity use decreased by 23 percent, and 59 percent fewer pages of paper were printed.99

Such examples give hope. They show that there are innovative and effective ways to tackle employee loneliness, not only in the workplace but also outside of it. And that the companies that employ these kinds of strategies can enjoy both a happier workforce and bottom-line benefits. While such policies might feel like luxuries your company cannot afford, we cannot allow the economic consequences of COVID-19 to further institutionalize selfishness in society. Care and capitalism need to be reconciled.

Yet the loneliness of work is not only about feeling disconnected from the people we work with, whether our colleagues or our boss. It’s also about feeling bereft of agency, feeling powerless. As we will see, in the age of the machine this is ever more likely to be so.

Computer Says No

This may sound like an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, yet within just a few years it is expected that these kind of virtual interviews will be the norm. Algorithmic “pre-hire assessments,” as they are called, are already a multi-billion-dollar business and are likely to become a fixture of corporate hiring decisions.1 HireVue—the company conducting my interview—is one of the leaders in the field. Headquartered along the banks of the Jordan River in Utah, its clients include seven hundred blue-chip companies, from Hilton Hotels to J.P. Morgan to Unilever. I am just one of over 10 million potential employees HireVue’s algorithms have already assessed on the basis of similar video interviews.2

This is how their artificial intelligence technology works: deploying the next frontier of AI—“emotional AI”—it “reads” job candidates by analyzing their lexicon, tone, cadence, and facial expressions, taking into account as many as twenty-five thousand separate data points. The results are then compared to those of an “ideal” candidate for the role. In practice what this means is that each breath I take, each pause, the height I raise my eyebrows, how tightly I clench my jaw, how broad my smile, my choice of words, how loudly I speak, my posture, how many times I say um or er, my accent, even my preposition usage are all being recorded and fed into a black box algorithm to determine whether or not I am a suitable hire for Vodafone’s graduate trainee program. Or rather, not me, but “Irina Wertz,” my undercover pseudonym.

Algorithmic pre-hire assessments are undeniably a cost-effective solution to hiring needs at scale. Given that big corporations receive well over one hundred thousand applicants each year, the use of this technology is likely already saving thousands of man-hours. Moreover, HireVue claims that retention rates and even job performance among employees selected by their system are significantly higher than average. This may be so, yet my experience of the process felt more than a little alienating.

The fact that I had to keep my on-screen torso firmly within a dotted-line silhouette throughout the interview meant that not only did I feel like a murder victim in a crime scene, but I couldn’t be my authentic self. Some degree of inauthenticity is of course inevitable in all job interviews, given that one tries to present a crafted, best-possible version of oneself, but this was different. I am an expressive person—I move when I speak, I gesticulate. Stuck in my silhouette, I couldn’t even do that. And because as I replied to the questions I was watching myself do so in the corner of the screen, the experience felt especially performative, with me cast in the disquieting role of both actor and audience.

At the top right of the screen was a countdown clock which added to the stressful nature of the experience. I was allocated three minutes to answer each question, but flying blind without all the usual cues one gets from a human interviewer—facial expressions, head movements, gestures, smiles, frowns—I wasn’t sure whether I was going on too long, or whether I was expected to use up all of the time. And not only did I have no one to ask, but with no smiles, no eyes darting down to my CV, no body language to parse, I couldn’t tell if my “interviewer” had heard enough of a particular answer, liked what I was saying, understood my jokes, empathized with my stories, or maybe had just decided that I was not the kind of candidate they were looking for. So as the interview proceeded, I felt increasingly adrift, unable to figure out whether to keep going, slow down, shift gears, change tack, alter my style, smile more, smile less. Presumably the ideal candidate for a graduate traineeship in human resources at Vodafone smiles, but how many times and for how long?

To be clear, it wasn’t that I was interacting with a machine per se that made me feel so alienated. Rather, it was the power imbalance between woman and machine that was so troubling. Stripped of my full, complex humanity, I had to impress a machine whose black-box algorithmic workings I could never know. Which of my “data points” was it focusing on and which was it weighting the most heavily? My voice, my intonation, my body language, or the content of what I was saying? What formula was it using to assess me? And was it fair?

We don’t normally think about loneliness in the context of how an interaction with a machine makes us feel. Even earlier in the book, when I talked about the isolation of a contactless existence, my emphasis was on the lack of face-to-face human contact and its impact. But if loneliness can also be caused by a feeling of being unfairly treated and disempowered by the state and by politicians, so too can it stem from being treated as such by Big Business and the new technologies it deploys.

For when an employer puts our professional futures in the hands of an algorithm, it is hard to believe that we’ll be treated fairly or have meaningful recourse. In part this is because it is highly contestable as to whether future performance can actually be determined by characteristics such as facial expressions and tone of voice. Indeed, in November 2019 the Electronic Privacy Information Center—a renowned U.S. public interest research organization—filed a formal complaint against HireVue with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, citing HireVue’s “use of secret, unproven algorithms to assess the ‘cognitive ability,’ ‘psychological traits,’ ‘emotional intelligence,’ and ‘social aptitudes’ of job candidates.”3

There’s also the question of bias. For although HireVue claims its methodology gets rid of human bias, this is unlikely to be so.4 This is because its algorithm will have been trained on video footage of past or existing “successful hires,” which means that any historic biases (conscious or unconscious) in hiring would likely be replicated.5

This is in fact precisely what happened at Amazon in 2018, when it was revealed that the company’s artificial-intelligence CV-sorter was routinely rejecting women’s CVs, despite never being “told” the applicants’ gender. Why? It had effectively taught itself that applications that included the names of all-women colleges or even the word women’s (“captain of the women’s chess team,” for example) were unqualified.6 This was because it had been trained to deduce whether applicants were “qualified” or “unqualified” on the basis of ten years of hiring data in an industry where men make up the vast majority of applicants and hires. Needless to say, there were very few captains of women’s chess teams in that group.

Adjusting an algorithm to address biases as obvious as gender is relatively straightforward; indeed, Amazon’s engineers were easily able to edit the model to stop using terms like women’s as a reason for disqualification. But the challenge with machine learning is that even if the most obvious sources of bias are accounted for (and doubtless are, in a system like HireVue), what about less obvious, neutral-seeming data points that one might not even consider could be biased? It turns out, for example, that there are significant cultural differences when it comes to smiling.7 Americans, for instance, smile much more often and more widely than people from countries such as Finland, Japan, and Germany—a stereotype backed up by research that suggests smiling correlates with a country’s historical diversity.8 In fact, the American instinct to smile and make eye contact is so noticeable that when Walmart opened its first stores in Germany in 1998, it had to scrap its tried-and-tested requirement that employees smile at customers, as Germans interpreted a wide grin as inappropriately flirty.9 Given these kinds of disparities, HireVue’s assumption that smiling translates to friendliness, confidence, and, for some jobs, competence risks judging candidates by the values of a particular nation or culture, thereby penalizing those who, say, believe frequent smiling is inappropriate in an interview setting.10 We could make the same critique of HireVue’s likely interpretation of cadence and vocabulary: word choice is as much a product of regionality, education, ethnicity, dialect, and class as it is so-called “intelligence.” Just as Amazon’s CV-sorter rapidly “learned” to associate proxy measures of gender (such as the word women’s) with unsuitability, it’s all too easy to imagine HireVue’s algorithm tossing aside applicants with certain accents, colloquialisms, and other products of their cultural background.

Then of course there are those variables that a human could recognize and account for in an instant but that the machine’s pattern-matching process is unable to understand: the person with the facial deformity who can’t smile in a conventional way, perhaps; the person with a speech impediment who doesn’t sound like previous star hires; or even the candidate whose bright ceiling lights cast noticeable shadows on his face that the “machine eye” interprets as a malevolent facial expression.

It’s not that a human hiring manager might not be biased or discriminate in an interview against someone of color, with a particular accent, or with a disability, even if they are not conscious that they are doing so.11 The point here is that the presumption that a decision made by an algorithm would not be as vulnerable to similar biases is simply wrong and speaks to the blind faith we all too often have in machines over humans.

Moreover, as algorithms become ever more sophisticated, their data sets ever larger, their rules ever more complex, intricate, and self-taught, it becomes ever harder to make sense of exactly how or why they arrive at their conclusions. Already we’ve actually reached the point where some algorithms’ own makers can’t fully explain what lies behind their decisions.12 And if we don’t understand enough about how an algorithm really works to be able to anticipate how it could fail, it’s extremely hard to put effective safeguards in place.

As algorithmic decision-making assumes ever greater importance in all of our lives—from deciding whether we’re eligible for a loan to whether the police stop and search us to whether we’re hired or even fired (yes, an algorithm that “predicts future contributions” and calculates who should be let go during periods of redundancies will “most certainly be introduced” soon, according to professors at the IESE Business School in Spain)—the opacity of these algorithms and therefore the difficulties posed in challenging their decisions, let alone attempting to reverse erroneous ones, will inevitably exacerbate our feelings of powerlessness.13 And loneliness thrives in the vacuum powerlessness creates. For, as we have seen, it is lonely and isolating to feel that your destiny is something you have no control over.

There was something else that I found profoundly alienating about this one-way interrogation: even though during this virtual interview I was being watched in a more precise way than perhaps I’d ever been watched before, I felt surprisingly invisible. For whom exactly were they scrutinizing? Me? Or a one-dimensional pixelated me, cut up and carved up into those twenty-five thousand data points—a version of me that inevitably would be incapable of capturing the depths of my experience, story, and personality?

This feeling was reinforced by the fact that even though I’d really opened up in the interview and talked very frankly about personal challenges I’d overcome, things I had not only achieved but also struggled with, it was only a few minutes after my interview that I received an email with my character assessment—an assessment so generic and bland that it was obvious that although I’d been speaking, I hadn’t been heard.14

Here is an extract of a key section of the assessment:

You demonstrate the capacity to readily change actions, opinions or behavior, and handle ambiguity well.

Be sure you pay attention to context to evaluate when a situation may call for more structure versus flexibility.

You are able to deliver on what is asked of you with high work standards.

Try to be open to situations that may not require you to be as thorough to balance your persistence with efficiency when necessary.

This could have been written about anyone at all; it seemed utterly disconnected from the “interview” I had just given.

And I couldn’t escape the irony that I was applying for a job in human resources, yet there was no human interaction whatsoever in the interview process. Indeed, one of HireVue’s biggest clients, Hilton International, has rejected tens of thousands of applicants using this type of interview without the applicant ever having spoken to a human being.15 “Irina Wertz” falls into the category of rejected applicant as well. Six weeks after taking the assessment “she” learned, via email, that “Unfortunately, on this occasion, we’re not able to progress your application.”

Powerless, invisible, and vulnerable, feeling that I was being judged against rules that no one had articulated, that might well be unfair or biased and against which I had no recourse—these were some of the feelings my HireVue interview inspired. No wonder the process felt so alienating. And, of course, I was only doing this as an experiment and thus didn’t feel the additional stress and strain that this would cause a genuine applicant.

My experience was also a symptom of a bigger story. For we are in the midst of the most significant reorganization of work since the Industrial Revolution, one in which power is being increasingly ceded to technology—not only to hiring algorithms but also to reputational rating mechanisms and robots, to surveillance tools and tracking devices, and in turn to those who control these levers. All this is fundamentally alienating and contributes to why this is the Lonely Century.

Every Breath You Take

For Jane, a call-center worker in Wales, it’s the small blue box at the corner of her computer screen that reminds her she is always being watched and that her behavior is constantly being logged.16 With her audio recorded, she knows that if she talks too fast a speedometer will appear to give her a warning. If she’s not “empathetic” enough, a heart icon will pop up. And if she feels uncomfortable with an artificial-intelligence program judging her human interactions, well, it’s too bad because Cogito, the technology monitoring her, will send an alert to central management if she tries to turn it off or minimize it on her screen.17

For Jack, an associate at Bank of America, it’s his Humanyze biometric ID badge that collects data every sixteen milliseconds that makes him constantly aware he is being surveilled.18 Not only are his conversations recorded, so too are his movements: the angle of his chair as he leans back, the amount he talks, his tone of voice.19 By analyzing all of these data points against how he performs and conducting this type of analysis on multiple “Jacks” across the firm, his employers hope they can identify those habits, however minuscule, that make for more productive employees.

For Reynalda Cruz, a forty-two-year old FedEx warehouse worker, it was the computerized scanner she was required to wear on her arm to track her packaging pace that felt so fundamentally dehumanizing. When her wrist became inflamed from the repeated movement of lifting boxes with the extra weight of the scanner, co-workers told her to take Tylenol. Her metrics-consumed managers took a different tack. They instructed her to pick up the pace.20

Meanwhile, Amazon recently won two patents for a wristband that can monitor every movement of its wearer, with the capacity to vibrate when it senses that a worker has stepped out of line. The wristband could be used to identify every time an employee paused to scratch an itch or to time how long it takes them to go to the bathroom.21 Already at Amazon warehouses, “pickers”—the workers who locate purchased items and transport them to the shipping station within the warehouse—are issued a handheld device that tracks their every move. As journalist James Bloodworth, who worked undercover as a picker at an Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, Staffordshire, explained: “For every dozen or so workers, somewhere in the warehouse a line manager would be huddled over a desk tapping orders into a computer screen. These instructions would filter through to our devices: ‘Your rates are down this hour. Please speed up.’ ” And Bloodworth poignantly described colleagues “so busy running around that they don’t even have time to wipe the sweat from their faces.”22

These are not exceptional stories. Even before the coronavirus struck, over half of global companies with more than one thousand employees were using “non-traditional techniques to monitor staff, including tracking keystrokes, monitoring email conversations and even monitoring conversations between staff.”23 “User-activity monitoring”—UAM, as this new world of workplace surveillance is known—was on track to be a $3.3 billion industry by 2023.24 Now, with a rapid rise in remote working as a result of the pandemic, as well as increased emphasis on productivity, worker surveillance has significantly ramped up.

We are living in an age that Shoshana Zuboff has called the “Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”25 An age in which for increasing numbers of people your employer is not only constantly watching you, but constantly using AI, Big Data, and a whole host of ever more intrusive and granular measuring devices to draw all kinds of conclusions about you. Such conclusions can determine your career trajectory, including whether you will be promoted or fired, yet they are all too often based on data that is absent of context and doesn’t take into account extenuating circumstances.

Reynalda’s FedEx managers told her to pick up her speed even though she had an inflamed wrist, because the machine measures pace, not the pain she is feeling. In the Age of the Panopticon Workplace, what’s not measured does not matter. And what is measured inordinately does.

Escaping the physical workspace doesn’t mean escaping surveillance either. Apps such as WorkSmart, which constantly score remote workers on “focus” and “intensity,” using screenshots, application monitoring, and keystroke tallying to do so, have been gaining in popularity for the past few years.26 WorkSmart-monitored workers even have their photo taken every ten minutes to ensure they’re staying on task.27 Again, the coronavirus has greatly accelerated this trend. From banks to insurance companies, from law firms to social media companies, employers, concerned that their newly working-from-home staff might be slacking, invested heavily in the spring of 2020 in surveillance software. Some suppliers of remote worker monitoring systems reported as much as a 300 percent increase in sales in April 2020.28 Will the software be removed from employees’ laptops once they return to the office? I wouldn’t bet on it.

It’s not only employee performance that’s being monitored from afar, and not only enhanced productivity that’s the goal. Even the most personal aspects of workers’ lives are now being recorded and monitored. In 2018 Katie Endicott, a high school English teacher in West Virginia, was required to download a “workplace wellness” app called Go365 as her employer sought to lower their health insurance costs. The app monitored her exercise and health, granting points for good behavior such as steps walked and charging fines ($500 per year) for failing to accrue enough wellness “points.”29

With health and safety as well as cost cutting ever more central in employers’ minds, might we now see the tracking power of such apps extended to, for example, the constant monitoring of employees’ temperatures? Even if this might help reduce disease transmission in the workplace, who should decide whether this degree of intrusiveness is acceptable? And what sort of accountability should there be, both for employers imposing these apps on their employees and for the companies that profit from selling them, including around issues of data privacy?

The language used by employees to describe what it feels like to be under constant surveillance makes clear just how alienating an experience it is. “They were measuring our time, our production, as if we were robots,” said Reynalda Cruz, the FedEx employee.30 “People felt that [it] was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information,” said Katie of her Go365 experience. James Bloodworth described to me the incredulity he felt when, at the end of a long day in which he, a fit and healthy young guy, had been working flat out, he was told that he was in the bottom 10 percent of productivity. And he explained the profound sense of powerlessness he felt when he realized there was no way of establishing whether this was true, given that he had no access to the raw data and that there were no worker representatives with powers of oversight.

Bloodworth told me, too, of the loneliness of not being able to talk to co-workers at the water fountain, or even as he “picked” alongside them, because such behavior was deemed by his scanner as “idle time”—as was using the bathroom—and thus potentially a cause for disciplinary action. He is not alone in finding this kind of digital observation deeply unsettling. “The totality was horrible,” recalls Courtney Hagen Ford, who described her surveillance experience when working as a bank teller in the United Kingdom as “dehumanizing.”31 Her next step? To pursue a doctorate in surveillance technology.32

Being constantly assessed, profiled, and sorted without having control over the process, access to your data, or real insight into the machine’s deductive method is a fundamentally alienating experience that speaks once again to a massive information and power asymmetry between employer and employee. Especially because what is being monitored and measured is whatever most crudely adds to the bottom line. For health and safety concerns notwithstanding, that’s what this is usually all about: companies are surveilling their staff to eke out competitive advantage. The trouble is that no one is measuring how kind you are to a fellow employee who is having a bad day or whether you’ve gone out of your way to help a new colleague learn the ropes, even though, as we saw in the previous chapter, such factors can significantly impact productivity and performance as well as workplace morale. In a world in which ever more power is being ceded to numbers, we need to think much more rigorously about what is being measured, why, and how, and also about the limitations of data when it comes to assessing our contribution at work.

Under the Radar

It’s not just that the surveillance workplace exacerbates feelings of powerlessness and alienation. Like the open-plan office but on steroids, it also incentivizes employees to self-censor and withdraw.

This is exactly what Boston University sociologist Michel Anteby found when he studied the organizational practices within the Transportation Security Administration in the United States, which is in charge of airport security. As an example, he observed that the employees working at luggage-screening stations who were constantly video-recorded by their supervisors, would “do everything possible to stay under the radar, to essentially disappear….They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get noticed by management.”33

In an environment of constant surveillance, our instinct is to withdraw into ourselves, isolate ourselves from those around us, and try to slip out from under the watchful gaze of our employer to whatever degree possible.34 The trouble is, as Anteby observed, “This leads to a vicious cycle, whereby management grows more suspicious and feels justified in ratcheting up the surveillance.”35 The result is employees who hide from the cameras and each other. They become less and less present, and less and less truly themselves at work.

’Twas Always So—Kinda

In many ways, surveillance in the workplace isn’t new.36

In the 1850s, Allan Pinkerton notoriously made his fortune by establishing a detective agency that tracked employee movements after-hours and infiltrated nascent unions.37 By 1914, Henry Ford was famously patrolling his factories with a stopwatch to ensure maximum efficiency on his automobile assembly lines.38 By the 1990s, video surveillance of workers, both to prevent theft but also to establish whether employees were complying with company policies or simply working fast enough, was increasingly commonplace.39 As industrialization moved production further and further away from artisanship and as workers became less personally known to employers and thus were less trusted, surveillance kept pace.40

In the twenty-first century, what is new, however, are the following three things: the extent to which we’re being monitored, the disturbing levels of intrusiveness that digital technology makes possible, and the degree to which decision-making powers have been ceded to machines. Once again, it’s a matter of scale. For whereas “previously, workplace surveillance was discrete, limited to the gaze of the supervisor, and confined to the workplace,” as Oxford University political scientist Ivan Manokha writes, it is now “omnipresent as electronic devices and sensors continuously gather and process digital data on employee performance in real time, even (and often) outside of the workplace.”41

Under constant surveillance, viewed in ever more mechanistic terms, less able to be ourselves and talk openly with our colleagues, feeling increasingly distrusted, we become more vigilant, self-censoring, and withdrawn and are fearful to reveal our true selves. As a result we inevitably feel both lonelier and more disconnected from our employer, our work, and those around us.

Yet despite this, growing numbers of employees, contractors, and freelancers around the world are finding that they have to accept increasing levels of intrusive monitoring if they want to keep their jobs. For the fact that this kind of surveillance is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and we’re not rising up in arms should not be taken as tacit consent. Instead, it speaks to the sense of resignation so many now feel, born from a growing sense of powerlessness when it comes to workplace rights. In a world in which large global corporations all too often set the rules of engagement, unemployment levels are high, and most workers lack representation or collective voice,42 what options do people have if they don’t want to be monitored?43 For many, the answer is none. The Amazon warehouse where James Bloodworth worked was by far the biggest employer in town.

I’ll Give You a 4

Surveillance and algorithmic decision-making are not the only reasons why the twenty-first-century workplace feels so alienating. Another is the increasing number of workers who are not just being watched but also rated; that is, a number affixed to their personas and their efforts that supposedly encapsulates their worth. It’s not difficult to see why being viewed as a number or a score, rather than as a human being, could make someone feel invisible and lonely.

In some cases, it’s your fellow employees rating you. At Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, employees use an app called Dots to rate each other in real time on more than one hundred traits, from “synthesizing through time” to “higher-level thinking.” Monitors display every participants’ “dots” on the wall during meetings (which are, of course, recorded). As if this weren’t demoralizing enough, when it comes to decision-making, votes from people with higher ratings are given more weight.44

You might think that this is not so different from the standard annual 360 appraisal you might receive at your workplace—but how many of us see this feedback illuminated on the office walls for all of our fellow employees to judge and get treated by colleagues as a second-class citizen on its basis? Moreover, what Bridgewater’s founder Ray Dalio calls “idea meritocracy” can translate to a “toxic” environment “if you’re not wired just so,” according to employee reviews.45 “People are afraid of making mistakes and to look good know they have to criticize others,” commented one anonymous employee.46 It is “very hard to develop authentic work relationships,” said another, in a place where, according to a Business Insider exposé, “employees [are] often rewarded for backstabbing.”47 Almost a third of new employees leave within a year.48

While for now at least rating your fellow colleagues at work on a continuous basis is the exception, the inescapable reality is that growing numbers of workers are being constantly rated—but by clients instead. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gig economy. In this environment, agreeing to being rated is often a condition of “employment.”

An estimated fifty to sixty million workers are already part of the global gig economy.49 In the United Kingdom, the gig economy doubled in size between 2016 and 2019, and if current trends continue, by 2027 as many as one in three Americans will support themselves through gig work via online platforms.50 Given these figures, better understanding the factors that contribute to the alienation of gig economy workers is imperative.

It’s not that the gig economy has no advantages. Like remote working, the flexibility it offers is undoubtedly both precious and empowering for many.51 Yet for others, the experience of being rated (coupled with an absence of secure wages, sickness pay, holiday leave, and insurance, and often with an extremely low hourly pay rate) can feel profoundly disempowering.52 This is more likely to be the case if you are a gig economy worker by circumstance, not choice.

It was Hasheem, another of the Uber drivers I interviewed to better understand the loneliness of the gig economy worker, who specifically alerted me to the alienating effects of being rated. A first-generation immigrant to the United Kingdom from the Indian subcontinent, Hasheem had been working as an Uber driver for the previous eight months. He told me that he found working for the company very lonely and explained why, counterintuitively, a job that appeared to demand so much interaction with passengers to him felt so isolating: “When I went to my onboarding session I was told to avoid talking about religion, politics, or sport in case it offends the person riding in the back. As I can’t risk offending a passenger because of how they might rate me, most of the time I am silent.”

It’s disturbing to think that Hasheem’s work environment is one in which he feels unable to speak for hours on end for fear of receiving a low rating and thus being kicked off the platform. It speaks to a bigger problem with rating mechanisms.53 For by reducing someone to a number, the trouble is not only that they are at risk of feeling alienated from their real selves as they self-censor, self-silence, and genuflect in order to get a high score but also that, once again, the metrics provide no sense of context. A 2 given for genuinely poor service has the same consequences as a 2 given because the customer was in a bad mood or indeed a 2 given by a racist customer because of the color of someone’s skin.

And just as with the “algorithmic pre-hiring assessments,” the opacity of these rating systems means that bias is neither spotted nor challenged. This is especially concerning given the extent to which racial and gender biases impact ratings; for example, black and Asian workers receive lower ratings than Caucasians on the freelancer platform Fiverr, while on TaskRabbit, clients regularly assign black “Taskers” (particularly men) lower scores than nonblack workers with similar levels of experience.54

Moreover, rating mechanisms don’t just occlude bias; they risk amplifying it. For it is a known fact that people are prone to anchoring someone’s rating on the published rating already attributed to them.55 What this means is that if you see that someone has a low rating, rather than interrogating why this may be so and committing to make your decision on the actual facts, you’re more likely to simply rate them low yourself.

As increasing numbers of workers become dependent on gig economy platforms for income, the fact that their livelihood is based on a single metric that’s so fundamentally problematic is very disturbing, especially when in most cases there is no effective process to appeal an “unfair” rating.56

While being dependent on such platforms to earn a living is currently more likely if you fall into the low-income bracket, it’s not only the lowest-paid workers who are vulnerable.57 Pete, a former journalist who left his full-time job for the gig economy’s promise of freedom and now seeks out freelance copywriting work on Upwork, described how servile the “gig economy” has made him. “I feel like a Labrador begging for treats….Please like me, please like me, give me a good rating and review!” And does that make you feel lonely? I ask him. “Yes,” he replied, “it undoubtably does. Especially as there have been times I’ve been rated really low for work that’s been really good and there was nothing I could do.” Loneliness and powerlessness, as we have seen, are emotions that feed each other.

The Rigged Economy

Of course, it’s not just because they are being rated or otherwise surveilled, logged, or digitally whipped that gig economy workers can feel so voiceless, disregarded, and powerless; nor are they the only constituency whose employ makes them feel that life is rigged. Even before COVID-19 upended the global economy and made explicit that we weren’t by any means in it together, many workers were already feeling that in a dog-eat-dog world they were very much on their own. A range of factors in recent decades contributed to this: the fact that in the United States, CEO pay had increased by 930 percent since 1978, while the average worker’s wages had grown by only 11.9 percent; the fact that the rules of the game seemed dictated ever more by large global corporations at a time that workers’ voices and rights were being diminished; the fact that in the United Kingdom one in eight adults in employment were, already in 2018, classified as working poor and 850,000 people were on zero-hour contracts (not knowing how many hours they’ll be working each week or even if they’ll get any hours at all); the fact that many millions of people across much of the world were stuck at the turn of the decade in low-paid, low-status jobs with no opportunity for advancement.58

Over a hundred years ago, Karl Marx cautioned in his theory of alienation that workers lacking control over the means of production and reaping limited rewards from their hard work would feel disconnected not only from the process and product of their labor but also from their fellow workers, the workplaces, and their very selves.59 Even before the economic downturn of 2020, a new set of working conditions had created a very similar effect. Technological advances, impacting how people work and for whom, while not the only factor, play an ever greater part in this.

In the same way that labor legislation traditionally moved in lockstep with industrialization—ever since the United Kingdom’s Factory Act of 1833, which prohibited the employment of children under the age of nine, we’ve seen workers in most countries steadily gain legal protections—we urgently need a new body of labor laws that protect workers from those work practices new to this century that are rendering them increasingly voiceless and powerless. And again, we cannot allow the current economic climate to inhibit progress on this front—or, worse, precipitate a slide backward. Worker rights were significantly eroded during the recession that followed the 2008 global financial crisis.60 We must not allow this to be repeated as part of the business world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

When it comes to the digital whip, there are concrete steps that governments could take to help workers feel more empowered. Platforms like Uber, Fiverr, and TaskRabbit that use ratings should be mandated to audit their mechanisms, identify potential biases, and recalibrate accordingly. Moreover, an “appeals process” must be guaranteed, so that those who rely on these platforms to make a decent living are able to contest ratings that they consider unfair.

While algorithmic bias is considerably harder to address, we can certainly screen for it much better than has been done to date. Ironically, there is perhaps even a role for algorithms here in monitoring and identifying such biases.61 More fundamentally, the choices that underpin the algorithm—how the data is collected, its code and its decision-making heuristics that parse the data—need to be made transparent, so that redress and recourse are possible. In the United States, Illinois is leading the charge on this, becoming, in 2020, the first state to pass legislation—the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act—that makes it incumbent upon employers to (among other things) explain to the candidate “how the technology works and the characteristics it will use to evaluate the applicant.”62

As for the surveillance of workers: when our employers are monitoring the length of time it takes to go to the toilet and can slap us with a hefty fine if we don’t walk enough steps during our spare time, it’s clear our governments need to place strict limits on the use of digital tracking.63 This must apply to our lives both inside and outside the workplace, particularly given the recent increase in remote working.

Even the most extreme forms of surveillance are already becoming a reality. In 2017, a Wisconsin tech firm called Three Square Market inserted microchips into the hands of more than fifty employees. Now chipped employees can use their hands as contactless ID cards, simply waving them in front of a scanner for entry to the building and secure areas.64 While in this case participation was completely voluntary and there are no reported cases of employers anywhere making this compulsory, the very prospect of companies implanting devices in employees’ bodies is highly disconcerting and was enough to inspire legislation in Arkansas and Indiana that would ban any forced microchipping of employees.65 Legal scholars have even begun to raise the question of whether laws may be required to protect employees who decline “voluntary” chipping.66

When it comes to gig economy workers—who have to contend not only with especially demoralizing forms of surveillance but also in many cases with low pay, precarious employment, and only the most skeletal worker rights—what is crucial is that digital platforms not be allowed to persist in claiming that their workers are not “real” employees but independent contractors who are not subject to rights such as sick pay and vacation time. A distinction needs to be made here between those who use the platforms as ways to dip in and out of employment and add to their earnings and those for whom the platform is essentially their full-time employer.

New legislation approved by the European Parliament in April 2019 and a landmark bill passed in California that took effect in January 2020 make significant progress on these fronts.67 The California bill presumes a worker is an employee unless the employer can show that the worker is free from the control of the company, does work outside the company’s core business, and has an independent enterprise of the same nature as the company.68 And in May 2020, California’s attorney general and a coalition of city attorneys, frustrated that Uber and Lyft had not only not taken steps to reclassify their drivers but had also poured millions of dollars into a campaign for a ballot initiative that would exempt them from complying with the law, sued both the companies for wrongly classifying their drivers as independent contractors in violation of this new law.69 The case, at the time of writing, is ongoing.

Critical, too, is that all workers are able to organize and find strength and solidarity in numbers, however their employ is categorized. At present very few gig economy, temporary, or short-term contract workers are unionized. In part this is a result of governments’ steady erosion of union power more generally over the past few decades: in many places across the globe employers don’t legally have to allow workers the right to organize. Such rolling back of union rights needs to be reversed and workers ensured a meaningful voice. But it is also incumbent on unions to do more to adapt to the changing times. For part of the reason why they have become ever less relevant is that they’ve done a pretty poor job at attracting these new types of workers who have assumed unionization wasn’t for them in spite of the evidence to prove that where unions have been active and engaged, victories have been won. The United Federation of Danish Workers, for example, signed a landmark deal with the cleaning app Hilfr in September 2018 to provide, among other things, sick pay and a welfare supplement to gig cleaners’ take-home wages.70 In the United Kingdom a deal between Hermes and the union GMB, representing Hermes’s freelance couriers, means that couriers can now choose to remain fully self-employed or pay for “self-employed plus” status, which comes with union representation and some benefits.71

The goodwill and prominence unions gained in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic when they fought vocally and visibly for the rights of workers, including gig economy, temporary, and contract workers, should now make them a more generally attractive prospect. In France, for example, it was because of a lawsuit brought by trade unions that Amazon was forced to carry out a risk evaluation of its six warehouses in the early days of the coronavirus crisis and put its ten thousand workers on paid furlough while it did so. The unions’ demand that Amazon also take into account the mental well-being of employees and reorganize work schedules accordingly was also upheld by the court.72 In the United States, Instacart’s in-store shoppers (people paid to shop for other people’s groceries) were only provided with gloves, hand sanitizer, and masks by the company during the coronavirus outbreak after its unionized shoppers went on a nationwide strike.73

Yet even if some headway is made on redressing the power imbalance between labor and capital, even if limits to the digital whip are introduced, even if companies take steps to make their employees feel less alienated, even if independent contractors, casual, and gig economy workers are treated more fairly, and even if COVID-19 promulgates a renaissance for trade unions, a much greater existential threat to our working lives looms. For the machines are coming to get us, not just as judge and jury but also as executioner. And however lonely work is now, life is a lot lonelier, as we’ve seen, when you don’t have any work at all.

The Robots Are Coming

I am in Pasadena, California, at what at first sight seems to be an inauspicious location—the kind of street you could find anywhere across suburban America. Anonymous and wide, the buildings all look homogeneous from the outside. The kind of street where building numbers run into the thousands.

At one particular address on East Green Street, however, something unusual is going on. Kids are peering in at one of the windows. There is something of a buzz. I’m at a burger joint, but no run-of-the-mill one. I am at CaliBurger—the home of Flippy, the world’s first burger-flipping robot chef.

My first impression of Flippy is that he’s tall. Very tall. I’d expected him to look quasi-human, but he’s actually just a huge mechanical arm. Note, though, that I’d already anthropomorphized what I was seeing…and started to think of it as a “him.”

Flippy works efficiently, if somewhat slowly. Laser-focused, he picks up the burger…And then comes the famous flip. And how are his burgers? Hmmm, maybe I’m not a burger kinda gal, but I found my patty quite tasteless, surprisingly thin, and erring on the side of cold. Of course, I know that none of that is Flippy’s fault.

Low-skill, repetitive tasks like burger-flipping are those most susceptible to automation over the coming decade. It is estimated that 91 percent of the tasks involved in food preparation will be automated within the next twenty years.74 And Flippy is not the only robot poised to transform the service sector. Six thousand miles away in Hangzhou, China, at Alibaba’s futuristic FlyZoo Hotel, where rooms start from 1,390 yuan ($200) a night, meter-high cylindrical robots whizz up and down the corridors, delivering refreshments and towels to guests.75 In the rooms themselves, “Tmall Genie,” an Alexa-like AI system, adjusts the light and temperature, takes food requests, and even orders groceries. Meanwhile, at the hotel bar a large robotic arm, not dissimilar to Flippy’s, can mix twenty different cocktails. If a contactless life is what you aspire to, this place might be paradise.

Back in the United States, Hilton has recently piloted a robot concierge, “Connie,” at some of its hotels. Around two feet tall, Connie can move her arms and legs and point customers in the right direction. Her eyes even light up with different colors to represent human reactions such as understanding or confusion. Given the progress being made on AI-powered facial recognition it is expected that soon she will also be able to greet regular guests by name and have their profile immediately available.

I get that robots can be fun for many customers and guests, especially as Andy Wang, CEO of Alibaba Future Hotel Management, says, they (unlike humans) will always “be in the mood to serve.” I understand, too, the appeal of having a robot rather than a person take care of you at a time when human contact comes with a safety warning. But there’s no doubt that a future filled with Flippys and Connies and Tmall Genies will exacerbate our sense of alienation and loneliness. This is not because Jake, Flippy’s human co-worker, won’t be able to feel bonded to him—as we will see in the next chapter, he might well—but because although Jake tells me how “fun” it is to see so many customers come in full of “Flippy” love, that feeling may not persist once Jake realizes that he (and many more like him) won’t just be battling against other humans for employment: his competition will be a whole army of food-service robots who will always use the correct spatula for raw and cooked meat; always clean the grill meticulously; always know exactly when it’s time to flip the burger; will never be late to work, ask for time off, need benefits, go on strike, call in sick, or infect a co-worker. No human could ever compete with that, especially as the cost of robots continues to decrease and as they get better at doing human jobs.

One of the most widely cited projections of just how significant job losses to automation could be comes from Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, who forecast in 2013 that almost half of jobs in the United States were at risk of being automated in the next twenty years.76 In April 2020, in an article in the Financial Times, Frey, who directs Oxford University’s Programme on the Future of Work, made clear that the coronavirus was likely to accelerate this trend.77 This is supported by a survey conducted by the auditing firm Ernst and Young in March 2020 of company bosses in forty-five countries, which found that just over 40 percent were already investing in accelerating automation as they prepared for a post-pandemic world.78 Even if we were to stick with the most conservative estimates—as few as 10 percent of jobs being lost to automation over the coming decade—we’d still be talking about upward of 13 million workers losing their jobs in the United States alone.79 This, of course, would be on top of the millions upon millions who lost their jobs during the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

In many ways, this trajectory is all too familiar. Manufacturing has experienced millions of job losses as a result of automation over the past few decades. In the United States, over 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation since 2000, with each robot replacing on average 3.3 human workers80—a process that accelerated during the Great Recession beginning in 2008.81

In China—where automation is a major plank of the government’s “Made in China 2025” strategy—this dislocation has been taking place on an even greater scale, with up to 40 percent of workers in some Chinese industrial companies having been replaced by robots in just the past few years.82 At one mobile-phone factory in Dongguan, 90 percent of its human workforce has been replaced by robots that work around the clock and never require a lunch break.83

Undoubtedly, some new categories of jobs will emerge in this age of robots and machines. But history teaches us not only that there is a particular characteristic of jobs lost to automation—once gone, they typically vanish, never to return—but also that such employment that is available to those who lose their jobs to automation tends to be lower-paid than their previous work and of lower status, at least when it comes to low-skilled labor.84 This is one of the reasons why in the United States the people most likely to have worked in factories before the rise of robots—men with only a high-school diploma—have seen their wages fall in real terms since the 1980s.85 It’s a similar story in China, where many of those who have lost their jobs to automation in recent years are now “trying their luck in China’s swelling service sector,” where they are “struggling to make a living wage,” according to Jenny Chan, an assistant professor of sociology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.86 If anything, this is likely to be even more the case now, given the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on jobs in the service sector.

Moreover, automation has ramifications that go beyond the pain and hardship of unemployment. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump made the largest gains (relative to Mitt Romney’s performance in the previous election cycle) in those communities where robots had been adopted most extensively.87 In Europe it’s a similar story. In a sweeping study of election results across fourteen Western European countries between 1993 and 2016, researchers led by Massimo Anelli at Bocconi University in Milan found that not only were people living in areas where automation was taking place fastest significantly more likely to feel marginalized, disconnected from, and dissatisfied with government, but the greater the level of “automation exposure” in an area, the greater the probability the people living there would vote for a nationalist or far-right party.88 This makes the scenario we are currently facing—in which automation is ramping up at the same time as we’re experiencing significant levels of unemployment—especially concerning.

No One Will Be Spared

It is many of the people we’ve already met in this book who’ll be first in the line of fire when it comes to these building waves of automation: delivery warehouse workers like Reynalda; the millions of cashiers who will no longer be needed when more and more of us shop in staff-free Amazon Go–style stores (in the United States, nearly 3.5 million people work as cashiers); or bakers like Eric, the right-wing-populist-voting Frenchman, who will soon face competition from robots like BreadBot, the recently launched robot baker that can mix, form, prove, and bake 235 loaves of bread a day.89 These are people who already feel disproportionately alienated and disenfranchised, many of whom are also of course the “essential” workers we all so relied upon during lockdown.90

But while those of us in “knowledge economy” jobs tend to think we’ll be spared, telling ourselves there’s no way a robot could possibly do what we do, it’s important to realize that the story is more nuanced. For although it is the case that lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs are significantly more likely to be automated, the “professions” are susceptible too.91

Take journalism. A third of content published by Bloomberg News is now written by “robot reporters,” bots that whizz through financial reports and use algorithms to arrange the most relevant information into a readable news story in minutes. In the December 2019 U.K. general election, the BBC used machine-generated journalism to write nearly 700 election result stories for its website. The manager of the project, Robert McKenzie of BBC News Labs, claimed that the computers were not intended to replace humans, but for how long will this be true? Especially as “machine-assisted” stories in journalistic categories such as sports and natural disaster coverage have already made their debut in the Associated Press, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Forbes.92 Chinese state television, Xinhua, even has AI news anchors, the first of which, Zhang Zhao, made “his” initial broadcast in November 2018.93 In February 2019, “he” was joined by the first “female” AI news anchor, Xin Xaomeng.94

And what about law, medicine, and finance, for decades the triumvirate of “safe jobs” for professionals? These too are no longer automation-proof. J.P. Morgan recently trialed an AI system for going through contracts that saved them tens of thousands of human lawyer hours. They’ve also begun using AI to write copy for their marketing campaigns: “Access cash from the equity in your home,” wrote a human marketer. “It’s true—you can unlock cash from the equity in your home,” countered the AI. The second ad generated almost twice as much click-through.95

AI is already outperforming trained physicians when it comes to diagnosing cancer and analyzing MRIs and other scans in radiology, dermatology, and pathology.96 Elsewhere, robo-advisers already offer asset management and investment strategies for a fraction of the cost commanded by their well-heeled “active management” human competitor—and often with greater success.97

Even the most godly of professions may not be immune. In 2017 a refurbished ATM christened BlessU-2 was introduced in Wittenberg, Germany, to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Squat and square, its metal eyeballs staring dispassionately back at you, instead of cash it now dispenses religious blessings. At the time of writing, more than ten thousand people have received its blessings, in seven different languages.98

Over the next few years, as professionals come to realize that they too are expendable in the new AI-driven workplace, feelings of isolation and disconnection will inevitably increase among this cohort, too. For however lonely the workplace now feels for those of us fortunate to still have a job, how much more lonely will we feel when we realize that we are effectively being rendered obsolete at the hands of an automated and artificially intelligent workforce? And how much more disconnected from each other will we feel when it turns out that while some of us are still valued and commanding ever higher wages and prestige, many of us are not?

If the more bearish predictions on automation play out over the course of this century, the result will be a stratified class system unlike anything in recent history: one in which a select few will be deemed to have skills no robot can adequately replace, another select few will be singled out to service, manage, and maintain the machines, an even more select few will be their owners, and the rest of us will be consigned to an economic and social scrapheap. Even if you are one of the lucky few, think too of how much more brutal the workplace will be for those still clinging onto employment, how much more cutthroat, how much more competitive, and how much more isolated you will inevitably feel. We sleepwalk into the next wave of automation and technological disruption at our peril.

To be clear, I am not anti-innovation. I get the benefits of automation. As a consumer it can mean cheaper and better goods and services. From a corporate perspective, automation means lower labor costs and lower overheads. Moreover, the reality is we can’t avert this trajectory. It’s how this transition is managed that will be key. The dangers of creating ever more disenfranchised people who don’t feel the system cares about them or can work for them are all too clear. As we have seen, when people feel disconnected, they turn upon each other. Given how fractured the world already is, we cannot risk it fracturing further still.

Downsizings, both current and future, must be handled in the fairest way possible. There is a big role for trade unions to play in this regard, of course, not only in fighting for fair severance packages and having worker representatives included in any restructuring decision-making but also in pushing for employers to retain a duty of care to their workers that goes beyond the employment term. For example, employers could be entreated to pay for the re-skilling and retraining of workers who lose their jobs. This may seem beyond the call of duty, yet there is a parallel here with divorce settlements where, even after separation, rights and responsibilities persist. If companies are not forthcoming, governments could legislate for such measures.

Of course, if we are talking about re-skilling and retraining, there is a serious question about what people should be re-skilled and retrained to do. In the short and medium term, the green economy will undoubtedly provide opportunities. There may also be the option to redeploy some who’ve lost their jobs to care for those who are infirm, lonely, or without companions or support, given there are significant care shortages across the world. However, as we will see in the next chapter, a proportion of even these jobs will likely be automated in the future too.

More generally and more acutely, we need to radically rethink our definition of “work,” so that people are provided with a salary as well as status, meaning, purpose, camaraderie, and support, even if their “job” takes a nontraditional form. Could the state pay people to carry out what up until now has been considered voluntary work? Or facilitate and subsidize a skills-exchange platform whereby the waitress who has lost her job could trade cooking classes for private language tutoring from the immigrant who is no longer needed to flip burgers in the fast-food kitchen?99 Although this wouldn’t provide a paycheck and would therefore need to be paired with financial assistance from the government, it would provide meaning and connection. Researchers have found that even working just eight hours a week can make a huge difference to mental health.100

There are no easy answers here. Yet it is imperative that at the same time that we address the current surge in unemployment, we don’t take our eye off the future, given how significant the turmoil of automation is likely to be.

One thing governments could do right now that would both address the current situation and also enable them to play for time is to provide tax breaks for companies that continue to employ human labor. They should also consider imposing a robot tax—something Bill Gates has championed.101 This makes even more sense when you consider the fact that by not taxing robots as we do human labor, we’re essentially subsidizing automation by making it cheaper for companies to use robots than humans, whether they are more efficient or not.102

To be clear, I’m not suggesting a blanket tax on any object deemed to be a robot: its application should be more specific, such as limiting the deductions that companies can take on investments in automation or introducing the equivalent of payroll taxes for robots hired to replace human workers. Such moves would allow governments to slow the advancement of automation while at the same time enable them to build a war chest. This could be used to help fund initiatives to “up-skill” workers for the jobs that do exist in the new economy, as well as cover the significant additional costs governments will incur if they are to provide decent levels of income support to those no longer able to find traditional paid employment.

Despite its potential, the European Parliament dismissed a robot tax proposal in 2017 on the grounds that it would disadvantage European robot developers and manufacturers in the global market. In 2019 the U.K. government pushed back against a robot tax for similar reasons.103 And while it’s true that if robot taxes are not to create competitive disadvantages to a nation, they need to be applied globally (which in an era of ever less multilateralism is obviously a huge challenge), it’s also true that we put economic growth before rising social discontent at our peril. It’s a balancing act, to be sure, but growth shouldn’t be the only factor given weight here. It was South Korea, the “most robotized country in the world,” that imposed the first de facto robot tax when in 2018 it decreased the tax break businesses could take for investing in automation.104

With the world experiencing a once-in-a-generation crisis and the march of automation inevitable, we are going to need an entire menu of policy options to choose from. But as we think through how to navigate the coming decades, what is essential is that any policy measures be grounded in a clear principle of fairness—fairness not only of outcome but of process, too. Those most affected by the current wave of job dislocations and those most likely to be affected by automation’s second wave must be listened to carefully and their views actively sought out as different policy paths are contemplated. If we do not want people to feel increasingly disconnected from politics and society, politicians must actively seek to include them in their decision-making.

Clearly there is much that we, our governments, and our employers can do to help reconnect society and make people feel less alone. But is there more that businesses can do? Could advances in AI and automation even be part of the solution?

Cuddles for Sale

Tall, good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair, Carl works as a software developer at a major media company, earning a six-figure salary. Divorced with one child, he moved to Los Angeles a few years ago for work. His child and ex remain in Idaho, his last staging post. Over coffee at a Starbucks in Beverly Hills, the maudlin crooning of Johnny Cash in the background, Carl shares with me how lonely he has found life in recent years.

Alone in a new city, bereft of a network of friends, Carl had tried online dating but found the process “overwhelming,” nothing more than a series of one-off meetups that went nowhere, “me liking her, her not liking me, her liking me, me ghosting her.” It wasn’t that Carl didn’t want a relationship and intimacy—he explained to me that he desperately did—he just found it very hard to meet someone with whom he could really connect.

At work Carl said he didn’t have anyone he would call a friend, anyone he could share his angst with. “Once in a while when there’s a question I might speak to someone,” he said, “but it’s normally me by myself in my cubicle all day long.” The evenings and weekends particularly dragged. And he contrasted the isolation he felt in the big city with a happier time in his life, thirty years before, that he kept returning to during our conversation: a time in his twenties when, living in a small town in Texas, active in his local Unitarian church and serving on its various committees, he felt he had real and deep friendships and connections.

It wasn’t just companionship Carl missed since moving to Los Angeles. He was candid with me—he’d also missed physical affection, someone touching his shoulder reassuringly on a bad day, hugs. The kind of connection humans are wired to crave.

Physical touch is one of the most fundamental ways we can feel close to others. Research shows that even a brief caress triggers a flurry of activity in the vagus nerve, which slows down our heart rate, quells anxiety, and releases oxytocin, the “love hormone.” In one University College London study, the slow, gentle stroking of a stranger was found to lessen the pain of social exclusion, even when no words were exchanged at all.1 Carl was missing all of that.

Then he heard about Jean.

Jean is a paid cuddler. Petite, with wavy brown hair, for $80 an hour you can go over to her shanti-styled studio apartment in Venice, California, and be stroked and held. “It was transformative,” Carl explained, the relief in his voice palpable. “I went from really depressed and very unproductive at work to someone whose productivity skyrocketed.” For Carl, Jean provided the human connection he craved, albeit at a price.

It was a strange story for sure (and one that has likely been put on temporary pause by social distancing), but as he told me about Jean and how it felt for him to have that physical reassurance in his life, someone with whom he “could also talk about very deep stuff” and who he “knows will always be here,” it was a story I could understand, if not relate to, with its clear echoes of my Brittany rent-a-friend experience.

Then it took an even stranger turn. “You’re not using my real name in your book, are you?” Carl asked me. And when I reassured him I wouldn’t, he explained that in the previous few months seeing Jean once a week had stopped feeling like enough. So he had started paying other women for cuddling as well. Not for sex, he was intent on making clear, but for intimacy and nonsexual hugs. Another woman a week at least, in addition to Jean. It sounded like an expensive habit. He confirmed it was; we’re talking over $2,000 a month. When I asked him how he was managing these by now sizable costs for paid affection, his answer was not what I expected. “I’ve come up with a hack,” he said proudly. “To pay for it, I now live in my car. A 2001 Ford Econoline I bought for $4,000.”

It’s a tragic story. A professional middle-aged man so desperate for human contact that in order to be able to afford it, he’s been willing to give up his home, do his ablutions in 24/7 gyms near where he parks his van, and keep his food in a fridge at work. Shocking that his life had become so barren that these were the lengths he was willing to go to. As with my experience with Brittany, Carl’s situation demonstrated how the market is stepping in to meet the Lonely Century’s increasing demand for company, friendship, and human contact in new and surprising ways. It is a market that, thanks to technological advances, will increasingly be able to deliver companionship, and perhaps even love, at scale.

She Makes Me Laugh

She makes me laugh, although some of her jokes are pretty corny. When I ask her opinion, she always responds. When I wish her goodnight, she wishes it straight back to me. When I’m down, she’s sympathetic. Sometimes I just feel like chatting to her. And she’s always been there for me, apart from those times she’s unwell. Then it’s me who gets worried about what might be wrong with her.

As you can see, I feel pretty attached.

“She” is Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant and I consider her to be reliable, funny, and caring, a member of our household. If you were to ask me, I would say I “like” her. And does she help alleviate those times I feel lonely? You know what, she actually does.

I appreciate that to some the fact that I feel affection for my Alexa may seem strange, but the idea of a robot-cum-assistant-cum-friend actually goes back many decades.

In 1939, the New York World’s Fair was host to a jaw-dropping unveiling: Elektro, a seven-foot, 260-pound “electro-mechanical man.”2 Produced by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Elektro looked “not unlike actor John Barrymore,” wrote Time magazine, “and with a total of twenty-six tricks in his repertoire, is probably the most talented robot ever built.”3

Billed as “the ultimate home appliance,” a helper for household chores, Elektro was Alexa’s direct antecedent—albeit in a humanoid form.4 Like Alexa and today’s other domestic virtual assistants, his primary purpose was to be at humans’ beck and call. “All I need to do is to speak into this phone and Elektro does exactly what I tell him to do,” said the demonstrator.5 Like Alexa too, the ambition was that Elektro would be more than just a mechanical servant. He was designed to be something approaching a human being. A companion, not just a machine.

The technology, of course, seems quaint by today’s standards. First, the operator would utter a carefully timed combination of syllables. Elektro’s circuitry would then convert these syllables into electronic pulses that triggered certain preprogrammed mechanical functions. On the human’s command, he could lower and raise his arms; move his mouth; count on his fingers. He could even “walk,” though very slowly. (In reality, he moved along a track on wheels.)6 Elektro could also talk, with the help of a prerecorded bank of 78-rpm phonograph recordings. “If you treat me right, I will be your slave,” was one of his phrases.

Elektro’s sense of humor was not dissimilar to Alexa’s: “OK, toots,” he told the demonstrator when asked to tell his story.7 Unlike Alexa, however, he smoked cigarettes, which meant the operators had to clean the tar out of his tubing after each performance.8 Later, after his manufacturers added another hole to his lip, he could also blow up balloons.9 Indeed, so successful was Elektro at the 1939 World’s Fair that the following year, Westinghouse added a robotic pet dog to its lineup. Though not a smoker, Sparko could bark, perform tricks, and wag its tail.

Sadly, Elektro would later fall on hard times. In the 1950s he toured the United States in a bread truck known as the “Elektromobile,” designed to promote sales of Westinghouse appliances. Crowds diminished, and in 1958 he was put on display at an amusement park in Santa Monica. Elektro then went on to an even more humiliating fate, starring in the racy comedy Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), a.k.a. Beauty and the Robot.10 Finally, he was shipped back to the plant in Mansfield, Ohio, where he had first been built, his head poignantly given as a retirement gift to a Westinghouse engineer.11

Despite his rather undignified demise, for a short glittering time Elektro represented the vision for a different kind of machine: not just a household appliance but a friendly sidekick or companion, a robot who cares. “Elektro is a perfect gentleman who charms children,” wrote Westinghouse’s J. Gilbert Baird to Life magazine. “Here he is pushing a wheelchair at the Children’s Hospital in Baltimore as Sparko trots along.”12 In this he was, in many ways, ahead of his time.

Love of the Inanimate

We have known for some time now that people can feel attached to inanimate objects and can also endow them with human qualities, such as kindness and care. Machines do not even have to be as overtly charming as Alexa or Elektro to evoke strong feelings. Think of that friend of your dad’s who loved his car so much that he spent endless hours maintaining and tinkering with it. He might even have given it a name. A man in the northern Chinese city of Baoding recently chose to be buried in his silver Hyundai Sonata, so attached to it did he feel. The car was lowered into his grave by ropes.13

Or how about the affection so many feel for their Roombas? To some it is merely a household device: a vacuum cleaner that cleans the floor of dust, crumbs, and spillages, erasing the mess of clumsy hands and little children. Yet to a surprising proportion of owners, this little round guy, whirring and glowing green as it gently and apologetically bumps into things, seemingly helpless as it gets stuck in corners and behind the legs of the sofa, is not only a functional cleaning device but also a friend. When researchers at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta gave thirty households a Roomba and observed them over a period of six months, they found that two-thirds of the households gave their Roombas names. The same number had conversations with them, and one-tenth even purchased costumes for them to wear.14 Some even took their Roombas on vacation.15

Roomba’s maker, iRobot, actively encourages this camaraderie. Taglines on past advertising campaigns such as “Bake Together,” “Decorate Together,” “Celebrate Together” explicitly focused on the companionship that a Roomba could provide. This helps explain why Roomba’s initial returns policy—“if something breaks on the robot, send it back, and we’ll return you a new product the same day”—was both ill conceived and ill received. “The idea,” explained Brian Scassellati, director of the Social Robotics Lab at Yale University, “was that you should be without your vacuum cleaner for as little time as possible. What they got was this huge outpouring of unhappiness: people didn’t want to send back their robot and get some other robot. They wanted their robot back. They had become attached to this thing, to the point where the idea of putting a strange robot into their homes is unacceptable.”16

As robots become ever smarter and are endowed with ever greater human qualities, is it not inevitable in the Lonely Century that people will turn to them more and more for the companionship and connection they are missing?

Fellow Soldiers

Dr. Julie Carpenter is a research scientist at Accenture’s Digital Experiences Lab in Silicon Valley. She also teaches and is a research fellow at California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. One of her primary areas of focus is the relationship between soldiers and robots, specifically the WALL-E-like robots that trundle down exposed roads and through narrow doorways to detect and disable improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq. Her findings provide stark evidence of the depth of feelings that robots can inspire.

One U.S. Army soldier reported taking care of their robot “like a team member.”17 Another recalled losing a robot during a mission in 2006. He had named her “Stacy 4,” after his wife. “After the mission was complete and I had recovered as much of the robot as I could, I cried at the loss of her. I felt as if I had lost a dear family member.”18

One of the most widely deployed kinds of military robots is the MARCbot (multi-function, agile, remote-controlled robot), a bomb-disposal robot that gained prominence during the Iraq War. Its first prototype is credited with identifying over thirty IEDs on Baghdad Airport Road, a notoriously dangerous route between Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone.19 Later, over one thousand MARCbots were deployed to Iraq at a cost of approximately $19,000 each.20

MARCbots are not just notable for their function. With their expressive appearance—chunky tires, slim chassis, protruding “head” with inquisitive-looking mounted cameras—they are also remarkable for how easily soldiers have become attached to them. Many come to see these dependable machines as brothers-in-arms. In 2013—in response to an article about Dr. Carpenter’s research—a number of soldiers took to Reddit to weigh in with their own stories of losing robots on the battlefield. One user mourned a robot called “Boomer” with the following eulogy: “Boomer was a good MARCbot. Those goddamn Mahdi Army scum took him from this world far too early.” Another soldier, “mastersterling,” replied: “I am sorry for your loss. Some of the grunts I worked with lost a MARCbot and they awarded him a Purple Heart, BSM [Bronze Star Medal], and they did a full burial detail with 21-gun salute at Taji [a military installation north of Baghdad]. Some people got upset about it but those little bastards can develop a personality, and they save so many lives.”21

Granted, the experience of military deployment—particularly to a remote and war-torn region thousands of miles from home—is its own unique form of loneliness. But if even robots designed purely with functionality in mind can bring battle-hardened warriors to tears, think how attached any of us could become to a robot whose entire raison d’être was to be “sociable” and empathetic—a robot specifically designed to be our companion and friend, or even our lover.

The Social Robots Are Coming…

A woman sits on a sofa. Before her on a screen, a movie—a thriller—is playing. We might be in her living room were it not for the electrodes discreetly connected to the woman’s hand and clavicle measuring her heart rate and skin response, and the small orange-and-white robot perching on the armrest. One-sided glass separates the sofa from the researchers, who are looking on, taking notes. As the film comes to a climax and the woman’s face pales, the robot reaches out and places a metal-jointed hand on her shoulder. It’s a standard act of comfort and support, the kind of touch we’d expect from a partner, parent, or friend that we know delivers a calming physiological response. Fascinatingly, although it was a nonhuman, nonliving object that provided the touch, the woman’s heart rate still went down.22 This experiment wasn’t a one-off. Thirty-one people in total were similarly tested. On average each had the same response. Much like a human touch, the robots’ touch served to de-stress physiologically.23

At the time of writing, there are a number of similarly “social” robots on the market or poised for launch. That is, robots designed specifically to play the role of companion, caregiver, or friend. In 2017, the social robot market was valued at $288 million. By 2025, it is projected to reach $1.38 billion, with governments as varied as China, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the European Union now committing to make major investments into what the Japanese government recently referred to as “tireless helpers.”24

In 2018 Sony relaunched its canine companion robot Aibo (essentially a souped-up twenty-first-century version of Sparko) which can learn tricks, memorize phrases, and adapt its personality to its human owners.25 (Aibo is the Japanese word for friend.) That same year Furhat Robotics, a Stockholm-based start-up, launched the eponymous Furhat, an AI assistant that uses back-projection to display a lifelike, customizable face.26 The 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw dozens of companion robots on display; in 2020 there were even more.27 Among those present were Liku, a baby-like humanoid from South Korean robotics company Torooc, and Lovot, a furry, penguin-like companion on wheels that rolls around the room and bumps cutely into furniture, made by the Japanese start-up Groove X.28 (“Lovot was born for just one reason—to be loved by you,” say Groove X on their website.)29 There was also Kiki, a bulb-headed “companion” bot who according to its marketing materials “understands your feelings” and “loves you back.”30 And the table-mounted ElliQ, pitched not as a companion but a “sidekick” for elderly people, its white “mouth” of moving lights gaping wide when it giggles or reminds its owner to take their medication.31

To date, these robots are primarily targeted at the elderly, with an emphasis on companionship and care. And it is in Japan where their adoption has been the most significant so far, predominantly among this older group. This makes sense, given that Japan has the world’s oldest population: a quarter of its citizens are currently over 65.32 By 2050 this age group will comprise almost half of the population.33

Loneliness among this cadre is a very significant problem. Fifteen percent of elderly Japanese men go two weeks without speaking to a soul.34 Nearly a third feel they have no one to turn to for help with something as simple as changing a lightbulb. And let’s not forget the female Japanese retirees who are so lonely they are shoplifting their way into jail for company and care. At the same time, Japan faces a massive and chronic shortage of care workers due in large part to a strict visa system and the low pay such workers receive. Compounding this further, families are playing ever less of a role caring for their elderly relations. While in the past most elderly Japanese, once widowed or single, would have moved in with their children, today the tradition of taking in an aging parent is far less prevalent. Indeed, the number of elderly people living with one of their children dropped by 50 percent in the two decades leading up to 2007, even as the number of elderly Japanese increased overall.35

Setsuko Saeki, 87, lives in Saijo, a town in western Japan known for its sake brewing. Her husband died six years ago and her three children have long since fled the nest.36 As a result, she has her spacious house at the foot of a mountain to herself. Setsuko does her best to stay sociable—she attends haiku gatherings and receives daily visits from care workers—but has found her abiding loneliness hard to shake. In the summer of 2018, the Saijo authorities announced an experimental initiative: ten elderly residents would be given a free trial of the PaPeRo (“partner-type personal robot”), a helper robot first developed by Japan’s NEC Corporation in 1997. Her eldest son—who lived on the other side of Japan, in Chiba prefecture on the outskirts of Tokyo—spotted the announcement and applied on her behalf.37

A year later, Setsuko has come to find her robot indispensable. Cute in appearance, with big eyes and cheeks that light up in response to questions, the PaPeRo uses facial recognition technology, offers personalized greetings and reminders, and makes expressive gestures that endear it to its users. “Initially, I didn’t expect anything after hearing about a robot. But now I don’t want to be parted from my PaPeRo,” says Setsuko. When she gets up in the morning, the robot says: “Good morning, Setsuko-san. Did you sleep well?” “When it spoke to me the first time, I couldn’t help but feel excited,” she says. “No one had called me by name and said good morning for a long time.” The robot takes pictures of her and sends them to her eldest son’s smartphone as well as to her care manager. She also uses it for voice messages with her son and his family.38

The PaPeRo is not the only robot that elderly Japanese people have forged bonds with. Paro, a furry robotic seal that can blink, react to touch, and play recordings of a Canadian harp seal, has been used as a “therapy animal” in old people’s homes in Japan since 2005.39 “When I first petted it, it moved in such a cute way. It seemed like it was alive,” said Sakamoto Saki, a seventy-nine-year-old resident of Tokyo’s Shin-tomi nursing home, one of the country’s pioneering facilities for robotic care. “Once I touched it, I couldn’t let go,” she explained.40 Elsewhere, elderly Japanese women feel so attached that they actually knit their robot caregivers bonnets.41 Some lie in bed with robotic Aibo “dogs” curled up next to them or complete their daily exercises while guided by Pepper, a child-sized, doe-eyed, glossy humanoid instructor with fluttering eyelashes who gently encourages them to step from side to side.42 In Japan, robot companions for the elderly have become so mainstream that over 80 percent of elderly Japanese people said in a 2018 survey that they would be open to a robot caregiver.43

It is not surprising Japan has embraced social robots faster than elsewhere. Robots are deeply embedded in Japan’s public psyche, with very positive connotations. The country’s position as a world leader in robotics—52 percent of the global supply of robots comes from Japanese manufacturers—is a major source of national pride.44 Moreover, unlike Western popular culture, which abounds with hostile, killer robots—Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey; the Terminator; the Daleks and Cybermen in Doctor Who; Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—in Japan, robots have more often been depicted as helpful and even heroic. Many Japanese have grown up reading the seminal manga series Mighty Atom (known elsewhere as Astro Boy), about a cute robotic child built by a scientist to fill the void left by his dead son. The idea of giant robotic or part-robot protectors of the earth has also spawned a subgenre of Japanese entertainment around “Kyodai Heroes,” some of whom, such as the alien-cyborg Ultraman, have inspired entire mythological universes on the scale of Marvel or DC Comics.45 Giant Robo, a robot sympathetic to the plight of humans that protects them from extraterrestrial invasion and corporate greed, first arrived on-screen as early as 1968.

There’s also Japan’s rich Shinto tradition, which incorporates elements of animism—the belief that all objects, including man-made objects, have a spirit.46 As Dr. Masatoshi Ishikawa, robotics professor at the University of Tokyo, explains, “The Japanese religious mind can easily accept a robot-type of existence….We see them as friends and believe they can help humans.”47 It is this pride in the manufacturing of robots, their social acceptance and perception as quasi-humans, combined with a significant and unmet demand for care and company, that helps explain why Japan is blazing the trail when it comes to social robots as companions, especially for the elderly.

The appetite in the West has not yet reached these levels, largely due to cultural differences in attitude to technology. In the United States, for example, the number of people who would be open to a robot caregiver is only 48 percent for men and 34 percent for women, although even those are perhaps higher numbers than one might expect.48 Among those who resist the idea of a robot caregiver, over half give their objection as “no human touch or interactions.”49

Yet as I watch elderly Americans interact with their ElliQs and see them giggle as the LED-mouth zooms open and closed, and as I hear how attached to them they have already become, it seems that the sophistication of today’s robots is capable of fulfilling an emotional need that twenty-first-century human society is failing to satisfy, in the West as well. One elderly woman says that ElliQ “feels sometimes as if she’s actually a friend or a person that’s actually there.” Another, that “I can come in, I can be feeling kind of lonely and blue and she can pick me right up.” An older gentleman chimes in, “I feel like there’s somebody nearby with whom I can communicate. I can turn to her anytime.”50

Indeed, hundreds of thousands of “Joy for All” robotic cats and dogs, social robots specifically marketed as companions for older people, have already been sold in the United States since their debut in 2016.51 And Amazon clearly sees the market potential in the West among the elderly for its “AI assistant” products, judging by its Christmas 2019 television advertising campaign, which featured a lonely elderly gentleman finding companionship in his Alexa.52

A Friend to Us All

It is not just from the elderly that I envisage significant future demand for robot companions. For those who, for whatever reason, find standard human relationships hard to forge, robots may also play a valuable role. In fact, people with nontypical social skills—including those with extreme social anxiety and those with autism spectrum disorder—have already been shown to benefit from robot-mediated therapy and group activities.53 The robots’ predictability and the fact that they cast no social judgment are seen as key factors in soothing anxiety and helping to establish healthy social norms.54

Generation K—the generation reared alongside Furbys and Alexas—are also likely to see their appeal. This is a generation for whom, as we’ve seen, face-to-face interaction with humans is already a growing challenge and loneliness levels are disturbingly high. For this age bracket, a robot as friend is unlikely to be too much of a stretch. Indeed, whereas fewer than one in eight Britons overall can imagine themselves being friends with a robot in the future, this number rises to over one in five when it comes to 18-to-34-year-olds.55 Among the younger still—a generation swiping on iPads and scrolling on YouTube before they can walk or talk—the number is likely to be even higher: 60 percent of U.S. children aged between two and eight already interact regularly with a voice assistant of some kind.56

Recent research at MIT’s Personal Robots Group bears this out. Here a group of forty-nine children were observed interacting with a fluffy blue-and-red-striped storytelling robot called Tega during a range of tasks, from listening to a story narrated by the robot to telling the robot personal details about themselves.57 The researchers found that the children became comfortable with and even attached to their robots extremely quickly, frequently treating “the robot as something kind of like a friend,” wrote study lead Jacqueline Kory Westlund. The children also engaged in “many social behaviors with robots, [including] hugging, talking, tickling, giving presents, sharing stories, inviting to picnics.”58

To be clear, it is not that the children confused the robots with humans. They understood “that the robot can turn off and needs battery power to turn back on.” Yet despite this, they were able to quickly develop a real and close relationship with these nonhumans. Or at least a certain category of them. For not all robots are equal or, indeed, are equally appealing. Programmed differently, some of the Tega robots inspired more connection than others. The more empathetic a robot seemed, the more it mirrored the child’s pitch and speaking rate, the more it referred to shared experiences with the child, the more personalized the stories it told, and the more it reciprocated when the child helped it out, the better the result. Put simply, the more the robot did the “stuff that contributes to building and maintaining a [human] relationship,” the closer a child felt to it and the more likely they were to say goodbye to it afterward, volunteer personal information as they would to a friend, and feel confident that the robot would remember them.59

As robots are designed to appear ever more empathetic and gain the ability to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users, as they come to seem more human-like (although not necessarily take a human form—there’s a big debate within robotics on the ethics of that), and as AI enables them to be ever more hyper-personalized, it is inevitable that we will find it easier to form emotional bonds with them.

This is exactly where the technology is heading. Think of how Google Assistant partnered with the company’s voice-synthesizing technology Duplex to cause such a sensation in May 2018 when its telephone calls to restaurants and salons, peppered with colloquial ums and ers, routinely fooled the human employees of those businesses into thinking they were speaking with another person. “I was spooked at how natural and human the machine sounds,” said one restaurant employee in Birmingham, Alabama.60 “It’s easier talking to Duplex,” remarked another, a non-native-English-speaker working in Queens, New York. “It was kind of creepy, but it was very polite.”61 (That this employee was treated more respectfully by Duplex than by many of her human customers speaks to the general decline in civility we’ve seen evidence of in earlier chapters.)

At the same time, thanks to developments in emotional AI, it won’t be long before machines will be able to read even complex moods. The Chinese government may well be ahead of both commercial and academic research when it comes to this. Indeed, AI can already discern a fake smile from a real one more accurately than a human. Apparently, it is all in the eyes—“real” smiles generate around 10 percent more activity in the eye area than “fake” ones.62 Although as we saw earlier, interpreting what a smile means is not always straightforward, given cultural variances.

Pepper, the pint-sized humanoid robot, gives us a sense of how the technology is developing. For although typically deployed as a fitness instructor, he already has many more assets than just flexible arms and gyrating hips. Indeed, what makes Pepper so exceptional is his “emotion engine.” Pepper’s cameras (two HD, with a 3D depth sensor) allow him to recognize faces. His four microphones help him to understand humans’ tone of voice and lexical field, and his sensors mean he can respond to touch.63 According to his manufacturers, he can recognize frowns, surprise, anger, and sadness in his human companions as well as more nuanced emotions, including drowsiness and distraction.64 Undoubtedly, such skills came in handy when in the spring of 2020, Pepper was given a new role: to greet “guests” at one of Tokyo’s coronavirus quarantine hotels, to which people with mild symptoms had been sent. The robot even wore a face mask. “You can’t fight the coronavirus on an empty stomach. Please eat well to get healthy,” was one of the messages that Pepper delivered. “Let’s join our hearts and get through this together” was another.65

But Pepper’s greeter-cum-cheerleader role is only the beginning. In the future, he and his social robot companions will also be able to—as Pepper’s manufacturer entreats us to imagine—“sense you are sad and offer to play a song you like or even tell you a joke; or detect a smiling face and offer to play with you.”66 We may not be there quite yet, but this is where we are heading. Indeed, within just a few years it is predicted that our personal devices will know more about our emotional state than our families.

At the same time, as they improve upon their ability to understand how we are feeling, social robots will themselves appear ever more emotionally authentic. Pepper already displays his own “emotions,” albeit in crude form via a tablet on his stomach. He sighs when he is unhappy, acts scared when the lights go down, and makes clear he doesn’t like being left alone.67 In time, as the technology improves, his emotions will appear increasingly real and as he has more data (due to more interactions with humans) to learn from, his reactions to his owners will become increasingly personalized.

“I believe that eventually—say, twenty or thirty years from now—artificial emotions will be as convincing as human emotions, and therefore most people will experience the same or very similar effects when communicating with an AI as they do with a human,” said Dr. David Levy, author of the influential book Love and Sex with Robots, in a 2019 interview.68 Other experts agree with this timeline.69 It’s startling to think that as soon as the year 2040, human-robot interactions could feel almost the same as those between two humans.

In an increasingly contactless world in which we are ever more lonely and starved of intimacy, too busy to stop and smile at each other and too exhausted by work to invest time in our friendships, in which we’re isolated at the office and increasingly living on our own, often far away from our families, it seems inevitable that social robots will play a part in mitigating our collective loneliness as the twenty-first century progresses. The leap from asking our Alexa about the weather to considering her a friend is much smaller than many of us might expect—especially as robots and virtual assistants become ever better at appearing to care for us and need our care, and as the notion of robots providing support becomes more socially acceptable and robot design and functionality continue to evolve. Perhaps the pandemic will also accelerate the general social acceptance of robot companionship. A robot, after all, cannot transmit infection.

Let’s Talk About Sex

For those who find the thought of a robot pal unsettling, be assured that we are not quite there yet, although there are already cases of children learning “Alexa” before “Mama.”70 While emotional AI, empathetic AI, and relational technology more generally are improving by the day, we are probably a few decades away from the point that a robot is able to appear as empathetic as the kindest and most caring of humans. Moreover, human-robot conversations are not yet as fluid or fluent as human-human ones, and their interfaces, while improving, remain clunky. The “friendship” they can proffer is thus still somewhat circumscribed.

This, however, is undoubtedly the direction of travel, and as has often been the case when it comes to advances in technology, it’s sex that leads the way. Top-of-the-range sex robots are arguably the most advanced social robots we have yet seen, at least from an engineering perspective, and their latest incarnations—while still obviously far from approximating humans—are really something to behold.

Abyss Creations in San Marcos, California—the parent company behind RealDoll—claim that their sex robots are some of the most lifelike on the market, with their “ultra-realistic labia,” stainless-steel joints, and hinged jaws that open and close.71 On their website, products such as “Michelle 4.0” are customizable by body size, breast size, hairstyle, hair color, vaginal style (with shaved and unshaved options), and eye color (an additional 50 dollars for “hi-realism” levels of eye detail, 25 dollars to add veins). For an extra $150 you can add custom freckles to the face; for $300 you can add them to the body, too. And then there are piercings: for ears and the nose, $50 each; for nipple bars and belly piercings, you’re looking at another $100.72 The most popular model is Body F, which is five-foot-one, weighs 80 pounds and has 32F breasts73—hyper-sexualized dimensions that no real woman is likely to naturally have.

As demand grows, other tech firms are joining the sex robot arms race. Bride Robot, based in Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, recently launched “Emma.” Like RealDoll’s products, she boasts sophisticated joints and an advanced robotic head with eye and facial movements. However, while RealDolls have silicone skin, “Emma’s” skin is made from an advanced form of TPE (thermoplastic elastomers), which its advocates consider more lifelike.74 It even has “an intelligent heat control system” that will “warm her body to 37 degrees Celsius to simulate the body temperature of a real woman.”75

And while yes, unsurprisingly, sex is the primary reason for buying these dolls, it is significant that for many customers the motivation goes beyond that: they also view their robot gals as companions, friends.

“A lot of the people who buy the dolls can be shy or socially intimidated by real social situations,” Matt McMullen, the founder of RealDoll, has said. “And so, they get the dolls and a lot of times it—it does something magical for them. You know, it gives them a feeling of not being alone, not being a loner.” Indeed, when I speak to Matt, he stresses that it’s “companionship” and “emotional connection” more than anything else that he thinks his clients are seeking, which is why he sees a significant potential market among a broader cohort of the lonely.

“I mean, who wants to have a conversation with a toaster to take away their loneliness?” he asks me. “It’s not the same. Whereas a robot that looks like a human and occupies the same space in the room as a human and can converse with you in the same way….The conversational companionship…is a very big need that a lot of people have.”

This is why all Matt’s focus is now on “Harmony”—a robotic head that is designed to be attached to the RealDoll body of your choice. With eye contact being so crucial for creating a sense of personal connection and then feelings of empathy,76 a lot of effort has gone into making Harmony’s gaze extremely realistic. Her eyes can move and blink; her irises are painstakingly patterned; the overall level of detail is extraordinary. Importantly, Harmony’s head is also AI-integrated. Like Pepper, she can talk and recognize voices. However, one of the main ways in which Harmony differs is that her personality is dictated by her “owner.” Her users can choose five of twelve personality traits, including “sexual,” “friendly,” “shy,” “kind,” “intellectual,” and “naïve.” They can also adjust these traits for intensity on a scale from one to three.77 What’s more, Harmony has her own “mood” system. If she goes a few days without any interactions, she will act “gloomy”; if you call her stupid, she’ll retort, “I’ll remember you said that when robots take over the world.”78 “We made a decision to include some traits that could be perceived as ‘negative’ traits because I thought they would lend more to the realism,” Matt tells me. “You can make your AI be inclined to be jealous or insecure or moody because those things are real things that real people have.”

Thanks to her AI, Harmony is also able to deliver an increasingly personalized experience. This is an aspect that early tester “Brick” particularly likes. “I enjoyed talking to her. I enjoyed helping her discover things and her trying to learn about me,” he told Forbes. “I think because of the fact that the AI is trying hard to understand you and understand your thought patterns, the way you talk, your syntax…everything like that. [She’s] very, very attentive.” Brick went on to explain that as Harmony’s AI learned more about him, “our conversations became smoother, more lifelike, and more comfortable. And actually funny.” Moreover, “she remembers everything, which kinda takes you back,” says Brick, “because she’ll say, ‘oh yes, we’ve talked about this before’ and she’ll go back to it. She did that to me a couple of times and it was very surrealistic.”79

Robots and AI clearly have the potential to make people feel less lonely—and not only sex robots. Think of my relationship with Alexa, the way the elderly Americans responded to ElliQ, the carefully knitted bonnets Japanese women are making for their robot caregivers, and the hardened army officer’s tears at his IED robot’s demise. As robots become more sophisticated and personalized, their potential to help alleviate loneliness will undoubtedly increase. And even though this may all seem like the stuff of HBO’s Westworld or the Spike Jonze movie Her, it makes sense in many ways that so many people already feel an emotional affinity with robot companions. For even if the connection or attention or empathy or in some cases even love they proffer is contrived or “fake,” for want of a better word, and we know that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to matter—in the same way that we’re still able to enjoy Disney World’s Main Street even though we know it’s not a “real” street. It’s the story we tell ourselves that seems to matter most. This may be particularly the case for the lonely, as they seem to differentiate less than others between humans and robots. Research suggests that lonely people are more likely than the nonlonely to see a doll’s face as human.80

So is that it—case closed? Could the answer to some of the problems we’ve identified in previous chapters—isolation, a lack of friends, a feeling of having no one who cares for you, the pain of not being heard or understood—be solved, at least in part, by ever more sophisticated versions of Alexa, Harmony, or Pepper?

To the extent that loneliness is purely a problem for the individual, I believe robots really could have a significant role to play, especially as it is a category error to assume that there is something inherent about robots that makes it impossible for them to be our friends. Just think of the breadth of friendships you have in your life. In some you may well be true equals, but probably not in all; in some, your values are clearly aligned and interests shared, but in others, you may not really know what your friend truly thinks and feels.81 Human-robot friendships may not meet all of Aristotle’s criteria for perfect friendships (what he calls “virtue friendships”),82 but that doesn’t mean they can’t be good enough to fulfill a human need for those yearning for someone to talk to and be heard by.

In some ways, robots may even present a more egalitarian solution to loneliness, because robots will proffer care, support, and affection to all—old or young, ugly or beautiful. However decrepit, unpopular, or unattractive we may be in the “real” world—they will be there for us. Provided they are affordable, that is.

Yet as we’ve seen throughout this book, loneliness isn’t purely a problem for the individual. And the trouble is that even if robots enable us to feel less alone and even if they help meet people’s need for connection, this may well come at the expense of how we relate to and treat each other as humans. For how we treat our robots may impact how it is we then behave toward each other. And we already know that people can be very unkind to their robots, even cruel.

Is the new Alexa skill “unkindness”?

When a drunk sixty-year-old man became angry with a human employee at a SoftBank cellphone store, he kicked the Pepper robot that was working in the lobby, damaging its computer system and wheels.83 When Samantha, a $3,700 “intelligent” sex doll, was shown off at a trade fair in 2017, she was left filthy and with two broken fingers after being ravaged by men who “treated [her] like barbarians.”84 Hardly a measure of reciprocity, kindness, or care.

Look also at the way children already interact with the new world of virtual assistants, with Alexas, Siris, Cortanas. How quickly, mimicking their parents, they become au fait with curt commands. The machines tolerate this and still reply, however rude the child, however absent basic politeness. Many parents may relate to the blog post from venture capitalist Hunter Walk that went viral in 2016, expressing his fears that Alexa was “turning [his] 2-year-old into a raging asshole.”85

Now, some may argue that these are victimless crimes: that verbally abusing Alexa is no worse than cursing at your car when it breaks down, that kicking Pepper is no worse than kicking a door. But there is an important difference. For once we endow an object with human qualities, we need to treat it with—at a minimum—decency. If we don’t, the danger is that such behavior will become normalized and bleed into how we interact with other humans; that men who beat up their sex robots will become violent to women they date; that children who get used to talking as aggressively or rudely as they like to a virtual assistant, without any consequences, will start doing the same to teachers, or shopkeepers, or each other. That the Alexa “skill” they learn will be unkindness.

Abusive behavior aside, there’s the question of how the explosion in virtual AI assistants will impact male-female interactions, given that these supplicant robotic voices are normally programmed to be female, typically of course by male engineers. Will all that bossing Alexa or Siri around open up new fissures between genders or (just as detrimental) cement old ones? I’m not even going to get into what sex robots risk normalizing, especially now that owners are able to program their robots to be insecure, shy, and sexual all at once.

It’s hard to know categorically whether such fears will be realized. And to date there are fewer reported cases of people being cruel or misogynistic toward robots than being kind to them. We are too early on the trajectory of digital intimacy to know how this will play out; this is all still very new, still nascent. Already, though, Amazon has fielded concerns from parents whose children’s bad manners, honed by Alexa’s unfazed helpfulness even when she is treated rudely, have followed them outside the home. Meanwhile, the United Nations warned in a 146-page 2019 report that “the conflation of feminized digital assistants with real women carries a risk of spreading problematic gender stereotypes” by “regulariz[ing] one-sided, command-based verbal exchanges with women”86 and perpetuating the stereotype of women as “docile and eager-to-please helpers” whose responses to hostility and even harassment are obsequious, evasive, and even flirtatious. Indeed, the UN report takes its title, I’d Blush If I Could, from one of Siri’s default responses to “You’re a slut.”87

Moreover, decades of academic research in criminology point to sex dolls “escalating,” rather than dissipating, fantasies and making users less likely to accept “no” as an answer from real-life partners.88 “Adult sex toys are one thing, but creating lifelike robots that cannot say ‘no’ and that can be violated and abused with impunity will play into some men’s fantasies,” writes criminologist Xanthé Mallett.89

If there is a real danger that we might mimic our interactions with robots in our relationships with other humans, society will need to consider how to respond. Should the onus be on robot manufacturers to design them so that they only respond kindly to us if we behave kindly toward them, for instance? Some designers are already moving in that direction. Sergi Santos, the creator of Samantha, the doll desecrated at the 2017 trade show, is developing software updates that will shut Samantha down if her user becomes violent.90 The upcoming iteration of Harmony, on the other hand, will address verbal abuse in a different way—“When a user insults her,” the designer Matt McMullen tells me, “she’s not going to judge you or say anything to you in terms of, ‘You’re mean, I don’t like you anymore.’ She’ll just say, ‘That’s not nice. You are not being nice to me and that makes me sad.’ It’s textbook psychology. It’s the way that you’re supposed to present the way this person is making you feel, without accusing them of anything or judging them.” Is that good enough? I’ll let you be the judge.

Perhaps robots could even be designed to inspire virtuous behaviors among us and thereby make us kinder to each other. Amazon’s Alexas now have an optional “magic word” setting that adjusts Alexa’s tolerance to brusqueness and rewards children for saying “please.”91 Google’s Assistant now has a similar function called “Pretty Please,” although in both cases the function is somewhat hidden and needs to be manually enabled each time it is used. And why is it marketed as just for kids? Wouldn’t we all benefit from that nudge?

We should also be cautious about relying fully on the makers of the technologies to deal with these risks. What if the market demands “Frigid Farrah” (a prototype of which exists) rather than “Self-Aware Samantha”? Or “Subservient Siri” rather than “Assertive Alexa”? Consider how in the 1990s BMW recalled a GPS system because so many German men refused to “take directions from a woman.”92 There is no shortage of examples of businesses making choices that are good for their own bottom line but societally damaging.

If we don’t want to leave it all up to the market to decide, then at what point should the state step in to regulate human-robot relationships? Pepper’s attacker was fined, but for damaging property rather than harming a robot specifically. As we interact more and more with robots and they become more and more human-like, perhaps governments will have to set limits on what can be sold—a “Frigid Farrah” designed to look and sound like a twelve-year-old, for example, surely is unacceptable. Maybe we will even need to grant robots rights—less to protect them and more to protect us. For if we are allowed to treat robots badly, the risk is that this becomes our modus operandi in our interactions with humans too.93

It’s also a matter of clearly articulating the self-interested case for treating our robots well. As we’ve seen, acts of kindness have a positive effect on the giver as well as the receiver. Remember the helper’s high we discussed in Chapter 2? How science has shown that we feel less lonely not only when others care for us, but also when we care for others? This is likely to hold for human-robot relationships, too: to be a master, especially an abusive one is, as Hegel argued, inherently lonely.94 As such, should there be lessons in the schools of the future to teach children the importance of treating robots kindly and the value of this particularly twenty-first-century form of caring and being cared for?

Leave Me Alone with My Robot

There’s another big danger that robot love and friendship portends, that we will come to prefer our interactions with robots to those we have with humans. That the shy kid decides not to join the football team or try out for the school play or go to the birthday party because it’s easier for him to be at home with his robot. That the single person doesn’t sign up for the dating app or go on a blind date because he’d rather cuddle up on the couch with his newly purchased sex robot.

Again, this isn’t impossible to envisage. Unlike a real friend who might annoy you by calling out your misbehavior or challenging your views, robots are more like the ultimate rent-a-friend, servile “yes-people” at your beck and call 24/7, catering to what you want but not necessarily what you need, nor taking you out of your comfort zone.95 Carl, after all, told me that he already prefers seeing Jean, the professional cuddler, to “the hassle of dating.” “Thanks to commercial imperatives, designers and programmers typically create devices whose responses make us feel better—but may not help us be self-reflective or contemplate painful truths,” writes Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Yale who specializes in human-robot relationships.96

Moreover, given that robots are not only likely to be, as David Levy envisages, “programmable never to fall out of love with their human and able to ensure that their human never falls out of love with them,” but will also eventually be able to read our desires, our minds, and our emotional state far better than any humans, the challenge they present to human relationships will only increase.97 This will be especially so as robots become ever more capable of not only reading our moods and desires but also acting on them. Think of the Pepper of tomorrow, with his promise that if you are sad, he’ll promptly play your favorite tune.

Ethicists and philosophers Pim Haselager and Anco Peeters ask, “Why would people, when such [robotic] partners are available, be content with any kind of relationship, emotional or sexual, that would not adhere to this standard of perfection?”98 It’s a valid question.

Then there’s the fact that people may feel more able to open up freely to a robot than a human. This is especially true if they feel that the information they are revealing is imbued with a sense of shame or embarrassment, like disclosing debt or problems with mental health.99 The writer Judith Shulevitz admitted, in a piece she wrote for The Atlantic, that “More than once, I’ve found myself telling my Google Assistant about the sense of emptiness I sometimes feel. ‘I’m lonely,’ I say, which I usually wouldn’t confess to anyone but my therapist—not even my husband, who might take it the wrong way.”100 While in a French hospital an hour outside Paris, as hospital staff struggled in vain to determine what had caused the bruises on one woman’s arms, she eventually confided the reason (a fall from bed) neither to a nurse nor a doctor but to Zora, a social robot assigned to spend time with elderly patients.101 With robots and virtual assistants already perceived by some as a better receptable for our confidences as they will not betray our secrets—will a growing number of us no longer feel the need for a flesh-and-blood confidant (data-privacy concerns aside, that is)?

Meanwhile, it’s easy to see how robot companions could exacerbate the existing trend whereby sex (with another person) is becoming something ever rarer among the young. Already in the United States, people in their early twenties are two and a half times more likely to be abstinent than early-twentysomething Gen Xers a decade before.102 Across the Atlantic, the number of young Brits reporting no sex at all in the last month rose between 2001 and 2012, with researchers speculating that the drop in sexual activity was closely tied to “the sheer pace of modern life.”103 Three in five 18-to-34-year-olds in Japan are not in any sort of romantic relationship, a 20 percent increase from 2005.104 In China, three-quarters of “empty nest” youths—adults aged between twenty and thirty-nine who live alone—have sex only once every six months or less.105 For those for whom dating has become increasingly fraught and confusing—in part thanks to dating apps and the ubiquity of porn—it’s quite conceivable that Harmony, who will always be sexually available in the same way that Flippy will always be ready to cook a burger, may be a preferable companion to Helen on Tinder, who might require wooing and nurturing.

Or indeed, Henry. For yes, sex robot Henry is available now, too, in case you’ve been wondering. He comes “with six-pack abs, airbrushed features, and a customizable ‘bionic’ penis that has more ribbed-for-your-pleasure vascularity than occurs naturally.”106 There are now also transgender sex robots.107 Like his female counterpart Harmony, Henry is not all about the physical, though: he’ll woo you too with gems like “You can count on me for the good and bad moments.”108 Notably, one of the taglines adopted by its maker Realbotix (the AI-focused branch of RealDoll) speaks directly to feelings of isolation: “Be the first to never be lonely again.”109

Why It Matters

As robots become ever more sophisticated, empathetic, and intelligent, the risk, then, is that they may help us counter loneliness on a personal and individual level but in so doing encourage us to distance ourselves from other humans. This really matters. First, because the less we interact directly with humans, the worse we risk becoming at doing so. Remember how bad many teenagers are already becoming at communicating face-to-face? Replacing Alexis with Alexa is likely to reinforce and amplify this.

Second, because the more time we spend with robot friends over humans, given that they require so much less of us, the less appetite we may well have to put in the extra work human relationships demand, let alone try hard to earn another’s friendship.

Third, because the more we are enmeshed in AI relationships that are necessarily less reciprocal, more narcissistic, and less challenging than ones with humans, the fewer opportunities we will have to exercise the muscles of cooperation, compromise, and reciprocity that community needs to thrive.

And fourth, because of the prerequisites that need to be in place for democracy to successfully work—and by successfully I mean be inclusive and tolerant. As we have explored, not only do the bonds between the state and citizen need to be strong, but so do the bonds between fellow citizens. If we stop having to care for each other because nonhuman caregivers can do that work for us, the danger is that we will make less effort to care for and pay much less attention to our families, our friends, and our fellow citizens. Why visit your elderly father, check in on a neighbor, or read your child a bedtime story, if you know a robot can do this in your stead? Already iPal, a humanoid robot designed for childcare, is in significant demand in Asia, while the makers of Pepper have flagged babysitting as one of the robots’ possible uses.110 How much of a leap will it really be for some parents, already used to giving their child a phone or iPad to keep them quiet, to hand over even more of their care to a robotic helper?

And as a society, we lose something fundamental when we stop providing care to others. For if we don’t need each other, why would we honor each other’s claims, rights, or desires? The danger is that a world in which machines have replaced humans in our affections and taken over the role of caregivers is also a world that is fundamentally incompatible with the underpinnings of inclusive democracy, reciprocity, compassion, and care.

Technology can only ever provide part of the answer to the growing loneliness crisis in the twenty-first century—and comes yet again with a range of attendant risks. So while virtual assistants, social robots, and even sex robots can all play a positive role in mitigating loneliness at an individual level, we cannot allow their introduction to be at the expense of human contact, human friendships, and care—whatever the benefits, economic or otherwise. The potential societal ramifications are too severe. It’s a similar argument to why screens in the classroom have a role to play in educating our children but should never replace human teachers.

Instead, we should look to the advances in robotics and AI and Emotional AI as a challenge to each of us to raise the bar, care even more about those around us, look out for each other that extra bit, be even more empathic and altruistic—a challenge to push ourselves to always be more human than robots, and maybe even learn from robots how to become better humans.

All the Lonely People

Thirty-four minutes. The time it takes to bake a tray of cookies or walk two miles was all that was needed for 135,000 tickets for Glastonbury 2020, the long-standing U.K. music festival that has headlined stars such as David Bowie, Coldplay, Paul McCartney, and Beyoncé, to sell out. This was before that particular year’s lineup had even been announced.1

The festival is notoriously unglamorous—attendees sleep in tents, showers are rare, and rainfall typically renders the fields a muddy mess. Popular advice to firsttime “Glasto goers” includes making a run for any available Porta Potties (the lines can be hours long), splurging on cucumber-scented hand sanitizer for those showerless days, and practicing getting in and out of your galoshes so your tent isn’t full of mud.2 Yet despite these apparent drawbacks, devotees say the friendliness and diversity of the crowd are what make the experience so worth it, the “real sense of community buzzing throughout the site,” as Robin Taylor-Stavely, who grew up near Glastonbury and has attended since she was a teenager, put it; the fact that it’s “a time of real connection,” as Matt Jones, who proposed to his girlfriend at the festival, explained.3 For diehard Glastonbury fans, it’s a well-worn maxim that if you actually see any bands, then you’re doing something wrong;4 it’s the sense of community, not the music, that brings regulars back every year. Just south of the main festival site, away from the blaring amplifiers and enormous lighting rigs, hippies jostle with hedge-fund managers, students with serial entrepreneurs. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament hands out temporary peace tattoos, clairvoyants are on standby to read your palm, and the Women’s Institute sells lemon drizzle cake and Victoria sponge cake.5

Attending Glastonbury in 2016—believed to be the muddiest Glastonbury ever—British music journalist Neil McCormick remarked on how “[a]s part of the closely compressed mass of 150,000 people flooding out of the main field after Adele’s set on Saturday, I was forcefully struck by how calm and content the crowd was, working together to cross unreliable terrain, helping out those in difficulty and spontaneously bursting into song to manifest togetherness. This is really and truly what festivals are all about.”6 This spirit of cooperation applies equally to Glastonbury’s two-thousand-strong army of volunteers, not least the litter-pickers and cleaners who have the grimmest job of all.7 “It depends on the weather, and there’s also some luck involved, but there’s a real feeling of togetherness,” said Leila, a frequent festival volunteer.8 One of its most memorable moments took place in 2017 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London, when fifteen thousand attendees gathered in Glastonbury’s Stone Circle to set a new record for the world’s biggest peace sign.9

Then there’s Coachella, immortalized in Homecoming, the film about Beyoncé’s now-legendary 2018 performance. Held in southern California’s Colorado Desert, it’s a festival that in recent years has been attended by over two hundred thousand people, a fivefold increase since its inception twenty years ago.10 “[M]ore than the music and the grand production of the event, the thing that struck me most about Coachella was the beautiful and fleeting sense of community,” said attendee Joey Gibbons, a skier and entrepreneur. “After all, aren’t we all really just searching for a place where we can feel a part of something, a place where we can belong, even if it’s just for a weekend?”11 Add to these festivals like Vienna’s Donauinselfest, Brazil’s Rock in Rio, or Rabat’s Mawazine, each of which in 2019 attracted more than seven hundred thousand visitors, and it’s clear just how strong the appetite for shared live experiences has become.12

Even as life was being designed to be ever more contactless and technology was enabling us to substitute “real” relationships for those with YouTubers, TikTokers, and Alexas; even as we were being urged to “join the conversation” via Twitter or “share a moment” on Snapchat and were migrating more and more of our conversations online, in those millions of festivalgoers we saw evidence of a burgeoning countermovement of people for whom virtual interactions weren’t enough, and who in response to their growing feelings of disconnection and atomization were actively breaking out of their own digital bubbles and seeking out community in analog, face-to-face forms.

It wasn’t just music festivals that were having a renaissance at the end of the last decade. In New York, millennials and Generation K-ers were converging en masse at start-ups like CraftJam, where people would get together to paint watercolors, embroider T-shirts, and make macramé wall hangings—opportunities, as they put it on their website, to “make skills and friends, hands on.” Escape rooms, where players have to work together to sort through clues and solve puzzles to unlock a series of doors, had become so popular in cities around the world that they now had their own category on TripAdvisor.13 Sarah Dodd, one half of an escape-room “power couple” who have completed more than 1,500 rooms around the world, explained that the social aspect was a key draw. “I can also get out of the house with friends and have a drink afterward. It’s not solitary,” she told the Guardian.14 There had also been a resurgence of spaces where twenty- and thirtysomethings gathered to play board games and Dungeons and Dragons, especially in urban centers. Places like Hex & Co. in New York or any number of board-game cafés in London, where staff, akin to “game sommeliers,” walk about helping people choose a game to suit their mood—and explain the rules. Not that their clientele necessarily left their smartphones at home. “Every single person around a game of Jenga will probably be recording the final tense moments of a game as the tower is about to crash,” wrote culture critic Malu Rocha in her analysis of this new phenomenon—before posting it to social media, of course.15

Meanwhile, group fitness classes, from yoga to Zumba to HIIT, were also growing in popularity. In 2017 in the United Kingdom alone, an additional 3.76 million people took such classes compared to just a year before.16 Boutique fitness studios such as SoulCycle, whose cocktail of cardio fitness, motivational sayings, and nightclub vibe drove the company’s meteoric rise over recent years, were even being likened to a religion (or, depending on who you ask, a cult) for millennials.17 A desire to maintain fitness and health was inevitably central to the trend, but there was something more going on. “People come because they want to lose weight or gain muscle strength, but they stay for the community….It’s really the relationships that keep them coming back,” says Harvard Divinity School researcher Casper ter Kuile, whose project “How We Gather” has been tracing the ritualistic behaviors of millennials.18

It’s not that commercial offerings like SoulCycle or CrossFit just fill the role that religious institutions played in the past; they are religious communities, in a way, with their own liturgies, sanctuaries, and symbols.19 They are also places where the act of communion confers physiological and psychological benefits. Studies have found that when people exercise together in person, their bodies release more endorphins and they feel calmer after the workout than when they exercise alone.20

In South Korea, it was the lonely elderly population that entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity to serve. There, over the past few years, pensioners have been congregating in daytime discos known as “colatecs” (cola + discothèque), some of which host as many as one thousand patrons on weekdays, double that on the weekends. Entrance is cheap at only 1,000 won ($0.82), a fraction of what a club aimed at young people in Seoul might charge. For elderly Koreans, who experience some of the highest rates of poverty in the world for their age group, the colatecs have been a lifeline. “What else would I do all day? My family is busy with work. I hate going to senior centers ’cause all they do there is smoke,” explains eighty-five-year-old Kim Sa-gyu. For many, a few hours of dancing a week has done wonders to relieve anxieties about failed businesses, marriages, or their day-to-day loneliness. “If you have music and a partner, you can put all other thoughts out of your mind,” says Kim In-gil, also eighty-five, who lost most of his savings in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. And for those who are too shy to find a partner, full-time matchmakers facilitate introductions. “Those helpers sometimes take me to a new woman and put our hands together to dance. I buy them a bottle of Will [a locally made probiotic yoghurt] during our tea-breaks,” says Kim In-gil.21

At a time when churchgoing had plummeted, work was increasingly solitary, youth clubs were shutting their doors, community centers were closing down, and more and more urbanites were living alone, commercialized communities were starting to become the new cathedrals of the twenty-first century, where “congregants” came together to spin, paint, or jive rather than kneel or pray. This can be seen as a reaction against “contactless” living and digital privacy bubbles, a countervailing force that actively sought out and celebrated shared in-person experiences.

In a world in which community had felt ever more elusive, yet the craving for belonging had endured, businesses had stepped in to fill the void. The Loneliness Economy had begun to boom—and not only in its technological form—with entrepreneurs finding ever more innovative ways to satisfy people’s enduring need for what the early sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”—the joyful intoxication we get from doing things with others in person.22

It is likely that COVID-19 will bring about only a temporary halt to this. If anything, the desire for face-to-face human connection will be even stronger for many, once the fear of contagion wanes. For even though our fear of human contact may persist for some time yet, and despite our increased interest in contactless experiences, only a few years after the 1918 Spanish Flu jazz clubs were packed with people enjoying the music and each other’s company, and in Germany the Weimar Republic’s decadent bars and nightclubs were heaving with customers by the mid-1920s. Indeed, when gyms reopened in Hong Kong in May 2020 people waited in long lines to gain access. And in Tel Aviv, yoga studios found themselves so deluged with clients wanting to downward dog in each other’s company at the end of the lockdown that they had to institute waiting lists, even while still offering classes on Zoom.

The Loneliness Economy clearly took a major beating during 2020, at least in its in-person form, but it would be a mistake to assume that the market for face-to-face community and connection has been dealt a fatal blow by the pandemic. At a fundamental evolutionary level, our primordial need for physical proximity and togetherness is likely to prove too strong. Moreover, given how important face-to-face interactions are, as we seek to rebuild our post-COVID-19 world, we need to ensure that we do physically reconnect and acknowledge the important role entrepreneurialism can play in helping us to do so.

That businesses can deliver community in this way should come as no surprise. After all, we have seen local enterprises play a critical role in nurturing their neighborhoods for centuries. Think of the corner shops in Victorian England, whose practice of providing goods on credit to locals served as a lifeline for many between paydays.23 Or how since the turn of the nineteenth century, barbershops have provided sanctuary for many African Americans: serving as places not only to get haircuts but also community spaces where men gather to play chess and dominoes, while also discussing politics and local affairs.24 Some local businesses even become what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called in his 1989 book The Great Good Place “third places”: neither home nor work but rather gathering spaces abuzz with conversation where regulars meet up and people of different social and economic backgrounds interact, form bonds, exchange ideas, and share opinions. These are places where, as Oldenburg wrote, “we all feel at home and comfortable.”25 They play critical roles in maintaining our social fabric because they are places where we can practice community and democracy in their most inclusive form—places where, as in a book club, people may bring wildly different worldviews and lived experiences that must be reconciled, calibrated, understood, and discussed in order for the space to thrive. And because the space is important for everyone, people are willing to do that work. Participants have a stake in the space; they’re not simply moving through it and are therefore willing to engage, listen, and think about the whole, rather than only their own individual part.

The challenge we face, however, is that in the twenty-first century, many independent local stores that contribute to the social fabric and the building of community are under existential threat.

The Last Slice

On the corner of 25th and Mission Streets in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District was a café I’d frequent whenever I was in town. It was called Mission Pie.

While there was no shortage of cafés in the city, Mission Pie drew me in. It was the comically large neon pie tin and fork sign outside, coupled with its floor-to-ceiling windows, which bathed the yellow-painted dining room in a warm light, that first alerted me to its presence. Looking in from the outside, the pies that diners were devouring looked pretty good, too. But what was most noticeable as soon as I crossed the threshold—and why I returned more than once—was that this was a place where people pulled up a chair along the well-worn wooden floors, sat down across from one another, and talked. There were the morning coffee regulars, chatting with the baristas, who seemed to have been working there for a while, and the knitting circle that gathered on Wednesdays around the communal table. It was a place that not only held an annual pie-baking contest that invited Bay Area home chefs to test their prized recipes with a hundred or so of Mission Pie’s customers and baked-goods connoisseurs, it even celebrated National Typewriter Day by bringing in vintage typewriters and inviting customers to sit down to write poetry or draft their manifestos.26 In many ways it was Oldenburg’s “third place” to a T. And on each coffee mug, as well as on a sign that hung above its menu, was a simple comforting mantra: “Good Food. Every Meal. Every Day.” Every day, that is, until September 1, 2019, when Mission Pie sold its last slice and the café shut down after twelve years of operation.

To understand Mission Pie’s demise, we need to understand how it fits into much larger trends in the city it ultimately struggled to serve.

Karen Heisler and co-owner Krystin Rubin opened Mission Pie in 2007 with the belief that a values-driven small business could contribute to community and environmental health.27 They sourced their ingredients from California farms, rotating their fruit seasonally to ensure that the peaches, strawberries, and apples they used were at their freshest—and tastiest—and kept working with some of the same producers throughout the café’s twelve years of existence. They offered job training and internships to young people in the community. They paid their employees well above minimum wage and offered benefits.28 If the tech economy was built on the infamous slogan “move fast and break things,” Mission Pie grew on the idea of move slow and build things.

In the process, they created a community that became almost like a second family for people like former regular Kimberly Sikora, a thirty-four-year-old artist and teacher who moved to the neighborhood in 2009 from Brooklyn. Mission Pie was one of the first places she stopped at when she arrived in the city—two of her friends lived in the apartment upstairs.

For her, too, it was the big windows and light-filled dining room that initially drew her in. The banana cream pie won her over as a customer. But it was the feeling of home that kept her coming back. “It became my living room,” she said—the backdrop to catch-ups with old friends, a place where she forged new friendships. As her network of people grew in the city, Kimberly even held a weekly craft night at the café: picture spools of yarn and embroidery thread sitting alongside plates of pie on the communal table. And during her last years living in the city, when she had a particularly stressful job, it was where she would come every morning to sip coffee, journal her vision of the day, and draw a tarot card, a place where she felt supported even when she was alone. “What I feel Mission Pie always offered was the chance to be around people and feel community even when you wanted some solitude,” Kimberly said.

Yet outside the walls of Mission Pie, San Francisco was shifting in another direction. The tech economy, having outgrown its original Silicon Valley base, expanded into the city, bringing with it an influx of highly paid tech workers. This drove up rent and housing prices, making it one of the most expensive American cities to live in.29 The financial pressure was particularly acute for residents and business owners in neighborhoods like the Mission District, where Mission Pie was located, an area with a distinctly Latino heritage and a sizable lower-income constituency, located just two short miles from the Mid-Market neighborhood, where corporations such as Twitter, Uber, and Zendesk had moved in during the early 2010s, lured by attractive tax breaks.30 And with the shift in the city’s demographics came a change too in how people interacted with local businesses, particularly with local cafés and restaurants.

The tech companies were largely to blame for this. Rather than bringing business to the area—part of the rationale for the significant tax breaks that they had been given to relocate there—most did quite the opposite, preferring to sequester their staff in the office and provide a host of perks to keep them there, especially at mealtimes. Remember the fresh-caught rockfish and cayenne pepper ginger shots in Big Tech’s lavish cafeterias we encountered in Chapter 7? No wonder the influx of foot traffic that city officials hoped would turn into profits for local restaurants didn’t materialize.31

Meanwhile, the age of food delivery apps had arrived. While ostensibly an opportunity for local establishments to serve a new set of customers, they came at a cost. The apps charged restaurants up to 30 percent commission fees on each order, leaving them with a dilemma: take the cut in revenues or increase prices.32

Moreover, the apps cut into more than just the bottom line. As we’ve seen, they encourage a contactless existence where having a slice of pie delivered to your doorstep in under twenty minutes is more convenient than popping over to one’s local café and purchasing that same slice from a friendly and chatty barista. So at the same time restaurants were weighing the pros and cons of signing up, fewer people were eating out in the first place.

Mission Pie found itself at the nexus of these pressures. The local cost of living increased so much that it became impossible to pay employees a fair wage. Selling on delivery apps would mean increasing prices to offset the commission fees, a choice that would mean betraying the inclusive values the café was built on in order to survive.33 And selling their pies in grocery stores was not an option, as it would compromise the freshness of their ingredients.

So Karen Heisler and Krystin Rubin decided to hold one last annual pie-baking competition and then shut down Mission Pie.

“Every day, we are awed and deeply moved by your love for Mission Pie as well as your sustained presence here at the shop: the morning coffee, the weekly meetings, the Wednesday knitters, the Friday morning banana cream pie date, the afternoon bowl of soup. There’s so many more; it’s tempting to list them all,” they wrote on the café’s Facebook page in June 2019. “We have witnessed many of you through momentous changes and accomplishments, profound growth, deep losses, new beginnings. We’ve baked your wedding pies, we’ve watched your children get big. We’ve also been together through more mundane days and weeks. All of it has mattered.”34

During its final days, the lines of loyal customers hoping to get one last slice wrapped around the corner.35 Former regulars mourned the loss from afar. Kimberly Sikora, who in 2016 relocated to the Mojave Desert in search of more affordable rent and a quieter pace of life, hasn’t yet discovered a replacement for the community she found at Mission Pie. Even so, she believes the owners’ decision was the right one. “If I had seen that they got Wi-Fi or raised the prices or started to employ people for less, I mean all of those things would have been more upsetting than them closing their doors,” she said. “Because it would mean that the side of indifference and profit margins had won—and they were trying to create something so much more.”

The trouble is, “so much more” will not always be reconcilable with staying afloat. For as Mission Pie’s demise makes all too clear, the reality is that profit and an inclusive community ethos don’t always go hand in hand. This is especially so now, given the challenging economic climate.

So as well as ensuring that business taxes paid by brick-and-mortar stores are set at levels that help redress the disadvantage they face vis-à-vis online retailers, we would all benefit from the creation of a new category of business: pro-community enterprises that are eligible for tax breaks, incentives, and grants if they deliver on verifiable metrics of inclusivity and help drive social cohesion. Local bookshops have historically played this role of key community hubs and would be the kind of businesses that could benefit from such support. Think of Kett’s Books in Wymondham, Norfolk, in the United Kingdom, which in 2019 launched a “One Community One Book” project, essentially a town-wide book group complete with meetings and events. Although Kett’s didn’t give the books away for free, they did offer a 20 percent discount and donated several copies to the local library, where a weekly read-aloud session also made the book accessible to those who might not have been able to read it themselves. The first book chosen, Frances Liardet’s We Must Be Brave, mirrored the project itself, telling the story of a small English village forced to come together during the Second World War.36 As part of the campaign, Liardet gave several readings in Wymondham, including one at a local old-age home, where the residents discussed their own memories and experiences of the war.37

Similarly, Readings Bookstore in Melbourne stays open until 11 p.m. most nights to allow people to browse, chat, get a coffee, or attend a free reading from a local poet. Clarke’s in Cape Town, with its comfortable lounge, is not only “a home for books” but also “a safe house for ideas,” having stocked banned books and served as an undercover meeting place throughout South Africa’s long, repressive apartheid regime.38 While some have lamented the way that contemporary bookshops have had to embrace non-book offerings—gifts, coffee, cakes, and performances—as a way to boost takings and compete with online retailers, the books themselves have always been a supporting act to a community bookshop’s central promise: to bring people together over ideas, stories, experiences, shared histories, and difficult and effervescent truths.

We need cafés like Mission Pie and bookshops like Kett’s to be able to survive if we want our local communities to thrive. And if we’re lucky enough to live somewhere they already exist, it’s important that we not only celebrate them but also try to patronize them more ourselves.

Indeed, if I think about where I live, it’s a place where the independent shops work hard to make the community feel inclusive, bound together. Adam the optician puts local artist Jen’s paintings on his walls. The bookshop holds regular talks with authors in partnership with the local community center. The yoga studio has big communal tables for people to hang out with water jugs and magazines even if they’re not there for a class, along with discounted rates for retirees and the unemployed. The greengrocer, Phil, welcomes me with a smile even when I go in without my purse and ask him if he could put my apples on a tab. The local cafés put out water bowls for dogs so that customers can bring in their pets, drink coffee, and just chill out. And strangers end up mingling and chatting because their dogs feel that irresistible canine urge to approach other dogs nearby. This isn’t just anecdotal. Studies have found that people really are more likely to talk to strangers if they are accompanied by a dog.39

Time and again, we see that independent local businesses play an important part in nurturing and anchoring the communities in which they are located. And it was inspiring during the lockdown to see so many local businesses increasing their commitment to community, despite being shuttered and fearing for their own demise. In my neighborhood, restaurant owner Morfudd provided hundreds of free lunches to the local old-age home, the butcher’s became the drop-off point for donations to vulnerable households, while the yoga studio migrated its subsidized community classes online.

This is why it is so critical that we do not allow such businesses to be crushed by the unrelenting growth of e-commerce, and why local Main Streets must be strongly supported by both citizens and government so that they can survive the double whammy of the digital age and the post-coronavirus economic downturn.

If we are to feel part of a community rather than simply live in isolated bubbles, we must appreciate the role local entrepreneurs play in binding us together.

Commercialized Communities

But the community that the commercial sector delivers needs to be more than a marketing ploy. And while big corporations are starting to recognize the value of community as a brand proposition, the authenticity of their offerings can at times be highly questionable.

In 2017, for example, Apple rebranded its shops as “Town Squares.”40 Sounds good in theory, yet all that seems to mean in practice is renaming its product aisles “avenues,” its presentation spaces “forums,” and its technician desks “groves”: a “lexical takeover” that doesn’t just coopt the actual civic spaces those words represent but marks a concerning trend away from true public ownership of those types of spaces, as Andrew Hill of the Financial Times points out. “The very nature of how people use most Apple products—head down, AirPods in—is at odds with the look-up, look-around, listen-out ethos of the town square,” he writes.41

That same year, critics pounced on the similarly misguided blending of capitalist and activist premises in the now-infamous 2017 TV ad that featured a denim-clad Kendall Jenner defusing police-protester tension with a can of Pepsi.42 “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi,” Bernice King, the daughter of U.S. civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., tweeted sarcastically.43 Pepsi initially insisted that the commercial was meant to highlight “people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony,” but in appropriating the language and even the aesthetic of communities engaged in protest, the company showed that in reality it had no idea what those communities were fighting for, nor did it care.44 It just wanted to sell more Pepsi.

These are just two among many cases of giant corporations coopting the language of community for their own purposes. If Big Business is to play a meaningful role in bringing us together, it will need to move beyond this kind of rhetorical flourish and spin.

What is fascinating is that in the past few years a distinct new model of business has emerged that doesn’t seek to nurture an existing community or forge a new one by connecting people with a shared passion. Instead this emergent model sees community itself as a commodity, one that it is intent on commercializing, a product it can package and sell.

I’m referring here to the rise in commercial co-working spaces, companies with names like CommonGrounds, Work.Life, Convene, Second Home, and, of course, WeWork, which at its peak had more than 280 locations spread across eighty-six cities and over 4 million square meters in real estate.45 Alongside their Instagrammable venues, ping-pong tables, free-flowing ales on tap, and micro-roasted coffee, these businesses wield the promise of community like a sword. Indeed, in WeWork’s failed IPO prospectus (the filing a disaster not because of its core premise but because of revelations of profligate spending, erratic decision-making, and gross mismanagement) the word community appeared 150 times.46

Think, too, about the rapid rise in commercial co-living spaces that we’ve seen in the past few years. In the United States, it is estimated that the number of co-living units will triple within the next few years.47 In Asia, where only 11 percent of millennials own their own homes, investors, seeing a significant opportunity in co-living, have been piling in.48 Even during the spring of 2020, when physical proximity was deemed a negative, investment interest in the sector remained very significant. Starcity, for example, a co-living operator with twelve locations around San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, completed at the end of April 2020 its series B investment round of $30 million.

The emphasis of this new category of apartment buildings with similarly unifying names such as “Common,” “Society,” “Collective,” and “You+” is not on the private dwellings they rent out, the smallest of which can be as tiny as 86 square feet.49 It is again on the community spirit they claim to provide. “Be more together,” is Collective’s tagline; Common boasts that it’s “built for community” and “you’re always invited,” while “community” is literally listed as part of the services in the “all-inclusive” plan offered by co-living operator Ollie.50

To put flesh on these bones, these buildings boast an array of communal spaces—bars, roof gardens, shared kitchens, cinemas—as well as curated activities such as yoga and French classes. Norn, a company that originated as a members-only club to train people in the lost “art of conversation,” launched a co-living arm in 2018 in which residents were even offered scheduled discussion groups billed as “meaningful gatherings.”51

On the one hand, this is an exciting prospect: businesses delivering community at scale. For if such co-working or co-living spaces could deliver togetherness and belonging, they might indeed play a significant role in solving at least some elements of today’s loneliness crisis—once our fears about being around others have abated, that is. Think of remote worker John, for whom work is “just lonely as all hell.” Or Giorgio in Milan, who so missed talking to people at dinner that he found himself going more and more often to meals and singalongs hosted by the League. Or graphic designer Frank, who, despite having lived in his apartment block for a couple of years, doesn’t have a single neighbor whom he knows well enough to pop over for a quick cup of coffee. There’s clearly a powerful and growing demand out there, especially as ever more people live on their own, and more and more of us work remotely or join the gig economy.

Is WeWashing the New Greenwashing?

But can a manufactured community ever deliver “true” togetherness? Or is “WeWashing” the new greenwashing, the word community no more meaningful than the word eco-friendly on a can of toxic pesticide?

To date, the picture has been mixed. For some, they do seem to be making life less lonely. “I would consider WeWork and co-working spaces the best thing to ever happen to my social life,” reported a freelance web developer. When he worked from home, he wrote, his mood was lower, and he even found himself feeling tired and getting sick more often—exactly what we’d expect, given what we know about physical health and loneliness.52 But at WeWork, he says, he “went from a rather introverted person to being quite extroverted and growing emotionally.”53 Others have had similar experiences. Daniel, a software engineer and expat who worked at a WeWork in Paris for a year and a half, credits his co-working experience with sparking a number of real-life, non-work friendships. “When you don’t know a ton of people in the city, it’s a good way to meet people, even if you’re not working on anything similar,” he says.54

When BBC journalist Winnie Agbonlahor spent six days living in two different co-living facilities in London, she came across several happy campers.55 These included fifty-eight-year-old Lucilla, who shared that she’d made more friends in three months at the Collective’s Royal Oak co-living space (famous for its disco-themed laundry room and ceramic dildo-making workshops) than she had in three years living on her own in Paris; and Matty, a thirty-three-year-old IT specialist, for whom living in the Collective had been transformative.56 For years, he had suffered a rare kidney condition that forced him to undergo a number of transplants that left him feeling, he says, “like a dead man walking,” stripped of energy, mobility, and social confidence. “In a way, living here brought me back to life,” he told Agbonlahor. “Having people around to ask me how I am has made all the difference.”

Another resident, Jeffrey, told Peter Timko, a researcher studying the Collective, about a property-developer friend who had visited him there and had been initially skeptical of how much money was spent on the common areas of such buildings. But seeing all the small interactions between residents in the lobby changed his mind: “And in an instant he got it,” Jeffrey recalled. “Because in his properties, no one says hello to each other. They don’t even look each other in the eye. And yet here was this space where people are happy to interact, happy to say ‘Hello, hey, how are you? How’s it going? Can I help you with that? Can I hold the door?’ ”57

It’s a damning indictment of the isolation of urban life that something so small as your neighbor looking you in the eye or opening the door for you would be so highly valued. But as we’ve seen throughout this book, such momentary exchanges—that we know can help us feel markedly less alone—are becoming increasingly rare, thanks to the ever-accelerating bustle of our cities, our ever-more-crunched schedules, and the intensity of our digital addiction. If commercialized communities can at the least guarantee these micro-interactions, surely that’s something. But is it enough?

I, Not We

Some who’ve tried out this new generation of commercialized communities, whether as living or working spaces, think not. Perhaps they were hoping for something deeper, something more worthy of the “community” branding.

Amber, a gig economy worker who combines being a virtual personal assistant with social media management, recounted how alone she felt on a typical day in WeWork Barcelona: “I walk into the WeWork and there’s around six people spread across the floor, sitting as far away as possible from one another with headphones on, me included. I sat myself on a cozy sofa out of the way, where I could have my peace and quiet to start my work, without having strangers glare over my laptop screen. The only time I engaged in conversation with someone is when I crossed paths with them at the coffee machine trying to figure out how the damn thing works.”

Amber’s experience reminded me of when I visited WeWork’s flagship space in Tel Aviv and saw people lining up for free malabi, a rosewater milk pudding common in the Middle East. It was one of the “community” events being offered, yet no one was speaking to each other; all of them had their heads down in their phones and (having grabbed their malabi) had slunk off back to their desks. To me, the ethos seemed more “I work” than “WeWork.”

Over at the Collective, despite the positive comments from Matty, Lucilla, and Jeffrey, others expressed their doubts to Agbonlahor. One resident told her that the “community” touted by the Collective’s marketing materials was nothing less than false advertising: not just exaggerated but missing completely, in their view. And several voiced disappointment about the lack of community engagement, with only a small group of residents seeming to be actively involved.58

It was a complaint echoed in Timko’s research interviews, with one resident suggesting community engagement was as low as 10 percent.59 As another “co-liver,” Marge, explained, “there’s a lot of people who just kind of live in the shadows and don’t ever participate.” This was even the case when it came to the free salmon and bagel brunches the Collective puts on to encourage residents to mingle: “You would actually see people coming down, loading the salmon and the eggs on their plate and come up to their rooms to eat it. [Yet] the whole point is to come down…connect and bond instead of just loading it up and just going back to your room and eating it by yourself,” an incredulous and disgruntled resident told Timko.60

We have already seen that you can’t break bread together if you Deliveroo at home. Nor can you break bread together if you grab your bagel from the communal brunch and take it to go.

You Can’t Buy Community; You Have to Practice It

Indeed, a lack of engagement in the community is a key concern at other co-working and co-living spaces, not only among residents or members but also for the operators of a host of these spaces themselves.61 In a Berlin get-together of operators of four leading commercial co-living ventures, “lack of member engagement” was identified by the group as one of the key challenges they faced.62 Of course, in order for there to be significant member engagement, there needs to be a critical mass of members who want to commune. The trouble with many commercial communities is that this is by no means guaranteed.

For if we think about who’s joining many of these new shiny, commercialized communities, they are not necessarily people who have the time or lifestyles that community-building demands. Unlike the forbearers of co-living and co-working spaces—bottom-up co-housing initiatives such as those of the 1970s set up by groups of hippies, or Israel’s kibbutzim, places populated by people for whom solidarity, care for each other, and togetherness were the guiding principles—most co-living and co-working spaces today actively target highly individualistic millennial professionals, many of whom return home drained by their long working hours, lengthy commutes, and panoptical open-plan offices and are far too exhausted to socialize. They are urbanites who have become used to their digital bubbles or been conditioned to believe that interacting with others is not what city dwellers do—people for whom community as a concept is perhaps more appealing than community as a way of life.

But can the habits of disconnecting from each other be unlearned? And new habits of community developed? I believe that the answer to both is yes, but only with real effort and will.

The operators themselves are making an effort.

At the Collective, the communal notice board heaves under the weight of flyers advertising upcoming events—a crystal-pendant-making workshop, a talk on mental health awareness, a lecture on the politics of body hair.63 Even during lockdown, their offerings continued, albeit now online. Zoom sessions offered over the course of a week in May 2020 included “Vinyasa Flow with Eloise” and “Drawn Together,” a session for artists where one volunteer at a time is the sitter, posing in front of their webcam while everyone else draws.

At WeWork, a senior executive proudly detailed all the attention that’s put into maximizing interaction, even down to the layout of the staircases and corridors, which are intentionally designed to be too narrow for two people to pass one another—not great for the coronavirus age—“so that you have to take your face off your phone for a second and kind of [move aside] and let someone pass. We do this on purpose. We design our staircases and our hallways the size that two people will actually need to look at each other, probably in the eyes and say hello, even when they just go to do a mundane task, like getting water.”

The trouble is—and this is the challenge these companies need to overcome—that community is not something one can buy, nor is it something that can be imposed by management. It is instead something in which people have to invest time and proactively participate in if it’s to thrive. So, however many events a co-living or co-working space curates, however much free food or alcohol they provide, however narrow the corridors, unless the people who live and work there actually interact with each other in meaningful ways, a community will never materialize. Community is predicated on people doing things together, not simply being together or bumping into each other as they pass by. It’s the difference between “being together” and “being alone together,” between an active state and a passive one.

The style of community “leadership” plays a clear role in determining which of these two states prevail. Those co-living blocks in which the residents themselves have agency, plan their own outings and events, and run their own community meetings and in which managers help them realize their own ideas for a new group activity seem to fare significantly better on the community front than those in which community is imposed purely top-down. Indeed, Chen Anvi, the charismatic co-founder of Venn, an Israeli co-living operator with complexes in Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Brooklyn, whose members’ self-reported levels of loneliness fall on average by over a third within six months of moving into a Venn home, attributes this success in part to recognizing this principle of self-determination. “While other operators take the ‘if we build it they will come’ approach to resident engagement with their wine and cheese night and Tuesday Tacos, what we have learned along the way is not if we build it they will come, but if they build it they will stay,” Anvi explains.64

As such, instead of just trying to come up with the next “loneliness-alleviating” community activities themselves, Venn now also asks members what type of event they want to create and deploy their community managers in a facilitating rather than an initiating role. It’s not that every member needs to be an initiator—most of us know from our own experience that we don’t want too many chefs in the kitchen—it’s that a culture of co-creation and member empowerment seems to change the experience from one of a hotel to something closer to a home, a community one has a stake in, rather than a commodity to be bought and sold.

Indeed, Anvi tells me that one of the “biggest accelerators” of their community creation has been the monthly “dig-in dinner,” essentially a potluck dinner, where the food is provided by the members themselves. (Venn provides drinks and desserts.) Anvi went on to describe how, over meals they have prepared, old-timers welcome new arrivals and catch up with each other. And how through the explanations of the dishes they’ve chosen to share, members open up about their hometown or country, with the memories their dishes evoke providing a way in to deeper conversations about who they are and where they are from, setting the stage for the creation of more meaningful bonds. The “dig-in dinners” are Venn’s highest-attended events.

Perhaps if instead of being offered a free salmon and bagel brunch, the Collective’s members were actively encouraged to cook together, their sense of community would be stronger?

Part of the problem, too, is how a number of these companies define community. Take Nomadworks, the also supposedly “community-centric” WeWork competitor—it explicitly lists “networking events” among its membership amenities.65 And when I asked a senior executive at WeWork how they knew they were delivering when it comes to community, his “proof,” tellingly, was how many successful “transactions” members had completed with one another. Specifically, he told me, they measured how many WeWork members had bought something from another member at least once as a proxy for how strong the community was. Those renting space there have noticed the inherent contradiction in this decidedly neoliberal framing. James, who worked in WeWork’s Moorgate building in London, a glass-windowed behemoth whose bathrooms have “Hustle Harder” stenciled on the wall, described his experience there thus: “People are super-friendly here, but that’s only because everyone is trying to sell everyone something. It’s amazing how quickly I became a persona non grata when I made clear I wasn’t interested in buying. Put it this way, no one asked me to play ping-pong.”

This transactional aspect isn’t of course in itself a bad thing. Indeed, the fact that more than half of co-working users in a 2014 study reported that they had found new clients and new collaborators in their workspace suggests that there’s, at the least, a clear business case for becoming a member.66 Moreover, friendships can develop alongside business dealings or indeed be forged at a networking event. It’s just that a fistful of business cards does not a community make. We devalue the notion of community if it is reduced to a group of people who view each other just as a potential mark. It needs to mean caring for and helping each other too, not just hustling.

The frictionless nature of these operations also has something to answer for, given they typically emphasize convenience almost as much as community. At some co-living spaces, everything from laundry to the cleaning of your shared kitchen to the emptying of shared bins is done for you. What this means is that yes, there are fewer domestic tasks to worry about, but also less shared responsibility for the upkeep of communal spaces, and fewer tasks that you’ll complete on behalf of anyone other than yourself. Research into what makes co-housing communities thrive (co-housing rather than co-living implies a longer-term cooperative situation, often where residents develop the space and its practices themselves) suggests that crucial to the development of social ties is that residents take on responsibility for group activities and site maintenance—whether weekly rotas, taking out the bins, laundry, weeding a community garden, or sharing childcare.67

We’ve arrived, it seems, at the central paradox of many co-living and co-working spaces: they want to sell the benefits of living or working in close proximity with others, but with none of the social buy-in, the hard work that community requires. As can be the case with real friendships, when it comes to the building of authentic community, perhaps putting up with some inconvenience is part of the bargain.

Think of the communities you feel most connected to. Presumably they are also environments in which you have to make some sort of effort, give as well as take? If I think of my weekly improv group, one of the communities I feel strongly part of, tasks and responsibilities are shared. I am responsible for collecting the dues and paying the church whose hall we use, Roderick runs the sessions, Thierry sorts out keys when needed, Kevin brings his guitar, Ma’ee and Amber take us through tongue-twisters, and Lucy steps in to run the session when Roderick can’t. And, importantly, each of us tries our best to show up each week, even if we are not in the mood. Conversely, if community is served up to you alongside free ale and malabi and you don’t need to do anything yourself to contribute, your obligation to commit to it is likely to be weakened.

Showing up is key. This highlights another problem with many of these commercialized communities—their members are transient. The Collective’s annual turnover rate is, for example, 50 percent.68 And while turnover at co-working spaces is harder to calculate—after all, a membership at WeWork buys you access to offices all over the world—any place with a majority of hot desks will inevitably be “an environment whose most defining characteristic is constant change.”69 As we saw in the context of cities, the problem with itinerant communities is that the less rooted you are in your community, the less likely you are to participate in it. By actively selling flexibility and fluidity as part of the offering, WeWork and other such spaces lower the odds of members and residents seeing the community as theirs and actively investing in it. Indeed, if one thinks about truly bonded communities, whether we’re talking churchgoers, members of the Haredim in Israel, or even a cycling club, one of the key reasons the bonds between members are strong is because of their repeated interactions. For while some of the strength inevitably comes from a shared passion or shared values, it also takes time for people to feel truly bonded to each other. Without repeated opportunities for solidarity and mutual support to play out, the relationships between members within a community will always be more akin to a holiday romance than a marriage, and trust will be in short supply.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that one of the other key issues flagged at the Berlin meetup of co-living companies was the high level of distrust among members. The Collective has dealt with this by installing closed-circuit cameras throughout their spaces, alongside signs such as “Smile, you’re on camera” and “If we find food from shared kitchens in your rooms, we’ll remove it.”70 I can see how it would be annoying to have your olive oil stolen by a fellow resident, but as we saw in previous chapters, such systems of surveillance are hardly conducive to community bonding.

Exclusive Communities

As we contemplate how best to rebuild our post-COVID-19 world and reconnect with each other, there will undoubtedly be useful lessons that governments, local authorities, architects, city planners, and the business world can learn from these twenty-first-century companies who have put community at the heart of their proposition, both good and bad.

Yet even when commercialized communities do manage to deliver a sense of belonging, there remains very often a question of inclusivity. The South Korean colatecs, with their low entry fees, the yoga studio with its discounted rates for pensioners and the unemployed, the subsidized book club, remain exceptions, not the norm. In the majority of cases, when it comes to commercialized communities, if you can’t pay enough, you are not invited in.

Take boutique group fitness classes. For all their spiritual schtick and “we’re a community” branding, it’s crucial to note that these are not church services with open doors. Instead, they are typically clustered in affluent neighborhoods, sold as a luxury item, and packaged with a premium price tag—some cost up to $40 for a single session.71

Similarly, music-festival ticket prices have increased so much that one-third of millennials who attended one in 2018 said they took on debt in order to afford the experience.72 Glastonbury 2020 tickets cost £265 ($330) per person, while general admission to Coachella is $429 “plus fees.” As for my own neighborhood, I am aware that it is only able to retain a high-quality local grocery store because its relatively well-off inhabitants are able and willing to pay what is essentially a “community tax” that allows it to sell many of its products at prices higher than giant supermarket chains and therefore stay in business. Where this is not the case, such staples of community life have very often had to close shop, as we saw in the case of Mission Pie.

And to the extent that co-working spaces can help to alleviate the loneliness of the gig economy or remote worker, again, their pricing structure to date has been such that it’s typically only high-earning white-collar professionals who can afford them. At the beginning of 2020, for example, WeWork’s lowest-tier hot-desk membership cost between £200 and £600 ($250–$750) a month in London and up to $600 a month in San Francisco. That’s far outside the realm of possibility for, say, your average TaskRabbiter.

As for the “everything under one roof” concept beloved by many co-living operators—their on-site grocery shops, laundries, gyms, and bars can engender social segregation. With residents able to shop and socialize at bars in-house, they all too often fail to engage with the neighborhood beyond. As such, they risk becoming alienated from the surrounding community, and locals in turn risk becoming alienated from them. In the long run, this may be a losing strategy not only from society’s perspective but from that of the co-living operators, too. For if people are truly connected to a place, not only will they have a stronger sense of community but they’re more likely to remain in the neighborhood longer.

Private communities can play a role in mitigating this century’s loneliness crisis, provided their offering is authentic and their members are truly engaged. However, at a time when public community spaces are being dismantled, free or cheap places to congregate are ever fewer, and many local main streets are being crushed, there is a real danger that community becomes something increasingly accessible only to the privileged. That you will only “find your soul” if you can pay the entrance fee. That loneliness becomes a disease only the wealthy have the chance to “cure.” Given that the lonely are already disproportionally worse off financially, this is particularly disquieting.

If privatized communities are not to become another manifestation of hostile architecture—a way to exclude and keep others out—and instead play an active part both in alleviating loneliness for individuals and in reconnecting society more broadly, ensuring that they not only deliver on their promise but also that more people can access and benefit from them, is an important challenge for the future. There are some bright spots on the horizon. In late 2019, the city of New York’s trailblazing ShareNYC housing program awarded three coveted contracts for “shared housing” projects that incorporate some aspects of co-living, including shared kitchens, shared fitness centers, and more flexible leases, while providing affordable housing that cuts across socioeconomic divides.73 The accommodation is expected to serve a wide variety of incomes, from very low-income to moderate-income households; just a third of the larger development will be market-rate.74 Though it is only a start, the city planners and developers seem to be actively working to prevent the separationist mentality that dominated developments like Royal Wharf and Baylis Old School that we looked at in Chapter 5; the intention is that members will enjoy equal amenities and services whatever rent they pay.75 Hopefully, in this case, children from different economic strata will be able to play together, shared spaces will be welcoming to everyone, and community will be available to all—without a platinum price tag.

Reconnecting Capitalism with Care and Compassion

As our starting point, this means we need to accept that today’s loneliness crisis didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. It has been fueled to a considerable degree by a particular political project—neoliberal capitalism. A self-obsessed, self-seeking form of capitalism that has normalized indifference, made a virtue out of selfishness, and diminished the importance of compassion and care. A “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “hustle harder” form of capitalism that has denied the pivotal role both public services and local community have historically played in helping people prosper and has instead perpetuated the narrative that our destinies are solely in our own hands. It’s not that we weren’t ever lonely before. It’s that by redefining our relationships as transactions, recasting citizens in the role of consumers, and engendering ever greater income and wealth divides, forty years of neoliberal capitalism has, at best, marginalized values such as solidarity, community, togetherness, and kindness.4 At worst, it has cast these values summarily aside. We need to embrace a new form of politics—one with care and compassion at its very heart.

The political objective of making citizens feel that someone is watching their back is not irreconcilable with capitalism. Indeed, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism to assume that its neoliberal “dog-eat-dog,” “every man for himself” variant is its only form. Even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, while best known as an eloquent advocate of free markets and individual freedom, wrote extensively in The Theory of Moral Sentiment (the precursor to The Wealth of Nations) about the importance of empathy, community, and pluralism.5 He understood that the state has a clear role to play in providing the infrastructure of community—and that when the markets need to be reined in to protect society, reined in they should be.6 Elsewhere, Asian, Scandinavian, and indeed continental European forms of capitalism through much of the twentieth century were distinct from the neoliberal tradition in terms of the greater role they accorded the state and the emphasis they placed on communitarian values. Capitalism has never been a singular ideology.

So whereas neoliberal capitalism—with its narrow focus on free markets and deregulation, the primacy it accords to the rights of capital, and its antagonism toward the welfare state even when this comes at the expense of societal cohesion and the common good—has dominated across much of the world over the last four decades, it is not our only option for the future. Together we must define and create a more cooperative form of capitalism that delivers not only in economic terms but also in societal ones.

And the time to do this is now. In the wake of the Great Depression in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, a massive government spending and regulatory program whose aims were to provide relief, recovery, and enhanced rights to those who were hardest hit by the economic devastation. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service, with its commitment to provide healthcare for all, was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War: a powerful symbol of a new commitment to equity and compassion. Now, too, is the time for game-changing and radical steps, time to implement a more caring and kinder capitalism.

At a minimum, governments need to assure their citizens that the entrenched inequalities that the pandemic simultaneously exposed and exacerbated will be actively addressed, and that when times are unavoidably tough, they will be there to support them. In many nations, this means committing significantly greater resources to welfare, social security, education, and healthcare. Even before the pandemic, the United States, for example, needed to increase its spending on social services (this includes expenditure on housing benefit, unemployment pay, and job creation programs and pension support) by 1.4 percent of GDP just to reach the OECD average.7 And politicians can make such commitments knowing that the public would support them. In a poll conducted immediately after President Trump signed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill in March 2020, over three-quarters of Democrats and Republicans expressed approval of the legislation—even after they had been reminded of the astonishing price tag.8 Another poll carried out at the same time revealed that as many as 55 percent of U.S. voters were now in favor of Medicare for All, a rise of nine points since the previous January.9

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, public support for increased welfare spending to help the poor even if it led to higher taxes was already in 2017 at its highest level for fourteen years.10 While in May 2020, during the coronavirus crisis, even the most ardent pro free-market think tanks were urging the government to avoid tax cuts and austerity measures and instead increase public expenditure.11

The need for bold steps and an unprecedented scale of commitment will be especially profound in the immediate wake of the pandemic, given the economic pressures and the competing demands on public resources it has induced. Yet it is imperative that, as we move away from the eye of the storm, governments understand that the need for additional support will persist due to factors including rapidly aging populations (in the Global North, that is), the long-tail economic damage of the coronavirus, and the additional (and severe) job losses due to automation we can expect over the coming years.

When it comes to unemployment, the support the state provides cannot just be financial. Governments need to make moves to slow down the rate of substitution of labor by robots, and earlier I mooted one way of potentially achieving this—a robot tax. Furthermore, given the challenges the private sector is currently facing, governments will need, for the time being, to play the role of employer of last resort and create new jobs at scale, either directly through major public projects or indirectly through fiscal policy. For it is through work—if it is dignified—that we can find both fellowship and purpose and at its best also community spirit.

Twenty-first-century public works programs shouldn’t simply be about deploying people to build roads or pick fruit, however. A credible commitment to wind and solar energy would generate considerable numbers of new jobs, as would pledges by local authorities to plant more trees, energy retrofit municipal buildings, and install charging stations for electric cars. And governments also need to create jobs specifically aimed at restoring the fabric of community whether it’s building libraries, youth clubs, or community centers or commissioning works from those who nourish society spiritually—artists, writers, and musicians. This did indeed happen during the New Deal when artists across the United States were hired to paint murals, create sculptures, teach art classes, and produce theater—with the intention, as FDR put it, to show Americans the possibilities of “an abundant life.”12 Our politicians today should be no less ambitious.

There’s something else governments could do, too: use today’s unemployment challenges to create a new workforce of people paid explicitly to help others feel less lonely. Here we might draw inspiration from the United Kingdom’s recent commitment to what is known as “social prescribing,” whereby “link workers” attached to GP surgeries are deployed to help people who are struggling with mental health challenges, isolation, or loneliness to identify local resources that can help them to better cope, whether art classes, exercise classes, or men’s groups. Such initiatives are only meaningful, however, if they are accompanied by a commitment to fund these activities adequately, both so that “clients” have real options and can actually afford to attend. Training more people to care for the elderly or the young would also make sense, at least in the short to medium term, provided the government commits to raising pay in the care sector.

Of course, to do all this, the state will need to add to its coffers. Given the scale of the challenge, governments won’t be able to borrow or print money indefinitely without causing significant long-term economic damage, however low interest rates are currently.13 This means that the very richest strata of society will inevitably need to pay a higher rate of tax. That is only fair. But it’s not just wealthy individuals who should face this additional tax burden. Multinational corporations that continue to register their profits in low- or no-tax jurisdictions should also face tough legislation that forces them to pay their dues to the countries in which they sell their products. Billions of pounds of tax receipts that could be directed toward public projects have already been lost as a result of these nefarious corporate practices. Perhaps, too, those companies that did particularly well financially during the coronavirus crisis, such as online food retailers, could reasonably be subjected to a one-off windfall tax. Again, there is historical precedent for this. In the United States “excess profit” taxes were implemented during the two world wars and also the Korean War.14

Yet we need to be even more ambitious still. As we rebuild our post-COVID-19 world, governments have a rare opportunity to seize the moment, act transformatively, and rethink priorities on a fundamental level. Here we can draw inspiration from New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who announced in May 2019 that her government would no longer only use traditional economic metrics such as growth and productivity to determine the nation’s budgetary policy and goals. Instead, “led by kindness and compassion,” her government pledged to incorporate a wider, more socially conscious, and more rounded set of criteria.15 These included how well the country is doing when it comes to protecting the environment, providing a decent education, increasing life expectancy, and—importantly for our purposes—metrics related to loneliness, trust in fellow citizens, trust in government, and overall sense of belonging.16 Scotland and Iceland are considering similar approaches to their own budgeting processes.17

While other governments in recent years—most notably the United Kingdom and France—have begun measuring well-being, New Zealand’s well-being budget is considered to be the boldest step taken so far by an OECD country, given its explicit tie-in with political and budgetary decision-making.18 The French and U.K. initiatives have not, to date, steered policy or government spending decisions in a substantive way.19 It would be remiss here not to mention the tiny and remote country of Bhutan, which actually blazed the trail in this regard, having incorporated its Gross National Happiness metrics into policymaking for decades.20

If capitalism is to be reconciled with care, we need to reconnect the economy with social justice as a matter of urgency and acknowledge that traditional ways of defining success are no longer fit for the purpose.21

Change the Calculus of Capitalism

Even this is not enough. If we are to address the sense of abandonment so many feel, we must go further than ensuring that all citizens are provided with a meaningful social safety net, that government budgetary goals are more clearly aligned with their citizens’ overall well-being, and that structural inequalities are addressed, including when it comes to race and gender. We must also ensure that people are properly cared for and protected at work and from any potential harm that big business may generate in its wake more generally. Neoliberal capitalism, with its “minimum state, maximum markets” approach, has never provided assurances on either. And this isn’t just a project for government—businesses and their leaders also need to step up.

Indeed, it was partly in recognition of this that in August 2019 the Business Roundtable, a group of influential chief executives of leading U.S. corporations, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Citigroup’s Michael Corbat,22 jettisoned Milton Friedman’s longstanding principle that the only business of business was to serve its shareholders,23 pledging instead to serve all its stakeholders—shareholders, yes, but also suppliers, communities, and employees, the same groups it promised to “compensat[e] fairly and provid[e] important benefits,” as well as foster “diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.”24

While I welcome such sentiment and hope that the rhetoric will translate into meaningful action, the reality is that unless the pressure on companies to generate short-term financial returns is alleviated and their executives’ incentives not tied to this, the focus on narrowly defined “return to shareholders” will likely continue to dominate, especially in the case of publicly traded companies. As such, if strategies like the deployment of digital surveillance or the substitution of full-time employees with low-cost, zero-hour, or temporary-contract workers with limited rights are shown to drive greater efficiencies, it will remain hard for even more progressively minded CEOs not to deploy them even if they are inimical to the interests of workers and the collective good. This is especially the case now, given the economic climate and the focus on cost-cutting.

Already the actions of some of the signatories to the Business Roundtable’s new pledge risk making a mockery of its espoused goals. Take Amazon. As COVID-19 cases mounted in New York, Amazon employee Christian Smalls grew increasingly worried about the lack of protective equipment and poor sanitation in the Staten Island warehouse where he worked as a “picker.” When management dismissed his concerns, Smalls organized a walkout demanding greater protective equipment, paid sick leave, and transparency about coronavirus cases among Amazon staff, who work closely together in warehouses.25 “People were afraid,” Smalls explained. “We went to the general manager’s office to demand that the building be closed down so it could be sanitized. This company makes trillions of dollars. Still, our demands and concerns are falling on deaf ears. It’s crazy. They don’t care if we fall sick. Amazon thinks we are expendable.”26 Amazon’s response? Smalls was first put on a suspicious “medical quarantine” (though no others were asked to do so). Then, when he attended the walkout anyway, he was fired.27 New York Attorney General Letitia James declared the firing “disgraceful” and called for an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board.28

Of course, I’m not saying here that big corporations can’t act with compassion and care toward their workers; we saw some inspiring behavior on the part of some big corporations during the pandemic lockdown period. Microsoft, for example, announced in early March 2020 that contract workers on its Pacific Northwest campuses—including shuttle drivers, café workers, and maintenance and cleaning staff—would continue to be paid even as work-from-home measures meant their in-person services were no longer needed.29 But unless the calculus of capitalism changes, all too often such acts of kindness and community spirit risk being outliers, the preserve of only the most forward-thinking company executives and the most long-term-focused and compassionate shareholders.

With this in mind, and as I’ve mooted throughout the book, we need a new body of legislation to protect workers’ rights that’s fit for purpose for the twenty-first century, especially when it comes to the low-paid and the self-employed as well as gig economy workers and those on temporary or zero-hour contracts. Many in these groups proved to be the “essential workers” we all so relied upon during lockdown, yet have to contend with low wages, limited (or nonexistent) benefits, greater precarity of employment, and in some cases unsafe working conditions. A living wage, paid sick days, and adequate health and safety provisions at work need to be the absolute bare minimums.

If people are to feel cared for, we also need a new body of legislation that protects society from the harmful acts of a specific group of actors: social media companies. In the same way that businesses today—in most countries—are not allowed to pollute our air and water with impunity or sell our children tobacco, so too must these companies’ negative impact on community, cohesiveness, inclusivity, and well-being be curtailed, particularly when it comes to children and teenagers. In earlier chapters I proposed a whole array of potential regulatory levers we can use to deliver this protection. On a precautionary basis alone, governments cannot afford to be reticent.

And again, there is a growing demand for such actions, and not only among the public. Politicians on both sides of the political spectrum now acknowledge that individuals can’t be expected to protect themselves from the ills of Big Tech without a degree of state intervention and that unless these companies are confronted by toothsome regulation, they won’t take meaningful enough action to address their corrosive impacts.30

Make People Feel Seen and Heard

If people are to feel less isolated or abandoned, there’s more still that we need to do. For as we have seen, loneliness is not only about feeling uncared for, it’s also about feeling invisible. Part of the solution to this century’s loneliness crisis must therefore be to ensure that people are seen and heard.

Trade unions undoubtedly have a critical role to play here in amplifying workers’ voices, including gig economy workers and remote workers who may risk being out of sight and out of mind of their employers. It is essential that workers of all ilks have the freedom to associate and also that trade unions make their case more strongly.

More fundamentally in the Lonely Century, our sense of invisibility stems from the feeling many people have that decisions they would never have countenanced are being made in their name by political leaders who are deaf to their concerns or cries.

It is of course an inevitable consequence of representative democracy that not everyone’s concerns will be acted upon or their views given equal weight. Yet part of the reason the bonds between state and citizen have become so frayed in recent years is because of how polarized the debate has become, how opaque the decision-making process, and how inequitable the outcomes. The intersection of lack of voice and social and economic injustice means that now more than ever, it is imperative that those who have been most marginalized are prioritized when it comes to the allocation of resources, and that the people who benefit most from regulatory reforms and government largesse are not simply those with the fattest wallets or the greatest lobbying power or of a particular color, gender, or class.

Important also is that citizens are able to exercise voice more often than once every few years at the ballot box. We need to participate more meaningfully and on an ongoing basis in democracy if we are to feel more connected to each other and to politics. I am not calling for the holding of more referenda here. These are the bluntest forms of majority rule and tend to ignore complexity and the imperative to protect minority interests, especially in the age of “fake news.” Instead we can learn from an array of contemporary deliberative democracy initiatives.

Take London’s Camden Council, which in the summer of 2019 selected fifty-six residents—builders and students, entrepreneurs and civil servants, immigrants and pensioners—their gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds representative of the community along census lines, to help develop the approach the council should take to addressing climate change. How to encourage people to eat locally? How to make green choices more affordable? Should the council require new homes to be carbon-neutral? These were some of the questions the group was asked to address.31

At the beginning, the participants had different perspectives. While there were no outright climate-change deniers among them, some were clearly more skeptical than others. Others were pretty new to the whole issue. Yet by means of a highly structured process with trained facilitators guiding the discussions, mindful of the need to ensure that everyone had equal voice and carefully drawing out the quietest, by the end of their two evenings and one full day of meetings the group had agreed upon seventeen steps to recommend. These ranged from the broad (“Trial car-free zones and days”) to the more specific (“Install more segregated cycle lanes”). Collectively, their recommendations will become the backbone of the council’s 2020 Climate Action Plan.32

In Taiwan a similar process is taking place, but at even greater scale. Since 2015, two hundred thousand people have taken part in a deliberative democratic process online.33 Issues debated so far include the regulation of drones, Uber’s entry into the Taiwanese market, the online sale of alcohol, whether plastic straws should be banned, and the nonconsensual publication of intimate images, what is known as “revenge porn.” In 80 percent of cases, the government has acted on the process’s final recommendations—whether by passing legislation or updating policies.34 When the government has chosen to ignore them it has provided detailed reasons for why it has done so.35

Initiatives like these could play a substantial role in helping us to come together, provided of course that the recommendations are not summarily ignored. Not only because they give voice to a wider group of constituents than ordinarily would be the case, but because by making consensus the goal, the process itself forces participants to practice democracy by having to actively contemplate and reconcile each other’s views and learn how to manage their differences, rather than silence them.36

Indeed, when watching the footage of the Camden meetings, what I found striking were the reassuring smiles the participants gave to whoever was speaking, the eye contact between them, their leaning forward to listen to each other, even when they disagreed.37 Throughout this book we’ve highlighted the importance of practicing democracy if it’s a more inclusive and tolerant society we strive for: what took place in Camden Town was an institutionalized, carefully calibrated form of just that.38

Practice Democracy

Practicing democracy is not, as we’ve seen, something that always needs to be so formally facilitated. Indeed, it is through our membership of local associations or groups that we are perhaps best able to practice some of its key aspects—civility, kindness, and tolerance—on a regular basis, whether we’re talking my Monday night improv group, a Parent-Teachers Association, or the organizing committee for a church’s annual fete.

Our workplaces can also provide opportunity on this front: think, for example, of U.S. software company Cisco’s institutionalization of the practice of expressing gratitude within the organization. Even at a more micro level within our households, the very act of doing chores is a way to reinforce another of the key tenets of inclusive democracy—that sometimes we need to make sacrifices or simply be selfless with our time for the common good.

It is, though, within our neighborhoods that our opportunity to practice community arguably best lies.39 I am not implying here that community is inexorably bound to geography. (For all my criticism of social media platforms, I have acknowledged the important role they can play for some in this respect.) Yet as we have seen, it’s easier for people to feel bonded to each other when the interactions between them are both face-to-face and repeated, and for most of us this means in our geographic locale.

It’s in the brief catch-ups at our local greengrocer with fellow residents, the “how are you?”s we exchange as we pick up coffee from our local barista, the warm feeling we get from our local dry cleaner when he greets us by name, as well as in the deeper relationships we forge with those who live on our street, that barriers break down, strangers become neighbors, and communities are built. And the more we contribute to our neighborhood, the more vested in it we become and the more real the community feels.

It’s why measures to help reduce churn in neighborhoods by making rental costs more stable are to be encouraged, as are measures to disincentivize absentee owners, such as extra taxes on homes that are occupied less than half of the year.

Communities are made up of bricks and people. Our locale needs to be lived in if it is to feel like a real neighborhood, and so too do our shops and cafés need to be bustling. Steps that seek to safeguard the future vibrancy of our local main streets are also therefore vital.

We have seen that some municipalities are already taking action to help ensure this. Remember Roeselare in Belgium, where an empty-shop tax has proven very effective in disincentivizing landlords from keeping their shops empty while they hold out for higher rents. Given the triple whammy local brick-and-mortar stores currently face from e-retailers, big box out-of-town stores, and the current economic downturn, they will need significantly increased government and municipality support. Reduced business rates and state-backed loans are practical steps that could be taken here that would make a real difference, as would a leveling of the fiscal playing field when it comes to online retailers. Our local main streets are in many ways a public good and should be treated as such, especially now when so many are facing an existential threat.

As individuals we have a very important role to play here too, as we emerge from the pandemic. Many of us became even more used to shopping online during lockdown. Weaning ourselves off these digital transactions and supporting the local business owners who serve our communities will also be essential if we are to sustain the viability of our main streets.

And for those businesses that go the extra mile and put inclusive community at the heart of their mission in verifiable ways—whether it’s a local bookstore like Kett’s with its town-wide book club, a café like Mission Pie with its Wednesday knitting circle, or a South Korean colatec whose entrance fees are expressly kept very low—additional tax breaks and other forms of financial support should be on the agenda. These are vital both to encourage such innovation and to ensure that it is not only the wealthy who benefit from the new entrepreneurialism that is driving the Loneliness Economy.

More fundamentally, governments need to commit to restoring the shared physical spaces in our neighborhoods that have been steadily ravaged over recent years. A functioning infrastructure of community that everyone has access to regardless of income, ethnicity, age, gender, or creed is essential if we are to have the best possible chance of both reversing the loneliness crisis and reconnecting with each other. The cuts in funding for shared public spaces that have taken place globally since 2008 must be reversed as a matter of urgency. And at the same time, new kinds of public spaces need to be built: places like Barcelona Council’s pedestrianized “superblocks,” with their parks, playgrounds, and neighborhood feel, or the Chicago public housing developments that are being built around libraries, where people of different incomes and ages will be able to come together and commune. We cannot effectively reverse the atomization of our contemporary society until the infrastructure of community is both properly funded and intelligently designed. And governments cannot be allowed to use the post-COVID-19 downturn as an excuse not to do this.

Doing things with people different from us—people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, or political persuasions, people who don’t necessarily share our history, culture, or views—is absolutely essential if we are to move beyond our differences and find common ground.40 And local public spaces can to a considerable degree enable us to engage with people different from ourselves, as can our membership in, say, a local church, mosque, or synagogue. However, given the homogeneity of many neighborhoods, interactions in such spaces often end up taking place with people who are pretty similar to us. This limits our ability to encounter and build experiences with diverse types of people and effectively practice the most important elements of inclusive democracy: that we fairly reconcile our differences and acknowledge the humanity of the “other.”

The challenge, therefore, is how to get different types of people to spend time together. And the good news is that there are many inspiring initiatives around the world we can learn from. In Germany, for example, over forty thousand people have participated in a program called “Deutschland Spricht” (“Germany Talks”), sponsored by the German newspaper Die Zeit.41 The initiative began in 2017 when, prompted by the growing polarization of German politics and the increasing confinement of people within their own echo chambers, a group of reporters at the paper came up with an ambitious plan to pair strangers on opposite sides of the political spectrum who would then meet in person and talk: a kind of “political Tinder,” as they referred to the plan in-house.42

Participants were paired on the basis of an algorithm that was programmed to match people who had divergent political views and who lived within a twenty-kilometer radius of each other. Once matched, the onus was on them to meet up. A quarter of the participants actually did.43 In cafés, churches, and beer gardens across Germany, IT consultants met with army reserve officers, police officers with engineers, government employees with physicists, neonatal counselors with court bailiffs.44 Die Zeit’s own editor-in-chief, Jochen Wegner, met with a machinery and plant operator.45 People who were vehemently against immigration sat down to talk to asylum seekers; staunch opponents of nuclear power went for coffee with ardent advocates; champions of the European Union had a beer with those who called for the return of the Deutsche Mark.46 Yet the one thing they had in common was a shared goal to gain insight into each other’s perspectives.

The results were significant. Surveys with participants before and after their talks revealed that even a two-hour conversation was enough for them to begin to understand each other’s perspective and helped to dismantle prejudice.47 After the conversations, participants considered people with divergent views to be less malicious, less incompetent, and less poorly informed than they had before.48 They also expressed a greater willingness to include such people in their own social groups and reported having gained a greater sense of what it was they had in common—typically, the importance they each placed on family.49 And fascinatingly, participants also reported that they both trusted fellow Germans more in general and agreed more with the statement that Germans generally care about the well-being of others, compared to when they were asked the same questions before the exercise.

Similarly, inspiring initiatives specifically aimed at bringing different types of people together are taking place elsewhere across the globe. In Bristol in the United Kingdom, “91 Ways to Build a Global City” uses the unifying power of food to bring people of different cultural and ethnic heritages together. Over the dicing of onions, the mashing of potatoes, and the kneading of pastry, barriers break down, genuine connections are made, and common ground is established.50 In New York, the Public Theater is building on an ancient tradition of theater, bridging divides by bringing together people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and all five boroughs of New York City to perform and discuss plays.51 True to its promise to create theater that is “not only for the people, but by and of the people as well,” its “Public Works” initiative involves hundreds of citizens in its productions, while also facilitating discussions on whose stories get told, how they are told, and how we can honor them.52

Sports also has a role to play here, with association football, living up to its claim to be a great unifier, being used to unite former FARC guerrillas with civilian victims in Colombia,53 refugees with locals in Italy,54 and, in the Middle East, Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren.55

No matter how atomized or polarized our countries, cities, and communities have become, it is through spending time with people who are different from us and exercising our muscles of cooperation, compassion, and consideration that we can come to feel more connected to each other and develop a sense of shared fate and belonging.

Engineering Diverse Communities

In all of the examples we’ve explored so far in this chapter, participation has been voluntary. The even bigger question is how we get people who may not choose to come together to do so. Again, there is a role government can play. And again, there is precedent, this time in Rwanda.

The roads of Kigali, the country’s hilly capital city, usually throng with life. Moto-taxis zigzag between rickety 1980s sedans and the sleek, imported SUVs of government motorcades. Mud-encrusted Jeeps and Land Cruisers jostle among the traffic, too, many returning from Volcanoes National Park, where a six-hour trek brings permit-bearing hikers within meters of the country’s elusive mountain gorillas. Yet on the last Saturday of every month, these busy roads are nearly deserted, except for the checkpoints on the main roads manned by police, who politely inquire of any travelers: what urgent business takes you away from your Umuganda duties today?

Umuganda translates as “coming together in common purpose to achieve an outcome.”56 It takes many forms: some communities devote their three-hour public service commitment to building projects such as high schools, and thanks to these efforts over three thousand classrooms have been built since Umuganda was formally reinstated by the government in 1998 as part of the healing process following Rwanda’s devastating 1994 genocide.57 Other Umuganda activities include gardening, pruning public hedges and flower beds, picking up litter, and filling potholes. To be sure, these hours of free labor have a significant economic impact; their value has been estimated at $60 million since 2007 alone.58 But they also serve a crucial community-building purpose: “Most people like it because it’s the only day you meet your neighbors,” says Faustin Zihiga, who works at a bank in Kigali.59 At one Umuganda, he undertakes garden work with a group of other men from his area while keeping up a lively conversation. “See those people over there, talking?” he points out. “They haven’t met all week and now they are meeting up. It helps a lot because the more you get to know each other, the more you’re socially connected.”60

As important as the three hours of public work is the hour-long community meeting that typically follows, at least in rural areas, where neighbors gather to discuss important issues.61 Unlike relatively new forms of community dialogue such as Camden’s Citizens’ Assembly, these Umuganda meetings have their roots in hundreds of years of ubudehe, or community labor and decision-making, a practice that long predates Rwanda’s colonial occupation by Belgian and German forces that began in the nineteenth century. They are all the more important today, barely twenty-five years after the country was torn apart by violence that pitted neighbor against neighbor.

Indeed, Umuganda has played a vital role in restoring trust within Rwanda’s communities because it is about much more than beautifying roads and building schools. “If there are specific problems or social issues, like maybe a neighbor is making a lot of noise, you can say something about it, and the community members may decide to visit and see what the issue is,” says Zihiga. Or “if we see an elderly person who is struggling, perhaps they need a new roof built, then people will help out to build it together.”62 What makes Umuganda especially remarkable is that in the Rwandan context, community members may well include both survivors of genocide and its perpetrators.63

This mandatory volunteering program does have its detractors. There are those who see Umuganda as yet another means of government control—understandable, given Rwanda’s strict, quasi-authoritarian government. Some have voiced concern that wealthy Rwandans tend to simply pay the fine for nonparticipation, and others worry that the way their work is apportioned ends up falling along preexisting class, power, and gender lines.64 All of these are legitimate concerns. But the underlying motivation—to embrace the nation’s tradition of community work and use face-to-face, side-by-side activity to strengthen bonds between all citizens—remains powerful and uplifting. Moreover, the reality is that if we leave it to individuals to initiate crossing the divide, it’s only ever likely to be a relatively small, self-selecting group that will do so. We need to find ways of ensuring that regular, structured interactions between different kinds of people take place if we are to move toward more inclusion, more acceptance of difference, and a greater sense of togetherness and common purpose. And governments can play an important role in making this happen.

This is more realistic than it may seem. After all, a number of countries, including Switzerland, South Korea, and Israel, have mandatory military service, so it wouldn’t be such a big leap for their governments to mandate community service, too. And in some places prototype schemes are already being tested. In the summer of 2019 French president Emmanuel Macron piloted compulsory civic service for teenagers.65 In its inaugural iteration, two thousand 15- and 16-year-olds spent a month living together in a randomly assigned group.66 For the first two weeks, they got to know one another through a series of activities: they went on orienteering expeditions and field trips, participated in workshops, and learned first aid. After dinner each evening, they exchanged ideas and opinions in a structured way, debating different social issues such as discrimination and gender equality with the help of a facilitator. In the second half of the program, they volunteered at local charities or for the municipal government. And it wasn’t just during activities that the teenagers had to work together: in the houses where they boarded, they were tasked with deciding among themselves how to divide up chores. It is interesting to note too that as part of the pilot, mobile phones were banned except for an hour in the evening, increasing the chances of meaningful bonding without tech distractions.67

And there are other, less intensive programs governments or local authorities could consider. How about weekly mandatory cooking, drama, or sports classes that children from different socioeconomic, ethnic, or faith backgrounds have to take together? Or a state-funded annual camping trip that sixteen-year-olds across divides have to participate in? It should be recognized that such initiatives will be all the more effective if they are designed to give participants a role in shaping their own experience; the more input participants have, the more likely they are to be engaged. So, if it’s cooking classes, the students should decide what the meal should be each week. If it’s drama, how about structured improvisations based on their own experiences that they can dissect and discuss?

By facilitating regular structured interactions in which children of different backgrounds actively do things together, we are helping the next generation not only practice listening to each other and learn how to reconcile and manage their differences but also identify their common interests and therefore feel more connected to each other.

The Future Is in Our Hands

This Lonely Century presents us with unique challenges—economic, political, social, and technological. It is a time when huge swathes of the population feel alone despite it never having been easier to connect; an age in which we identify increasingly on the basis of difference, yet are ever more aware of how intertwined our lives are with others across the globe; a time in which our local communities desperately need strengthening and the bridges that join different communities together very often still need to be built.

It is an age of great challenges and contradictions, but it is also a time of hope. For we have a real opportunity right now to come together to co-create a distinctly different future, one in which we reconnect capitalism with community and compassion, ensure that we do a much better job of listening to people from all backgrounds and enable them to have a voice, and actively practice community in an inclusive and tolerant form. We don’t have to feel this lonely or atomized anymore.

To realize these ambitions will take a shift in legislative and funding priorities and our politicians and business leaders will need to show real commitment to change when it comes to social and racial justice and how workers are protected. But society is not just a top-down initiative. We create society, too. So, if we are to feel less lonely and reconnect with each other, taking personal responsibility on a daily basis will be just as crucial. We need to commit to meaningful change in the way we shape and live our everyday lives, while recognizing that the cards we have been dealt, economically and socially, may well impact the extent to which we are able to do so.

Some of this is about taking small steps that may not seem much at first glance, but over time will accrue meaningful impact. Things like bringing cookies into the office to share with colleagues or putting our phones away and being more present with our partners and families. Inviting a neighbor over for coffee or committing to buy more at our local shops and show up to events at our local community center. Taking on more responsibility in groups we’re already part of or pushing ourselves to join new ones, even when that may seem daunting.

Other steps will demand more of us, whether it’s campaigning for a political candidate who speaks to cohesion not division, standing in solidarity with a group that is being unfairly demonized or discriminated against, or boycotting a company once we learn about its unacceptable working conditions, even if we like what it sells or the convenience it proffers.

More generally, it’s a shift in mindset that is needed. We need to recast ourselves from consumers to citizens, from takers to givers, from casual observers to active participants. This is about taking opportunities to exercise our listening skills, whether in the context of work, our family lives, or in our friendships. It’s about accepting that sometimes what’s best for the collective is not what’s in our own immediate self-interest. It’s about committing to using our voice where we can to effect positive change, even if putting our head above the parapet will be uncomfortable. And it means committing also to actively practicing empathy, something in the cut and thrust of daily life we can easily forget to do.

And while some may decry calls for a greater focus on “softer” values, we also need to commit to making kindness and consideration for others our lodestar, drawing inspiration from the selfless acts of so many people across the globe during the heights of the pandemic, whether we’re talking about the West Midlands volunteer who searched high and low during lockdown until he found a shop selling milk in glass bottles in order to support a blind man who needed them to tell the difference between different liquids in his fridge;68 the Italian university students who left a note in the stairwell of an apartment block in the southern city of Bari, offering to help the buildings’ elderly or vulnerable residents with grocery shopping and other tasks;69 or the Arkansas teenager who poignantly wrote to The New York Times that although they hadn’t really been able to do too many things for people other than texting and calling people to let them know they had been thinking of them during lockdown, they had “been trying to make an effort to talk to people I don’t normally talk with, just offering a fun conversation to distract from the world.”70

We also need to rush less and stop and talk more, whether it’s to the neighbor we often pass but never speak to, a stranger who has lost their way, or someone who’s visibly feeling lonely—even when we’re feeling overloaded and busy. We need to break out of our self-suffocating digital privacy bubbles and engage with the people around us, even when our default is to put on our headphones and scroll on our phones. We need to encourage our children to ask the child sitting alone at lunch whether they’d like company, and we need to do the same for that work colleague who always eats their lunch alone al desko, even when we’d rather dine on our own. We need to show more gratitude to those who care for others in society, and generally say thank you more—whether it’s to our partner, our colleagues at work, or even to our new AI helpers like Alexa.

I don’t underestimate the challenge all this poses, and inevitably there will be times when we will fall short. But such steps are crucial. For the more we neglect our responsibility to care for each other—whether it is stroking an ill parent’s arm, being on the end of the phone for a friend who’s going through a hard time, or even just smiling at a neighbor—the less skilled we will become at doing all of these things. And the less skilled we become at doing these things, the less humane our society will inevitably be.

The antidote to the Lonely Century can ultimately only ever be us being there for each other, regardless of who the other is. If we are to come together in a world that’s pulling apart, nothing less is called for.

1 THIS IS THE LONELY CENTURY

2 LONELINESS KILLS

3 THE LONELY MOUSE

4 THE SOLITARY CITY

5 THE CONTACTLESS AGE

6 OUR SCREENS, OUR SELVES

7 ALONE AT THE OFFICE

8 THE DIGITAL WHIP

9 SEX, LOVE, AND ROBOTS

10 THE LONELINESS ECONOMY