The statistics are stark. According to an EU study, 13 per cent of people feel lonely most or all of the time. In Ireland it’s even worse, at a poll-topping 20 per cent.
Little wonder the World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared loneliness a pressing health threat, launching a commission to foster social connection as a priority in all countries.
Social isolation is now a major public health concern, as harmful to our physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and associated with a 25 cent increase in mortality risk.
As a research- and anthropology-driven marketing agency, it’s something Bricolage’s chief executive Viv Chambers and cultural insights lead Sarah Van Horn have been studying closely.
Van Horn’s interest was sparked by The Lonely City, a book by Olivia Laing published in 2016, and the rise of similarly themed cultural initiatives such as The Lonely Girls Club, which was founded the following year.
“This idea of loneliness started to come up more and more. At Bricolage we began to feel like it was an emerging cultural story that was worth paying attention to. It feels very zeitgeisty and something we felt brands working in culture need to be on top of,” she says.
The team undertook a deep dive into the subject, talking to psychologists and community groups as well as focus groups, looking to identify the drivers behind the spike in loneliness.
“We were ultimately trying to understand the way forward, trying to get to a positive space and, within that, to see where society, including companies and brands, might have a role,” she explains.
All the lonely people
Though definitions vary, research says, “Just like hunger is the signal for needing to eat, loneliness is a signal that we need to connect,” she explains.
It’s a definition that reframes the problem by containing its solution – connection.
Being lonely from time to time is an absolutely normal part of being human, she points out. Indeed, it is to be expected at certain stages in our life, such as moving house, starting university, or in bereavement.
But while she cautions against “pathologising it”, it certainly warrants examination.
“We approached it from a systemic or structural point of view, versus an individual point of view. That is, instead of seeing loneliness as this individual problem, we see it as a normal response to some of the choices we have made as a society,” she says.
It is “a reaction to some of the systems that are in place, that we may – either wittingly or unwittingly – have chosen for ourselves”.
In it together or out for ourselves?
Ultimately, our loneliness epidemic is a symptom of traditional community structures breaking down, the agency found.
“When traditional community structures break down, we don’t feel that we are all ‘in it together’ as much as we were,” says Chambers, who points out that the opposite of “in it together” is “out for yourself”.
“When you’re not all in it together as much as you were, you tend towards fragmentation and fracture. And we are seeing an increase in social conflicts as a result. To be clear, that is a correlation, not a causal relation, but it correlates very strongly – the lonelier a society feels, the less communal we are, the more out for ourselves we are, the weaker the social fabric is overall. We are seeing all manner of consequences of that in our society today,” he says.
The irony is that all this isolation is coming in an era of “unprecedented hyper-connectedness”, says dentsu’s Dave Winterlich. Yet therein lies the rub. “Shares and friends and likes on social media are not the same as personal connections,” he points out.
The current phenomena has led to innovative thinking across a range of spheres. Doctors, for example, are increasingly engaged in “social prescribing”, a clear indicator that loneliness is now being seen “something we can treat”, points out Van Horn.
The rise of “self-care”, which only reinforces the feeling that we have to solve these issues for ourselves, is “not necessarily the solution”, she adds.
Politicians are weighing in too. The UK has had a Ministry for Loneliness since 2018 – the same year Ireland’s Loneliness Taskforce was set up.
The Netherlands has been particularly innovative, with such initiatives as pairing elderly people who love animals but don’t want the responsibility of ownership with dog-owing families in their neighbourhood, for walks and pet sitting.
Brands too can help. Dutch supermarkets have introduced dedicated “slow lanes”, which shoppers can opt for if they feel like having a chat to the checkout staff or others in the queue. “Not everybody wants it, but if it’s potentially your only social interaction of the day, it’s nice to have that option,” says Van Horn.
Consumers are beginning to push back against hyper-efficiency anyway, Bricolage’s research has found, with a desire for more “in real life” experiences.
It’s why some supermarket chains in the UK are getting rid of self-service checkouts and prioritising customer service instead. The rise of book clubs among younger generations is part of the same trend.
Brands can also help by responding to the demise of third spaces, those loose, unstructured meeting places where people traditionally went to just chill and be with one another. From pubs and clubs to community halls, these are in decline.
The decline of so many small, family-run “main street” businesses across the country has also had a detrimental impact on loneliness, points out Winterlich.
But this sense of connection can be restored in innovative ways, such as Bank of Ireland’s giving over of some of its former retail branch space as a place for start-ups and founders to work, meet and get business advice, points out Chambers.
Adidas’s collaboration with UK musician Stormzy to create Merky FC HQ, a “next level community centre” for young people in Croydon, is a case in point.
“There are football pitches, recording studios, gaming centres where kids can just hang out,” says Van Horn. She also points to UK cycling brand Rapha, which has established Rapha Clubhouses around the world, as places for cyclists to meet and hang out, while also growing sales.
Obviously such capital investment is not possible for every brand, “but it’s about asking what could community look like? What could these new third spaces look like, in a reimagined future?” she says.
The full report is available via email at culturelab@bricolage.ie
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