I was in a shop, queuing up to pay. The elderly woman in front of me got to the till, and, as often happens, started chatting to the shop assistant. I didn’t catch the drift of what she was talking about, other than it went on for a while, and as she talked, the queue behind me started to lengthen.
Yet the shop assistant was kind and listened to the woman until she eventually ambled off. I approached next. He quickly dealt with my purchase and ruefully said: “That’s probably the shortest conversation I’ve ever had with her.”
Perhaps the woman was one of those incorrigible yakkers; or perhaps going to the shop was one of the few daily opportunities she had for human contact. If it was the latter, she’s not that unusual. Like most of the developed world, Ireland – a country internationally renowned for its friendliness – is experiencing what’s often described as an epidemic of loneliness. According to the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, about 400,000 Irish people experience it. Another survey put it at 20 per cent, making Ireland the loneliest place in Europe.
It seems to become more acute as we grow older, but it’s certainly not unique to older people. It can be found among widows and widowers, stay-at-home parents, divorced people, men and young people. And this is at a time when the population of the country is growing – there are literally more people around us – and social media can be deafening with the number of online voices. There’s never been so much opportunity for contact, and there’s never been so much loneliness.
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I’m always first up in my house, and I treasure those few hours. It’s deathly quiet, and although there are people sleeping upstairs, I am alone. Yet I never feel lonely. In fact, I seem to need the quiet time so I’ll be able to face meeting people during the day. And while it would be a stretch to say it’s a regular occurrence, if I get ambushed by loneliness, it’s when other people are around me, never when I’m by myself.
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That seems contradictory. But it’s surprisingly common. Research into loneliness – and there’s a lot of it – has found that it can be experienced in different ways. For some who are physically isolated and wish they weren’t, the solution is the obvious one of contact with other people. But there’s another cohort who experience loneliness because of the people around them. That can be in the confines of a relationship or a friend group or a place of work: and all of its online equivalents.
In this context, it’s more like a feeling of: ‘I might as well be alone.’ You are a man and you have a friend group who you meet for pints and talk about football. Yet the group dynamics restrict it from being any more than that. You’re in a marriage where you only talk about the functional aspects of your life together. At work, you risk isolation if you’re not relentlessly upbeat.
[ ‘Sometimes, I am one of the lonely people. And it isn’t usually when I am alone’Opens in new window ]
The concept of loneliness, as we understand it now, only developed in the 19th century with the advent of industrialisation, the growth of towns and cities and, with that, the championing of individualism: a concept that in the 21st century has been given a steroid boost. Tech billionaires, the gig economy and an online culture where people endlessly promote a marketable version of themselves in a struggle for likes from people they will never meet. It’s a form of digital solipsism.
And in turn, that squeezes out the idea of society as a benign entity built on mutual interdependence, on the comfort of community. All we might be left with is a cold place of struggling individuals, all competing with each other: a cultural and economic Squid Game, where everyone ends up by themselves.
