I met a man on a prop plane flying from Dublin to Newquay. He wore a knotted tie embroidered with tiny cows under a padded gilet. Tired of my own thoughts and seeing him cast his magazine aside, I started chatting.
A meat farmer from Louth, he told me he was heading to Cornwall for work. My knowledge of farming extends to Diddly Squat, and an aspiration to grow my own vegetables.
But by chance, I’d just visited a regenerative farm in Ballyagran in Co Limerick, where dairy farmer Tom Stack is using micro-organisms, like fungi, to create fertile soils with no chemical inputs.
I dallied with mentioning this to the Louth farmer, concerned I was throwing a conversational grenade as we gained altitude. But he lit up. We went from small talk to proper conversation as he told me about the online courses he had taken in regenerative agriculture, and how he wanted to overhaul his farming practices. For his own health and that of his family, he felt it was the only way forward.
READ MORE
I used to impose strict rules when flying solo.
On a long-haul flight, I would barely look at the person beside me until I felt the aircraft’s wheels release for landing, safe in my calculation that there could be a maximum of 30 minutes for chatter, inane or otherwise, before disembarking.
On short flights, I felt no obligation to engage with anyone, so I’d watch a movie on my phone, write in my journal and without any effort at all I could ignore the human sitting just inches from me for several hours.
I erased my rules 18 months ago after finishing The Lonely Century, a powerful book by economist Noreena Hertz about the fragmentation of communities in our modern era, the resulting loneliness crisis and the damage it is doing to human health.
Loneliness, Hertz writes, is like hunger and thirst. It is a red flag warning system from our bodies that our need for connection, a need which is vital to our survival, is not being met.
Ireland is now the loneliest country in Europe, according to European Commission research. One in five adults in Ireland report feeling lonely most or all of the time, compared to a European average of 13 per cent.
According to research, lonely people are more likely to get heart disease, strokes, anxiety, depression and dementia. The risk to our health is so great that the former US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, equated the damage of loneliness and a lack of social connection to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
[ Why is Ireland, the land of a thousand welcomes, the loneliest country in Europe?Opens in new window ]
Effectively tackling the pernicious causes of loneliness in our society – social inequality, migration, population distribution and architecture which seems designed to divide us rather than encourage connection – feels beyond me.
But psychologists have found that even “minimal social interactions” with strangers, like speaking to a shop assistant, or even making eye contact with someone and smiling, bring feelings of happiness and a greater sense of belonging than when we cocoon ourselves from the world around us.
Mistakenly Seeking Solitude, a 2014 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that people who were instructed to talk to other passengers on public transport felt more positive about their commute than those who didn’t.
The researchers also noted that the effect was positive for both the person initiating the connection, and the person on the receiving end. Happiness, like loneliness, is contagious.
It spreads through our social networks, so for every individual extending themselves with a smile, a hello, or a compliment, there is a ripple effect.
After years of smartphone commuting and reducing my interactions with strangers to the minimum, I realised that it didn’t matter how close I am to my family, how many friends I have or how deep the relationship I share with my partner is, I am part of the problem. And yet, I could so easily stage daily rebellions against social fragmentation.
As I closed the final chapter of Hertz’s book, I tacked an A4 poster at the entrance of my building recruiting my neighbours, none of whom I knew, for a book club.
After a week, there were still no takers. So I started smaller and made a point of saying hello to everyone that passed by me in my building. I started to strike up conversations while queuing for coffee, for buses, for gigs and finally I took on airplanes, the great frontier where I was effectively locked into the possibility of conversation, good or bad, for the duration of the flight.
There are still days when I can’t bring myself to extend a word or even a smile, but then there are connections like on the Cornwall flight, where, when I passed through Newquay Airport on my return to Dublin, I saw the Louth farmer on the other side of the metal detector.
Greeting him like an old friend, I noticed how the world felt just that bit more interesting than before I knew this stranger.
