Ideas - Inside Canada’s loneliness epidemic

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Some experts are calling loneliness an epidemic in Canada and throughout much of the world. Social isolation is a public health risk with consequences for individuals, communities and for our social systems. A multi-disciplinary panel, hosted at the University of British Columbia, examine loneliness from perspectives of men's and women's health, interpersonal relations, climate change and public policy. Guests in this episode:Dr. Kiffer Card is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Health Sciences. He was the moderator of the panel presentation, All the Lonely People: the Search for Belonging in an Uncertain World.Mandy Lee Catron is from the School of Creative Writing, at UBC.Dr. John Oliffe is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Men’s Health Promotion at the School of Nursing, at UBC.Dr. Carrie Jenkins is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at UBC.Dr. Marina Adshade is an assistant professor of teaching at the Vancouver School of Economics, at UBC.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's Personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. We're finding that these experiences of loneliness and social isolation not only pose deep personal, emotional and physical health challenges, but also undermine the very fabric of our society.

Some experts are calling it a public health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness in Canada and throughout much of the world. Isolation is fueled by technology, by families who are disconnected geographically, by mental health challenges, and more recently, by environmental factors like heat waves and poor air quality that can further isolate people. Kiefer Card is the president of the Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health. He's also an assistant professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University. He was the moderator of a multidisciplinary panel hosted at the University of British Columbia. The panel is called All the Lonely People, the Search for Belonging in an Uncertain World.

Thank you all for joining. I think not only the selection of tonight's topic, but also the attendance of all of you here today really, I think, strikes the salience of this topic as being something that we're all acutely aware of for not only our daily lives and the way we lead them, but in thinking about how we structure the communities in which we live and structure the society that we're building together each day. Many of you have probably heard statistics

like loneliness and social isolation being equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If that's a new statistic for you, it comes from some of the most robust meta-analyses that have been published on the topic. And we're finding that these experiences of loneliness and social isolation not only pose deep personal, emotional, and physical health challenges, but also undermine the very fabric of our society, serving as a threat to democracies across the globe as we fight increasing polarization and

disconnection from our neighbors and from each other. You'll hear from tonight's speakers that we did not arrive at the state in which we are now without the contributions of centuries of social organizing in the way we've chosen to structure our communities and our society, and millennia of evolution in which basic human psychology and development around how we relate to one another as a social species is shaping these experiences of loneliness and social isolation. We've also seen for over a century

evidence in epidemiological research showing that lonely and isolated individuals such as war wives, widows and bachelors tend to die earlier and lead sicker and shorter lives. And then of course it was in 1942 that the World Health Organization first declared that health is a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being. And while mental and physical health have been addressed through public health campaigns for decades,

the same treatment around social connection and our social fabric has yet to mount an effective policy response to this issue. And I think we've only now woken up to it, not because of the centuries of research that we've had on this topic, but because we all experienced it together through the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly all of us were thrust into experiences of loneliness and social isolation. And I think that was

finally what we needed as a wake-up call, that this is something that's important to address. So tonight's panel aims to help us understand the problem of loneliness and catalyze responses to address it. And to this end, we brought together an incredible panel of speakers. Our first speaker this evening is Dr. Marina Adshade. Dr. Adshade is a faculty member of the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia.

She is one of Canada's foremost economic experts on the role of women in society and a major advocate for inclusive cultural reform with the goal of increasing safety, competitiveness, and leadership. Her unique approach to research applies a mix of economic, sociological, biological, and physiological theories and evidence for a wide range of social issues. Please join me in welcoming Marina Ache to the stage. It's so lovely to see everybody here. When I first proposed this event, everybody said to me, you should have this online. It'll be so much easier and more people will come. And that's true, of course. But given that we're talking about social connection, it

was really important that we all came together in the same physical space, so it makes me very happy to see everybody here. So as an economist, there's lots of things I can talk about when it comes to loneliness. I could talk about how loneliness affects worker productivity, not only affecting individual income, but also aggregate output of the economy. I could talk about how loneliness affects people's physical and mental health, overburdening a healthcare system that is already strapped.

But I'm gonna use my time tonight to convince you of something else, and that is that if we want to address loneliness in our world, the one thing that we need to do is we need to make our worlds smaller. In order to make this argument, I want to take you back to a time in which we all lived as hunter-gatherers.

These civilizations still exist today, but the one thing that's true about everyone in this room is we have all descended from hunter-gatherer civilizations. Hunter-gatherers lived in small worlds. They may have been nomadic, moving through spaces, but their social worlds were small and supportive. They likely met with other communities for trade and other purposes, but each individual's role within the community would have been predetermined and predictable. Survival depended on sharing. With the advent of settled agriculture,

new tools and techniques, most notably the plow, transformed the way that humans lived and worked together. That technological shift led to a more rigid division of labor, particularly between men and women, with men being more likely to be working in the fields and women more likely to be left with child bearing and other domestic responsibilities. And at that time, the household emerges as the central unit of production, but not in the nuclear family sense that we think of today. Instead, extended families, multiple generations,

came together to work the land together. Although families in early agrarian communities were more independent than their hunter-gatherer predecessors, they still heavily depended on mutual cooperation. Tasks such as planting, harvesting, food storage, they only took place with coordinated effort and community support.

Did people in this time experience loneliness? Probably, maybe during periods of grief or illness or social isolation, but the persistent loneliness that we see in our modern world today was probably extremely rare. In short, while agricultural societies may be more stratified with distinct gender roles, the structural conditions for enduring loneliness just didn't exist. So this all begins to change with industrialization. New technologies, including those that made farms more productive, led to people leaving rural areas in search of work in urban areas. As populations shifted, those tightly knit communities people had drawn on for support

in the past started to unravel. At the time, we now call the male breadwinner model of the family, which is much more like the nuclear family that we're used to today. Now we have men leaving the house to go work, perhaps in a factory, women being isolated within the home. And this is particularly true in industrial cities. So families become smaller as fewer children are required to work on the farms, meaning that those kin networks that previously provided so much support, they start to diminish over

time. At the same time, colonial expansion and improvements in technology led to a vast diaspora. In the 19th century, 100 million people left their homelands. That's about one-tenth of the population at the time. And that doesn't even include the millions of people who were forcibly removed from Africa as part of the slave trades. I would argue that the structural phenomenon that led to modern isolation became prevalent long before smartphones were available. It began with the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the steam engine, technologies that

didn't just reshape labor but dismantled the social environments that once shielded individuals from persistent loneliness. Since the Industrial Revolution, our worlds have relentlessly grown larger. Decades of expanding technology and globalization. And I really do think these are the two key phenomenon that have led to the situation where we find ourselves now. With each innovation, we gained access to more information, more people, more places.

But that came at a cost. It came at a cost of connectedness. It came at a cost of intimacy. It came at a cost of stability. All of the things that we need to have a sense of belonging in the world in which we live. And then came the so-called information highway that opened up the world further. And suddenly the world didn't just feel large, it actually felt infinite.

Anybody who stared at the night sky at night knows that infinity doesn't usually feel very inclusive. It often feels like insignificance. So why does this all matter? If we attribute the rise in loneliness just to screen time and social media, I think it vastly underestimates the scale and the depth of the problem that we're facing. Systemic loneliness is not just a side effect of individual choices. It's the outcome of centuries of social restructuring, and there is no easy fixes.

But I do have one suggestion. I said this at the beginning. I think that we need to make our worlds smaller again. Governments need to create conditions that allow people to remain close to their kin and their community networks, not force them apart due to housing scarcity or labor markets or lack of resources. That means investing in policies that support small-scale place-based living, whether that's in rural communities, suburban neighbourhoods or in dense urban communities.

We obviously can't go back to the hunter-gatherer time in Norway we want to because technology and globalization has significantly improved our standards of living. But we can re-imagine the social conditions that gave those people belonging for the modern time in which we live. We can start living locally. So for this moment, here together, we can remember that in this vast and shifting world that we live in, we can still choose to connect with one another. Thank you. Thanks so much, Marina. Our next speaker is Dr. Kerry Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is a writer and philosophy professor

based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Salewa Tooth First Nations. Her first novel, Victoria Sees It, was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Fyre Academy Award. Please join me in welcoming Kerry to the stage. APPLAUSE Thank you very much. So a few years ago I published this book called Sad Love, Romance and the Search for Meaning.

I think because of the title a lot of people assumed it was going to be mostly about rejections and breakups and how to recover from those things, but it wasn't. It was mostly about the romantic idea of a happy ever after, a connection with somebody that constitutes the central focal point of a good life. And really it was about how, to what devastating effects, that idea is failing us. It's about how the pursuit of happiness seen through that romantic lens tends in fact to backfire, and it's about the search

for other better ways to create meaning in our lives. So in a nutshell, it has to do with this pressure that we are all, like it or not, placed under pretty much from birth and possibly even before, to follow a certain path through our lives. And I liken this to being directed down a bowling alley. So there are two gutters on either side which will stop us from veering off, right? One is the policing of non-monogamy through the kind of stigma and warnings that it will make you miserable that we tend to encounter if we ever raise the question of being romantically involved with more

than one person at a time. The other is the policing of the single life also with stigma and warnings that it will lead you to a miserable, loveless existence of some kind, and with shame. I can't believe you're still single is not the compliment people think it is. Because what does that imply about people who are single? So these are the gutters. They stop us from veering off in the direction of too many partners, not enough partners.

That leaves one correct answer, right? The romantic happy ever after with one partner. That is the romantic ideal. Now between them, this combination of pressures is aimed at keeping us all on the same path, funneling us towards the nuclear family structure. Margaret Thatcher famously or infamously said, society there is no such thing. There are individual men and women and there are families. That's what she said. This is a lie. But she says it because she wants it to be true or more specifically because she wants us to believe it by design

capitalism needs most of us to be consumers and in competition with one another as individuals Society would lead to dangerous things nasty things like solidarity and unions and all the things that Margaret Thatcher hates nasty things like solidarity and unions and all the things that Margaret Thatcher hates. So now, the romantic ideal of the monogamous marriage leading to nuclear family formation channels our inevitable needs for connection and love and funnels all of those towards the formation of small nuclear households, which can be managed under capitalism very much like individuals can.

The nuclear family is positioned as just a slightly larger consuming unit, also in competition with every other slightly larger consuming unit. And the weakening or relegation to secondary status of any other bonds, of friendship, of community, of extended family and so on, lead us to a place of isolation within the metaphorical picket fence.

This way of organizing us hugely benefits capitalism and the 1%, while the massive costs of that kind of isolation fall on the rest of us. So that's kind of my critique in a nutshell. So what do we do? What can we do? I think many things, many practical things and many political things. Being a philosopher, what I tend to sound off about whenever somebody hands me a microphone are some of the conceptual things that we can

do. One thing that I do in Sad Love is argue that the romantic concept of a happy ever after, and the ideology that comes with that, rests all its stakes on us valuing a particular contemporary conception of happiness. This is happiness as an individualistic and pleasure-based phenomenon, basically a nice way that you feel on the inside. But for thousands of years philosophers have been really skeptical of happiness, so construed, and have looked elsewhere for value. Relatively recently,

just to give one fairly well-known example, Victor Frankl famously argued that what makes a life worth living is not happiness but meaning. And meaning is not about feeling good. Sometimes it does feel good to live a meaningful life as a kind of side effect. Sometimes it doesn't. And also philosophically, the feeling good is not where the action is. So meaning, living a meaningful life according to Frankel and many others is crucially not an individualistic phenomenon. We find meaning in things that point beyond ourselves, in collaboration and in connection.

There is an ancient Greek word for what makes a good life. It is eudaimonia. This word is often associated with Aristotle but I'm not using it in Aristotle's way at all. I actually turn instead to the etymology so the U means good, the same as in euphemism or euphoria. And the daimon just means a spirit. So eudaimonia is a state of being in good spirits. The idea would have originally been connected with supernatural entities within the Greek cosmology, but in my sense a eudaimon could be a good-spirited person, an individual. Or to push us beyond that kind of individual thinking, it could be something like a support system, a workplace, a community, or even

something vaster like a global political zeitgeist. All of these things can serve us as good spirits, can make life meaningful for us, or of course they can do the exact opposite. They can be toxic or even deadly. So what if, for example, our global political zeitgeist is trending towards fascism? Then it is a cacodemon, a harmful spirit. And incidentally, I think this is a really satisfying and necessary insult to have in your repertoire, as in, you know that guy? Yeah, that guy.

He's such a cacodemon. In my newest work, I'm also turning towards another philosopher of love. This is Iris Murdoch, who was a 20th century philosopher and novelist. And she teaches that love is a matter of paying a certain kind of attention. To love something is to see it as it really is.

But she says we struggle to offer each other this kind of attention. And we struggle to pay this kind of attention to the world in general. We are subject to all kinds of self-serving illusions and projections that interfere with our vision of reality. And now I see this problem as being grossly exacerbated by the particular form of online attention capitalism that we currently have to deal with. With all the distractions that we wade through on a day-to-day basis, with the outright theft of our attention by devices and advertisements and algorithms, all of them

specifically fine-tuned to capture our attention and hold it against our will. And of course, they're doing this because their designers understand that our attention is in many ways the most precious thing we have to offer. It can be translated into dollars. That's what they are generally interested

in, but it can alternatively participate in a completely different system of value. And Iris Murdoch suggests that training the attention, this kind of moral vision, our ability to really see one another and the world, we need to do something quite intentional. She suggested we practice paying loving attention to things like nature and to great art, because these are situations where many of us find it easier to attend in the right kind of way. But I personally like to also contextualize these thoughts in terms of how we've all been trained by attention capitalism to project curated images of ourselves, false avatars that we hide our messy realities behind. These prevent others from seeing us as we really are because we're

afraid and we're ashamed of that reality. But by Murdoch's lights that means we are preventing people from loving us. In one essay about how great art can be a training ground for giving loving attention to reality Murdoch mentions that Rilke said of the painter Cézanne that he did not paint I like it, he painted there it is. He painted reality and that helped us to see it better. But projecting a false self into the world is like covering a Cézanne painting with some kind of kitschy, prettified version of the image. And the idea I want to end on here today is that what we have to do, one of the things we have to do is become

a work of great art that allows others to attend to us as it is, and not as we would like it to be. Or more accurately, I think what we have to do is get out of our own way and allow ourselves to be the great works of art that we already are. And it's when we stick the prettified image over the reality, we are making the kind of vision that love requires, that love consists in, impossible.

Thank you very much for your attention. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. We are also a podcast, and you can find us wherever you subscribe. I'm Nala Ayaad. There are two kinds of Canadians. Those who feel something when they hear this music and those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nile Coixal. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens and every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard-hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories.

Also we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running and most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Earlier this month, the University of British Columbia hosted a public event called All the Lonely People, the Search for Belonging in an Uncertain World, with moderator Kiffer Card. Next in our lineup is Dr. John Olyph. John is a professor and Tier 1 Canada research chair

in men's health promotion at the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia, and a professor at the Department of Nursing at the University of Melbourne. As the founder and lead investigator of UBC's Men Health Research Program, his qualitative work focuses on the influence of gendered health behaviors and illness management and its impacts on partners, families, and overall life

quality. He has expertise in a wide ranging of qualitative methods and the findings drawn from his research offer guidance to clinicians and researchers and have informed evaluated tailored interventions for men. So please join me and the findings drawn from his research offer guidance to clinicians and researchers and have informed evaluated tailored interventions for men. So please join me in welcoming John to the stage. I borrowed a song from the Bee Gees, recognising that it's kind of all about song, so lonely days, lonely nights. An opportunity to talk about men's health in the context of social isolation and loneliness.

If you think about the three things that are the biggest predictors of suicidality in men, in order, it's substance use, the breakdown of a relationship, intimate partner relationship and being single, and the third one is depression. Those three things happen to be the things that we research on a routine basis and we do a lot of work it's called photo voice where we ask guys to take pictures and talk to us about their experiences. This is from a 40-something year old fellow who talks about how you can connect over beer and alcohol and it's the way that guys often connect but also there's this kind of this yearning

for something more, for something a little bit more depth and being able to talk about the things that are going on in each other's lives. It's an interesting thing, because we talk about substance use like it's sold as a marketing way of guys connecting. But we also see changes over time with how alcohol is used.

There's been a real rise of the nonny. So 30 to 44-year-old guys tend to not drink full alcohol beer. So it's interesting there's been this real movement. The biggest growth in brewery at the moment is in non-alcoholic beer. We wonder about that a lot because there's a lot of profit in that. So it's quite strategic that you be selling non-alcoholic beer. What we're not sure about is if guys are actually moving on to different substances and it might be that maybe we've gotten a little bit old fashioned with alcohol.

And maybe it's expensive, more expensive than some of the other kind of substances that guys could use. I just pointed out in terms of thinking about how social connection come about, you know, within the realm of alcohol, how it might be generational and how it might be shifting and it's one of those ones that we're keeping an eye on in terms of thinking about how guys with substance use sort of emerge. In terms of relationships we know that guys do really better when they're in a functional relationship. That is, their mental health is better.

They use less substances. We know that when their relationships are distressed, they don't do so well in terms of mental health. Movember asked us to ask guys about their relationship breakdowns, which we were happy to do. When we talked to guys, most guys spoke to us about not really having a plan about their

relationship. They almost talked about relationships as happening to them, which was kind of interesting. And then we talked to them about where they learnt about relationships. And most guys sort of didn't really know. It was kind of trial and error. And then thinking about the pressure on the domestic sphere in COVID is unparalleled and a lot of relationship breakdowns. So again, we were interviewing guys on Zoom

about their relationship breakdowns during that period when it was super interesting. We then went on to sort of ask guys what would be an equitable relationship. We interviewed a hundred odd guys across the world, 15 countries, they were, I wanna, 19 to 44 years of age, so relatively young blokes. And so we talked to them about their relationships,

what they thought would make for an equitable relationship. It's really interesting how guys talk about equality, so equalness, and the guys do really well with gender equality. 50% of them really do understand gender equality. The challenges came when the guys got into the hard count about 50% as a hard number. And who was doing what?

Because we know it kind of never really is 50%, 50%. So equal share. About 25% of the guys really did understand what gender equity is in terms of a relationship. So thinking about how they connect. And so this one from a guy who talks about how it's not a cross-sectional moment, it's an ongoing process by which you negotiate

who's got the energy, who's got the resource for getting the things done on a routine kind of basis. Seems really basic and super interesting because we were asking the guys about equity the entire time time and I think equity is a kind of a hard word for a lot of guys to get their heads around. But certainly, you know, you might spot yourself in these three patterns, not suggesting that they're the only three patterns, but certainly what emerged when we spoke to guys about their relationships.

The last one, just in terms of depression, it's interesting. We talk about it as a discordant relationship. Men are diagnosed with depression at half the rate of women and they suicide at three to four times the rate. Not suggesting the only route to suicide is major depression, but we know that it's a big risk factor. We often want to work out what the connection is between depression and suicide for men. When we talk to guys, they talk to us about three things,

injury, interiority, and isolation. And that being this 21 year old guy talking about his parents divorcing, neither of them expressing a real interest in having him live with them. And then his own relationship with a girlfriend failing. And he talks about the abandonment. The injury is so common with guys

and it tends to get pushed underneath and not spoken about because it's almost normed in terms of how those things happen. And then the interiority guys will typically look inward and they'll look to solve their own problems, conceal their own problems, often at a time when they don't have a whole lot of resource for doing that work.

And some of that's where we see some of the substance use come in, in terms of self-management and self-medication. And then finally, in terms of isolation, a 20-something guy coming home from work and just talking about the isolation and being alone in his thoughts and being trapped in his thoughts, I mean trapped in his thoughts. And he's actually connected, like he's in an open workspace, eight hours a day with a hundred other people, but he's actually quite isolated.

So this isolation within it. Not offering super remedies here, but some of the basic things for getting back into a bit of social connection. We run a website called InGood Company, and we try to do these podcasts where we try to help guys think about what connection is, what social connection is and trying to help them build relationships.

I'll leave you with a final thought. We often talk about equity, diversity and inclusion and I think it's really the remedy in the simplest way, in an applied way, if we're able to sort of work with guys to get some inclusion, to accept some diversity, and sort of to talk about equity, about this fair and justness, I think we'll go a long way to sort of addressing some of the issues and some of the high and rising suicide rates that we've seen men for the longest time. Thanks so much, John. We have one final speaker to introduce. So I'm very pleased to welcome to the stage Mandy Lynn Catron, who is the author of the

critically acclaimed essay collection, How to Fall in Love with Anyone. The book was listed for the RBC Taylor Prize and the Kobo Emerging Writer Award. Her writing can be found in the New York Times, the Atlantic, The Guardian, The Rumpus, Orion, and the Walrus, as well as other newspapers, library journals, and anthologies. Her essays and talks have been translated into more than 30 languages and Mandy is a faculty member of the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and she is currently working on a book about loneliness.

So please welcome Mandy to the stage. APPLAUSE Thank you guys so much. So I have been writing about loneliness and social connections for several years now, and recently I became interested in the relationship between loneliness and our changing climate. I grew up in rural Appalachia, and when Hurricane Helene hit last October, I was pretty shocked. I thought it was impossible that these mountains, which are over 300 miles from the ocean, could

be vulnerable to a hurricane. But I understand that the nature of climate change is simply that we are dealing with a new scale of weather-related disaster. But in the weeks that followed, another story started to emerge online as well, which is the story of neighbors helping neighbors. People were looking out for each other. They were sharing food, cleaning up debris, gathering supplies, raising money, taking other people in.

And all of this is still happening. Nine months later, I just talked to my dad a couple of days ago, and he had been at a fundraiser on Saturday. Something that I started thinking about is how the tightly knit social fabric of these communities, the very thing that made me want to run away to the anonymity of the city when I was a teenager, really made it possible to form a foundation for the recovery process. And I thought about my life here in Vancouver, and I could see that that kind of community was lacking here.

So in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit writes about the kinds of communities that emerge in the wake of disasters. She argues that despite the very real trauma of these events, disasters often create a renewed sense of solidarity. People turn toward one another, they take charge of their communities in ways that are generous and resourceful and imaginative. I particularly like this line. She says,

Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility. And what is seen there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times. And for me, I think Helene really offered this, which is a visceral lesson in social desire and possibility. And I think about the lesson this way.

The loneliness that I sometimes feel in my apartment building here in Vancouver, when I'm standing in the elevator studiously avoiding eye contact with the person next to me, is actually a longing for a different kind of urban life. One where we acknowledge that we need one another because as it turns out, we really do. And this need isn't theoretical. The heat dome that struck BC in June of 2021 killed a staggering 619 people.

That is a fatality rate that is almost three times higher than Hurricane Helene. And more than half of those who died lived alone. Many lived in what researchers call socially deprived neighborhoods, which are places that are characterized by fewer close social connections. So we can think of these deaths as a product of two overlapping crises, extreme weather brought on by climate change, and high levels of social isolation. It's really easy to feel overwhelmed by the sense that we're not facing not two but actually many overlapping crises in this moment. And historians have a word for

times like these, they call it polycrisis. But these are also moments when immense change is possible. So when it comes to planning for the future, we encourage urban planners and policymakers to dream big about building cities that are more just and resilient in the face of a changing climate. And rethinking our roads and transit systems and energy grids is essential.

But we also have in this moment, the opportunity to build a more robust social infrastructure. With Hurricane Helene, we saw that an entire region's physical infrastructure can be destroyed in a single day. But social infrastructure is far more durable and arguably more critical. So instead of waiting for disaster to strike and renew our sense of solidarity,

what if we started creating that sense of community and belonging now? There's a word for this too, which is multi-solving, where you try to address multiple problems with a single solution. I felt sure that there must be people who are already doing this kind of work, and when the online news magazine, The Narwhal, reached out to me and said they had a grant to fund climate writing in British Columbia, I jumped at the chance to investigate this. And one of the programs that I found really stood out to me.

Connect and Prepare was designed by a BC nonprofit called Building Resilient Neighborhoods. And it's an intervention that happens at the micro scale, which is to say the level of the city block or even the building. And in this program, trained facilitators go in and they help neighbors create emergency preparedness plans. So Stacey Barter is the director of building resilient neighborhoods. And I spoke with her and she said she really sees the issue of climate and the issue of community as being fundamentally

inseparable. Because social connection boosts our resilience in the face of disaster and the act of preparing for a crisis deepens our sense of community and connection. So participants typically come out of this program or out of this process with projects and action plans but Barter says it's actually the process of coming together and building those relationships that makes the difference. People meet their neighbors, they start looking out for one another in small ways and they develop a sense of shared responsibility for their collective well-being. So ultimately, building social connection requires a substantial culture change.

One where we shift the existing norms that put privacy and self-reliance above collaboration and interdependence. And this can feel pretty daunting, but the creators of Connect and Prepare believe shifting our norms is actually easier than we think. And it starts at that small scale. Because when a few people behave differently, that sense of warmth and connection can ripple out

and change entire communities. And actually recent social science research backs this up. It finds that when just 25% of a population adopts new social norms, those norms spread rapidly throughout the entire community. So part of the value of a program like Connect and Prepare is that it functions as a kind of Trojan horse to legitimize doing something we're all pretty bad at in our era of individualism, which is asking for and accepting help. When we say out loud that community matters and that we're thinking not as individuals but as a collective, it gives people a little more comfort with turning toward one another. It gives them a reason

to knock on their neighbor's doors. It makes it a little bit easier to share their vulnerabilities and it makes it easier to start noticing their collective strengths. And it may be this sense of ourselves as a collective that matters most going forward. Climate change is, after all, a collective problem, one that cannot possibly be solved by individual solutions. And our relationships offer us an essential sense of belonging to one another and to the world around us, in a sense of possibility that despite everything, the future could be a place that we want to live and a place that we can build together.

Thanks. All the lonely people, the search for belonging in an uncertain world, took place at the University of British Columbia's downtown campus in early June. Moderator Kiffer Card posed questions from the audience to the panel of experts. The number one question, at least last I saw. How do you suggest we might address the loneliness epidemic if it is so intricately connected to and they've said capitalism. Marina

maybe I'll ask you to go first. Often when people are out lonely or isolated because the message you get is you need to go out you need to make more friends. But you know I actually I really think that what we need to do is not know more people I think we need to know more friends. But you know, actually I really think that what we need to do is not know more people.

I think we need to know the people that we have in our lives better. The idea of allowing yourself to be vulnerable around other people is very difficult. It's not something that we're particularly good at. It's something that I'm working on personally. And I think that actually really just getting to know people well, I think would make a

huge difference because historically, societies that didn't have the type of loneliness that we have now, people knew each other well. When I go back to my hometown that I left when I was very young, I was 17, the people who stayed behind, they know each other well, in ways that I don't know anybody in my life. So I think that that would be one way to do that. Yeah, it reminds me of work of Robin Dunbar who said that we have about 150 people in a typical social network, that it's actually hard to remember or have relationships with more than that.

And his work kind of showed that in that prehistory, that tended to be the number of people you could know in a lifetime. And so you got to know them pretty well, an average group size being around 30 people, and five of those being really close friends. In my opening remarks, one of the things I always try to do to frame for people is that these are choices and decisions that we make.

And maybe not that we're making as individuals, but we're making as a society to reconstruct and rebuild society in a certain path. And I think that lends us to the next question. Somebody mentioned AI. So this person asks, what do you see as the impact of AI that could potentially exacerbate loneliness when people opt to interact with chatbots instead of a real life person? And so what if we make our world so small that it's just me and chat GPT?

Any reflections or speculations on what's in store for us as we face this next chapter of technology? One of the appeals as far as I can understand it of talking to a chat bot is they're not going to cause you discomfort. They're not looking to do anything that will upset you. I believe recently the extreme problematicness of the subservient nature of some chatbots, even to very

dramatic things that really any kind of decent human being would contradict, like threats of violence to self or other, that a chatbot is so willing to go along with whatever the person is doing or saying means that it's very comfortable, very convenient, and very easy to interact with such persons. It's very hard to interact with real human beings sometimes because they don't behave that way.

And it means if we don't practice the skill of actually interacting with a difficult human being and seeing the reality of another person, which is not the pretty face, but the real and sometimes ugly human nature, human character in front of us, that is a muscle that atrophies. It's a skill set that requires practice and maintenance. If we're feeling inclined to do that, I think the battle is kind of already lost because

it means for someone to think that looking to a chat bot could be a solution to loneliness, they would have to have misunderstood the nature of the problem and the nature of the situation. A lot of it boils down to the fact that humans are difficult and awkward but also that that is the point. That is a lot of the point because we need to be seen in our own difficulty and awkwardness. We need that. And it's vulnerable. It's awful. It's horrific. And it's essential.

It's difficult. And I actually, I lived in a very small fishing village in Scotland for a while. And I was going through a divorce at the time. And so, you know, for the first couple of years I lived there, I was like, well, this is great. I see people I know in the pub like every day because there's nowhere else to go. And so we just hang out. And then I realized as I was

going through my divorce, oh my gosh, everybody knows exactly what is happening in my day to day life. And now that is suddenly extremely uncomfortable, but you don't get one without the other. You can have a chat bot who just tells you yes to everything. You are seen by nobody. Yeah, thank you for that. I think there's a lot of wisdom in seeking out that discomfort because as you mentioned, happiness, it's not what we should be seeking, it's meaning. And so I think that resonates with what you said earlier. Before we close as we wrap up, I want to give each of you an opportunity to kind of give us the final kernels of wisdom that might still be percolating there. So John, you've been quiet for a moment, so maybe I'll start with you, but if each of you could share any final reflections from this conversation that you want to send people

home with tonight. People often ask me, you know, if you've got a bloke in your life that, you know, you want to sort of connect with, sometimes it's a bit difficult and we have this little acronym and it's called ALEC and it's simply ask, open-ended questions because if you ask closed-ended questions you will get yes, no's. So open-ended questions, listen without trying to solve any problems, just listen to what they've got to say and ask them to elaborate a little bit. And then the most important thing,

if you are connecting with guys is to check back in with the C and the alloc because oftentimes when guys disclose or they get a little bit vulnerable with what they've said, it's really important to check back in and continue the conversation, maybe not in the depth, but just to be able to norm it in a way that they can open up again.

So we often get asked that question. So remember Alec. That's great. Mandy, any reflections from you? Yeah, as everybody's been talking, I've been thinking about a book I read recently, it's called The Other Significant Others. It's about adults who have chosen to make a life with someone who isn't necessarily their spouse.

And the writer, her name's Raina Cohen, she and her husband live with roommates. She said, I've chosen the problems of community over the problems of individualism. And I think because we live in such an individualist society, it's really easy for us to see the problems of community. I live in like a six story building, but I can't access any of the other floors in my building. So if I had a friend, I couldn't even go knock on their door. I would have to go down to the front of the building, buzz them, and then I could access the elevator to get to their floor, which is like absurd to me.

But it's not just that, not a lot of shared spaces because we're maximizing every inch, every square inch of a building for living space rather than community space. And so there are so many ways in which I think it's just like if people sense it, feel a sense of precarity and they are living in spaces where they don't regularly even have eye contact with the people around them, you know, it's extraordinarily difficult to create community. Like I think the costs of individualism are actually quite a bit higher than the costs of community and if we could reframe it that way, it might help us be a little braver.

Marina, do you have any kind of final take-home messages for us? If I might want to add one more thing, you know, a lot of what we talk about makes it seem like it's up to you to solve this problem as an individual. I think that we should be asking more of the people who represent us in government to actually address some of these problems because this is not just an individual problem, it's a problem for our

healthcare system, it's a problem for productivity. If I want just to give one example, one of the things we know is that older women who experience loneliness, particularly menopausal women, often leave the workforce. That affects their ability to support themselves later in life as one of the contributors to senior poverty. We haven't really talked about senior loneliness, but it's a very serious issue in this country. And I actually think that if you have an opportunity to interact with the politicians who are making a lot of the decisions and when you vote, I think that these are things

that it's reasonable for us to expect for them to take loneliness and social isolation seriously given how much it impacts everybody's life. Kerry, any kind of final thoughts? I think we should land on a philosophical note maybe with that. But... Something Mandy was saying has been sort of sitting with me, so I want to come back to

it. It was that comment about the other levels in the building being locked, so you can't reach them in the elevator. And it's making me think about safety and our ideas around privacy and isolation being safe and public spaces being dangerous. And I think that's really powerful as a motivator for staying isolated. I think there is no quick solution to this, of course, in certain sense. Yes, public spaces are dangerous.

So is being vulnerable and so is allowing people to see our real face. But there isn't a safe option because in fact the isolated situation, the fully private situation is very dangerous. That's what we're realizing. It's also dangerous. So there is no safe choice here. And what we are all in our different ways trying to grapple with is that it's a management of competing dangerous things.

I don't think there's any kind of one way to land here. I do think, though, that Marina is one way to land here. I do think though that Marina is absolutely right to emphasize that we should be asking more of our representatives. This isn't anyone's individual struggle. This is all of ours and that

means it needs to be something that ultimately through our individual contributions emerges at a higher level of government. I think that is the perfect way to close. For all the comfort and safety that we've allowed the system to provide us, it's actually come at a great cost that's observable on the cellular level. People living 10-15 years shorter

lives than they should is a really profound wake-up call that what we're doing now isn't working and now is the time to change and the only thing that's going to make that happen is us coming together and advocating for that change and making social connection relatedness not only a personal priority, but we come together and we really work towards that solution as a human family and as a community. Thank you, Cindy. Kiffer Card is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Health Sciences. He was the moderator of the interdisciplinary panel presentation called All the Lonely People, the search for belonging in an uncertain world. It took place at the University of British Columbia's downtown campus in early June.

The panelists are all from UBC. Mandeli Katron from the School of Creative Writing. Dr. John Olif, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Men's Health Promotion at the School of Nursing. Carrie Jenkins, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and Marina Adshade, assistant professor of teaching at the Vancouver School of Economics. In the fall of 2025, ideas will be turning 60. Six decades of thought-provoking and award-winning documentaries, interviews, and discussions that crack open an idea to see how it's played out

over place and time. And we'd like to know your story. So if you've ever been touched by an episode of Ideas in a way that changed the way you look at the world or affected your life in some deep way, we'd love to know about it. To get in touch, email us at ideas at cbc.ca with a brief outline of your story. That's ideas at cbc.ca with a brief outline of your story. That's ideas at cbc.ca. This program was produced by Anne Penman. Our technical producer is Danielle Duvall.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Nikola Lukcic is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Aya. For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.