Modern Wisdom - #266 - Noreena Hertz - Is There A Loneliness Epidemic?

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Noreena Hertz is an author and economist. Even before social distancing was a word, loneliness was a huge crisis. More people than ever before feel detached in a world that's never been so connected. Expect to learn the dramatic health impacts of loneliness, the extreme lengths some people are going to in an effort to feel connected with other humans, why 16-24 year olds are at highest risk and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Lonely Century - https://amzn.to/352AouB  Follow Noreena on Twitter - https://twitter.com/noreenahertz  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello people in podcast land. Welcome back. My guest today is Norena Hertz, author and economist, and we're talking about the loneliness epidemic. Even before social distancing was a word, loneliness was a huge crisis. More people than ever before have failed attached in a world that's never been so connected. It seems so converse, right? We have ubiquitous global instance communications access to everybody. and yet there is a huge surge in self-reported loneliness. So today, expect to learn the dramatic health impacts of loneliness, the extreme lengths that some people are going to just in an effort to feel connected with other humans, why 16 to 24-year-olds are at higher risk and much more. In the before I get to other news, if you haven't already, go and subscribe to the Modern

Wisdom YouTube channel. We are so close to 100,000 subscribers, I can taste it, I can smell that 100k party. So just now while you're on your phone, navigate to YouTube, Modern Wisdom and press the subscribe button, who'd make me very, very happy indeed. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful, Norena Hertz. Thank you for having me on. Pleasure to have you here. You're an economist. What are you doing talking about loneliness? Why are you interested in that?

So it was a few things happening pretty much at once that made me think this is what I want to research next. First, it was my students. I was noting that increasing numbers were coming into my office during office hours and confiding in me how lonely and isolated they felt. And this was a new phenomenon. I've been teaching for a few years and I hadn't experienced anything like it before. But it was notable. And the other thing that I really noticed was that when I set my students'

group assignments increasingly or significant numbers of them seemed to be finding it increasingly hard to interact face to face. And when I raised it with a colleague, an American professor who runs one of America's big universities, he said to me, we're seeing exactly the same thing here. In fact, it's so bad here that we're having to run remedial how to read a face in real life classes for our incoming students because they're spending so much time with their heads and their screens that they literally are unable to read a Roman person. So that was kind of one piece of information, which I guess I lodged. And then at the same time,

I was really interested in my research in the rise of right-wing populism, rise of people voting for the people like Le Pen in France or Salvinian, Italy or Trump, of course, in the United States. And so I started looking into this and I started into being voters and hearing from these kind of voters and one thing that came out time and time again

from their stories was how lonely they felt or at least how lonely they had felt until they found community in this far right populist kind of gathering. And I found that disturbing but also really interesting and a kind of way of making sense of what was going on that I hadn't come across before. And then the third insight, these are all happening at roughly the same time, was I had bought, and I apologise already in advance if this is annoying for anyone who's listening, I had bought an Alexa, so I'm whispering in case she starts going off. bought an Alexa, so I'm whispering in case she starts going off. And I noticed myself becoming increasingly attached to my own Alexa. And it got me thinking about AI and social robots, and the role that they were inevitably going to play in coming years in helping us feel more connected to each other and less,

in helping us feel less lonely and more connected, maybe not to each other, but to something at least. And I started researching that and started to realise that actually what we'd been seeing, and this is before the pandemic, and this may speak very much to you, Chris, was the rise of what I call the loneliness economy, an entire economy that had sprung out really speaking to people's need for what the famous 20th century sociologist Emil Dirk, I'm called Collective Effervescence. The need for people to have shared experiences together in person, and I'm saying this might resonate with you because of course with your club promoting history. And really, and we'd seen it whether in the rise of people who wanted to go to clubs or the rise in people who wanted to go to things like escape rooms or the rise of people who wanted to go to clubs or the rise in people who wanted

to go to things like escape rooms or the rise in people who were looking for community and things like soul cycle. What we'd been seeing in the years preceding the pandemic was really a rise in this appetite for community, whether it was in a non-paidful form or in a paidful commercialised form. So it was those three different things together that made me realise that loneliness was a way really of making sense perhaps, a prism through which to understand what was going on in the world, the big societal shifts and political shifts that been going on. How do you define loneliness? So, I define loneliness in a broader sense to the sense that some people listening might

think of it. I define loneliness as not only feeling disconnected from your friends and family and craving connection with them, although it is of course that too. I also define loneliness as feeling disconnected from your employer, your government, from feeling uncared for and supported not only from those who are meant to be close to you, but from your workplace or your government too. So, the me loneliness is political as well as personal and its drivers are economic, technological, demographic, not only to do with how we treat ourselves and each other. I imagine one of the challenges that you're gonna come up against when researching loneliness is that

all of that's very subjective. Now we don't have, we can try and make an objective metric from a very subjective feeling, but it's like trying to rate happiness or trying to write any other sort of emotion. We don't know what it's like to be another person's consciousness. So their level of loneliness and ours,

we can try and give it as best a scale as we can rate from one to five if this statement It was somewhat agree disagree etc But it's always going to be slightly messy. I imagine and the statistics around that must be similarly messy as well What what statistics did you find around loneliness levels? So I think that's firstly such an interesting point that you raised because it's something that I grappled with so much as I was doing my research. And I ended up thinking about loneliness and you're right, there is with all emotions, that challenge, you know, I'm very lonely. Is my very lonely the same as you're very lonely, but it's also I realized it's like pain as well. Because if somebody says I'm in a lot of pain, physical pain, we also don't know whether

they're physical, they're very pain, is equivalent to your very pain. Like they're stubbing their tails, might be like you having a poker put in your eye. We just don't know. So there is that challenge with these kind of metrics for sure, whether it's loneliness, depression, anxiety, or physical pain even. But assuming that we're in the ballpark at least with these kind of figures, and I think that's a fair assumption, what the research shows really clearly is that loneliness even before the pandemic was a really serious problem with one in five UK adults saying that they felt lonely always or most of the time and half of 18 to 24-year-olds saying that they felt

lonely regularly. And that's an astounding figure. And in the workplace, that also an incredibly lonely place for many 60% of UK workers say that they feel lonely at work. One in five, American workers say that they don't have a single friend in the workplace. So loneliness really a very pervasive feeling throughout our society, which the pandemic has significantly amplified. And research that has come out in the last few months really shows that very clearly with especially with three groups especially being finding themselves

even more lonely through the pandemic, the young, people on low income and women. So these are the three groups who I mean everyone on average feels lonely but those three groups in particular feel especially lonely or have been feeling especially lonely. I remember listening to a I want to say a podcast, I don't tend to dip in much into the sort of women on women world of podcasts, but this one was really fascinating. And they were talking about sympathizing with women who are single and doing lockdown alone because of the need for the oxytocin release from being close, like physically close to people. And that was an insight that I totally hadn't thought of,

you know, a bloke. For me, that hugs and stuff, yeah, they're all right. But I don't really need them that much. And seeing it from that side, that made a lot of sense. I thought you meant to do warmer up north than like the more, the more insolent paving and stuff. Sort of the earth up here. Now everyone's terrified of hugging now.

It's that weird, it's that weird elbow thing, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So out of all of the different groups, it's surprising, I think, might be surprising to some people that was surprising to me upon reading the book, that that 18 to 24 age bracket is suffering because you just presume between the age of 18 to 24 age bracket is suffering because you just presume between the age of 18 and 24 that everyone's just swimming in late night house parties and a morning book club and

a ride to the gym with your friends and all this sort of stuff, but it seems like that's quite the opposite, especially given that that's the age that people at university are higher education. So that will be chunked into fairly, you know, you're forced to see people. Some of the lectures I had at Mekasel were 150 people strong. I wanted less people around me, not more, but it seems like that's changing. So, I think firstly, you can be lonely in a crowd. I mean, so in the same way that you are not necessarily lonely if you're on your own. So I think that's

one fact to be all right. I think that was really surprising to me as well how lonely the younger, in fact the younger the loneliest generation. And when we think about loneliness we often think about it being the elderly, but that just isn't the case. It is the young. The data is really clear on this. So, the loneliness, I think, you know, what differentiates the young in particular is their usage of mobile phones and social media. And I really began my research, feeling really agnostic on this point, and I had no agenda beforehand. but as I dug into the academic research and as I interviewed many teenagers, what came out again and again was the really destructive role that social media in particular was playing in their lives.

Now, of course, again, this is on average. And so there are going to be people for him, social media has been a lifeline. The LGBTQ kid in a small village somewhere who wasn't physically around anyone who was like them. It may well have found their community on Instagram, say. But on average, it seems that these platforms are really playing a significant role in the rise of young people's loneliness, and it's for a few reasons. In the first, it's quite simply that these platforms designed to be addictive, to keep

drawing us in with their kind of twinkly lights and colour and flashing and endless scrolls and all the ways that they've kind of designed them to do so. And the more we're on the phones, I mean the less present we are with those actually around us. And so the quality of our face-to-face relationships are diminished. And I've been guilty of it myself. I've been scrolling on my social media feed in the room with my husband. And not really, even hearing him, because my attention has been on my phone.

But the social media playing the role of kind of being a weapon, not only of mass destruction, but also a weapon of, sorry, not weapon of mass destruction. That was a bit far, I think. But social media, you know, not only playing a part also being a very excluding mechanism for many young people it turns out. In my interviews with teenagers, I remember Peter, for example, a 14-year-old schoolboy telling me very pointedly about how invisible he felt when he would post on Instagram and then be waiting waiting waiting waiting for someone to like his post and then when nobody did asking himself, what am I doing wrong? Or

Claudia, a teenager who told me about the pain she felt when she realized that her friends were out without her, that said that they weren't going out and she was scrolling through her feed and saw them hanging out without her and she had been excluded or apparent who shared with me the pain his daughter felt when she was in a cafe with her friends and everyone's foam pinging with a WhatsApp message inviting them to a party and she didn't even get the message, but she had to pretend that she had the message. So as to not appear, so excluded.

So, of course, young people were excluded in the past too. This isn't a contemporary phenomenon. And yet, what makes it different now is that because so much of their social interaction has migrated onto their screens, whereas an adult in their lives in the past might have seen this is going on and actually done something to intervene to a teacher might have seen a child

not being asked to sit with others, or a parent might have noticed that their kid wasn't being asked to do something. Today, the adult typically isn't aware of it, whereas to all their peers, the exclusion is really visible. There's a lack of visibility in the sun-learned helplessness, lack of visibility from a care-giver's perspective looking in and then the learned helplessness. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to say,

just man up, you know, that people have been excluded for all of time, but there does seem to be a corner that's turned with social media, the fact that the ubiquity of it, the messiness of it, Jonathan Hates, the coddling of the American mind, which I'm halfway through at the moment is really fascinating and terrifying around this. There is a, like a great wall from teenagers around about 2012 to 2014, which is kind of

when Instagram came around, and it's just this, the crest of this tsunami that's kind of moving through the demographic, and it's very much split into pre and post that time. And when we look at rising loneliness figures amongst this generation, they also massively shoot up from then onwards. But what's really interesting is that so we've been aware of that research for a few years now, but what we can determine definitively was whether this was just was whether this was just correlation or was it actually causation? Was it because people were on their social media platforms that they were loaner? So it was hard to disentangle that when all you knew was that there was a kind of the periods corresponded.

But about two years ago, there was a really seminal new piece of research done at Stanford University, obviously at Oxford University, where they got 3,000 students, where they put half of those into a control group. They were told to keep using their Facebook as usual. The other group were told to delete that Facebook for two months. And then they tracked how the different groups responded and the group that were off Facebook. Fascinatingly, it wasn't that they then just spent more time on other platforms. They actually spent less time on the internet overall and more time in person with friends and family. But they were

also significantly less lonely and significantly happier. In fact, the researchers said that deleting Facebook is 40% as good for you as actually having therapy. Yeah. Shit the bed. That's a really astounding, I mean, I've been very sort of anti-social media, anti-technology for three and a bit years since I got introduced to Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology. Yes. And I've kind of been on this flex for a long time, but it does feel very much like, I don't

know what the solution is here. I think it needs to be emergent, bottom up, it needs a social change, it requires people to be able to self-regulate, despite the fact that there is billions and billions of dollars in an army of engineers behind every click, but it also requires perhaps some sort of top-down litigation. I know that we're seeing screen time trying to get brought in. Yeah, not perhaps. I think that absolutely needs to be part of the package. In many ways, I think we should think of social media companies as the tobacco companies, of 21st century. And the search, they really should be regulated as such, strongly, especially when it comes to children. And in the UK, there is actually just in the last few days, there's been some real action on this front with a new bill going through Parliament, which will hold social

media companies accountable for online harm, not only for the most egregious hate speech, but also for when it comes to children, negatively affecting them psychologically. So that is actually a significant step in what I believe is the right direction, because although, of course, we can try and resist our addiction ourselves, I know how hard it is to do so. I mean, I typically am not on social media, but when I have a book out, I have to go on social media. And I've really seen how addicted, how quickly I've become once I've been, you know, going on it on a daily basis. Yeah, the problem is once those neurons have wide themselves in, they're not going anywhere, they're there for the rest of your life. I know what you mean about... Yeah, I mean, although, although even with the addiction, one way that I managed to kind of break

it is by being quite draconian and actually just having like not keep putting my fans so that it's not actually an arms reach. Like I have to physically distance myself. Sleeve, put your phone outside of your bedroom is the number one hack for reducing your screen time. But yeah, I saw the legislation that you're talking about. I am concerned that that involves a restriction of freedom of speech and we get into a whole other conversation to be had there. It is going to be difficult to legislate top down and restrict the bad, that is ubiquitously bad platform wide around social media whilst getting into a more nuanced discussion, I think, about what we should and should not be, are they a publisher, are they a pipeline, are they the provider of information, are they

liable for what's on their platform, what does that mean, what do we so on and so forth. One question that I had that I thought was kind of interesting, what was the last time in your research that you looked at that we didn't have mass loneliness, are we going back to like the 1800s here or? So it's only in the 1800s that you even start reading about loneliness as a phenomenon. So the phrase itself, the word lonely is something that really only entered the vernacular

from the 1800s onwards. But I think it's partly because of how people conceived of themselves in a religious context, being kind of, you weren't lonely if you were at one with God. And so I think that's maybe part of the reason why we didn't see that sentiment expressed before. But that isn't say that people weren't lonely before because I'm sure there were many people who felt lonely if you were living in an abusive relationship, whether that was in the 16th or 15th or 14th century.

Imagine if you were an LGBT, if you were a racial minority in a... If you were economically, if you were a peasant, if you were in a poor house, if you were... I'm sure there were lots of circumstances that felt only, even if it wasn't something that was talked about then. So what's changed? Obviously we've got this contribution of technology. What else has changed that's driving this loneliness? Yeah, a number of factors. For example, more people live on their own now than at any time before.

It's not, as I said, that everyone who lives on their own is lonely. That of course isn't the case, but if you live on your own, you are disproportionately likely to be lonely and disproportionately likely to feel lonely more often. We do less with other people than we did in the past. We go to church less, we are less likely to be members of trade unions, we are less likely to do things like go to parent teacher evenings if we're a parent, so we just do less with others and we did in the past. And then there's what I would call the neoliberal mindset, which is really the particular capitalist mindset that has dominated the last few decades ever really a kind of me-eye-centric philosophy that really valorized self-interest and selfishness. We even see this in the way that pop song lyrics evolved from the 1980s onwards,

where we see words like we ask and hour being steadily supplanted by words like me, myself, I, which is fascinating. And an eccentric, mecentric, well, was inevitably always going to be a lonelyer one. Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's important I'm a massive champion of a meritocracy. I'm also a huge champion of upward mobility personal sovereignty taking agency and control of your own actions But I can see how That taken to its extreme can lead to loneliness and kind of talking about it's the same theme throughout all of this that We want the good bits of what we can get out that's

good, but as soon as we start to push it to an extreme with technology, with independence and sort of sovereignty of the individual, when you take it to the extreme, you also then get malignant effects that come as a byproduct of that too, and finding the messy middle, finding what's good of that without taking too much of it, I think is a real challenge. And also recognizing that there are trade-offs we sometimes have to make between individualism and community, between freedom and fraternity. These aren't binary choices we have to make, but it's recognizingising that we have to give probably a bit of one to get more of the other. What about city design? Yes, that's something I look at a lot in my

book and there's a whole chapter on that. Cities are, and again some people are surprised by this finding, but cities it turns out are the loneliest habitats in which to live, you might think with all these people around you, you wouldn't be lonely, well, it turns out that isn't the case. It's partly about the speed of the city, everyone rushing, go, go, go, in fact, research, I found this fascinating, that the rich are a city, the faster its citizens walk, that the richer a city, the faster its citizens walk, and also the denser a city, the less civil it's citizens are to each other, which I'm fascinating as well. So cities, these rushing places where people are not really

civil to each other, or that civil to each other, are inevitably going to be lonelier places. But cities also designed, in most cases, more really for cars, all too often than people, the scale of a city can be alienating and isolating with increasingly what I call hostile architecture dotted around the city. So benches, lights, spikes, grills, designed with the express purpose of excluding certain groups. For example, there's a shopping mall which has a very special kind of pinky light in the bathrooms to dissuade

teenagers from hanging out there because it shows up acne. There's also this kind of high-pitched sonic sound that some other shopping malls are using, which apparently only young people can hear it. Something about what there's something that happens in your ears as you get older when you don't hear these frequencies as well. And also to dissuade people from young people from hanging out there, we see it with benches even. There's a bench near to where I live, the cams and benches, it's called, designed specifically this kind of sloping bench to really dissuade skateboarders to skate in it,

homeless people to line it, but of course then being a bench which no one really can sit on, including the elderly woman who might have wanted to sit there, watch the world go by and chat to pass us by. So cities, yeah, in many ways, being designed intentionally to exclude thereby, making them lonely for significance, ways of people in them. I went to Rome last year and I went to go see the Colosseum and as a part of that, the tour guide showed us that I'm going to get this wrong, it's something like a hundred thousand people, I think, see the Colosseum and as a part of that the tour guide showed us that I'm gonna get this wrong. It's something like a hundred thousand people I think that the Colosseum at its absolute max could have in and they could exit all 100,000 people in under 10 minutes and one of the strategies that they implemented

Was that the steps as you were going down they were sloped towards the exit So you couldn't slow down as soon as you begin moving down the steps, your feet have to go faster to catch you up. Well, in a world that doesn't have suing and litigative lawsuits around, I fell down your steps getting out of the gladiatorial arena. Like, when that isn't an option, I think it probably makes for a good idea to get people out of a stadium quickly, but not safely, and also probably people out of a stadium quickly but not safely and also probably a bit of a ship bench. What are some of the most extreme examples of loneliness that you found?

It's probably Carl. So I had heard that people paid to be cuddled, that there was that a growing industry, the growing part of what I've called the loneliness economy, was people paying to be cuddled. And I started investigating this online initially and came across a woman called Jean. Jean is a professional codler. She is in Venice, beach in California and she introduced me to some of her clients and when I was in Los Angeles, I met with one of them. Let's call him Carl. And he came in, I met him in the Starbucks. I think it was Johnny Cash playing on the radio and he walked in nice looking man, early 50s, Sultan Purple Hair, Chino's, Baton Danshirt, sat down and told me his story and it turned out, it had moved to Los Angeles a few years before from a small town and didn't know

anyone in the city and he was divorced and he didn't know anyone in the city and he was divorced and he didn't know anyone in the city and felt really lonely and really craved intimacy he had tried online dating but it really wasn't for him he said and he then heard about paid cuddling and he started seeing Jean and he said it absolutely transformed his life. Now, this, by the way, he's a media executive earning six-figure salary. Single, I'm going to guess. Single working for a big media corporation.

Yeah, he started seeing Jean. He said it transformed his life. He went from being really down, really depressed, to feeling really positive, his productivity at work, he told me, shot up, you know, a fascinating story. And so he told me he was seeing Jean once a week. I said, gosh, that's a lot. And then he said, you're not using my well name are you? And I said, no. And he said, well, if I'm, let me then tell you something else. And I said, what? And he said, well, seeing Jean hasn't ended up being enough.

And so I'm actually seeing other people to pay to be cuddled. And by the way, we're making very clear this was not a sexual thing. This was about intimacy, about wanting to be held, touched, no in a sexual way. And I said, gosh, that must be really expensive. How are you paying for it? And he said, I'm living in my car. This was somebody who was so craving connection and intimacy that in

order to pay for it, he was living in his car, shattering at the 24-7 gym, he was parking outside, leaving his feed in the fridge in work. I mean, I found that such a disturbing story, such a sad story. Yeah, so I think that was probably one of the most extreme ones I came across. On the other end, if the age spectrum, another story that I did find really moving was what's going on in Japan with elderly pensioners who are the fastest growing demographic when it comes to people being incarcerated, people going to jail. And the reason for it, research has to study this phenomenon, is because they're so lonely, the group of pensioners who are committing crimes like shoplifting in order to be jailed, that they want to be jailed in order to find the company and companionship that jail provides. A 40% of these jailed pensioners have no relationship with their families,

50% haven't seen any friends in recent months even. So again, a really sad story. But these are at the extremes. It's important to, again, remember how pervasive loneliness is amongst all of us. How'd you get jailed? It's a Japanese groney. Shoplifting. Of course.

A bit just really badly done. Like really obvious shoplifting, like walking out with a huge teddy bear or like a TV under your arm or something. If you're elderly, you might not be able to carry the TV. Something like teddy bears, teddy bears. Maybe the teddy bear, maybe the teddy bear. Marshmallows or the light objects. Yeah, I don't really know to think about that. I mean, I think the, you man from LA, obviously, that's a very bizarre example. I wonder how much of that is a pathology on his part and how much of that is a byproduct of loneliness. Well, what was interesting was I actually went to

Jean's cuddle sanctuary as well when I was in Venice Beach. Is it like a sort of, I don't use word brothel because I know that was steering clear of sexy stuff here, but it kind of like a sort of a madame's house, but it's all different. Would you like to cuddle in the pink room today or in the cloud or in the unicorn lounge? So I've got to say before I went I was really nervous and I was thinking, what am I letting myself in for? But actually, it was much more akin to a yoga

studio with the people coming in. Incents and the music. Yeah, didn't have incense, but it kind of had, you know, beanbag type things on the floor and like, may there's tubes that peat that in gyms you can kind of use to learn and do your exercises. It's a bit like that dotted around a mat on the floor, kind of like those mats that you see in yoga studios. And the people attending, so it was a group cuddle session. The people attending. So you get paired up with random other humans for a cuddle. with random other humans for a cuddle. So what happens is you pay to attend,

and then you sit around in a circle and you'll meet each other. What was really interesting was everyone looks so normal. I mean, I didn't know what to expect, but everyone just, this really, they look like people who are going to their local gym class or yoga class, you know, wearing kind of, kind of, the top clothes, physical deficiencies or people sort of.

No, not at all. And then what happened then was you kind of moved around with different people and were cuddled and cuddled that. Oh, so it's like a car keys in the bowl type job, but for that and then you swap and you change and you keep on going, I had a cuddle with Gini. Yeah, but you keep your clothes on and it's all very consensual.

So you say, would it be okay if I put my arm around you? And then the person has to say yes or no. But what was really, I mean, it wasn't really for me. I don't think it played out. Do you have a go? No, I did have a go. Do you have a go with Jeannie? I had a go. Yes, I had a go. I mean, I went, I like experienced it and the experience was, I'd say not really for me. I think my British reserve, I didn't play well to the group, cuddling, but I went for it. I, you know, I went for it, I think my British reserve didn't play well to the group, Cuddling, but I went for it.

I went for it, see what it felt like, but what was really interesting afterwards, because this is speaking to whether Carl had some word pathology, I don't think he did because this group of people who I chatted to afterwards, they were so normal and their reasons for it were just quite straightforward. One of them, a woman from Texas, again, an attractive woman from Texas, she had moved to California. She was divorced. She said, you know, she didn't want to be in a relationship right now, but she craved

having some intimacy and some touch. Another woman, a university administrator in her 20s, she told me again that it was intimacy, she was missing connection, a feeling of connection in an increasingly disconnected world. So it was actually interesting how not strange the people were, yeah, who are doing it. What happens physiologically when someone's lonely? So when we're lonely, we think of loneliness really as being something that only effects our mental health, but actually loneliness does your right affect us physiologically too. It's really because of how we've evolved, because we are essentially creatures of togetherness, hard

wire to connect. Our bodies have been designed so that when we're not connected to others, when we feel lonely, it sends alarm bells ringing, kind of putting us into a really strong state of fight or flight. So our blood pressure goes up, our heart rate goes up, our levels of cortisol, which we can measure in our saliva go up when we're lonely. All of us, all of these things just essentially telling our body, stop being lonely, go and find someone to hang out with and be with. And the trouble is that even though in many ways this is a great piece of evolutionary design in the modern world when 70 people are lonely for protracted periods of time. This actually makes you really

quite unwell and it's like if you were driving a car in first gear, for the first initial moments, that's great, that's what you want to be doing. But if you're doing it over time, that's really going to damage your engine and so too when you're lonely for protracted periods of time, are our bodies physically damaged. In fact, research has found that loneliness is as bad for our health as making 15 cigarettes a day. I'd seen that start. How does that tie in? Because obviously I'm not going to get infocema. I'm not going to be impacting my lungs. Do you know when you dig into that? Yes. We know, for example, that if you're lonely, you have a 30% higher chance of getting heart

disease. If you're lonely, you have a 40% higher chance of getting dementia. If you're lonely, you also have a higher risk of getting stroke. If you're lonely and you're ready at ill, you're less likely to recover as well. So it's all those sorts of factors, which is how. Why is that manifesting? Do you know, did they look at why that's coming up? Like, you've got some pretty strong physiological adaptations, small adaptations. Yes, well, it's really because of this continuous state of being on red alert, fight or flight, high blood pressure, high stress levels are really bad for us

when they're sustained because what they do is they dampen our ability to fight infection and the increase our inflammation levels in our body and both of those are ability to fight infection and raise inflammation levels are really bad for our life expectancy and for our health. So that's why essentially. I wonder how much... What we're talking about here are diseases which will tend to manifest in older age. But we're talking about a group of specifically young people across the spectrum, but some very young people.

I wonder how much harm can be done and then under. You're not the person who used to party really hard when they're young and they've now decided to go T total. I wonder what sort of chronic changes we're going to see from young people who are maybe who suffer with loneliness then perhaps they get into a happy marriage and they have kids and they have lots of dogs and cats and live in the country away from a big city and stuff like that. I wonder there will be fascinating to look at that in you know sort 50 years' time and see what's actually going on. So the bad news is that researchers have looked at this and what they found is that even relatively short periods of loneliness, so under

two years of feeling lonely, can have a significant impact on our life expectancy. Shit. Shit the bad. But the good news, okay, the good news on the other hand, let me counter that then, is that actively helping others, feeling connected to others, feeling part of the community is good for our health and actually is shown to improve our life expectancy. So even if you've had a

period of loneliness, if you then invest, like actually invest in strengthening your relationships, in being part of a community and also in caring for others because people who give no one else any help, it turns out also have their life expectancy slashed, whereas helping others makes you live longer. So there are things you can do to repair that damage from your past. If that were your past.

Sitting as the new smoking was a term that I coined when I bought this beautiful standing desk last year, but it's now loneliness is also the news. So sitting all loneliness are both the new smoking and you know, a lot and smoking also, smoking is the old smoking, but it's still going. So you need to watch out for that. There is a number of ways that you can reduce your life expectancy. So moving through this, it seems like a common antidote here, just off the top of my head, is find a partner that loves you. Find a partner that loves you, build a family. Surely that's one of the most robust solutions to not being lonely.

I'm sure that there's many parents that are listening that wish that they could feel lonely, having to take Cindy to school in the morning and Joseph to football on a night time and stuff like that. Well, again, just being in a relationship doesn't necessarily alleviate loneliness and it can actually make me lonely. One of the reasons women is one of the groups which have become lonelier through this pandemic is because of the rise of domestic abuse that we've seen during the pandemic too. And I'm loathed to make marriage the solution for the contemporary loneliness crisis. I think what your question does speak to you correctly,

however, is the importance of having strong relationships in our lives and investing in our relationships and our support structures, which don't have to be those traditional ones of a marriage or a partner, investing in our friendships, also can alleviate loneliness very successfully too. Kind of friendship replace the level of contact that you get from a relationship though. We're talking about someone that you get to spend some time with, but unless you decide to actually live in a house together, perhaps with this friend for a really expanded period of time,

that compared with the number of, the sheer number of hours, the time and attention that you're going to get in a marriage, surely the, I'm aware that time together doesn't necessarily Yeah, the level of connection but the presumption is at least I would hope that most people who stay in a marriage for a long time Hopefully it's not abusive. Hopefully it has got a level of connection. You're having kids You're trying to support them raise them create a family that is meaningful and has purpose and it moves towards a common goal of

Building a better life for everybody that's within that household. I wonder how many friends equal a good partner, if that makes sense. I think a good marriage is a wonderful thing for sure, but I'm not sure how many people are in a good marriage. And so that being the case, probably suggests. Exactly. And so that being the case, I would say that investing in good friendships is really important to me. Yeah, I suppose good friendships are quite robust, aren't they? You tend to see people going in out of relationships more quickly than they do lifelong friends.

Yeah, I mean, my friendships, like, we're really there for each other. I really believe that and have seen it through the years. Yeah, let's talk about remote working. Obviously, upon starting whatever three years ago, right in your book, and then hitting 2020, like the loneliest year in history, the creation of the word lockdown, the creation of the word sort of teared social isolation, you know. Social distancing. Social distancing, sorry, yes. I mean, yes, no social isolation as well, but social distancing, that's such an kind of, it's the most like, I mean, that we were prescribing, telling people to social distancing. Or insane isolate. Yeah, it's not, it's not been a year of a glossary filled book of words that nice is it? It wasn't like social coodling or like house fun or so it was

all like sort of fairly nasty words. Thinking about that I know that you talked about the work industry, how people feel in the workplace, what do you thoughts on the the new normal of remote working? So I don't believe it is the new normal, firstly, because I think there was this initial euphoria when remote working was introduced. But by and large, this is really wearing thin, and I think most people by now are expressing quite clearly to their employers. So they actually want to go back to the office, especially young people who maybe have got a really not that ideal work environment to be working from and of missing the chats at the motor cooler and when you're making your cups of coffee in the shared kitchen. So the idea that people actually really want

to keep on working remotely, I don't think it's the case. Of course, some companies have been looking at how things have been unfolding over recent months and they're looking at this with Glee, thinking that this is a justification for them now massively reducing their physical footprint, why provide offices. If everyone can just work from home, but I would caution that because what I discovered in my research was that lonely workers not only feel bad themselves but lonely workers are bad for business itself with lonely workers less productive, less motivated, less efficient than workers who are not and also more likely to jump ship in a study of thousands of workers across a number of countries. They found that

workers who were lonely were 60% more likely to quit. Shit. I was really interested around the insights of open office spaces versus cubicle office spaces and the fact that open office spaces actually caused people to feel more lonely and you were saying, I think it was on Chris Evans or something that you sometimes go into the office, you got your noise canceling headphones in because you like it, it's going to be loud in here and annoying and all the rest of it. And I can totally see how the openness of an open plan office actually causes people to open up less because they know that everybody in the room essentially can hear what they're going to say.

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, perhaps the new abnormal, we could call remote working. And I definitely get it as well, that from the pure rationalist, utilitarian perspective, well, look, you've saved 10 hours a week on your commute to work. And half an hour there and back each day. And plus, look, you get to work with pajama bottoms

on. You only have to wear a shirt on your top half now because you do the Zoom calls. On no pants at all as some of my friends have sent me selfies. I've just them in their boxes with a shirt and tie on top doing a Zoom meeting. I have no idea what you've got. Yeah, look, well that's precisely why you can only see up to my waist. Yeah, that is never going to get boring, but not only does that not speak to necessarily the full gamut of requirements that we have as a human, but we don't even know what we want. A lot of the time we think, well, look, I've saved this time, I'm spending more time,

I get to go to the gym more, I get to do this than we think, well look, I've saved this time, I'm spending more time, I get to go to the gym or I get to do this than the other, but the the thread of knowing what the inputs are in our life and how they make us feel, you know, we'd never need a therapist or a doctor if we were fully cognizant about those things, right? But we're not. We don't we don't know just how much we need to awkwardly say hello to the cleaner on our way in and our way out, or like the receptionist that we're not too sure, does she like me, does she not like me? I think that's one of the things, interestingly, that the pandemic and the past, however many

months it now is, has made us, however, recognize more than we were aware of before. Those little micro exchanges and how much they actually matter, whether it is that chat in the cafe to the server or whether it is the conversation you might have in your local bookstore or whether it is, hello, um, those conversations you might have at a club in the evening with those people who you don't ever see outside of the club, but in some shape or form, they are in some way who you'd consider to be your friends. I think, or even, um, those colleagues in the office, he maybe you never really thought of his friends, but now as months of Gumball you're thinking actually they kind of were friends at least in some way. Actually you miss Smelly Bill and Dopey Joana, whatever you know the weird nicknames that you've got for all of the people.

I don't know where you've been working. But yes, so I think one of the things actually that we are more attuned to is how important those micro exchanges actually are. And when it comes to roommate work, there was a big experiment done in China a couple of years ago, where a big company helped with their employees, was sent to work from home for six months. And at the end of six months, they were given the option. You can either return to the office or stay at home and the vast majority rushed back even though they had really long commutes. The craving for face-to-face interaction was actually stronger. That's really interesting. I'm reading The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Height,

like down the rabbit hole at the moment. And he says that the length of commute to work is one of the easiest hack reducing your commute to work is one of the easiest hacks to increase happiness across your life. But because people tend, specifically in America, tend to prefer to have a big square footage house because it's impressive and it gives them status and it makes them feel important and so on and so forth. They'll tend to live further outside of a city so they can afford a bigger house which causes bigger commute. But the converse of that is that obviously the commute to work enables you to see the people who are at work. So perhaps that's a price and it comes back to what we were saying

before, right? Like these gradations, what is the price that we have to pay to get ourselves to this particular situation? Something else I've been thinking a lot about this year, obviously my industry, Clopomo, I employ up to about a thousand students every year who are 18 to 21 freshers arriving at university, you know, some fresh faced wet behind the years, young guys and girls who've arrived from Leeds, a Manchester or Birmingham or something, and they come to Newcastle full of gumption and ready to do Jordy Shaw. And they have been through, like this year as a student must have been total hell, you've been locked down in your halls of residence, burly halls in Manchester, you'll have seen, was 1700 students socially isolated, not even able to

go down to the front door to collect delivery or Amazon Prime parcels for stuff that they needed all manner of crazy crazy situations and I wonder we've sort of talked about what the more Small gathering interpersonal one-to-one one-to-two Situation, but that collective effervescence that you spoke about, the way that people feel sports, fans feel when they get to chant their team's name, when they're watching a game go on,

the way that it feels when your favorite song come, like when WAP comes on in a club or whatever it is, and you're able to dance with your friends and you go up and you meet people. First off, I wonder what sort of an effect that's going to have. And secondly, I wonder how long it's going to be. It's a broader question.

How long it's going to be before we look at the world we have now, social distancing, masks outside, limited social contact, no clubs, no bars, no mingling between groups. When we see, because even now I see on TV the old world, the world from pre-2020 and think that looks alien, that looks bizarre, that obviously wasn't filmed this year, that's not the world that I inhabit right now. So yeah, a whole host of potential sort of negative downstream effects from what's going on.

So I'm actually more optimistic on this front. One of us needs to be. I think if we look back historically, there's reason for optimism. If you think just a few years after the 1918 Spanish flu, bars, nightclubs, cafes were heaving. The roaring 20s, that's all. Yeah, the roaring 20s came after right up the back of the 1918 Spanish flu situation, very similar to this. If you think about how in Taipei as soon as people were allowed to, 5,000 people were congregating each night to watch fansom of the opera now, like in the last few months. If you think about, if you've been tracking

what's going on in Sydney or Christchurch, say Australia or New Zealand, we're seeing music festivals packed with people, nightclubs packed with people dancing. In Israel after yoga studies were able to open again, people were encircling the blocks. I really firmly believe that our fundamental desire to be with others is going to prevail. And, you know, I'm an absolutely no doubt about it. So you're saying that I can be very bullish about my industry over the next few years as soon as we get back out the other side of that? Well, that's good.

I would even, yes, and I would even go, I would say be really bullish because in the same way that after a period of Fasting we become more hungry after this enforced social recession. I think our desire to be with others is going to be stronger than ever one Structural limitation that we're going to come up against there is the F&B nightlife leisure industry is getting pounded and it is not cheap to run. There's a big venue up here, you'll have been with Tiger Tiger before at some point in the year in your life and they were purchased by a company called Deltik, huge big publicly traded company, they own a ton of different venues. They turn them into prisms and they bought Laverignite.

They bought LumaNar that used to have liquid and LQ. Big, big group. And on Saturday, I had to drive into the new castle one to pull all of our inflatables out before the administrative is going this week. And I turn up outside and there's a queue of lorries, five lorries, 10 cars, all in this little side street that's usually my secret parking spot.

And there, anything that isn't stapled or drilled into the floor and some things that are just being lifted out of this building before the administrative is coming in, put a big chain around the door in a couple of days time. So you think like that is going to bring the guardrails in on what people can do. How many yoga studios, how many gyms, bars, restaurants, little independence, plus the ones that you might have thought would have been able to weather the storm because they got deep pockets. Someone like a big publicly traded national company, there's no one that's safe from going pop at the moment.

No, and it's absolutely tragic. I mean, my sister has a yoga studio and she's experiencing this kind of first hand. So I mean it's absolutely tragic. And yet from the ashes of these businesses, new pro community commercialized ventures will inevitably rise, inevitably. Correct. And for those who can hunker down and weather the storm, I mean, there is light out there at the end of this tunnel for sure. Now, like that, if you were to give someone a prescription for how they can avoid loneliness as best they can. What would your best tips be?

So if you're feeling lonely yourself, is there something that you're into doing where you might be able to find other people to do it with? So I, for example, I'm into improv, I do, I'm part of a week, I do improv every week. In the old world, I would go and meet up with my fellow improvisers, but in the on-zoom world, we've migrated to Zoom for now. But that is really great having something that you're interested in. So whether it's improvising or singing or, I don't know, playing chess, collecting stamps, whatever it is, is there something that you're into where you could find other people for now? It may have to be on Zoom, but hopefully afterwards in person. Is there something you can do to help others? Helping others is a really good way of

feeling less lonely yourself, feeling more connected to other people, but you're also of course doing really good for someone else at the same time. You're also as a helper getting what's known as the helpers high of physiological response, dopamine rush, which which feels good as well, so helping others feels good too. So just a couple of practical things, if you're low-me, you could try out. Yeah, I have a friend who did classics at Liverpool Crazy Smart Girl and she came out, she got first, she walked her first having done no preparation for the entire three years,

she did the degree and started volunteering on below minimum wage, a dog shelter, looking after abandoned dogs. And I was like, one, you've just dropped 40 ground and you'd agree what you're doing. And she's like, I've never been this happy in my life, just like assisting dogs. And I mean, anyone that's around that many dogs is gonna be happy. But she took that as more valuable than doing a,

monetizing a 40,,000 first in classics from Liverpool. So you think, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Surprisingly being selfless is one of the most selfish things that you can do sometimes. Self-interested. Yes. Self-interested it is. Self-hearing.

If people want to check out more about you and find out more stuff, where should they go? Um, they can either go to my website, www.nerina.com. They can follow me on all my social platforms, which I am currently still on. And by the book, um, it's got lots more about what we've been talking about today, the lonely century available in all good independent bookshops, as well as of course, online. Fantastic. That we linked on Amazon in the show notes below. If you buy it through that, you will be supporting the show at no extra cost to yourself. And it's anybody now that's able to get just their first name.

dot com as their URL. Like that is such a rarity. You must be one of only a very few people that's able to do that. So I congratulate you on a fantastic URL. Marina, today's been really cool. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. of that