one of the positives that has come out of our shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness much more today than we were in the past.
And we should be because the scale at which it's affecting us is immense.
Rich, poor, young, old, male, female are lonely people.
And of course the East as well as the West has been becoming more neoliberal, more individualism, more loneliness, more neoliberalism, more loneliness.
And the West doesn't have the monopoly now neither.
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Today I'm speaking with Norena Hertz, who's been named by Vogue as one of the most inspiring women and called by other outlets, one of the world's leading thinkers.
This episode is about coming together in a world that's falling apart.
We talk about loneliness, what it is, how to recognize it, the health implications, the shame around admitting it, and what we can do about it for ourselves, our friends, our community, and our kids.
It's time to listen and learn.
How is it you came to write about loneliness?
Yes, it wasn't the most obvious topic for an interview.
I was very struck by the fact that an increasing number of my students were coming into my office in office hours and confiding in me how lonely and isolated they felt.
This was a new phenomenon.
I'd been teaching at university for over a decade and I hadn't seen this before.
The other thing I'd noticed with my students was when I was assigning them group assignments, increasing numbers seemed to find it quite challenging to interact in person, face to face.
I actually raised it with a colleague who runs one of America's most prestigious 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 on their screens that when they're face to face, they're finding it really hard to interact.
I thought, gosh, this is interesting.
At the same time in my academic research, I was looking at the rise of right -wing populism across the globe.
I wanted to better understand the drivers for it, economic drivers for sure, but also whether emotional drivers for it as well.
As I started interviewing right -wing populists voters in France, in Germany, Trump voters in the United States, what came across time and time again from their stories was how lonely and disconnected they felt.
I thought, okay, loneliness playing out in this political sense too.
Then the third thing, and these things were all happening at roughly the same time, which was the stars aligning, telling me I had to do this book.
The third reason was that I had bought an Alexa and I apologize in advance if you have one and it's gone off now.
I noticed how attached I was increasingly feeling to my Alexa.
It got me thinking about what I've come to call the loneliness economy and the whole economy that has sprung up to alleviate the loneliness that we feel our collective state of disconnection and isolation.
It was those three things really together.
My students being so lonely, because when we think of loneliness, we often think of it as being something that's mainly the elderly, but three in five 18 to 34 -year -olds feel lonely often or always.
Three in five. One in five millennials don't have a single friend.
So loneliness is a real epidemic amongst the young.
The rise of right wing populism is making me kind of think about how loneliness was shaping our world, not only our interactions.
Then I was really intrigued by the fact that the market had stepped in or was stepping in to address this.
What did that mean?
You can also be lonely in a marriage or in a relationship.
What's the feeling alone?
That's a great question.
You're absolutely right.
There's probably nothing more lonely than being in a bad relationship or a bad marriage.
Being lonely has a sense of powerlessness attached to it.
You lack agency. It's about wanting to feel connected.
Typically, we think of loneliness as wanting to feel connected to friends and family, but I actually broaden it to include also wanting to feel connected to your government, wanting to feel connected to your employer.
Loneliness for me is about feeling disconnected in a much more existential state, about feeling that you're not cared for, that you're not supported, whether it is by those closest to you, but also whether it's by your government or your workplace.
Is it technology that's causing us to feel lonely or do we go to technology because we feel lonely and we seek out technology as a way to feel connected or find people like us?
When I started my research, I was agnostic about the role that technology and social media played in today's learning this crisis.
But the more I dug into the academic literature, and there's by now, of course, a vast body of this, the more I came to believe that technology was net a problem here.
Up until about a year and a half ago, it was hard to actually establish definitively whether it was just correlation that people who were lonely were spending more time, for example, on social media, or was it causative.
There was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000 participants, 1500 in a control group, and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case, Facebook.
The results were very clear.
The group who went off Facebook for two months were significantly less lonely, significantly happier, and interestingly spent significantly more time doing things in person with friends and family.
So it wasn't that they just migrated onto other platforms.
And since then, there have been a few other studies which have supported this, showing that social media actually makes people feel more lonely, but even our devices play a part here.
We've all done it. We've all been in a room with our partner, or our family, heads on our phones, not even really hearing them, not present with them.
And there was a study where they put a smartphone on a table between a couple.
Even when the smartphone was turned off, even when neither person was touching the smartphone, the couple felt less empathetic towards each other and less connected.
And so there's lots and lots of research on why technology net is making us feel less connected to each other, although I'm actually quite optimistic about the role that social robots and virtual assistants will be able to play in alleviating loneliness.
And in my research, I've kind of looked into this a lot.
And one example is an Israeli startup.
It's a company called LEQ.
They have a social robot specifically designed for elderly people.
And during the heights of the COVID pandemic, they shipped thousands of these LEQ robots to the United States.
And the stories of people who were holed up, isolating, self -isolated, saying, I would be feeling so lonely if I hadn't found a companion in my LEQ.
And of course, we know from Japan, where this has been going on for much longer, that people can really become very attached to their robot friends and carers, even knitting bonnets for them in elderly people's homes.
So it doesn't mean that we need to have a relationship with people to feel less lonely.
Go deeper on that. So that's a very interesting and important question.
How I see it is that on an individual level, social robots technology can help alleviate our loneliness for sure.
But what does this mean for society?
Because if we choose to hang out with our Alexa, rather than Alexis, if we choose to spend time with LEQ, rather than L .E .N., we're not going to invest in our human or dangerous, we won't invest in our human relationships.
Moreover, the danger is that we'll get very used to having relationships with essentially servants who do what we want and love at our jokes and are much more submissive than any human relationship would be.
So whilst I do see it as a cure for loneliness at an individual level, I do worry about the ramifications for society, should we wish to migrate our friendships to social robots and virtual assistants.
I want to come later to a little bit of the implications of loneliness on society with or out robots.
But it seems like one of the major problems with loneliness is that there's so much shame in admitting that you're lonely.
Why is that? There is a stigma.
I'd say especially nowadays when the market for popularity has never been more visible.
And again, social media clearly playing a role in that you scroll on your feeds and everyone looks like they have more friends than you and is having more fun than you and is more popular than you.
And so it's easy to believe that others are more popular than you.
And there's something that feels quite shameful about feeling like no one wants to be your friend.
So I think there is a stigma.
I do think something one of the positives that has come out of the shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness much more today than we were in the past.
And we should be because the scale at which it's affecting us collectively is immense.
Rich, poor, young, old, male, female, are lonely people.
Is this a Western Eastern culture thing too?
Does this transfer across all these cultures?
It does, even though the more individualistic society is the lonelier it's likely to be.
And also I argue that the neoliberal capitalist mindset, so the dog eat dog, me first, self interest first mindset, is also inimicable ultimately to a world in which we feel connected to each other and feel part of a community.
And of course the East as well as the West has been becoming more neoliberal and more individualistic.
You even see this in pop song lyrics.
So there were studies done with pop song lyrics which showed that in general in the West, pop song lyrics from the 1980s to today have become increasingly individualistic with words like we as now supplanted by words like I mean my.
And this is even going on in China fascinatingly where you're seeing a lag but you're also seeing this trend.
So more individualism, more loneliness, more neoliberalism, more loneliness and the West doesn't have the monopoly now neither.
That's really interesting to think about how this will play out and we can anticipate some of the consequences.
I just want to go back a little bit more to the individual and acknowledging loneliness and I was talking to a friend about this and she said simple things like filling out a form made her feel lonely when it asks like who's your emergency contact or who's your next of kin.
What's your response to that?
I think we have come to see the family as the all -important support network in our lives and I would argue that we really need to redefine support networks for the 21st century so that friendship networks you know are viewed as meaningful as ones where we have blood ties and that ideally we should be
moving to a whole system whereby we're able to invest in our friendships as much as in our blood relationships and you know wouldn't it be fantastic if at work people didn't just have mothers and fathers increasingly now getting um eternity and maternity pay when they have children but also if people
were allowed not only to take off paid time to care for an elderly relative and some companies are pioneering this but also if you were able to take time off to help out a friend in need help out a neighbor do something for your community so I think part of our challenge and part of the reason your
friend probably felt so lonely is because you don't really think oh I'll put down my friend as the next of kin or as my emergency contact and yet and yet how great would it be if we could but of course in order to do that it's not just about companies doing things it's also about us prioritizing our
friendships more ourselves and it's hard to do that because we're many of us are so busy working all hours so overstretched and care takes time to nurture relationships don't just happen on the fly so we're partly culpable of course too I like to think is you know part of real wealth is actually the the people
around you the good company that you have around you you can buy company but you can't buy good company and to have good company you have to invest in it you have to constantly water the grass between you and them and I think that it's increasingly hard to do that when we feel overstimulated over busy
we don't reach out and the longer you don't reach out the more it becomes harder to reach out and then it just sort of spirals from there I definitely I was just going to build upon that because I so agree with what you're saying and it's also about nurturing our local environments and our local neighborhoods
and this is something that really as I was researching my book it became increasingly clear to me that my kind of conception of myself as a global citizen you know I was the kind of person who was on a plane every couple of weeks and flying around the world and quite proud really of how unrooted I was as
I was writing this book and researching it I came to realize the importance of our local neighborhoods in a way that I hadn't really realized before and of course being forced to spend most of a big chunk of time due to COVID in my local neighborhood I came to realize this even more and so in the same
way that we have to nurture our friendships I think we have to nurture our local neighborhoods too and that's really important moving forward you know whether it's really committing to shop at our local shops and trading off that convenience that yes we can get from online retailers for the community
that needs nurturing it's about showing up at community events if they exist in our areas or if not actually initiating them it's about taking that pause as you're walking down the street and actually saying hello to the person who's walking their dog and not just blinking headphones on rushing by so so much
we can do once we're once we're conscious of it and and it also pays off there's research that shows that even a 30 second exchange in a cafe with the server can make a huge difference to how connected you feel to others and how lonely you feel or otherwise so it doesn't only have to be deep interactions
with your friends even these what I call micro exchanges can make a huge difference to how we feel I think that's a really important aspect to the mosaic of life that many of us don't appreciate until it's it's too late it's one of those things where you you develop this hindsight that you should have been
more involved in your community but you don't it's really hard to see that in foresight but it is a it's an aspect that connects you to something larger than yourself and I think that's part of what what we miss these days in a non -political way is just being connected to our neighbors our community
being a part of that community together yes and virtual you know we've been doing our best to do this virtually of course and yet I think after months of that being the only way we often could connect I think there is a collective sense that it's not as good it's not as good as the face to face in -person interactions
and even though it's wonderful that I'm I'm in London and you're in Ottawa and we're speaking and chatting and even looking at each other on screen as we're doing so it's not the same as if we were in the room together is there a particular way that we can use technology to better connect with people
that we were not doing or exploring part of the challenge actually is the latency effect of kind of slow internet speeds and as technology gets better I think I think some of the the jerkiness of our zoom calls and the you know which just kind of doesn't help us our brains be able to synchronize with each
other which they need to do in order to feel empathetic and connected so some of it is to do with just really something as simple as our internet connection speed but but I think the way that the way that these where screens are currently designed and if there are people listening who are in this space
maybe you can fix this we don't look at each other when we're on zoom typically you know our eye lines aren't looking at each other because of the way it's set up and in fact all too often we're distracted by the pictures of ourselves on our screen turning our interaction as a kind of quasi -performative
one in which we're actor stroke participants all at once and so so I think there are some ways maybe that that technology could be tweaked and and I think also you know when we have choices in a world in which our choice of how we interact has been seriously constrained over in recent times but where we
have choices I think it's also about remembering do choose to meet someone face to face if you if you can and if it's in a socially distanced way and if that's possible you know make that choice because it's actually really good.
What are some of the health implications on the individual I know it's in your book I think you said that it's like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or a week or something you know the the equivalent impact on your overall health talk to me about some of the other health implications and why that is.
So we think of loneliness often as being something that affects our mental health only and of course it does loneliness is linked to increased levels of anxiety depression stress but what's less known is that it also really seriously affects our physical health and why this is is because when we're
learning what happens is essentially we go into fight or flight mode our blood pressure goes up our levels of cortisol or stress levels in our body go up our cholesterol levels also go up and it's a reaction which is a kind of evolutionary reaction which absolutely makes sense in that it's all these
physiological features telling us get connected go to a tribe find a tribe hunt with others gather with others it's all these solid evolutionary reasons the trouble is when we don't act upon them we remain in the state of high alert for a sustained period it's like if you were driving your car put it
in first gear that's the right thing to do initially but stay in first gear for a long time well that's terrible for your engine and that's what protracted periods of loneliness are doing to us and that's why loneliness it turns out is if you're lonely 30 percent more likely to die prematurely than if you're
not and what's worrying is that even relatively short periods of loneliness even periods of loneliness under two years researchers have found can significantly increase your likelihood of an early death oh that's so interesting the way that you phrase that made me think of something i come across i'm
sure most people come across this online sort of thing where single people are more likely to die earlier than married people but maybe it's really not single versus married and it's really just the how lonely your your perception of loneliness it is you can be single and have a huge friend network
and not feel lonely at all and you can be married and feel lonely in that marriage and i wonder if you have any comments on that yeah i think i think that's i think that absolutely makes sense and the research on people who live on their own does show that if you live on your own of course not everyone
who lives on their own is lonely i lived on my own for many years and you had a great network and strong support system but people who live on their own on average are 10 percent likely to feel lonely than people who don't so i think bad relationships and living on your own you're more likely to feel
lonely but of course in either case you can find companionship and connection through friendships through your workplace through membership of a trade union membership of a church i mean part of the reason of course we're lonelier today than we were in the past is just that we do less with each other
less than we are than we did before so we do go to church less we are less likely to be members of a trade union we go less to parent teacher association meetings all these things that typically brought us together and no longer do how does it affect our role in democracy and maybe the trade -off between self
-interest and community so i think democracy is affected on a number of fronts by the growing loneliness crisis firstly these micro exchanges these interactions we have with people who are different to us people have says differences economic groups the kind of interactions which have day to day the kind
of interactions which have of course in shared public spaces public parks public libraries we're having increasingly less of those and those exchanges don't only make us feel less lonely but i argue that there are also ways that we practice democracy even if you're in the supermarket wheeling your trolley
rather than ordering your food online even that interacting interaction in the supermarket it's forcing you to negotiate moving the trolley pass by somebody move around them these are actually important skills skills about enabling other people to get on with their lives skills around respecting other
people skills around recognizing other people and so one of the reasons that democracy is being challenged in today's lonely century is because we're just doing less with other people especially with people who are different to us and so we're we're not practicing also things like respecting others
ideas when they're different to us really important for inclusive democracy of course but the other reason why loneliness is threatening democracy is because of the link between loneliness and populism that my research has kind of made really clear populism whether on the right or on the left in increasing
numbers people seeking feeling lonely feeling marginalized feeling disconnected from each other but also from the government craving connection and finding this community in populist politicians many of whose tenants are antithetical to an inclusive democracy one of the things you said about going through
the grocery store that sort of struck me is that we're just increasingly insulated from people who are different than us so if we're in our house and we're ordering food and it's delivered we don't see the people making the food we don't have to walk by anybody who might be less fortunate that us or homeless
or begging for money or living in a different circumstance than us we effectively are insulating ourselves in these gated communities and the more the less socio -economically diverse the less diverse in every sort of way less cognitively diverse less ethnically diverse these communities are the more
that we see people that are sort of just like us and i think that that's really dangerous for not only not empathizing with the rest of the world but not empathizing with our community and not being in touch with what's going on in the world absolutely and uh i have a whole chapter in my book which looks
at the architecture of exclusion really at the physical architecture of exclusion because some of these things that you're talking about the fact that we don't see other people it's because cities are increasingly designed to keep those deemed undesirable out we've seen a real rise in what we might call
hostile architecture in recent years benches for example designed so that they're sloping um so that the skateboarding kid can't can't skateboard on them and the homeless person can't sleep on them but of course also the place then that the elderly woman can't sit on and pass the day chatting to passers
-by in the street um there's even cases in shopping malls in the united kingdom where in order to keep out undesirable youths um they emit a very high sonic pitch sound which only young people can hear a very unpleasant sound is yes there's something that happens to our to the cells in our ears i learned
um as we get older which means that there are very high pitched horrible sounds that only young people can learn they also put um special lights um in the bathrooms of these malls which expose teenage acne so that young people won't want to spend time there there is a danger that we are really creating
um and of course gated communities increasing numbers of exclusive communities um even ones that are ostensibly set up to have some elements of social housing where those on low income literally excluded examples in my books from the playgrounds from playing from their kids playing in the playgrounds
that the richer inhabitants have so wow and if we don't connect with people who are different to us if we don't spend time with people who are different to us of course we're going to feel be increasingly siloed as a society and of course we're going to be increasingly unable to bridge across communities
which is why one of the things i'm really passionate about and talk about a lot in the book is ways that we can come together as a society and as individuals and there are so many inspiring things out there in the world that we can replicate there was a wonderful initiative done by a german newspaper
did site journalists got very concerned about the growing political divide in germany the growing sense of fragmentation and they decided to initiate this scheme called deutschlandchbrecht germany speaks where it was like a political tinder was what they called it in house where basically they matched
up people with radically different political points of use of people who were really anti europe met up with people who really pro they matched with people who were pro europe people who were anti -immigrants they matched with asylum seekers of course it was an opt -in scheme but basically thousands of people
across germany took part and they met up all across the country all they had to do was agree to meet up for two hours in a public space in cafes in bars in beer gardens what was remarkable after just two hours people's conceptions of each other radically changed they saw this person who they previously
had deemed to be very different to them to be actually much more similar to them than they realized they were aware of all their shared concerns interests often shared thoughts around family they said that they'd be much more willing to include a person like that in their social group that was after just
two hours other kind of bigger schemes that have taken place government led have led to kind of more material longer lasting more entrenched results whether it's Rwanda's practice of umiganda where in order to heal the terrible scars after the terrible genocides the government initiated a program where once
a month everyone has to come together in the community and volunteer do voluntary work together and it's a process that is seen as having played a huge role in reconciling the society in France president macron has trialed civic service for community service for young people he did a pilot project 15
to 16 year old boys they lived together um worked together did voluntary work together had to negotiate you know who's going to do the meals who's going to take out the trash all these things people from vastly different socioeconomic groups made a huge difference to how they felt about each other when the project
ended there are so many ways we could engineer um more interactions between people of different trust but so important is of course that we protect these shared public spaces where people can come together like libraries like community centers like youth clubs places that really since 2008 across the globe
have seen their funds slashed dramatically we're never going to find ground to share if there aren't physical spaces that we share that's a great way to sort of connect us perhaps to people that are different from us and let us see the full spectrum of society that we are just a part of a speck in if you
will um but what can we do about loneliness what are what are the remedies for on the individual level and then maybe from a policy perspective that we can choose to explore for addressing that start with putting our phones down more be more present with those around us so when we're actually physically
with someone actually be with them be in the moment with them support our local communities our local environments if there are if there is a local library even if you don't even if you can afford to buy your own books show up every so often at your local library event you know be part of your community
we can value kindness more in each other traits like competitiveness determination uh focus these are the kind of traits that have really been valorized in recent years but when you think about traits like kindness caring for each other being more collaborative these aren't really traits that we've
really respected perhaps even in each other so really recognizing the importance of these valuing these more i think is so important whether it is in your co -worker your friend your partner your employee i think we can also do a much better job at actively reaching out to those in our own networks who we
think might be lonely um you know really think about it especially in these more challenging times is there someone who might be feeling lonely prioritize them on your call sheet you know pick up the phone do give them a call or at least a text volunteering is a way that we actually can feel less lonely
ourselves so it's a win -win we can help others but also feel less lonely and it's got a great health benefit research has shown that people who never do anything for others die earlier than people who do help others so health benefit too so lots that we can do as individuals lots that employers can do
too for sure um as they think about how to rebuild the office post pandemic and i think putting alleviation of loneliness is really critical 40 of office workers feel lonely at work one in five um adults in the u .s say that they don't have a single friend at work this comes not only to told to their
own mental health and physical health but also has a huge business cost we know that lonely employees much less productive much less engaged much more likely to leave a company so really put alleviating loneliness at the heart of a corporate mission moving forward and there's so many you know easy things
that companies can do from getting people to eat together once we're back in the office um from ditching the open plan office once we're back in the office surprisingly open plan offices um actually make people really socially withdraw maybe not that surprisingly so panopticon i'm so noisy people tend
to withdraw communicate more on email and a lot that governments can do too whether it is about investing in the infrastructure of community whether it is about putting alleviation of loneliness actually at the heart of their economic mission as Jacinda Ardem the prime minister of New Zealand has done
she's put alleviating loneliness and other metrics of well -being right at the heart of the country's economic policy so not only looking at metrics relating to GDP but also to alleviation of loneliness and enhanced well -being and also helping us be able to care more for others whether it is our friends
or our family helping us to be able to do that to be able to take out the time to do that that's really important too what are the signs as a parent that your your teen or your child might be feeling lonely and then what are the steps that you can do to help them so it's important firstly to recognize
that there's a really good chance that your child is feeling lonely because we know that the numbers are you know over 60 of young people are feeling lonely pretty much all of the time we also know that periods of lockdown and isolation have exacerbated this particularly amongst the young think about their
social media usage this is one of the interesting insights that a head teacher brought to my attention he said look it wasn't that children weren't excluded in the past they were but the difference is now that whereas in the past an adult in a child's life could typically see this was going on so you
would see your child wasn't being invited out with others so a teacher would see a child not being asked to sit with others at school today because so much of their social life is happening on their phones on their screens the adult in their lives often isn't aware that they're not being invited to
things and being excluded so you know be aware that this might be going on and there are all terrible terribly poignant stories of from teenagers who i interviewed one peter a 14 year old boy told me about how he would post on instagram and then wait wait wait hoping for somebody to like his post and when they
didn't asking himself what am i doing wrong and saying how invisible he felt or claudia his friends had told her that they weren't going out after school and then she was scrolling on her beads and saw them going out without her or another where a parent told me that their kid came home and everyone
was sitting in the times when everyone was still sitting round with each other but it was sitting around together and everyone's phones pinged with a whatsapp message inviting something and their kids phone didn't ping and she had to pretend that it had pinged so i think being aware of being aware of that having
these conversations with them destigmatizing loneliness within your own household and then also and then encouraging your kid to find a community around the things that they're genuinely interested in and passionate about and this isn't only kids who should do this we all should be doing it i mean i
for example i'm part of a weekly improv group um so every week and it's something i try and ring fence in my diary however busy i am however kind of much works going on i try and ring fence this two hours where i'm going to meet up with my improv friends during the pandemic we migrated to zoom not as
good but better than nothing for sure so you know does your kid have something they're interested in whether it's music or drama or filmmaking or chess or reading and they could find some like -minded people to interact with too i'm curious as to what lessons you've learned from improv that you've applied
outside of your classes so one of the very basic rules in improv is yes and so you build upon a scene so if you say to me hi noreenah here's a present for you i would say yes and it's a box of balloons and you would say yes it's a box of balloons with sprinkles on them so you're you're always building
upon it so that's just kind of it's a pretty good lesson um for conversations for interactions for group for group discussions i think improv is also for me really about being in the moment it's probably the most zen thing i can do i do in my life it's most mindful because you your attention is really
focused on the other person it really helps you be a better listener and be in the moment so i think improv helps me listen better and also be more now well thank you very much rita this has been a great conversation i've really enjoyed it you're very welcome to join my improv group virtually whilst
we're doing it i might take you up on that thank you for sharing hey one more thing before we say goodbye the knowledge project is produced by the team at fernom street i want to make this the best podcast you listen to and i'd love to get your feedback if you have comments ideas for future shows or topics
or just feedback in general you can email me at shane at f s dot blog or follow me on twitter at shane a parish you can learn more about the show and find past episodes at f s dot blog slash podcast if you want a transcript of this episode go to f s dot blog slash tribe and join our learning community
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