As the comfort of community dwindles, all we might be left with is a cold place of struggling individuals, all competing with each other
I was in a shop, queuing up to pay. The elderly woman in front of me got to the till, and, as often happens, started chatting to the shop assistant. I didn’t catch the drift of what she was talking about, other than it went on for a while, and as she talked, the queue behind me started to lengthen.
Perhaps the woman was one of those incorrigible yakkers; or perhaps going to the shop was one of the few daily opportunities she had for human contact. If it was the latter, she’s not that unusual. Like most of the developed world, Ireland – a country internationally renowned for its friendliness – is experiencing what’s often described as an epidemic of loneliness.
That seems contradictory. But it’s surprisingly common. Research into loneliness – and there’s a lot of it – has found that it can be experienced in different ways. For some who are physically isolated and wish they weren’t, the solution is the obvious one of contact with other people. But there’s another cohort who experience loneliness because of the people around them. That can be in the confines of a relationship or a friend group or a place of work: and all of its online equivalents.
The concept of loneliness, as we understand it now, only developed in the 19th century with the advent of industrialisation, the growth of towns and cities and, with that, the championing of individualism: a concept that in the 21st century has been given a steroid boost. Tech billionaires, the gig economy and an online culture where people endlessly promote a marketable version of themselves in a struggle for likes from people they will never meet. It’s a form of digital solipsism.
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