Loneliness
Gearóid Carroll
Available for bookings now: creative, brand and comms strategy for creative agencies. At the intersection of advertising, digital, social, earned and experiential.
This post on loneliness came about from an insight journey I took for a prospective project aimed at generation Z. Don’t get me started on defining an audience by generation, or I will go off-topic and not be back for a while while I rant about how life stages are a superior lens. But we digress.
So the approach I took was looking at the problems and challenges faced by the target cohort. From reading academic papers, I came across things like anxiety, climate anxiety and loneliness. Loneliness stuck out as interesting, as it was something that small community moments could be fostered around and an FMCG brand would help in an authentic low key way without being parasitic.
First of all it makes sense to define what loneliness actually is? According to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
loneliness, distressing experience that occurs when a person’s social relationships are perceived by that person to be less in quantity, and especially in quality, than desired. The experience of loneliness is highly subjective; an individual can be alone without feeling lonely and can feel lonely even when with other people. Psychologists generally consider loneliness to be a stable trait, meaning that individuals have different set-points for feeling loneliness, and they fluctuate around these set-points depending on the circumstances in their lives.
The UK government commissioned a report in 2019 by Simetrica Jacobs that quantified the economic cost of loneliness for businesses in terms of ill health and lost work productivity as ￡9,900 per year, per person. Commentary in The Lancet associated loneliness with a 26 percent increase in premature mortality.
Loneliness hits youth harder
In my initial research I found that we had high levels of loneliness and young adults experienced this in a more acute way.
83% of generation-z survey respondents said that they experience loneliness, compared to 68% of the UK population as a whole. I found this fascinating as if you look at the TGI data around the UK overall group cohesion score, you tend to get much smaller variances from the mean.
Nor is loneliness just a UK phenomenon. Studies have indicated that it is prevalent from multiple countries with different levels of cultural commonalities: from the US, Israel, Japan and the Philippines.
This seems to go hand-in-hand with other conditions such as anxiety and depression. There are plenty of other causes for anxiety and depression: but loneliness certainly feeds into their severity. This can be seen by the increasing incidence of mental health on US student campuses over the years according to research by The Health Minds Network.
Some experts hypothesise that the normalisation and embedding of therapy in modern culture and the popular lexicon may well be exasperating the loneliness problem, rather than helping.
The idea of being alone, but not feeling lonely has become a rich vein of content inspiration for influencers.
Loneliness is a longitudinal trend
COVID-19 isolation brought ideas of loneliness to the forefront, but it has been a rising issue for a long time.
Going back over a century of data from 1919 – 2019, we can see that mentions of loneliness had a peak during the great depression. It then dropped through the second world war and started to pick up again. There was a rapid increase from the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s and then an notable increase from the mid-2000s through to 2019 – which is the latest year that we currently have data for.
There seems to be a correlation between mentions of loneliness and times of economic hardship. One also has to remember that during the second world war, publications were widely censored. Printing paper was in limited supply due to the war effort.
The BBC conducted conducted research with the Wellcome Foundation in 2018 with 55,000 respondents. At the time it was the largest survey that had been conducted on the subject. The research found that a higher number of younger survey respondents felt lonely and that having online-only friends correlated with higher degrees of lonely feelings.
At the time, the BBC came up with a few hypotheses about the possible high incidence of loneliness among 16 – 24 year olds:
They have less experience of regulating their emotions, so everything is felt more intensely
The view that this might be a phase was supported by qualitative responses of older respondents who said that young adulthood was the time when they had felt loneliest. Loneliness might be something that we can’t blame completely on social media.
Social capital
Public policy academic Robert D Puttnam warned about the decline in social capital across American society back in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone. Social capital is the reward from communal activity and sharing. Shrinking social capital impacts both civic and personal health according Puttnam.
Based on survey data outlining American social activities over the decades, Puttnam outlined how the population had become more disconnected from family, friends, neighbours, and social structures. This makes sense given the pivot that western society went through during the 1960s and 1970s towards existentialism, or even go further back as far as the post war period where Benjamin Spock’s?The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care?realigned parenting around the child as an individual. For various factors including long work days, both men and women working, increasing personal distractions meant that there was less participation with local organisations like:
In the revised edition of Bowling Alone, Puttnam explored the omnipresent fabric of social media and the internet which represented an opportunity for new types of social connections, as well as the threat of even higher levels of alienation and isolation.
Loneliness solutions
The World Health Organisation (WHO) considers social isolation / loneliness as one of the key social determinators of health. Over this decade, they have been focusing on loneliness in aging populations. Society has already been evolving various point solutions to help combat loneliness with varying degrees of success. There have been some attempts to use healthcare’s tool de jour -behavioural economics.
Mukbang
Mukbang (or meokbang) is a type of online streaming programming that started in Korea. It crossed the cultural barrier to western audiences where it lost its meaning as it became a platform for eating feats or stunts. In its original form, it addressed the loneliness felt by many Korean single-person households.
Korean cooking is designed to be shared. You have lots of side dishes, the best known of which is kimchi.
Mukbang streamers ate and interacted with people watching their stream, giving the impression of a virtual dinner table. The watchers may be only eating an instant ramen, a convenience store meal, take-out pizza or a Cafe de Paris baguette. But they had a parasocial experience more akin to when they lived with family members.
Elder care
WHO is most focused on the impact that loneliness has on the elderly in society. Governments and the health sector have looked to address this in a systematic way. In Hong Kong, there is a disco to bring elderly together and visits from therapy dogs are two of the ways local government have looked to stave off the worst effects of isolation.
Japan pioneered the use of robotics with the PARO therapeutic robot. It looks like a baby seal and provides a similar experience to a therapy lap dog. Sony’s Aibo has been adapted for a similar role.
Inclusivity
In Ireland, the Roman Catholic church has been weakened as the organisation at the centre of social fabric due modern Ireland gradually becoming more secular.
Clips from the Late Late Show hosted by Gay Byrne (an Irish analogue of Johnny Carson) from the 1962 to 1999 showing how Irish society changed. Byrne was both a chronicle of change and a catalyst for it because of the discussions his show facilitated.
The GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) is Ireland’s largest sporting organisation and is made up of local amateur clubs playing indigenous Irish sports including camogie, hurling, Gaelic football, handball and rounders. The local GAA (Gaelic Athletics Association) clubs have gone some way to pick up the slack with the GAA Social Initative.
The GAA Social Initiative continues to grow in its capacity to enrich the lives of all older members of our communities while specifically reaching out to isolated older men across the 32 counties.
How else do you think society should deal with loneliness? Feel free to share, like, comment and subscribe if you found this article interesting or noteworthy.
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More information
Assistive social robots in elderly care: a review. Joost Broekens, Marcel Heerink, and Henk Rosendal (PDF)
Business & Brand Strategy
1 年Great piece Ged, thoroughly enjoyed the read. Thanks for sharing!
Ged it could be worse than using Gen Z as a classification, you might have been forced to use the lens of Experian Marketing clusters ?? As for the development of loneliness it is strange that we Social Networks have provided a ranking system based on how many connections you have. This measurement system has then allowed some to think that popularity is the key metric. Which given that at one point we were told that the Long Tail means that everyone can find their clan however niche. Philosophically I wonder how much loneliness is a consumption issue, in that we have been a taker of things rather than maker. We are the agency to go out and find things and people that mean that we may overcome thinking we are lonely and yet some cannot. Is this a learnt state or a limitation caused by lack of imagination/motivation?
Co-Founder at Co-Learn Collective + host of The Drum podcast Politics for Drummies
1 年this is really good stuff Gearóid Carroll
Helping businesses scale - Chief Marketing Officer (fractional), NED - Zappaty, Your CMO; ex-PlayStation, Yahoo!, Three, BT, 4finance, LendingCrowd
1 年Nice piece Ged - hope you are well. I'm available to catch up soon on a call mate
Strategising. Creating. Future-gazing.
1 年Great piece Ged, I wonder about social media –?somehow people are more and less connected at the same time it seems to me.