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

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Researchers have found that…

   1. NHNoreena Hertz0:00

      Researchers have found that loneliness is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 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 already ill, you're less likely to recover as well. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:26

      You're an economist. What are you doing talking about loneliness? Why are you interested in that?

   3. NHNoreena Hertz0:32

      So it was a, 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. Um, I'd 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, um, 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 in their screens that they literally are unable to read a room in person." So, that was kind of one just 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, the rise of people voting, um, for people like Le Pen in France or Salvini in Italy, or Trump, of course, in the United States. And so I started looking into this and I started interviewing, uh, 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 apologize already in advance if this is annoying for anyone who's listening, I had bought an Alexa. So I'm whispering it (laughs) in case she starts going off. And, um, and I noticed myself becoming increasingly attached to my own Alexa. And, uh, 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... Or in helping us feel less lonely and, um, more connected. Maybe not to each other, but to something at least. And I started researching that, and started to realize 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 up really speaking to people's need for what, um, the famous 20th century, um, sociologist Emile Durkheim 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, um, 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, um, or the rise in people who were looking for community in things like SoulCycle. What we'd been seeing, um, in the years preceding the pandemic was really a rise in this appetite for community, whether it was in a non-paid-for form or in a paid-for commercialized form. So, it was those three different things together that made me realize 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, um, shifts and political shifts that had been going on.

   4. CWChris Williamson4:58

      How do you define loneliness?

   5. NHNoreena Hertz5:01

      So, I define loneliness in a broader sense to the sense that some people listening might, um, think of it. I define loneliness as not only feeling disconnected from your friends and family and craving, um, 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 work, but by your workplace or your government too. So, for me, loneliness is political as well as personal, and its drivers are, um, economic, technological, um, demographic, not only to do with how we treat ourselves and each other.

   6. CWChris Williamson5:53

      I, 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 rate any other sort of emotion.... we don't know what it's like to be another person's consciousness.

   7. NHNoreena Hertz6:13

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson6:13

      So that 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, uh, somewhat agree, disagree, et cetera. But it's always going to be slightly messy, I imagine. And the statistics-

   9. NHNoreena Hertz6:25

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson6:25

       ... around that must be similarly messy as well. What, what statistics did you find around loneliness levels?

   11. NHNoreena Hertz6:32

       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 your 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 their physical, their very pain, is equivalent to your very pain. Like, their stubbing their toe might be like you having a poker put in your eye. We just don't know. So there is that challenge with, with, um, these kind of metrics for sure, whether it's loneliness, depression, anxiety or physical pain even. But, um, assuming that we're in the ballpark at least with these kind of figures, um, 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. Um, one in five American workers say that they don't have a single friend in the workplace. So, um, loneliness really a very pervasive, uh, feeling throughout our society, which the pandemic has significantly amplified. Um, and research that's come out in the last few months, um, really shows that very clearly with especially, with three groups especially being, um, 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 lonelier, but those three groups in particular, um, feel especially lonely or have been feeling especially lonely.

   12. CWChris Williamson8:48

       I remember listening to a, I wanna say a podcast. I don't tend to dip in much into the sort of, um, 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, uh, because of the need for the oxytocin release from being close, like physically close to people.

   13. NHNoreena Hertz9:14

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   14. CWChris Williamson9:15

       Um, and that was a- an insight that I totally hadn't thought of. Um, you know, I'm a, a bloke. For me, like, hugs and stuff, yeah, that, I can, 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. Out of, out of every-

   15. NHNoreena Hertz9:31

       I s- I thought you were, I thought you were meant to be warmer up north and like be more, be more into kind of hugging and stuff.

   16. CWChris Williamson9:37

       Salt of the u- salt of the earth up here, you know.

   17. NHNoreena Hertz9:39

       (laughs)

   18. CWChris Williamson9:39

       Ev- everyone's terrified of hugging now. It's that weird, it's that weird elbow thing, isn't it?

   19. NHNoreena Hertz9:43

       (laughs) Elbow bump.

   20. CWChris Williamson9:43

       Yeah, exactly. Um, so out of all of the different groups, it's surprising, I think, it might be surprising to some people, it was surprising to me upon reading the book, that, that the 18 to 24 age bracket is suffering, because you just presume between the age of 18 and 24 that everyone's just swimming in l- late night house parties and, uh, uh, 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 are at university or higher education-

   21. NHNoreena Hertz10:16

       Yes.

   22. CWChris Williamson10:16

       ... so that will be chunked into fairly... You know, you're forced to see people. Some of the lectures I had at Newcastle were 150 people strong. I wanted less people around me, not more. But it seems like that's changing.

   23. NHNoreena Hertz10:29

       So, I think firstly, you can be lonely in a crowd. I mean, uh, so, in the same way that you are not necessarily lonely if you're on your own. Um, so I think that's one factor. But you're right. I think that was really surprising to me as well, how lonely the young are. In fact, the young are the loneliest generation. And when we think about loneliness, we often think about it being the elderly have the loneliness, but that just isn't the case. It is the young, the data is really clear on this, who are the loneliest. 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, you know, 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, um, destructive role that social media in particular was playing in their lives. Now, of course, again, this is on average, and so there are gonna be people for whom social media has been a lifeline. The LGBTQ kid in a small village somewhere who, you know, wasn't physically around anyone who was like them, um, may well have found their community on Instagram, say. But, um, but on average, it seems that these, um, platforms are really playing a significant role in the rise of young people's loneliness. And it's for a few reasons. I mean, the first is quite simply that these are platforms designed to be addictive-... to keep drawing us in with their kind of twinkly lights and color and flashing and endless scrolls and, um, 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, uh, I've been guilty of it myself, you know, being scrolling on my social media feed in the room with my husband and, um, you know, not really even hearing him 'cause my attention's been on my phone. But there's social media playing oth- the role of, um, kind of being a weapon not only of mass destruction but also a weapon of... Sorry, not a weapon of mass destruction. Um, (laughs) that was a bit far I think. But social media, you know, not only playing a part of being a weapon of mass distraction, I'd rather, um... I, I, I mean, let me not go too far here. But, um, but also, um, being a very excluding mechanism for many young people, it turns out. Um, in my interviews with teenagers, I remember Peter, for example, a 14-year-old schoolboy, telling me very poignantly 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. They'd 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 a parent who shared with me the pain his daughter felt when she was in a café with her friends and everyone's phone pinged 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, um, 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, um, whereas an adult in their lives in the past might have seen this is going on and actually done something to intervene. So, 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. Um, today, the adult typically isn't aware of it, whereas to all their peers, the exclusion is

2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah, so there's a…

   1. NHNoreena Hertz15:00

      really all too visible.

   2. CWChris Williamson15:02

      Yeah, so there's a lack of visibility and there's some learned helplessness. Lack of visibility from a caregiver's perspective looking in, and then the learned helplessness. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to say, "Ah, 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 Haidt's, uh, 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.

   3. NHNoreena Hertz15:52

      Yes.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:52

      And, uh, I think that's-

   5. NHNoreena Hertz15:52

      And when we, and when we look at rising, uh, loneliness figures amongst this generation, they also, like, massively shoot up from, um, 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 couldn't determine, um, definitively was whether this was just, um, correlation or was it actually causation? Was it because people were on their social media platforms that they were, um, lonelier? So, it was hard to disentangle that when all you knew was that there was a kind of... that the periods corresponded. But about two years ago, there was a really seminal new piece of research done at Stanford University, obviously a top university, where they got 3,000 students, um, 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 their 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. (laughs) Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson17:25

      Shit the bed.

   7. NHNoreena Hertz17:27

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson17:29

      That's a really astounding... I mean, I, 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.

   9. NHNoreena Hertz17:41

      Yes.

   10. CWChris Williamson17:41

       Um, and I've kind of been on this flex for a long time. But it does feel very much like... I, I, I don't know what the solution is here. I think, um, 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 and 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 finally got brought in.

   11. NHNoreena Hertz18:06

       Yeah. Not... I mean, yeah. Not, not perhaps. I think that n- absolutely needs to be part of the package. And in many ways, I think we should think of social media companies as the tobacco companies of the 21st century. And as such, they really should be regulated as such, um, strongly, especially when it comes to children. And in the UK, there is actually, just in the last, um-... few days, there's been some real action on this front with the new bill going through Parliament, um, which will hold social media companies accountable for online harm, not only for the most, um, egregious hate speech, but also for when it comes to children, um, negatively, negatively affecting them psychologically. So that is actually a significant step, um, 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, when I, 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 the, how addicted, how quickly I've become once I've been, you know, going on it on a daily basis.

   12. CWChris Williamson19:20

       Yeah, the problem is once those neurons have wired themselves in, they're not going anywhere. They're there for the rest of your life. Um, I, I, I know what you mean about-

   13. NHNoreena Hertz19:29

       Well, yeah. I mean, although, (laughs) although even with the addiction, I, um, one way that I manage to kind of break it is by being quite draconian and actually just having, like not keep putting my phone so that it's not actually in arm's reach. Like I have to physically distance myself from it.

   14. CWChris Williamson19:46

       Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom is the number one hack for reducing your screen time. Um, but yeah, I, I, I saw the legislation that you're talking about.

   15. NHNoreena Hertz19:55

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson19:55

       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. Um, 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...?

   17. NHNoreena Hertz20:39

       So it's only in the 1800s that you even read- start reading about loneliness as a phenomenon. So, um, so the phrase itself, um, the word lonely is something that really only entered the vedad- vernacular from the 1800, 100s onwards. But I, and I think, um, you know, it's partly because of how people conceived of themselves, um, in a religious context, you know, being kind of you weren't lonely if you were at one with God. And, um, so I think that's maybe part of the reason why we didn't see that, uh, ex- that sentiment expressed before. But I, that isn't to say that people weren't lonely before, uh, because I'm sure there were many people who felt lonely if you were, um, living in an abusive relationship, whether that was in the, um, 16th or 15th or 14th century. That probably felt lonely.

   18. CWChris Williamson21:43

       Imagine if, imagine if you were a, a, a, a LGBT-

   19. NHNoreena Hertz21:46

       If you-

   20. CWChris Williamson21:46

       ... if you were a racial minority-

   21. NHNoreena Hertz21:48

       Yes.

   22. CWChris Williamson21:48

       ... in a, in a way.

   23. NHNoreena Hertz21:48

       If you were economically, if you were, you know, a peasant, if you were in a poor house, if you were, you know, I'm sure there were lots of circumstances that felt lonely even if it wasn't something that was talked about then.

   24. CWChris Williamson22:01

       So what's changed? Obviously, we've got this, uh, contribution of technology.

   25. NHNoreena Hertz22:05

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson22:05

       What else has changed that's driving this loneliness?

   27. NHNoreena Hertz22:08

       Yeah, a number of factors. Uh, 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. Um, 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, um, less likely to do things like go to parent-teacher, um, evenings if we're a parent. So we just do less with others than 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 since the 1980s when it was promulgated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And this is really a mindset that firmly put the individual at the center, a kind of me, I-centric philosophy that, um, really valorized self-interest and selfishness. And we even see this in the way that pop song lyrics evolved from the 1980s onwards, where we see words like we, us, and our being steadily supplanted by words like me, myself, I, which is fascinating. And an I-centric, me-centric world was inevitably always going to be a lonelier one.

   28. CWChris Williamson23:53

       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 a loneliness. And, uh, 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, uh, uh, sovereignty-

   29. NHNoreena Hertz24:26

       Mm-hmm.

   30. CWChris Williamson24:26

       ... 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-... a real challenge.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Single, I'm going to…

   1. NHNoreena Hertz30:00

      and he didn't know anyone in the city and felt really lonely, and really craved intimacy. He'd tried online dating, um, 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 a six-figure salary working for a-

   2. CWChris Williamson30:26

      Single, I'm going to guess.

   3. NHNoreena Hertz30:28

      Single, working for a big media corporation. Yeah. He started seeing Jean. He said it transformed his life. Um, 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, and I said, "Gosh, that's a lot." And then he said, "You're not using my real 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 w- I ... This was made very clear this was not a sexual thing. This was about intimacy, about wanting to be held, touched, not in a sexual way. And, um, 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 s- somebody who was so craving connection and intimacy that in order to pay for it, he was living in his car, showering at the 24/7 gym that he was parking outside, leaving his food in the fridge in work. I mean, I found that such a disturbing story, such a sad story. Um, yeah, so I think that was probably one of the most extreme ones I came across. O- on the other end of the age spectrum, um, 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, researchers who've studied this phenomenon, is because they're so lonely, this group of pensioners, who are intent ... 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. You know, uh, 40% of these gelled pensioners, um, 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, these are at the extremes. It's important to again remember how pervasive lo- lo- loneliness is amongst all of us.

   4. CWChris Williamson33:03

      How do you get jailed as a Japanese granny?

   5. NHNoreena Hertz33:07

      Shoplifting.

   6. CWChris Williamson33:08

      Yeah, of course. But just really badly done?

   7. NHNoreena Hertz33:13

      (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson33:14

      Like, really obvious shoplift- like walking out with a huge teddy bear or, like, a TV under your arm or something?

   9. NHNoreena Hertz33:20

      If you're elderly, you might not be able to carry the TV, so-

   10. CWChris Williamson33:22

       Something like, yeah. Teddy bears. Teddy bears are good options.

   11. NHNoreena Hertz33:25

       So maybe, maybe the teddy bear. Maybe the teddy bear.

   12. CWChris Williamson33:27

       Marshmallows, uh, other light objects. Yeah-

   13. NHNoreena Hertz33:31

       (laughs)

   14. CWChris Williamson33:31

       ... uh, I, I don't, I don't really know what to think about that. I mean, the, the, your man from LA, obviously-

   15. NHNoreena Hertz33:38

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson33:39

       ... that's, that's a, 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. Um, and-

   17. NHNoreena Hertz33:47

       Well, what was, what was interesting was I actually went to Jean's Cuddle Sanctuary as well when I was in, um, Venice Beach.

   18. CWChris Williamson33:54

       Oh, God. Is it like a ... Is it like a sort of a ... No, I don't want to use the word brothel because I know that we're steering clear of sexy stuff here, but kind of like a sort of a madam'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?

   19. NHNoreena Hertz34:09

       So, I've got to say, before I went there, 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-

   20. CWChris Williamson34:21

       Oh my God. (laughs)

   21. NHNoreena Hertz34:22

       ... with, with, with the people coming in-

   22. CWChris Williamson34:24

       Incense and the music.

   23. NHNoreena Hertz34:25

       With the ... Yeah, yeah. It didn't have incense, but it kind of had, you know, beanbag-type things on the floor and, like, you know, those tubes that pe- that ... in gyms you can kind of use to lie on them and do your exercises. It was a bit like that, dotted around, and mats 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-

   24. CWChris Williamson34:52

       So you get paired up with random, random other humans for a cuddle?

   25. NHNoreena Hertz34:56

       So, what happens is you pay to attend, and then you sit around, um, in a circle and you all meet each other. What was really interesting was everyone looked so normal. I mean, this d- uh, you know, I didn't know what to expect, but everyone just ... This really looked ... They looked like people who were going to their local gym class or yoga class, you know, wearing kind of comfortable clothes, tracksuits-

   26. CWChris Williamson35:20

       No obvious physical deficiencies or people sort of-

   27. NHNoreena Hertz35:23

       No, not at all.

   28. CWChris Williamson35:24

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   29. NHNoreena Hertz35:24

       And then, um, what happened then was you kind of moved around with dif- to different people, and were cuddled, and cuddled them. And-

   30. CWChris Williamson35:34

       Oh, so it's like a car keys in the bowl-type job, but for, for that, and then you swap and you change and you keep on going. "Oh, I had a cuddle with Jeanie now."
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   I think a good…

   1. CWChris Williamson45:00

      how many friends equal a good partner, if that makes sense.

   2. NHNoreena Hertz45:04

      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-

   3. CWChris Williamson45:14

      Divorce rates probably suggests-

   4. NHNoreena Hertz45:15

      Yeah. Exactly. And so that being the case, I would say that investing in good friendships, um, is really important to do too.

   5. CWChris Williamson45:23

      Yeah. The, the, the, I suppose good friendships are quite robust, aren't they? You tend to s-

   6. NHNoreena Hertz45:27

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson45:27

      ... see people go in and out of relationships more quickly than they do lifelong friends.

   8. NHNoreena Hertz45:32

      Yeah. I mean, my friendships, like, we're really there for each other. I, I really believe that, uh, and, and have seen it through the years.

   9. CWChris Williamson45:41

      Yeah. Let's talk about remote working. Obviously, uh, upon starting, whatever, three years ago writing 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 tiered, uh, social isolation, you know-

   10. NHNoreena Hertz46:00

       Social distancing.

   11. CWChris Williamson46:01

       Social distancing. Sorry. Yes.

   12. NHNoreena Hertz46:02

       I mean-

   13. CWChris Williamson46:03

       Sorry. All right.

   14. NHNoreena Hertz46:03

       Yes. No, no. Social isolation as well, but social distancing, that's such an kind of... it's almost like, I mean, that we were prescribing, telling people to socially distance.

   15. CWChris Williamson46:13

       Quarantine, isolate. Yeah. That, it's not, it's not been a, a year of a glossary-filled book of words that's nice, is it?

   16. NHNoreena Hertz46:20

       No.

   17. CWChris Williamson46:20

       It wasn't like social cuddling or like house fun or so... It was all like sort of fairly nasty words. Thinking about that, I know that you talked about, um, the work industry, how people feel in the workplace.

   18. NHNoreena Hertz46:35

       Mm-hmm.

   19. CWChris Williamson46:35

       What's your thoughts on the, the new normal of remote working?

   20. NHNoreena Hertz46:38

       So I don't believe it is the new normal, firstly, um, because I think there was this initial euphoria, uh, when remote working was introduced. But by and large, this is really wearing thin, and I think most people by now, um, are expressing quite clearly to their employers that they actually want to go back to the office. Um, especially young people, um, who, you know, maybe have got a really not that ideal work environment to be working from, um, and are missing the chats at the, um, water cooler and, and when you're making your cups of coffee in the shared kitchen. So, um, so where the idea that people actually really want to keep on working remotely, I don't think it's the case. Of course, some companies, you know, 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. Um, in a study of thousands of workers across a number of countries, um, they found that workers who were lonely were 60% more likely to quit.

   21. CWChris Williamson48:26

       Shit. I, I was really interested around the insights of open office spaces versus cubicle office spaces, and the fact that open office spaces actually cause people to feel more lonely. And you were saying, I think it was on Chris Evans or something, uh, that you sometimes go into the office, you got your, the noise-canceling headphones in because you're like, "It's gonna 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. Um, yeah.

   22. NHNoreena Hertz48:59

       Yes.

   23. CWChris Williamson48:59

       It's a, it's a... so perhaps the new abnormal we could call remote working. And I, 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 you've 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-

   24. NHNoreena Hertz49:21

       (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson49:21

       ... 'cause you do (laughs) Zoom calls. Or no pants at all as some of my friends have sent me selfies of just them in their boxers with a shirt and tie on top doing a Zoom-

   26. NHNoreena Hertz49:29

       (laughs)

   27. CWChris Williamson49:29

       ... doing a Zoom meeting. Just never-

   28. NHNoreena Hertz49:30

       I have no idea what y- I've got no idea what you've got on.

   29. NANarrator49:33

       (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson49:33

       Yeah, uh, look, well, that's, that's precisely why you can only see up to my waist. Um, (laughs) yeah, that, that is never gonna 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, or I get to do this, that, and the other." But the, um, the thread of knowing what the inputs are in our life and how they make us feel, you know, uh, we'd never need a therapist or a doctor if we were-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:02:03

   Yeah. The, uh, I…

   1. NHNoreena Hertz1:00:00

      try out.

   2. CWChris Williamson1:00:01

      Yeah. The, uh, I have a friend who did Classics at Liverpool, crazy smart girl, and, um, she came out and she got a f- she walked her first, having done no preparation for the entire three years she did the degree, and started volunteering on, m- below minimum wage, at a dog's shelter, looking after-

   3. NHNoreena Hertz1:00:18

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:00:18

      ... abandoned dogs. And I was like, "Well, and you've just dropped 40 grand on your degree. What are you doing?" And she's like, "No, like, I've never been this happy in my life, just, like, assisting dogs and, and..." I mean, anyone that's around that many dogs is gonna be happy, but she-

   5. NHNoreena Hertz1:00:33

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson1:00:33

      ... she, she took that as more valuable than doing a, uh, monetizing a 40,000 pound first in Classics from Liverpool. So you think, yeah, it, it, it makes a lot of sense. Surprisingly, being selfless is one of the most selfish th- things that you can do sometimes.

   7. NHNoreena Hertz1:00:50

      Self-interested, yes. (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson1:00:52

      (laughs) Self-interested it is. Uh, if people want to-

   9. NHNoreena Hertz1:00:55

      Self-caring.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:00:55

       There we go. If people wanna check out more about you and, uh, find out more stuff, where should they go?

   11. NHNoreena Hertz1:01:01

       Um, they can either go to my website, www.noreena.com. They can follow me on all my social platforms, which I am currently still on, and buy 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.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:01:22

       Fantastic. That will be 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, th- it's anybody now that's able to get just their first name.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 fant-

   13. NHNoreena Hertz1:01:42

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson1:01:42

       ... a fantastic URL.

   15. NHNoreena Hertz1:01:43

       (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson1:01:43

       Noreena, today's, today's been really cool. Thank you very much for your time.

   17. NHNoreena Hertz1:01:46

       Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

   18. NANarrator1:01:51

       (instrumental music)

Episode duration: 1:02:04