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

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)

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

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.