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Modern life contributing to rise in loneliness

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Sitting on the train back to Edinburgh from London last Sunday, having attended a friend’s wedding, Helen and I were struck by the ebullience of one of the passengers sitting at the table opposite. She was enthusiastic on a monumental scale, seemingly eager to speak to anybody that wandered within audible distance of her seat. The people who held tickets for the three places around her gradually appeared and as their conversation spread simultaneously through its natural progression and the carriage, we learned her back-story and that of one of her new-found companions.

I was in the mood I generally find myself in when leaving London or arriving at my destination within the city, exhausted. There are few experiences in the world I find more soul destroying or spirit sucking than travelling in London. Wave upon wave of people washing around with callous disregard for each other, preening, posing and condemning; all eager at the same time to mean something to everyone else through the narrow confines of celebrity defined to them by the media. This is woven through with a constant stream of bawling emergency services rushing to save the infirm, ill, arrest the criminal or attend the unwanted. Together with the intense heat of a glorious summer day, it is a cocktail that is liable to leave you drained and struggling for the meaning of it all.
As the conversation between our fellow travellers developed at the next table, we discovered that the instigator was on the final leg of her journey home, having spent the year in Australia. Borrowing a phone from one of her new-found friends, she called her father, who was due to pick her up at York station, delivering coordinates and news of safe passage through London. A crisis with the electricity supply for the laptop on our side of the aisle brought her enthusiastically into our lives with an offer of help and advice. It was refreshing and surprising, particularly in the context of having just spent a weekend in London.
We interacted no more but we discovered that the girl who sat opposite her had just that morning arrived in London from the United States, having never left the country before, for a few months travelling in Britain before starting university here in September.
Good-natured advice and insight followed from the returning adventurer and was received in most welcome terms by the rookie. It stoked many happy memories for us. It was offered free of charge and with no demand of anything in return and on an admirable trust basis.
All around us in the carriage people sat, silently using smart phones to update their status’ and occasionally grunting at the people in the seat beside them when they deigned to allow them to pass in order to urinate.
This scene on the train came flooding back to me today when I read about a report just released by the Mental Health Foundation. The figures make for stark reading and show that one in 10 people feel lonely. As I type, a phone-in show on BBC Radio Four is being flooded with calls from people from all walks of life who are suffering chronic loneliness, a condition described by the Mental Health Foundation as a “health risk”.
The figures reveal a strange new trend. Nearly 60% of those aged between 18 to 34 questioned spoke of feeling lonely often or sometimes, compared to 35% of those aged over 55. Traditionally, we have associated loneliness with the elderly. Society has become accepting of the fact that when people age, lose loved ones and partners to bereavement, they fall into a state of enforced solitude. This report must be seen as a wake-up call to all of us. Despite the explosion in interconnectedness on the internet with social networking sites, the young appear to be more prone to loneliness than before. Despite living in cities in greater numbers than ever in close proximity to many thousands of people, we seem to be growing less and less connected to each other.
This is not a new problem. Fr Harry Bohan has worked relentlessly over many years to raise it in the public arena but it seems that at a time of great financial crisis it is one of the social issues that gets pushed to one side. In fact, sense must tell us that if somebody is hit by the financial crisis, unemployed and trapped in poverty, they cannot get out and meet people. They are prone to become trapped in a cycle of isolation, unable to access the natural human contact that we crave as social animals.
As a society we must begin to break the stigma around loneliness. Doing this demands a change in societal attitudes and a breaking down of the barriers we have built around ourselves in response to the highly stressed and suspicious environment that modern life engenders.
Loneliness is not always connected to solitude and we must distinguish between the two. It can be the easiest thing in the world to be in the middle of a crowd and feel overwhelming loneliness. In the modern world, it is very possible to go through a whole day interacting with the world without ever having human contact. Cash comes from an ATM, shopping can be bought from a self-service checkout and train tickets acquired from a machine.
The physical effects of interacting online are not yet clear. Certainly, it is great to be connected over the net but it has been suggested that physical presence is needed for the hormone oxytocin to be released – believed to be the chemical process underpinning the relationship between social contact and healthy hearts.  
Humans are social animals and need and crave interaction with others to thrive. In so many cases, modern life is reducing our potential to achieve this. Personal contact has been slowly pared back in recent decades and society has grown more suspicious in tandem. There are massive implications for society as a whole if this problem is not acknowledged and addressed with great haste.

 

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