by HUSNA ARA
‘Less friendship and more work’ is the dogma of the day. The result? A crisis of loneliness. Husna Ara offers some answers on how we might build avenues to more meaningful social interaction once more.
The first time ‘Ms N’ shoplifted was when she was 67 years old.
‘I was alone every day and feeling very lonely,’ she told Bloomberg during her third stint in jail. ‘I wandered into a bookstore in town and stole a paperback novel. I was caught, taken to a police station, and questioned.’
Although Ms N was financially secure and had a husband, two children and six grandchildren the solitude of her day-to-day life had become too much. In prison she claims she didn’t feel lonely.
Japan is known as the world’s oldest society – over 75s account for over 15 per cent of the population. And a perhaps unexpected proportion of them are ending up behind bars. Almost one in five women in Japanese prisons is a senior, often having been convicted for things like shoplifting.1
Writer Yuki Shingo has documented some of their stories and found that for those without social networks, breaking into a house can be a win-win. Unlike Ms N, many turn to stealing due to financial struggles and if they don’t get caught, they can afford to eat. If they’re arrested, they ‘get to live with many others in the same boat’.
Social isolation is not only the preserve of the elderly. In February 2021, Japan’s government recognized something was going awry after it released data showing that the number of people who had died by suicide in October 2021 surpassed the death toll caused by Covid-19 over 10 months that same year. Women under 40 who lived alone were over-represented in these figures. A YouGov poll surveying the US and UK in 2019 found that 30 per cent of millennials – those aged 26 to 41 – felt lonely. Even more worryingly, 27 per cent of this group admitted to having no ‘close friends’ at all.
Loneliness, according to US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, ‘is the difference between the relationships we want, and the relationships we have’. Much like stale dating advice – join a sports club, go to a bar, pick up a hobby – the common prescription for this social ill seems to be: ‘put yourself out there’ and scramble together what community you can… on your own.
The effect of social isolation can also take its toll on the body. In essence, when chronically lonely, our bodies begin to experience inflammation, a kind of ‘high-alert mode’ for the nervous system. Living in this mode for too long can lead to cardiovascular and inflammatory diseases – contributing to the recent medical view that loneliness creates a risk similar of 15 smoked cigarettes per day.
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