Alone at last
The most serious of the evils that afflict the world are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old, according to Pope Francis. “The old need care and companionship; the young need work and hope, but have neither one nor the other, and the problem is they don’t even look for them any more,” said the pontiff in an interview last fall with prominent atheist Eugenio Scalfari.
The solitary condition is becoming one of the biggest social issues of our time — and it’s not just about the elderly.
According to the 2011 census, one-person households in Canada were up 10.4 per cent. For the first time, there are more single-person households in Canada than couple households with children. In all, just over half of the Canadian population is never married, divorced, separated or widowed.
Living alone is a trend throughout North America and Europe. In Stockholm, Sweden, over half of households consist of only one person.
The condo boom in major cities has been fuelled by demand from singles.
Does this mean that Pope Francis’s lonely seniors will turn to the company of sociable robots? Will the solitary acquire small dogs and cosset them like spoiled children? Will aging, single baby boomers resurrect the communes of their youth, but more upscale, move in with their children, or invent new kinds of “urban families” connected by affinity and not blood ties?
Social relationships are good for both physical and mental health. In a study released in 2011, Statistics Canada analyst Mirielle Vézina looked at surveys of 15,600 people between ages 25 and 64, both single and couples, to gauge the quality of their personal networks.
She found that the personal networks of singletons were different from those of the coupled. Singletons had fewer close ties with relatives and fewer acquaintances, although both groups reported having similar numbers of close friends in whom they could confide.
“When the data on their network size, frequency of contact and degree of social loneliness are combined, people living alone are more likely to have poor-quality personal networks,” concluded Vézina, who did not include virtual social networks in the analysis.
Some argue that being alone is not the same as being lonely. In his book, Going Solo: the Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, New York University sociology professor Eric Klinenberg says for many, living alone is a choice. For the first time, many single people are wealthy enough to enjoy the luxury of living alone. Another factor is the growing independence and economic clout of women.
In the coming years, technology will increasingly be touted as the anodyne for aloneness.
It raises questions about what this means for relationships with people. We expect more of technology, but less of each other, in the words of Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who studies human-technology interfaces.
As Turkle puts it, we are “alone together.”