‘Loneliness is the new cancer’
A society that fails to notice the isolation of others should feel ashamed
We take for granted the human touch, the gentle thrum of heartbeats around us. A handshake here and there, a warm embrace at a social gathering.
And yet for many, the rarely spoken-of reality is very different. A recent report revealed that half a million Britons over the age of 60 routinely go through an entire week without any direct human interaction.
Bob Lowe, a 95-year-old who served in Africa and Burma during the Second World War, lost his wife six years ago. On New Year’s Eve, as he recalled past festive periods surrounded by family, he found himself crying.
“You have got to accept it is a blessing you are healthy — but the loneliness,” he said. “Because what is life without company and companionship?”
It isn’t only the old who experience this. Loneliness is a silent epidemic, one that is, ironically, not endured in isolation. On every street and in every train car, there will be someone who thinks they have no one. People feel it more than ever, in this age of social media when we’re all superficially connected but in reality have never been further apart.
An old man on crutches once approached me, asking for help across the road — he said he had tried at one intersection, but everyone was too busy with their phones. I didn’t know who to feel more sorry for — him, with his broken leg and his alcohol-tinged breath, or the people who exist in a bubble where nothing matters outside their Facebook feed.
One of the most eagerly anticipated novels of 2017 is Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman, about a 30-year-old who is completely alone.
Honeyman felt compelled to write it after reading a piece about an “ordinary woman in her 20s, with a job and an apartment, who said that unless she made a special effort she’d often — not by choice — spend entire weekends without seeing or speaking to another human being.”
The book is a heartbreaking study of isolation in which the narrator concludes that “loneliness is the new cancer — a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”
A society that allows half a million people to have no human contact for days on end should feel ashamed of itself. We have evolved communally, in tribes. That we fail to notice the needs of neighbours and even family members, because we’re too busy being busy, should make us all feel profoundly sad.
Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. But it’s not, really. It’s feeling you don’t have a single other being in the world to turn to. This new year we would do well to remember this: that in reality, hell is not having other people.