The Age of Loneliness - Village Magazine

58 February 2015

ENVIRONMENT

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Emissions 60

Climate change 62

Meat industry 64

We are prisoners

of competition and

individualism.

By George Monbiot

The

Age

Loneliness

February 2015 59

HAT do we call this time?

It’s not the information

age: the collapse of popu-

lar education movements

left a void now ﬁlled by

marketing and conspiracy theories.

Like the stone age, iron age and space

age, the digital age says plenty about our

artefacts but little about society. The

anthropocene, in which humans exert

a major impact on the biosphere, fails

to distinguish this century from the pre-

vious twenty. What clear social change

marks out our time from those that pre-

cede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the

Age of Loneliness.

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that

in the state of nature, before author-

ity arose to keep us in check, we were

engaged in a war “of every man against

every man”, he could not have been more

wrong.

We were social creatures from the

start, mammalian bees, who depended

entirely on each other. The hominims of

East Africa could not have survived one

night alone. We are shaped, to a greater

extent than almost any other species,

by contact with others. The age we are

entering, in which we exist apart, is

unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that lone-

liness has become an epidemic among

young adults. Now we learn that it is just

as great an aﬄiction of older people. A

study by Independent Age shows that

severe loneliness in England blights the

lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women

over 50, and is rising with astonishing

speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many

people as this disease strikes down.

Social isolation is as potent a cause of

early death as smoking 15 cigarettes

a day; loneliness, research suggests, is

twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia,

high blood pressure, alcoholism and

accidents – all these, like depression,

paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become

more prevalent when connections are

cut. We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, peo-

ple travel by car instead of buses, use

YouTube rather than the cinema. But

these shifts alone fail to explain the

speed of our social collapse. These struc-

tural changes have been accompanied by

a life-denying ideology, which enforces

and celebrates our social isolation. The

war of every man against every man

– competition and individualism in

other words – is the religion of our time,

justiﬁed by a mythology of lone rangers,

sole traders, self-starters, self-made

men and women, going it alone. For the

most social of creatures, who cannot

prosper without love, there is now no

such thing as society, only heroic indi-

vidualism. What counts is to win. The

rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to

be train drivers or nurses, more than a

ﬁfth now say they “just want to be rich”:

wealth and fame are the sole ambitions

of 40% of those surveyed. A government

study in June revealed that Britain is

the loneliness capital of Europe. We are

less likely than other Europeans to have

close friends or to know our neighbours.

Who can be surprised, when everywhere

we are urged to ﬁght like stray dogs over

a dustbin?

We have changed our language to

reﬂect this shift. Our most cutting insult

is loser. We no longer talk about people.

Now we call them individuals. So per-

vasive has this alienating, atomising

term become that even the charities

ﬁghting loneliness use it to describe

the bipedal entities formerly known as

human beings. We can scarcely complete

a sentence without getting personal.

Personally speaking (to distinguish

myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy),

I prefer personal friends to the imper-

sonal variety and personal belongings to

the kind that don’t belong to me. Though

that’s just my personal preference, oth-

erwise known as my preference.

One of the tragic outcomes of lone-

liness is that people turn to their

televisions for consolation: two-ﬁfths

of older people now report that the

one-eyed god is their principal com-

pany. This self-medication enhances

the disease. Research by economists at

the University of Milan suggests that

television helps to drive competitive

aspiration. It strongly reinforces the

income-happiness paradox: the fact

that, as national incomes rise, happi-

ness does not rise with them.

Aspiration, which increases with

income, ensures that the point of arrival,

of sustained satisfaction, retreats before

us. The researchers found that those who

watch a lot of television derive less satis-

faction from a given level of income than

those who watch only a little. Television

speeds up the hedonic treadmill, forc-

ing us to strive even harder to sustain

the same level of satisfaction. You have

only to think of the wall-to-wall auctions

on daytime TV, ‘Dragons’ Den’, ‘The

Apprentice’ and the myriad forms of

career-making competition the medium

celebrates, the generalised obsession

with fame and wealth, the pervasive

sense, in watching it, that life is some-

where other than where you are, to see

why this might be.

So what’s the point? What do we

gain from this war of all against all?

Competition drives growth, but growth

no longer makes us wealthier. Figures

published recently show that while the

income of company directors has risen

by more than a ﬁfth, wages for the work-

force as a whole have fallen in real terms

over the past year. The bosses now earn

– sorry, I mean take – 120 times more

than the average full-time worker. (In

2000, it was 47 times). And even if com-

petition did make us richer, it would

make us no happier, as the satisfaction

derived from a rise in income would be

undermined by the aspirational impacts

of competition.

The top 1% now own 48% of global

wealth, but even they aren’t happy. A

survey by Boston College of people with

an average net worth of $78m found that

they too are assailed by anxiety, dissat-

isfaction and loneliness. Many of them

reported feeling ﬁnancially insecure: to

reach safe ground, they believed, they

would need, on average, about 25%

more money. (And if they got it? They’d

doubtless need another 25%). One

respondent said he wouldn’t get there

until he had $1 billion in the bank.

For this we have ripped the natural

world apart, degraded our conditions

of life, surrendered our freedoms and

prospects of contentment to a com-

pulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism,

in which, having consumed all else, we

start to prey upon ourselves. For this we

have destroyed the essence of humanity:

our connectedness.

Yes, there are palliatives, clever and

delightful schemes like Men in Sheds

and Walking Football developed by

charities for isolated older people. But

if we are to break this cycle and come

together once more, we must confront

the world-eating, ﬂesh-eating system

into which we have been forced.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a

myth. But we are now entering a post-

social condition our ancestors would

have believed impossible. Our lives are

becoming nasty, brutish and long. •

This article ﬁrst appeared in

www.monbiot.com

Competition

drives growth,

but growth no

longer makes

us wealthier

“