Our crisis is not loneliness but human beings becoming invisible

Summary

Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area.1 Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem. ‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told me. ‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’ He paused. ‘I have friends that tell me: “You’re essentially working as a vending machine.”’ For Paul, it was his newfound invisibility that was searing. ‘I feel as if I don’t want to be a robot. I want to have some sort of – ’ he broke off. ‘It’s so much more enjoyable for me to talk to somebody.’ Paul’s struggle reflects a contemporary emergency that some are calling a crisis of loneliness. There is widespread concern about loneliness, which scientists define as the feeling that one’s need for social connection is not being met. (They differentiate loneliness, a subjective experience, from social isolation, the objective fact of how many social contacts one has.) In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic, and the World Health Organization established a Commission on Social Connection to recognise a ‘global public health priority’. In the United Kingdom and Japan, governments have appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Worldwide, loneliness has attracted enormous attention from policymakers and researchers alike. Thanks to research, there is much we know about loneliness, first and foremost, that it has an enormous impact on wellbeing. Studies link loneliness and social isolation to increased mortality, dementia and stroke. Among adults, loneliness is linked to chronic diseases such as heart disease and obesity, ...