Essay: Why is the Modern World so Lonely?

Loneliness is truly heartbreaking.

When I would work in a call centre, I get calls from old people all the time, who would usually say the same kind of thing,

“I was the only person that they’ve spoken to all day, other than their TV.”

There’s something so wrong about it, some ancestral memory that our lives shouldn’t be this way, that we should be together in a community. I mean if we could find some way to organise ourselves so that we could spend more time together but obviously, that’s not gonna happen now.

This is objective loneliness, not having anyone around. As I’ll explain in this particular article, the loneliness problem is more complicated than just lack of human interaction, because while a lot of people over seventy who are experiencing objective loneliness because of their isolation also interestingly eighty percent of young people report feeling lonely sometimes and seem to be the next highly affected group. When you’re young this is the time when you have the most frie…