The leading expert on #loneliness in the world, Professor John Caccioppo, said something to me once that I have been thinking about a lot in the past week of corona crisis.
He was trying to define loneliness. It seems strange - we all instinctively know what it feels like, but it’s surprisingly hard to pin down in words & to study.
In trying to do this, John discovered an apparent paradox: it turns out that how lonely you feel doesn’t relate to how many people you see every day. Being alone and being lonely are surprisingly different when you study them.
He found that you can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely. (We’ve all had the experience of being in a crowded place in a new city & being surrounded by people but feeling lonely). And you can see relatively few people and not become lonely. How can that be?
This is when he made a breakthrough. He discovered loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people. It’s the sense you aren’t sharing anything meaningful with them.
(This is why, for example, as a relationship breaks down, you start to feel lonely - even though the other person is physically still around. The meaning between you is gone)
I think this has big implications for us as we isolate to beat this virus. We can’t be physically together now - but we can still build meaning together, and that will make us all less lonely.
Different people can build meaning in different ways. Here’s an example - I am thinking about what we can campaign for now to thank the people keeping our society going through this, at risk to themselves.
The shelf-stackers, the bin-men, the cleaners. I think we should be fighting now for a big bump in the minimum wage to honour & thank them. How can we campaign for that online? Smarter people than me - please build & tell us how. @Avaaz?
We need collective projects now - ones with deep meaning. It’s the way out of our isolation & loneliness. What collective projects do you think would help right now?
