Review | What you should know about loneliness, and how to overcome it
- In The Lonely Century, author Noreena Hertz explains how the epidemic of loneliness has been growing for 40 years as individualism grew while community faded
- With 40 per cent of workers saying they feeling lonely, the blame may lie in our 996 work culture and social media, with most of us spending more than three hours each day on our smartphones
The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz, Sceptre, 3.5/5 stars
Are you feeling lonely? If you’re reading this in Hong Kong, there is a 50 per cent chance the answer is yes. If you’re at work in China, the odds are rather better than 2:1. Never fear. You might be lonely, but you are not alone. Forty per cent of office workers across the globe say they feel much the same. In Britain, the figure is as high as 60 per cent.
Of course, statistics only go so far, although it is mind-boggling to learn that an estimated 58 million “empty nest youths” – young, unmarried urbanites – live alone in Chinese cities. Or that loneliness is as harmful to your physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
But if your heart strings need plucking, remember Han Zicheng, who survived the Cultural Revolution but couldn’t endure lonely old age in Tianjin. In 2017, he stuck a notice on a bus stop begging to be adopted by a kind-hearted person. Han died three months later, aged 85.
Or how about Japan’s Tochigi prison, which is full of women over 65 who break the law deliberately because incarceration is better than a life of intense isolation.
According to The Lonely Century, a thought-provoking book by Noreena Hertz, all this loneliness says a lot about who we are, what we want and what we spend most of our waking hours doing.