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, and it is known to worsen job performance and commitment. Lonely children and youth are more likely to be anxious or depressed, addicted to games, or to suffer from sleep problems. Loneliness also worsens academic achievement, and lonely kids are more likely to drop out of school. Being lonely is undeniably bad for our physical and mental health.
While the consequences of loneliness are not controversial, its causes are. Scientists do not agree about the impact of screen time or age, nor do they agree about loneliness trends over time. While it is certainly important and pervasive, the ‘epidemic’ might not be new. Loneliness in older adults appears largely stable over time, although there has been a small, gradual increase in loneliness among young adults over the past 50 years. A glimpse at trends in Australia collected by the government tells the story: although there are differences by age group, the proportion of people aged 15 and over who are lonely is similar to two decades ago, at about 15 per cent. Even the COVID-19 pandemic did not have the devastating effect on people’s social relations that might have been predicted: recent research suggests that, overall, people’s social-gathering habits and number of confidants were resilient, dipping during the pandemic but then bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels. Loneliness is a serious health risk, then, but we are likely not lonelier now than we have ever been before.
Instead, pundits and policymakers are applying the word ‘loneliness’ to address a real and growing problem, but they are applying the wrong diagnosis. What they might call ‘loneliness’ is actually a different sort of crisis, one of depersonalisation. Depersonalisation is what happens when people feel not exactly lonely, but rather profoundly invisible. What is missing here is what scholars call ‘recognition’, ‘mattering’ or ‘being seen’ – the notion that you are seen and heard, even emotionally understood, by the people around you, as opposed to feeling insignificant or invisible to others.
The depersonalisation crisis reflects changes in both the supply and demand for this kind of attention. Anonymity has long been the curse of modernity, given enduring trends like industrialisation and urbanisation, but even contemporary developments such as the spread of standardisation in service work – like when the grocery checkout clerk asks ‘paper or plastic’ or the call-centre worker races through their closing spiel to get it in before you hang up – can make us feel like a number. At the same time, while infants may have a basic need for it, the sense that we deserve or require emotional recognition by others is historically new, reflecting the rise of a therapeutic culture and changes in what counts as ‘good enough’ parenting, among other trends. When Paul talks wistfully about not being a robot or about having customers just point out where he should put his delivery, he is talking about depersonalisation.
Sarah, a therapist in a veteran’s hospital, told me about how depersonalisation led to a surprising realisation in her practice about the power of mistakes. She’d had a patient, a woman who had experienced sexual trauma in the military, and, as Sarah told the story, at the end of her third or fourth week of therapy, the woman left the session with a comment that she might not be able to return, about how she ‘might get busy’.
She seemed to come from a lifetime of not mattering enough, of enduring misrecognitions from practitioners
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