POLLY VERNON
COLUMNIST OF THE YEAR
A NEW STUDY by the World Health Organization declares loneliness a ‘pressing global threat’. Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, says its impact on mortality is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness increases your chances of: dropping out of university, a lifetime of poorer economic outcome, heart disease, dementia and stroke. It affects ‘every facet of health’ said African youth envoy Chido Mpemba, who, alongside Murthy, will lead a three-year commission into the problem. ‘Social isolation knows no age or boundaries.’
This both breaks my heart, yet does not surprise me at all. But perhaps I mean, how much it doesn’t surprise me breaks my heart.
Even if I didn’t know that loneliness is consuming more and more of us – an enduring consequence of Covid 19 lockdowns, although it was an issue even before ; in 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May considered it such a problem she launched a cross-Government strateg y to tackle it – I’d still know. Loneliness is ever ywhere. People are heavy with it, brittle, bowed under its weight; their faces, their postures shuttered down, closed off, derelict, like once-buzzy restaurants, like our lost high streets.
I worr y less about the ones desperate to talk still, their faces wide open, slightly manic, sweeping their vicinity for opportunities to connect. Ones like my male friend who told me he’d felt loneliness so acutely a night previously, he’d done the only thing he could: he’d DM’d Joe Wicks. (Wicks, bless his little heart, had replied.) Ones like the old boy on the bus who’d seemed like he wanted to talk to my dog , but had actually wanted to tell me (/anyone at all) stories about his wife. She’d died a year earlier, but could be kept a little bit alive for a lit
