Despite our ever-more connected world, we live in an age of disconnection. The technology to communicate instantly and everywhere may be at our fingertips, but our sense of human connection, empathy and community has weakened.
A large number of forces have, layer by layer, built up this separation. Economic trends like globalisation and digitisation, cultural shifts like the rise in single occupancy living and even bureaucratic efficiencies like automated phonelines have reduced human interaction, contributing to a creeping and corrosive loneliness.
Research shows that this epidemic of loneliness is more than a personal crisis. It's both a public health and political crisis, too. It's a public health crisis because loneliness is associated with an increased risk or exacerbation of dementia, stroke or heart disease, and is linked to mental health problems. It’s a political crisis because it leads to distrust and can cause polarisation, division and discrimination. Loneliness is also estimated to cost the economy £32bn annually due to absence and lost productivity.
Research shows that this epidemic of loneliness is more than a personal crisis. It's both a public health and political crisis, too
We need to take steps to tackle this disconnection as a priority. I propose a simple start: a five-pence charge on self-service transactions, an anti-social behaviour levy on each of the over six billion one-sided interactions that occur every year.
There’s a good argument for this, because while evidence shows that most people prefer convenience in the moment, many do not like the way these interactions over time make them feel and how they reduce opportunities for human connection. This is a trade-off that needs balancing, every bit as much as our overuse of carrier bags was rebalanced with a similar levy from 2015.
Given the cost-of-living crisis, this charge should be paid by the supermarket rather than the consumer. Extrapolating from figures calculated by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Social Integration, it might raise perhaps £150m a year which could fund projects that build social capital in local communities. Those projects could include replacing lost venues and congregational spaces with newly emerging community-owned football clubs, or intergenerational programmes like those led by The Cares Family, the organisation I work for. The fund could also support large-scale research or trials into reducing loneliness. We need to protect local sites and sources of belonging that encourage empathy, wellbeing and connection—a loneliness levy could set us on that path.
This article first appeared in Minister for the future, a special report produced in association with Nesta.
