This column is being filed around Christmas. It begins, perhaps aptly, by referring to a Christmas in Calcutta, albeit one that is imaginary, portrayed in a film made 44 years ago. In this cinematic portrayal of the festival, Christmas, ironically, is not a harbinger of joy for the protagonist, an aged Anglo-Indian teacher; it serves as a moment of epiphany. That cold Christmas evening, Violet Stoneham, battling death and desertion in her personal life, would discover that the two young people, a former student and her husband, who had kindled, briefly, the hope of friendship and a reprieve from solitude in the twilight years of her life had, in fact, deceived her.
Aparna Sen’s debut film, 36 Chowringhee Lane, continues to mesmerise us over four decades after its making because it explores, sensitively and simultaneously, multiple planes of reality. At one level, it is an empathetic study of, through Violet’s life, a community’s cultural and economic unmooring from this city; the film also leaves its mark on the intimate sphere, reflecting on human bonds in their many shades, including a palpable, enduring grey. It is also a sociological cipher. For the film is a prescient examination of loneliness as a social reality, a phenomenon that has since acquired a global, epidemic form and, in the perspective of the World Health Organization, poses significant risks to public health.
The data on loneliness are solemn and staggering. One out of six people around the world is, at this very moment, suffering from loneliness. Writing with his co-authors in Al Jazeera, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of WHO, pointed out that between 2014 and 2019, loneliness was linked to more than 871,000 deaths annually — equivalent to 100 deaths per hour. Since then, this emerging vector has continued to fatten itself on the atrophy of social and community ties, with teenagers and the elderly — Violet would nod gravely — being the most vulnerable constituencies. Interestingly, low-income nations are saddled with a disproportionately higher burden of lonely people compared to the developed world. This is a significant finding because low-income countries are usually associated with Asian and African nations where social lives and networks are assumed to be more vigorous than those in the West: perhaps a more incisive, ground-level analysis is required to understand how loneliness is eating into the socio-economic foundations of Asia and Africa.
Worse, research also speculates that human beings, wired to sociability as a survival kit in the course of their evolution, are particularly vulnerable to a sense of isolation during festivities. Violet, abandoned by her two friends, walking back home — alone — with Shakespeare’s Lear and a mongrel for company on Christmas day, thus blurs the lines between imagination and reality.
Given loneliness’s potential to exacerbate dissociation from community life, functioning, in effect, as the very antithesis to the foundational glue of society, the urgent policy responses from governments around the world are not surprising. South Korea, Singapore and the Netherlands have, for instance, entrusted their faith in the establishment of non-clinical collectives — spaces that facilitate social bonding such as parks and libraries — to battle loneliness. Japan and the United Kingdom, on the other hand, have thought up innovative additions to their legislatures, appointing ‘ministers of loneliness’ who are expected to serve as a bridge between policy interventions and ground realities. A revealing assessment of the first five years since the appointment of Tracey Crouch as the first minister of loneliness of the UK includes a seemingly illuminating remark by a senator from the United States of America that unchecked loneliness is facilitating a shift of public opinion in favour of the political Right. This, of course, is not revelatory, even if it may sound like a revelation. Hannah Arendt had made a compelling association between loneliness and the ascendancy of right-wing politics in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Yet, on joining the dots, what we get is a bleak — political — dimension of loneliness that is underexamined and disconcerting. Doing this math for a piece in Scientific American, a popular magazine in the US, Kim Samuel found that personal socialising among American men fell by an astonishing 30% between 2003 and 2022 and 12% of Americans confessed to having no close friends since the 1990s. On the other side of the Atlantic, one in every 10 Britons was friendless in 2016. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, that ratio shot up to 1:8. Little wonder then that the emerging era of mass loneliness — from the 1990s till the present — has corresponded to the electoral resurgence of the Right globally.
Loneliness as a political issue has another, equally understudied, facet: the eagerness of modern capitalism and technology, especially social media entities, to profit from this crisis. As the atomisation of modern life gathers pace, the market economy, in a swift, predatory response, has kept ready a bouquet of ‘loneliness-driven services’ to satiate — superficially — the needs of the lonesome. Today, Violet’s redemption would be contingent upon her (financial) ability to consume such a product that profits from loneliness, whether it is an Artificial Intelligence-powered bot with a honeyed voice; applications that pledge companionship, including rent-a-friend services as well as — this is true! — ‘paid cuddlers’, men and women who earn a living by cuddling clients for a considerable fee; or virtual, algorithm-curated communities that come tailored with shared interests — that perhaps would be a Shakespearean Society in Violet’s case, but the catch is it would be a virtual realm, stripped of human presence and essence.
The monetisation of alienation has been yet another triumph of modern capitalism. Consider the following data. A report by Grand View Research, a consulting firm, predicted that the market value for AI companions will reach $140.754 billion by 2030; the market for dating platforms will zoom to $17.28 billion that same year, while the mental health application market — worth $7.48 billion in 2024 — would reach $20.92 billion in eight years.
The perverse irony, of course, is
that the products of the Loneliness Economy do not resolve human isolation; they perpetuate it by offering a clever semblance, a simulation, a hologram of a connection that is designed to be ephemeral.
Arendt had argued that the condition — contagion — can be reversed. She placed her hope in humanity’s ability to resurrect the reservoirs that replenish solidarity and togetherness.
But some ruptures — is loneliness not a rupture from a milieu, social and ecological, that was once familiar? — seem inescapable.
This piece is being written in a wintry light that is more a sulphurous haze than luminescence, the kind of mellow light that made this city shimmer during an all-too-fleeting season once upon a time. With our heads buried in digital sand, we are no longer inclined to witness winter’s lonesome passing.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in
