Robin Wright, a correspondent with The New Yorker, has a piece that looks at the cost of loneliness, which is an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of the isolations and quarantines affecting so many people in this pandemic era. It isn't strictly about business, but there certainly are business implications - because the people feeling these jumbled emotions also are the people who work for our companies and serve our customers.
An excerpt:
"As governors across the nation began ordering lockdowns, I talked with neuroscientists and psychologists about the impact on the human body—not of this new pathogen but of the various stresses that accompany it. The novel coronavirus has swept the globe at a time when more people are living alone than ever before in human history. The trend became noticeable in the early twentieth century, among industrialized nations; it accelerated in the nineteen-sixties. In the United States, the numbers have almost doubled over the past half century, according to the research aggregator Our World in Data. In 2019, twenty-eight per cent of households were single-person—up from twenty-three per cent in 1980. Stockholm may represent the apex of this trend: in 2012, sixty per cent of households in the Swedish city had only one person. Psychologists note the difference between living alone and loneliness. I live alone and have no family, and usually don’t think much about it. But, as the new pathogen forces us to socially distance, I have begun to feel lonely. I miss the ability to see, converse with, hug, or spend time with friends.
"Life seems shallower, more like survival than living."
Good piece. You can check it out here.
