Isolation – TPW261

Does isolation help or hinder productivity? What about loneliness?

Isolation, loneliness, and productivity

This episode was born out of conversations I've had recently. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I was trading messages with a colleague about how she was feeling lonely and about the isolation of working at home, and how it sometimes makes it hard to focus on work that needs to get done.

Isolation and loneliness are common consequences of working remotely, but it’s possible to be lonely even if you’re constantly with other people.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was worth exploring how it impacts our productivity, both in the sense of getting the things done that we care about and in making a life that matters.

Difference between isolation and loneliness

Isolation and loneliness can go hand in hand but they are not the same thing. Isolation is simply being separated from other people, whereas loneliness is a feeling that can come regardless of how many people are around.

Social isolation is an objective measure of the number of contacts that people have. It is about the quantity and not quality of relationships.People may choose to have a small number of contacts. . . . Loneliness is a subjective feeling about the gap between a person’s desired levels of social contact and their actual level of social contact. It refers to the perceived quality of the person’s relationships. Loneliness is never desired and lessening these feelings can take a long time.

Loneliness and isolation - understanding the difference and why it matters

Are isolation and/or loneliness a 21st-century epidemic?

Many people think they are.

“With digital connection increasingly replacing face-to-face human interaction, loneliness is spreading round the world like a virus.”

Is loneliness a 21st-century epidemic? Why we’re all feeling more lonely

In researching for this episode, I learned that the UK appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018.

“Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness, and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according to ideas about the self, God, and the natural world.”

The history of loneliness

A lot of research, thought, and writing looks at this epidemic of isolation and loneliness and tries to identify the causes. Several articles I read recently point to isolation and loneliness as being the consequence of a change in our worldview, about our society, and the individuals, and the place of individuals in society as a whole.

“The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialization, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion, and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasize that the individual was what mattered — not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.”

“loneliness can exist only in a world where the individual is conceived as separate from, rather than part of,