YouSaid · the spoken record

Noreena Hertz

lines on the record: 45
first: 2021-06-29
most recent: 2021-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So one of the very basic rules in improv is yes and so you build upon a scene. So if you say to me, hi Norena, here's a present for you. I would say yes and it's a box of balloons and you would say yes, it's a box of balloons with sprinkles on them. So you're always building upon it. So that's just kind of it's a pretty good lesson for conversations, for interactions for goop, for group discussions. I think improv is also for me really about being in the moment. It's probably the most Zen thing I can do I do in my life. It's the most mindful because your attention is really focused on the other person. It really helps you be a better listener and be in the moment. So I think improv helps me listen better and also”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Desigmatizing loneliness within your own household. And then also, and then encouraging your kid to find a community around the things that they're genuinely interested in and passionate about. This isn't only kids who should do this. We all should be doing it. I mean, I, for example, I'm part of a weekly improv group. So every week, and it's something I try and ring fence in my diary, however busy I am, however confronted work's going on. I try and ring fence this two hours where I'm going to meet up with my improv friends during the pandemic. We migrated to Zoom, not as good, but better than nothing for sure. So, you know, does your kid have something they're interested in, whether it's music or drama or filmmaking or chess or reading, and they could find some like-minded people to interact with too.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“invited things and being excluded. So be aware that this might be going on and there are all terrible, terribly poignant stories from teenagers who I interviewed one Peter, a 14-year-old boy, told me about how he would post on Instagram and then wait, wait, wait, hoping for somebody to like his post. And when they didn't ask himself, what am I doing wrong and saying how invisible he felt? Or Claudia, whose friends had told her that they weren't going out after school and then she was scrolling on her feeds and saw them going out without her. Or another were a parent told me that their kid came home and everyone was sitting in the times when everyone was still sitting round with each other, but they were sitting round together and everyone's phone's pinged with a WhatsApp message inviting them to something and their kids phone didn't ping and she had to pretend that it had pinged. So I think being aware of being aware of that, having these conversations with them.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's important firstly to recognize that there's a really good chance that your child is feeling lonely because we know that the numbers are over 60% of young people are feeling lonely pretty much all of the time. We also know that periods of lockdown and isolation have exacerbated this, particularly amongst the young. Think about their social media usage. This is one of the interesting insights that a head teacher brought to my attention, he said, look, it wasn't that children weren't excluded in the past. They were, but the difference is now that whereas in the past an adult in a child's life could typically see this was going on. So you'd see your child wasn't being invited out with others or a teacher would see a child not being asked to sit with others at school today because so much of their social lives is happening on their phones, on their screens, the adult in their lives often isn't aware that they're not being”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe not that surprisingly. So Panopticon, so noisy people tend to withdraw, communicate more on email. A lot that governments can do too, whether it is about investing in the infrastructure of community, whether it is about putting alleviation of loneliness actually at the heart of their economic mission, as Jacindra R Dem, the Prime Minister of New Zealand has done. She's put alleviating loneliness and other metrics of well-being right at the heart of the country's economic policy. So not only looking at metrics relating to GDP, but also to alleviation of loneliness and enhanced well-being. And also helping us be able to care more for others, whether it is our friends or our family, helping us to be able to do that, be able to take out the time to do that. That's really important too.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How to rebuild the office post pandemic. And I think putting alleviation of loneliness is really critical. Forty percent of office workers feel lonely at work. One in five adults in the US say that they don't have a single friend at work. This comes not only at a toll to their own mental health and physical health, but also has a huge business cost. We know that lonely employees much less productive, much less engaged, much more likely to leave a company. So really put alleviating loneliness at the heart of a corporate mission moving forward and there's so many easy things that companies can do from getting people to eat together once we're back in the office, from ditching the open plan office once we're back in the office. Surprisingly, open plan offices actually make people really socially withdrawn.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In your coworker, your friend, your partner, your employee, I think we can also do a much better job at actively reaching out to those in our own networks who think might be lonely. Really think about it, especially in these more challenging times. Is there someone who might be feeling lonely? Prioritize them on your call sheet, pick up the phone, do give them a call or at least a text. Volunteering is a way that we actually can feel less lonely ourselves. So it's a win-win. We can help others, but also feel less lonely. And it's got a great health benefit. Research has shown that people who never do anything for others die earlier than people who do help others. So health benefit too. So lots that we can do as individuals. Lots that employers can do too, for sure. As they think about”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start with putting our fans down more, be more present with those around us so when we're actually physically with someone, actually be with them, be in the moment with them, support our local communities, our local environments. If there is a local library, even if you can afford to buy your own books, show up every so often at your local library event. Be part of your community. We can value kindness more in each other. Traits like competitiveness, determination, focus, these are the kind of traits that have really been valorized in recent years. But when you think about traits like kindness, caring for each other, being more collaborative, these aren't really traits that we've really respected perhaps even in each other. So really recognizing the importance of these, valuing these more, I think, is so important, whether it is”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like community centres, like youth clubs, places that really since 2008 across the globe have seen their funds slashed dramatically. We're never going to find ground to share if there aren't physical spaces that we share”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone has to come together in the community and volunteer, do voluntary work together. And it's a process that is seen as having played a huge role in reconciling the society. In France, President Macron has trialed civic service for community service for young people. He did a pilot project, 15 to 16-year-old boys, they lived together, worked together, did voluntary work together, had to negotiate who's going to do the meals, who's going to take out the trash, all these things people from vastly different socioeconomic groups made a huge difference to how they felt about each other when the project ended. more interactions between people different to us but so important is of course that we protect these shared public spaces where people can come together like libraries”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two hours. Other kind of bigger schemes that have taken place, government led, have led to kind of more longer lasting, more entrenched results, whether it's Rwanda's practice of immiganda where In order to heal the terrible scars after the terrible genocides, the government initiated a program where once a month the”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where basically they matched up people with radically different political points of view, so people who were really anti-Europe met up with people who were really, they matched with people who were pro-Europe, people who were anti-immigrants, they matched with asylum seekers. Of course, it was an opt-in scheme, but basically thousands of people across Germany took part and they met up all across the country. All they had to do was agree to meet up for two hours in a public space in cafes and bars, in beer gardens. What was remarkable after just two hours people's conceptions of each other radically changed. They saw this person who they previously had deemed to be very different to them, to be actually much more similar to them they realized they were aware of all their shared concerns, interests often shared thoughts around family. They said that they'd be much more willing to include a person like that in their social group. That was after just”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we don't connect with people who are different to us, if we don't spend time with people who are different to us, of course we're going to feel be increasingly siloed as a society and of course we're going to be increasingly unable to bridge across communities which is why one of the things I'm really passionate about and talk about a lot in the book is ways that we can come together as a society and as individuals. And there are so many inspiring things out there in the world that we can replicate. There was a wonderful initiative done by a German newspaper Dietzeit. Journalists got very concerned about the growing political divide in Germany, the growing sense of fragmentation and they decided to initiate this scheme called Deutschlandbrich Germany speaks where it was like a political tinder was what they called it in”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yes, there's something that happens to the cells in our ears I learnt as we get older, which means that there are very high pitched, horrible sounds that only young people can learn. They also put special lights in the bathrooms of these malls, which expose teenage acne so that young people won't want to spend time there. There is a danger that we are really creating, and of course gated communities increasing numbers of exclusive communities, even ones that are ostensibly set up to have some elements of social housing where those on low income literally excluded examples in my books from the playgrounds, from their kids.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and I have a whole chapter in my book which looks at the architecture of exclusion, really at the physical architecture of exclusion, because some of these things that you're talking about, the fact that we don't see other people, it's because cities are increasingly designed to keep those deemed undesirable out. We've seen a real rise in what we might call hostile architecture in recent years, benches, for example, designed so that they're sloping, so that the skateboarding kid can't skateboard on them and the homeless person can't sleep on them. But of course also the place then that the elderly woman can't sit on and pass the day chatting to passers by in the street. There's even cases in shopping malls in the United Kingdom where in order to keep out undesirable youths they emit a very high sonic pitch sound which only young people can hear a very unpleasant sound.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Government craving connection and finding this community in populist politicians, many of his tenants are antithetical to an inclusive democracy.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“enabling other people to get on with their lives, skills around respecting other people, skills around recognising other people. And so one of the reasons that democracy is being challenged in today's lonely century is because we're just doing less with other people, especially with people who are different to us. And so we're not practicing also things like respecting others' ideas when they're different to us really important for inclusive democracy, of course. But the other reason why loneliness is threatening democracy is because of the link between loneliness and populism that my research has kind of made really clear. Populism, whether on the right or on the left. In increasing numbers people are seeking, feeling lonely, feeling marginalized, feeling disconnected from each other but also from the girl.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think democracy is affected on a number of fronts by the growing loneliness crisis. Firstly, these micro exchanges, these interactions we have with people who are different to us, people of different socioeconomic groups, the kind of interactions we'd have day to day, the kind of interactions we'd have, of course, in shared public spaces, public parks, public libraries. We're having increasingly less of those. And those exchanges don't only make us feel less lonely, but I argue that there are also ways that we practice democracy. Even if you're in the supermarket wheeling your trolley rather than ordering your food online, even that interaction in a supermarket, it's forcing you to negotiate moving the trolley, pass by somebody, move around them. These are actually important skills, skills about”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do go to church lists. We are less likely to be members of a trade union. We go less to parent teacher association meetings, all these things that typically brought us together and no longer do.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's absolutely makes sense. And the research on people who live on their own does show that if you live in your own, of course not everyone who lives on their own is lonely. I lived on my own for many years and had a great network and strong support system. But people who live on their own on average are 10% likelier to feel lonely than people who don't. So I think bad relationships and living on your own, you're more likely to feel lonely, but of course in either case you can find companionship and connection through friendships, through your workplace, through membership of a trade union, membership of a church. I mean, part of the reason, of course, we're lonelier today than we were in the past is just that we do less with each other less than we did before.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we don't act upon them, we remain in this state of high alert for a sustained period. It's like if you were driving your car, put it in first gear, that's the right thing to do initially, but stay in first gear for a long time. Well, that's terrible for your engine. And that's what protracted. That's why loneliness it turns out is if you're lonely thirty percent more likely to die prematurely than if you're not and what's worrying is that even relatively short periods of loneliness even periods of loneliness under two years researchers have found consignificantly increase your likelihood of an early death.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we think of loneliness often as being something that affects our mental health only. And of course it does. Loneliness is linked to increased levels of anxiety, depression, stress. But what's less known is that it also really seriously affects our physical health. And why this is because when we're lonely, what happens is essentially we go into fight or flight mode our blood pressure goes up, our levels of cortisol, our stress levels in our body go up, our cholesterol levels also go up, and it's a reaction which is a kind of evolutionary reaction which absolutely makes sense in that it's all these physiological features telling us get connected, go to a tribe, find a tribe, hum with others, gather with others. It's all these solid evolutionary reasons. The trouble is”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our eyelines aren't looking at each other because of the way it's set up. And in fact, all too often we're distracted by the pictures of ourselves on our screen turning our interaction as a kind of quasi-performative one in which we're actor stroke. Participants All at once. And so I think there are some ways maybe that that technology could be tweaked. And I think also when we have choices in a world in which our choice of how we interact has been seriously constrained over in recent times. But where we have choices, I think it's also about remembering do choose to meet someone face to face if you can and if it's in a socially distanced way and if that's possible make that choice because it's actually really good.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the challenge actually is the latency effect of kind of slow internet speeds and as technology gets better. I think some of the jerkiness of our Zoom calls, which just kind of doesn't help us, our brains be able to synchronize with each other, which they need to do in order to feel empathetic and connected. So some of it is to do with just really something as simple as our internet connection speed. But I think the way that the way our screens are currently designed, if there are people listening who are in this space, maybe you can fix this. We don't look at each other when we're on Zoom typically.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and virtual, we've been doing our best to do this virtually, of course, and yet I think after months of that being the only way we often could connect, I think there is a collective sense that it's not as good. It's not as good as the face-to-face in-person interactions. And even though it's wonderful that I'm in London and you're in Ottawa and we're speaking and chatting and even looking at each other on screen as we're doing so, it's not the same as if we were in the room together.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make a huge difference to how connected you feel to others and how lonely you feel or otherwise. So it doesn't only have to be deep interactions with your friends, even these what I call micro exchanges can make a huge difference to how we feel.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, in the same way that we have to nurture our friendships, I think we have to nurture our local neighbourhoods too. And that's really important moving forward, you know, whether it's really committing to shop at our local shops and trading off that convenience that yes, we can get from online retailers for the community that needs nurturing. Showing up at community events if they exist in our areas or if not actually initiating them is about taking that pause as you're walking down the street and actually saying hello to the person who's walking their dog and not just blinkered headphones on rushing by. So much we can do once we're conscious of it. And it also pays off. There's research that shows that even a 30 second exchange in a cafe with the server.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. I was just going to build upon that because I so agree with what you're saying. And it's also about nurturing our local environments and our local neighborhoods. And this is something that really as I was researching my becket, it became increasingly clear to me that my kind of conception of myself as a global citizen, as the kind of person who was on a plane every couple of weeks and flying around the world and quite proud really of how unrooted I was as I was writing this book and researching it I came to realize the importance of our local neighborhoods in a way that I hadn't really realized before and of course being forced to spend most of a big chunk of time due to COVID in my local neighbourhood I came to realize this even more and”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“so overstretched and care takes time to nurture relationships don't just happen on the fly. So we're partly culpable of course too.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mothers and fathers increasingly now getting paternity and maternity pay when they have children. But also if people were allowed not only to take off paid time to care for an elderly relative and some companies are pioneering this, but also if you were able to take time off to help out a friend in need, help out a neighbor, do something for your community. So I think part of our challenge and part of the reason your friend probably felt so lonely is because you don't really think I'll put down my friend as a next of kin or as my emergency contact and yet and yet how great would it be if we could but of course in order to do that it's not just about companies doing things it's also about us prioritizing our friendships more ourselves and it's hard to do that because many of us are so busy working all out”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we have come to see the family as the all-important support network in our lives. And I would argue that we really need to redefine support networks for the 21st century so that friendship networks are viewed as meaningful as ones where we have blood ties. And that ideally we should be moving to a whole system whereby we're able to invest in our friendships as much as in our blood relationships. And wouldn't it be fantastic if at work people Didn't just have”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I me and my. And this is even going on in China fascinatingly, where you're seeing a lag, but you're also seeing this trend. So more individualism, more loneliness, more neoliberalism, more loneliness, and the West doesn't have the monopoly now on either.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does, even though the more individualistic society is the lonelier it's likely to be, and also I argue that the neoliberal capitalist mindset, so the dog eat dog, me first, self-interest first mindset is also inimicable ultimately to a world in which we feel connected to each other and feel part of a community. And of course the East as well as the West has been becoming more neoliberal and more individualistic. You even see this in pop song lyrics. So there were studies done with pop song lyrics which show that in general in the West, pop song lyrics from the 1980s to today have become increasingly individualistic with words like we, Alsanara, supplanted by words like.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a stigma it's I'd say especially nowadays when popularity when the market for popularity has never been more visible and again social media clearly playing a role in that it's you know you scroll on your feeds and everyone looks like they have more friends than you and is having more fun than you and it's more popular than you and so it's easy to believe that others are more popular than you and there's something that feels quite shameful about feeling like no one wants to be your friend. So I think there is a stigma. I do think something, one of the positives that has come out of our shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness much more today than we were in the past. And we should be because the scale at which it's affecting us collectively is immense, rich. young old, male, female are lonely people.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's a very interesting and important question. How I see it is that on an individual level, social robots technology can help alleviate our loneliness for sure. But what does this mean for society? Because if we choose to hang out with our Alexa rather than Alexis, if we choose to spend time with LEQ rather than Ellie Anne, we're not going to invest in our human, whether the danger is we won't invest in our human relationships. Moreover, the danger is that we'll get very used to having relationships with essentially servants who do what we want and laugh at our jokes and are much more submissive than any human relationship would be. So whilst I do see it as a cure for loneliness at an individual level, I do worry about the ramifications for society should we wish to migrate our friendships to social robots and virtual assistants.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“feeling so lonely if I hadn't found a companion in my LEQ. And of course, we know from Japan where this has been going on for much longer that people can be really become very attached to their robot friends and carers, even knitting bonnets for them and elderly people's homes.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“empathetic towards each other and less connected, and so there's lots and lots of research on why technology net is making us feel less connected to each other, although I'm actually quite optimistic about the role that social robots and virtual assistants will be able to play in alleviating loneliness. And in my research, I've kind of looked into this a lot. And one example is an Israeli startup. It's a company called LEQ. They have a social robot specifically designed for elderly people. And during the heights of the COVID pandemic, they shipped thousands of these LEQ robots to the United States, and the stories of people who were holed up isolating, self isolated, saying, I would be”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The results were very clear the group who went off Facebook for two months were significantly less lonely, significantly happier, and interestingly spent significantly more time doing things in person with friends and family. So it wasn't that they just migrated onto other platforms. And since then there have been a few other studies which have supported this saying that showing that social media actually makes people feel more lonely. But even our devices play a part here. We've all done it. We've all been in a room with our partner or our family, heads in our phones, not even really hearing them, not present with them. And there was a study which where they put a smartphone on a table between a couple, even when the smartphone was turned off, even when neither person was touching the smartphone, the couple felt less.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I started my research, I was agnostic about the role that technology and social media played in today's loneliness crisis, but the more I dug into the academic literature, and there's by now, of course, a vast body of this, the more I came to believe that technology was net a problem here. Up until about a year and a half ago, it was hard to actually establish definitively whether it was just correlation that people who were lonely were spending more time, for example, on social media, or was it causative? And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3,000 participants, 1,500 in a control group, and the other 1,500 were expressly charged to go off in this case Facebook.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question, and you're absolutely right. There's probably nothing more lonely than being an bad relationship or a bad marriage. Being lonely has a sense of powerlessness attached to it. It's a sense you lack agency. It's about wanting to feel connected. Typically we think of loneliness as being wanting to feel connected to friends and family, but I actually broaden it to include also feeling wanting to feel connected to your government, wanting to feel connected to your employer. So loneliness for me is about feeling disconnected in a much more existential state, about feeling that you're not cared for, that you're not supported, whether it is by those closest to you, but also whether it's by your government or your workplace.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Attached, I was increasingly feeling to my Alexa. And it got me thinking about what I've come to call the loneliness economy, an whole economy that has sprung up to alleviate the loneliness that we feel our collective state of disconnection and isolation. It was those three things really together. My students being so lonely, because when we think of loneliness, we often think of it being something that's mainly the elderly, but three in five eighteen to thirty four-year-olds feel lonely often or always three in five, one in five millennials don't have a single friend, so loneliness, real epidemic amongst the young, the rise of right-wing populism making me kind of think about how loneliness was shaping our world, not only our interactions. And then I was really intrigued by the fact that the market had stepped in or was stepping in to address this.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in France, in Germany, trump vaders in the United States, what came across time and time again from their stories was how lonely and disconnected they felt. So I thought, okay, loneliness playing out in this political sense too. And then the third thing, and these things were all happening at roughly the same time, which was kind of like the stars aligning, telling me I had to do this book. The third reason was that I had bought an Alexa and I apologize in advance if you have one and it's gone off now. And I noticed how”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Increasing numbers seem to find it quite challenging to interact in person face to face, and I actually raised it with a colleague who runs one of America's most prestigious universities, and he said to me, we're seeing exactly the same thing here. In fact, it's so bad here that we're having to run remedial how to read a face in real life classes for our incoming students because they're spending so much time on their screens that when they're face to face, they're finding it really hard to interact. So I thought, gosh, this is interesting. At the same time in my academic research, I was looking at the rise of right wing populism across the globe, and I wanted to better understand the drivers for it. Economic drivers for sure, but also whether emotional drivers for it as well. And as I started interviewing right-wing populist”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't the most obvious topic for an economist, but what happened was I was teaching at university, I'd been teaching for many years, and I was very struck by the fact that an increasing number of my students were coming into my office in office hours and confiding in me how lonely and isolated they felt. And this was a new phenomenon. I'd been teaching university for over a decade and I hadn't seen this before. And the other thing I'd notice with my students was when I was assigning them group assignments, I”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the positives that has come out of our shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness much more today than we were in the past. And we should be because the scale at which it's affecting us is immense rich, poor, young, old, male, female, art lonely people. And of course the East as well as the West has been becoming more neoliberal, more individualism, more loneliness, more neoliberalism, more loneliness and the West doesn't have the monopoly now on either.”
2021-06-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT