Life & Style | Health
A call to connect
Face-to-face, not Facebook, keeps your sanity intact
- By Darian Leader, Guardian News
- Published: 00:00 June 12, 2010
- Image Credit: Rex Features
- A report from the Mental Health Foundation argues that our market- driven society has led to an increase in human solitude
A report from the Mental Health Foundation argues that our market-driven society has led to an increase in human solitude. We have forgotten the value of relationships.
Doctors, philosophers and sociologists have been pointing to the clash between capitalism and the human spirit for more than 150 years. They have shown how social and emotional isolation break down both body and soul. So what has changed today?
Something crucial. Loneliness, the report tells us, is bad for us because it makes it more difficult to control our "habits and behaviour". Genes may be responsible — and loneliness may be hereditary.
The report tells us, relationships are "worth investing in". Why? Because they strengthen our immune systems and improve our cardiovascular function. Face-to-face conversations are good, too. Why? Because of the "chemical processes" stimulated in the process, such as oxytocin production.
Today the spirit and the bonds between individuals have become commodities. Business has absorbed relationships. Human life is seen as a set of skills to be learnt, so that we can form new relationships. Yet, we can't just form bonds because we're told it's healthy.
The realities of relationships are more complicated than the ideology of choice can allow. Going through the motions of communicating isn't the same thing as relating. Spending more time on the mobile phone and the internet doesn't mean we are in touch with other people and how they feel. Rather than commodifying loneliness and creating measuring scales, it is dialogue and the sense of connectedness that matter.
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However well-intentioned it may be, the pseudoscientific discourse adopted by the Mental Health Foundation helps to create it. In this mind-set, if you tick more than five out of ten boxes, you're lonely. But it is through dialogue and genuine human engagement that one can understand what a lonely person's condition is. Is it because they miss someone they have lost or is it some other factor?
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