Look at all the Lonely People

On 20 March, 2020, New York City went into COVID lockdown, and street photographer Paul Kessel found himself trapped inside his apartment. It could have been worse, perhaps. Paul lives high above the corner of Central Park West and West 63rd Street, with the kind of Manhattan views you usually associate with political dramas starring Brian Cox.

While other New Yorkers had to content themselves with airshafts and fire escapes, Paul could (at least) sit by his window and watch the spring clouds blow over Central Park. Still, he was a street photographer without a street, and, after a few weeks, his shutter finger began to itch…

"I was used to being on the street every day searching for photos," Paul tells me from New York. "But the pandemic drastically altered pedestrian traffic, and it felt unsafe to be outside and mingling with others, so I stayed home in my apartment."

To pass the days filled with equal parts boredom and fear, Paul started taking self-portraits, but the results were flat and uninspired. As someone who fed off noise and movement, and New York's patented hey-I'm-walkin'-here spontaneity, the idea of shooting himself at home, alone, quietly eating toast, didn't do much for Paul's creative juices. "It seemed meaningless to me," he laments. "I had no good ideas." But then inspiration struck out of the ether. Maybe he wasn't alone, not really.

Paul still had a mannequin in the apartment from an old studio lighting course, and he took a few test shots of its dead-eyed plastic face. Soon he was on Amazon ordering lifeless heads and cheap synthetic wigs. And while the death toll rose, and the streets went quiet, and the world closed its doors and retreated inside, Paul began eagerly shooting his new group of friends. The project would eventually form a collection, Solitary. As in confinement.

"In the beginning, I still had no idea what the point was, of any of this," Paul says. "It then occurred to me that maybe I should shoot in the street photography style. Somehow that got me going. It could be spontaneous and not conceptualised. I started to fantasise various situations with myself and the rest of the cast. Gradually, interactions took place. In my mind I made up stories about the mannequins and me.

"In the end, there was a portfolio of photos with a narrative – and my finger no longer itched."

Deprived of human company, Paul invented his own, and looking back with five years' worth of hindsight, Solitary seems to neatly capture the unhinged isolation and social trauma of those early COVID lockdowns, when it felt like the world was spinning loose, unplugged from its normal programming. No-one knew what to do, or what was coming next, or even if there would be a next.

And so we get images of Paul naked in the shower, alone, surrounded by disembodied heads. Drinking wine in a dressing gown, alone, while imaginary friends sit down to lunch. Curled up in bed, alone, with a mannequin resting tenderly on his shoulder. Without genuine connection, or interaction, or the warmth of physical contact, Paul created a simulacrum of the real thing, which you can either interpret as profound or creepy (or both). Solitary is like the uncanny valley of human relationships.

"Anytime there is a lack of social engagement, it results in increased craziness," Paul says. "The human is a social animal."

As a photography collection, Solitary really resonated with people, generating a modicum of viral buzz and showing up in several magazines (including this one). But to understand why it touched a collective nerve, we have to zoom out and look at a larger societal trend: loneliness.

The truth is, despite the global population ticking over 8.2 billion, we live in a lonely world. And it’s getting lonelier.

The research suggests we were lonely before COVID, and we're certainly lonely after it. According to a 2023 Meta-Gallup survey, almost a quarter of adults worldwide feel lonely. That's more than one billion people. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared loneliness a global public health concern, right up there with cancer and mosquito-borne diseases, and launched an international commission to investigate the problem.

Loneliness doesn't seem to discriminate based on wealth: developing nations, industrialised nations, wealthy nations, poorer nations – loneliness can afflict anyone at any time. Just because you're not lonely today, statistically speaking, doesn't mean you won't be lonely tomorrow. There's no gender differential either: men and women seem to feel loneliness in roughly equal measure.

Paradoxically, loneliness does seem to bite hardest in cities, where it's known as "urban loneliness" – that peculiar modernist hell of being lonely together. According to some studies, the more people we have around us, and the denser those people are packed, the more lonely humans tend to feel. And considering about 56 per cent of the world's population – 4.4 billion people – live in cities, the scale of this thing is hard to overstate. People are hesitant to use the word 'pandemic' these days, for obvious reasons, but when it comes to loneliness we're definitely facing something pandemic-ish. A very real and physical threat to global health and happiness.

"The first step to fixing this is to acknowledge what loneliness is, and what it's not," says Associate Professor Michelle Lim, clinical psychologist and Scientific Chair of Australian-based not-for-profit, Ending Loneliness Together.

"Loneliness used to be seen as a personal matter, something we don't ask about. But what we realised over the last 20-odd years of scientific research is that loneliness is a normal biological signal for us to reach out to other people. It's your body's way of telling you there's an unmet need, like hunger. In this case, the need for meaningful connection."

The challenge has always been getting people (i.e. governments and policy makers) to treat urban loneliness as what it is: a public health crisis. There's been some progress on this front, but Dr Lim says the scrabble for public funding is a constant battle.

Whichever way you slice it, research suggests that a lack of social connection can be as harmful as 15 cigarettes a day. Lonely people are two times more likely to have chronic disease and 4.6 times more likely to experience depression. They're less productive at work, less engaged in physical activities and five times more likely to commit suicide. In a kind of dark, poetic twist, we tend to experience the physical symptoms of loneliness in exactly the place you might expect.

"There's something about loneliness and the heart," muses Dr Lim. "We have emerging studies now that show cardiovascular ageing in young people who are lonely. These are young people – we're talking about 22 year olds – who don't have a history of cardiovascular disease, but they show significantly increased signs of vascular ageing."

Of course, like many complex public health issues, while the effects of urban loneliness are simple and well understood, the causes, and more importantly what to do about them, are much fuzzier.

How can we make our cities less lonely? How can we encourage not just social interaction – people have annoying social interactions every single day – but meaningful connection? And what incentives can governments and health organisations offer to make this stuff happen? Brilliant people all over the world are working on this problem as we speak. Some of them are architects.

"Architecture alone can't solve loneliness, but it can help alleviate it by creating environments that encourage organic connection," says Maya Shpiro, Social Impact and Co-Creation Lead at international architecture firm, Henning Larsen.

It's an attractive idea. Architects (at least the best ones) have long believed that design can influence human behaviour – the so-called Architectural Determinism¹, also known as the school of Built It And They Will Come. Names like Oscar Newman, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch were frontrunners in the field, and the concept has been kicking around since the middle of the 20th century, if not way earlier. Rome had the bathhouse, Renaissance Italy had the piazza, Enlightenment Europe made coffeehouses a thing. These days we call it 'human-centred design'. Making buildings to fit people, rather than the other way around.

"There's no single formula," Maya says, "but successful spaces often share principles that respond to human complexity. They accommodate a range of uses and experiences, from places to linger and people-watch to areas for movement or quiet solitude. Uniform, standardised environments can feel alienating because they don't reflect the messiness or spontaneity of real life."

Maya begins rattling off examples. There's Sydney's Lighthouse at Darling Park – an upcoming Henning Larsen project – which sprawls over a freeway that currently acts as a barrier between Sydney's urban centre and the waterfront. The idea is to create a village-like atmosphere: a 10,000-square-metre civic-hang-zone-slash-public-park. The Sydney Daily Telegraph is already calling it one of the "biggest slices of public land in the heart of the city in more than a century." Melbourne's Federation Square, built in 2002, had similar ambitions.

Due to be completed in 2028, Lighthouse at Darling Park is an example of what Maya calls 'human sustainability'. It's the bit on the Venn Diagram where 'urban design' and 'social well-being' overlap.

"Human sustainability in architecture is about designing environments that not only support people's physical well-being, but also nurture mental and emotional health. This involves acknowledging the complexity and diversity of human needs and moving beyond merely functional access to consider how people actually feel in a space," says Maya.

"As we navigate an era defined by technological mediation and diminished face-to-face interactions, architects have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to design spaces that create subtle forms of connection."

This is where public health, government policy, urban planning, psychology and architecture kind of bleed into one another. And Lighthouse at Darling Park is just one example. New York's High Line – a former elevated railway-turned public park, inspired by the Coulée Verte in Paris – has been a community-driven sensation, drawing over eight million visitors each year and re-energising the west side of Manhattan. BedZED in London – the UK's first dedicated zero-carbon community – made waves for encouraging neighbours to share communal laundry facilities, gardens and car-free spaces. And Copenhagen's Superkilen is the city's so-called "quality of life oasis": an urban park that integrates design elements from over 60 nationalities, including playgrounds, picnic areas, chess tables and open plazas.

When governments and architects work together, good things can happen. But as Maya says, good design on its own can't solve loneliness. Architects can encourage social interaction, but they don't have much say over meaningful connection, and when it comes to fighting loneliness, connection is really the secret sauce. Unfortunately, the thing about connection is that it tends to happen organically. You can't force it or legislate it; all you can do is make space for it to grow. It's like happiness in that respect. You can't manufacture genuine social connection, any more than you can make a society happy. Connection comes from the inside out, not the outside in. It's something else, something deeper, something hard to define – but we know it when we see it. It's something to do with purpose, joy, community, responsibility and self-sacrifice.

"What governments can do is implement policies that help everyone," Dr Lim says. "For example, we tax sugary drinks to disincentivise people from drinking them and help fight obesity. So how do we implement a broad solution for the population, one that will encourage people to have the time and space to develop meaningful social connections?"

This is the big question. But to answer it, we might need to start thinking smaller, rather than bigger; to step away from sardine-stacked cities for a minute, and journey to the little English market town of Frome, Somerset. Population: 28,000. In 2018, Frome (pronounced FROOM) became the epicentre for one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the last 50 years. In short, the people of Frome may have found a cure for loneliness.

The story began in 2013, when a local GP, Dr Helen Kingston, launched the Compassion Frome Project. Fed up with the incessant medicalisation of her patients – the way the system treated them as a collection of disconnected symptoms, rather than people – Dr Kingston teamed up with the NHS and Frome council to build a directory of agencies and community groups. She then employed 'health connectors' and voluntary 'community connectors' to link patients up with the relevant support networks. In practice, this could be anything from men's sheds to a financial service to driving someone to choir practice. It's been known for a while that sick people are at higher risk of isolation, and therefore loneliness, and it was hoped that by literally prescribing social interaction – just like any other medication – Dr Kingston and her colleagues could break the cycle.

A few years later, the data was analysed, and Frome became an overnight international sensation (at least among clinical psychologists and social policy wonks). While emergency hospital admissions across Somerset rose by 29 per cent during the three years of the study, in Frome they dropped 17 per cent. This wasn't just significant, it was unprecedented. As Julian Abel, a palliative physician and lead author of the study, said: "No other interventions on record have reduced emergency admissions across a population."

By prescribing targeted social remedies, Frome had somehow managed to shrink hospital admissions across their most at-risk population: sick people. By 2023, this 'social prescribing' model was being rolled out in 24 countries around the world, from Europe to Australia.

"There are dozens of trials going on," Dr Lim says. "In Australia, the Victorian state government has even implemented social prescribing for people with mental ill health and older adults. But the trick is finding a model that's specific to each city – because we know that community interaction differs from place to place."

Of course, we don't have to wait for governments, or even doctors, to prescribe social interaction, and some of the most successful anti-loneliness programs are the ones that have sprouted organically. From local communities. In Paris, for example, the wonderfully-named Republic of Super Neighbours has transformed the social fabric of the 14th arrondissement – a largely residential district on the Seine's Left Bank – with dozens of community meetups, local lunches and post-work drinks. No invitation necessary. The organisers have even set up 40 WhatsApp groups, where residents can get hyper-local assistance with everything from finding a cat sitter to fixing a broken toaster.

The Republic's founder, Patrick Bernard, says that we've got urban policy back-to-front. Instead of thinking large-scale, with sweeping legislative changes, we should be focussing on "the most local entity in a city": the neighbourhood.

"Urban strategy must focus on these micro-neighbourhoods, or three-minute villages, as I like to call them," Patrick told the New York Times, "Conviviality is a richness that is sleeping. When we awaken the sense of place and community, the citizens and urban fabric are transformed."

In a way, this is how most cities first started – outlying towns and villages simply got absorbed into the urban sprawl. In the old days, a Parisian might have only ever seen 10 per cent of Paris. To them, Paris was their arrondissement, their neighbourhood, their street. The smaller the social units get, the more meaningful and helpful they become. When you need a cup of sugar, you're not calling the mayor, are you?

What Frome and the Republic of Super Neighbours have really uncovered is the long-forgotten value of Community, in the capital C sense of the word. The rise of loneliness coincides with the atrophy of community, and everything that came with it: reciprocal care, a social safety net, over-the-fence gossip, charity, parochial pride, and the reassuring feeling that someone out there actually gives a shit. We traded a lot of this for streamlined convenience and intergalactic communication and next-day delivery and high-density living, but the price was secret – and significant. We lost the mysterious alchemy that turned strangers into neighbours, neighbours into friends, friends into loved ones.

Photographer Paul Kessler understands this, which is perhaps why Solitary hits so hard. Society has gained a lot over the last 50 years, but at what cost?

"I think that urban environments exacerbate isolation and loneliness," he says. "And yes, photography was a wonderful antidote to loneliness during COVID – photography has always been an antidote to loneliness and isolation as I age. But really, the friends I've made through my photography are way better than my photographs."

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¹ For more of Paul’s traditional, non-mannequin-related work, please refer to the article Meet Paul Kessel.

² Architectural Determinism is a somewhat-debunked social theory that gained traction in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to figures like Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus movement. The basic idea was that architecture could shape emotions and actions, often with the goal of getting people to do something (i.e. work harder, concentrate better, buy more stuff). Critics in the 1970s called it simplistic, but if you’ve ever walked out of a supermarket with a trolley full of unnecessary chocolate, you’ll know there’s some truth there.