Dispatch by Cris Corbito
Cris Corbito is a political science student at York University - Glendon Campus. He is interested in the history of political thought.
On November 20th, 2024, three speakers inaugurated the first Glendon Global Dialogue event at Glendon Campus to discuss the baffling, forgotten pandemic of our time: loneliness. The speakers at this event explored loneliness as a social issue and shared strategies for mitigating this challenge.
It is complex to imagine that even with 8 billion people on Earth, most people still feel lonely. Considering that we are more connected than ever with resources like the internet and social media, and that most people live in urban areas, shouldn’t the word ‘loneliness’ no longer bother us?
Cris Corbito
The moderator of the event, Susan Pond, began by disseminating the alarming news that loneliness is precarious to one’s health, comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day. The precarity of this situation made Japan and the United Kingdom to establish their own Ministry of Loneliness. Hard questions like these require people to have expertise and intrepidity to tackle and share their solutions to this perpetual pandemic.
The three speakers of this event were Dr. Gordon Flett, a psychology professor at York University; Dr. Patrik Marier, a political science professor at Concordia University; and Harry Hobson, the director of Neighbourly Lab in the United Kingdom.
What made the event interesting to me was how Flett’s views differed from Hobson’s, while at the same time, they still met in the middle of the crossroads.
For Flett, loneliness is a negative phenomenon. He began his speech by sharing the life of a family member, who passed away at the age of 99. Even though this family member remained single throughout their life, he believed that the role of community played a substantial role in his longevity. Flett said that he treated his own neighbours and townsfolk as his own family. He contrasted this example with the life of the former Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Indeed, King suffered from depression; in his diary, he wrote how he was desperately lonely and how depression was jeopardizing his life. Flett stated that King wanted to write his memoirs, yet he passed tragically before he even started it.
Flett then imparted that 1 in 2 Canadians are lonely at some point in time, and that 1 in 6 Canadians feel lonely most of the time. He described Toronto, the most populous city, as the loneliest city in Canada. He argued that the most extreme form of loneliness, which King suffered, was unbearable loneliness. According to Flett, unbearable loneliness starts when people have internal dialogues concerning how their lives matter and how they themselves matter. Flett called this dialogue “anti-mattering” (i.e. people feel undervalued, unseen, unheard, “unmattered”), which is the ultimate catalyst of unbearable loneliness. He concluded his speech with his solution of normalizing loneliness and neutralizing it by encouraging the audience that they matter. His solution of “mattering” consists of actions that can be either small or big. For instance, people can experience this form of “mattering” by volunteering or mentoring. Flett insisted that “mattering” is a form of reciprocal relationship, which can ultimately solve one aspect of loneliness: being disconnected.
In contrast, Hobson began his talk by arguing that loneliness is a positive phenomenon. He described loneliness as a wake-up call to reconnect with one another akin to the biophysical sensation of thirst, which is a wake-up call for the body to hydrate. According to Hobson, loneliness must be viewed as an impulse to reconnect, and must be seen as an opportunity, rather than a tragedy. In Toronto, for instance, Hobson argued that there were about 350,000 people who were severely lonely, and this alarming statistic should be a wake-up call for us to pay attention to this matter.
While Hobson believed that both older and younger people are susceptible to loneliness, his talk concentrated on the impacts of loneliness on youth. Hobson stated that half of the younger generation aged 16 to 24 are extremely lonely. Despite this generation being active on social media, spending about 4 hours a day on it, Hobson believed that they still feel lonely. He also believed that this new environment in the post-pandemic era attributed to the rise of loneliness among the younger generation, particularly that these people are oblivious to socialization. His alleviation to this problem was to redesign social spaces to increase social engagement among the youth, notably universities and public spaces.
By the end of the event, Flett and Hobson challenged my perspective on how we can tackle loneliness in the university setting. Based on Hobson’s solution, I believe that the university setting must be transformed back to its glory: a space for intellectual discussion and a scholarly community. We—students and faculty members—must aspire to cultivate the social and intellectual life of every individual in the university to foster a sense of belonging and community, enriching the university space for the better.
In addition, the discipline of Canadian Studies is a platform that must be at the forefront of investigating the well-being of Canadian university and college students, and examining how to redesign post-secondary settings in order to eliminate loneliness. This is only possible, however, if we start to decommercialize post-secondary education, as some students still feel that they are just mere numbers and consumers of the post-education sector. It is time for students to feel they matter as scholars and changemakers of society—a beacon of hope and progressive future.
Destigmatizion is paramount. Universities and colleges should tackle loneliness as a social issue among students, faculty members, and others in order for us to overcome it. We should transform university and college campuses into spaces that can increase social engagement and social interaction to combat loneliness within the academic sphere. For instance, universities and colleges must host more “mattering” social and intellectual events like academic conferences, networking events, get-together events, among other things as a means for students and others to interact with others. Moreover, students should talk to one another more even if this is beyond the classrooms. After all, real life happens outside of the classrooms. Universities and colleges must be at the forefront of eliminating loneliness.
Admittedly, loneliness is something that cannot be solved instantly. However, I hope that my reflection will initiate a conversation that would uplift and empower everyone. It is noteworthy to note that everyone matters.
Dispatchers in Canadian Studies are undergraduate students who attend events related to the study of Canada and report on what they witness and learned through blogposts. This initiative is in collaboration with Brock University, Mount Allison University, and Trent University.