Monbiot: The age of loneliness is killing us

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For the most social of creatures, the mammalian bee, there’s no such thing now as society. This will be our downfall.

• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 October 2014 19.49 BST

‘Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity.’ Photograph: Feri Lukas/Rex

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the collapse of popular education movements left a void filled by marketing and conspiracy theories. Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. The anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous 20. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.

When…

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