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Neoliberal capitalism promotes social isolation, loneliness and inequality. Are we prone to loneliness rather than collective strength?

Loneliness, capitalism and neoliberalism: economist Noreena Hertz on social isolation and inequality

As it often does in the interests of expanding its power, the World Health Organisation classified loneliness as a ‘global health crisis’ in June 2025. The figures behind this announcement are, however, striking: 871,000 deaths per year, one death every 36 seconds; one in six people is chronically lonely. What appears in the statistics is no coincidence; it is the product of an economic and social order that systematically produces isolation, a fact that unfortunately escapes the unblinking eye of the WHO.

What did the WHO publish on loneliness in 2025?

The WHO Commission on Social Connection, led by Vivek Murthy and Chido Mpemba, presented a comprehensive report on 30 June 2025. Key figures: between 17 and 21 per cent of people aged between 13 and 29 report chronic loneliness. Across all age groups, almost one in ten people say they feel “regularly or particularly” lonely. Among some 65-year-olds, the figure is even higher, as mobility and changes in accessibility often weaken family ties.

The WHO refers to a “pandemic”, not in the strict virological sense, but as a social phenomenon that has been fuelled by the Covid-19 measures rather than brought to an end by them. In surveys, around two-thirds of those under 30 report feeling lonely frequently or at times in recent years. In some surveys in the US and the UK, 40 per cent of adults report experiencing loneliness in the past month. Murthy’s 2023 Surgeon General’s Report compared the mortality risk to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Specifically, loneliness increases the risk of stroke by 32 per cent, cardiovascular risk by 29 per cent and the risk of dementia by 50 per cent. The health effects are comparable to those of obesity and physical inactivity. In May 2025, the World Health Assembly adopted the first resolution classifying social connectedness as a key health issue.

Why is loneliness a structural rather than an individual phenomenon?

The obvious interpretation is an individualistic one: some people are shy, others have had negative experiences with relationships, and others are overwhelmed by digital technology. These factors do exist, but they do not explain the acceleration seen over the last 40 years. Studies show that the number of close social relationships per person in the US, the UK, Germany and Japan has fallen steadily since the 1980s. Isolation and loneliness are increasing measurably. People who talk about their social relationships today are more likely to report casual contacts and less likely to report meaningful bonds. A single factor (smartphones, the pandemic, scepticism towards therapy) struggles to explain this trend.

What has changed during this period, however, is the economic and social architecture. The breakdown of stable employment relationships, the erosion of trade unions, the shrinking of church and community structures, the privatisation of public services, and the logic of competition in education and the workplace. Each of these shifts reduces the low-threshold spaces for encounter where relationships can develop without explicit arrangement. What appears to be individual suffering is in fact a widespread, collective symptom.

In sociological terms, this means: we live in a society where connection has become a commodity. Those who do not actively seek friendship have none. It is possible to make an entire society lonely without any single authority ordering it to do so. It is enough for the structures in which the community used to form to dissolve. This isolation is a consequence of the individualism that has been established as an economic and cultural model since the 1980s.

What does Karl Marx mean when he speaks of alienation in capitalism?

Marx described the concept of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Four dimensions are developed there: alienation from the product of labour, from the labour process, from one’s own human nature and, crucially for our topic, from other people. Marx argued that a capitalist economic system, which positions people primarily as competitors for scarce resources, systematically undermines their ability to relate to one another.

Other people tend to become mere means: customers, labour, competitors. The intrinsic relationship, unclouded by any exchange motive, becomes the exception. This observation was speculative in 1844. By 2026, it is empirically substantiated. Studies on the ‘commodification of friendship’ show that even friendships are increasingly evaluated according to utilitarian logic: what does the relationship offer me? How many can I maintain without my productivity suffering?

Where profit dominates the structural logic of coexistence, the common good becomes a residual category. This reduction appears particularly pitiful where it is naturalised, that is, where it is presented as having no alternative. Marx’s concept of alienation is today less a theory than an observation.

How does neoliberalism intensify isolation?

Neoliberalism, as a political-economic programme since Thatcher and Reagan, and in Germany increasingly since the Schröder era, rests on three pillars: the privatisation of public goods, the deregulation of the labour market, and the shift of responsibility from the state to the individual. Each of these pillars produces isolation. What was previously organised collectively (housing, healthcare, education, pensions) is now privatised and declared a matter of individual self-care. Everyone must ‘look after themselves’.

Deregulation: stable employment relationships, long-term service, and trade union structures are disappearing, causing the social spaces that once fostered friendships to vanish as well. One fixed-term contract follows another; precarious employment, long working hours and constant self-optimisation leave no time for relationships. Anyone who falls off the employment track (due to unemployment, illness, or care leave) quickly experiences what it means to be left behind socially. The rise in lonely living situations follows directly from this structure.

Shift in responsibility: success becomes a personal achievement, failure a personal failing. Those who fail feel ashamed and withdraw. These three pillars work together like a machine designed to isolate people. They do not destroy all relationships – intact families and close friendships can remain resilient – but they erode the spaces in between: clubs, workplaces, neighbourhoods, trade unions, church groups and sports clubs. The WHO refers to these spaces as ‘intermediary institutions’. Their erosion is not to be explained in emotional terms, but structurally.

Economist Noreena Hertz and The Lonely Century

In 2020, the British economist Noreena Hertz published The Lonely Century, perhaps the most radical contribution of recent years. Hertz argues that loneliness is not primarily a personal phenomenon, but a political-economic one. She systematically links data on loneliness and isolation to three drivers: the dissolution of social bonds through economic precariousness, the erosion of urban meeting spaces, and an aggressive individualism that instils competition even where cooperation would be functional.

Hertz analyses data from several countries and shows that it is no coincidence that the feeling of loneliness is increasing most sharply in those societies most deeply committed to neoliberal capitalism: the US, the UK, and parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Social inequality exacerbates this effect, as poorer sections of the population are more frequently excluded from the remaining social spaces. At the same time, she identifies a political consequence: socially isolated people are more susceptible to authoritarian and nationalist movements. This is her truly alarming thesis: isolation undermines not only the quality of life, but also democratic stability.

Research into loneliness in the English-speaking world has become significantly more focused since Hertz’s book. The term ‘neoliberalism’ now appears regularly in epidemiological studies on loneliness, something that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

How does isolation manifest itself?

Firstly, there are the functionally lonely: well-provided for, professionally successful, well-connected in the sense of having ‘300 LinkedIn contacts’, but without a single person to ask how they are in the morning. They often develop non-specific symptoms: exhaustion, sleep disturbances and a vague sense of depression.

Secondly, there are the ‘left-behind’ lonely: people whose last remaining social networks have been severed due to job loss, separation or illness. Here, loneliness intersects with poverty. They are over-represented in WHO statistics and under-represented in psychotherapeutic care, even though chronic loneliness can escalate into a manifest mental illness here, which the healthcare system then treats on an individual basis.

Thirdly, the relationship-lonely: people in functioning partnerships who are no longer seen as part of the relationship. Marital loneliness shows that the existence of a relationship does not prevent loneliness if the relationship itself is alienating. Emotional closeness is lacking, even though the outward form of the bond appears intact.

Are Discord groups and co-working spaces enough to combat loneliness?

The short answer: No, not without bigger structural change. Discord, Slack communities, and co-working spaces are so-called ‘weak ties’. They are not worthless. Mark Granovetter demonstrated as early as 1973 that weak ties are important for information, careers, and cultural diversity. But they are no substitute for strong social bonds: people who know you, with whom you share crises, who are there when your own world changes.

The loneliness machine creates a world full of weak networks and ever-weaker bonds. A TikTok account with 50,000 followers is no substitute for a single person who is truly there. This illusion of substitution is one of the most bitter experiences of our time: some people are excessively active on social media and yet deeply lonely, particularly young adults and older people living alone.

What helps is not more apps. What helps are recurring, accessible, shared spaces: the same sports club twice a week, the same choir rehearsal, the regulars’ table with no set agenda. The boring, non-Instagram-worthy togetherness. That is precisely where community is formed, and that is precisely where one can practically escape isolation.

What role do smartphones, social media and digital mobility play?

The debate surrounding smartphones is often treated as a monocausal explanation. This is an oversimplification. Smartphones are not the cause of loneliness, but they act as a catalyst that exacerbates the underlying structural conditions. Three mechanisms can be identified.

Firstly, phubbing: the competition for attention between devices and the people present means that even shared spaces are no longer ‘shared’. When two people use their smartphones at dinner, they are physically together but mentally elsewhere.

Secondly, the distortion of social comparisons: anyone scrolling through Instagram sees the lives others have put on display and contrasts them with their own. The relative deprivation this creates is a source of loneliness in its own right.

Thirdly, Pseudo-contact and parasocial relationships with influencers, AI companions, and chatbots provide short-term comfort without fostering the ability to form bonds.

However, studies show that smartphone bans for young people do not lead to significantly lower levels of loneliness. The chains of causality are more subtle, and without considering the structural level (isolation caused by economic conditions), the impact of smartphones, viewed in isolation, remains overestimated. Mobility and constant availability have a similar effect: those who are constantly available are never fully present anywhere.

How does society respond to a collective crisis?

With individualised responses, such as those provided by the WHO, for obvious reasons. Health insurance funds reimburse therapy sessions, not club memberships. GPs can prescribe antidepressants, but cannot change the structures that cause isolation. The system’s response to collective trauma is individual treatment of the affected, a model that shifts the burden from structural factors onto individuals. Many psychologists, too, feel overwhelmed and, in part, powerless within this logic: day after day, they witness the consequences without seeing any change in the structures.

This is not meant cynically. It is a real bottleneck. Even the WHO’s 2025 recommendations remain within this logic: better counselling, more education, and raising awareness among GPs. The structural dimension – housing policy, working hours policy, community infrastructure – is mentioned, but is scarcely put into practice. A political discourse that prioritises the common good over profit is almost absent.

In Germany, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs has had a ‘Strategy against Loneliness’ in place since 2023. It is ineffective, not even well-intentioned, yet it lists 111 measures, most of which are awareness-raising and networking projects. The economic machinery of loneliness remains untouched. The lack of alternatives within the economic framework is not questioned.

What can individuals do anyway?

The advice to “have more social contact” is superficial and often falls on people whose life circumstances (workload, rent, care responsibilities) no longer allow for any contact at all. More realistic approaches include safeguarding existing bonds, reducing overwhelming commitments, and establishing a reliable weekly routine that involves others. Psychologically, the key is to restore a minimal space for connection.

Investing in long-term relationships. The book club meets every month. The Sunday walk with the same neighbour. The routine phone call with your sister. These bonds may not be exciting, but they are important. They are the opposite of glossy networking and of what the WHO actually means by ‘social connection’. Social connection is not a luxury. It is a basic human need. The human need for reliable closeness is one of the few constants that cannot be compensated for by productivity or consumption.

Politically: engagement in structures that facilitate relationships. Tenants’ associations, trade unions, neighbourhood councils, clubs. Historically, these structures were precisely the spaces where relationships developed alongside the issues at hand. Strengthening them again is the collective response to a collective crisis, and it requires political participation, not just individual self-care. Anyone who takes loneliness seriously must address the economic system, not just the individual.

Summary

·         WHO June 2025: Loneliness as a “global health crisis”. 871,000 deaths per year, one in six people is chronically lonely, with 40 per cent reporting an experience of loneliness in the last month in some surveys.

·         Structural causes: The acceleration of the last 40 years is not an isolated phenomenon but can be explained in economic and social terms, including the erosion of intermediary institutions.

·         Marx’s theory of alienation: empirically substantiated; relationships are increasingly evaluated in terms of utility; profit takes precedence over the common good.

·         Neoliberalism: three pillars drive isolation – privatisation, deregulation of the labour market, and the individualisation of responsibility. Precarious employment conditions and fixed-term contracts exacerbate the problem.

·         Noreena Hertz, The Lonely Century, systematically links loneliness and isolation to neoliberal capitalism and warns of political consequences (vulnerability to nationalist movements).

·         Three types of everyday life: functionally lonely people, socially isolated people, and relationally lonely people.

·         Weak ties are no substitute for strong bonds (Granovetter 1973); networks without genuine bonds do not hold up.

·         Smartphone effect: an accelerator, not a cause. Phubbing, comparison bias, pseudo-contact.

·         Systemic response: individualised, not structural. WHO recommendations remain below the level of economic policy.

·         Individually: protect existing bonds, establish reliable routines, take social connection seriously as a basic need, and engage politically in structures that facilitate connection.

Related:

• Loneliness: Neurology, the Brain and the Mechanism Behind It

• Neoliberalism and the Business of Fear

• Marital Loneliness: Lonely Despite Being in a Relationship – Overcoming Loneliness in a Partnership

• No Contact: Why Gen Z Is Cutting Ties with Friends and Parents

• Adult Friendships: New Findings from Sociology, Social Psychology and Friendship Research