“Far-right groups prey on her”: Olivia Laing talks about arming the unit | books

I I first had the idea to write a book about loneliness in 2012. I was 35 years old and had just moved to New York City when I got lost in a maze of isolation and misery. A love affair ended suddenly while I was still sky high with expectations, thriving with relief that I was finally in a stable marital relationship. Failing this transformation, being rejected and left alone, filled me with a shame that I felt was literally indescribable.

And so there I was: alone in the city, an exile condemned to watch the world go by. It was a very humiliating and scary feeling. The pain was intense, and it couldn’t have been a broken leg or even a broken heart, because my loneliness was unacceptable, something that couldn’t be said for fear of alienating others. This was the most disturbing aspect of the experience, as the need to hide further entrenched isolation, such that loneliness became more inescapable than ever, a bastion of isolation whose bastions and walls would never stop growing.

But once I realized that Unity worked in this strange, cumulative way, it became strangely interesting to me. What was this feeling, which seemed so radiant, so shameful, that it could not be acknowledged? What did he look like, what were his characteristics? Were there other people also silently experiencing this like me? If as a person I was basically desperate, the writer in me was starting to realize that I had made a huge mistake in uncharted territory.

The simplest definition of loneliness is a state of longing for more connection and intimacy than you have. It’s not the same as solitude, which can be fun and fulfilling, and it doesn’t require complete physical isolation. You can feel lonely at a party; Alone in marriage. This sensation is extremely painful, and brings with it profound physical consequences. Loneliness raises blood pressure and accelerates aging and cognitive decline. It causes insomnia, weakens the immune system, and predicts increased rates of morbidity and mortality. To put it in layman’s terms, it can be fatal.

Regarding whether other people had experienced this, I quickly realized that the Secluded City was indeed a densely populated space. I conducted my investigations through visual artists, including David Wojnarowicz, Andy Warhol, and Henry Darger. While we assume that loneliness is a result of personal failure, and a lack of attractiveness in some way, what I discovered by examining their lives is that loneliness is often the result of larger social forces of stigma and exclusion, which serve to isolate vulnerable populations of many kinds. Being poor, an immigrant, being sick, being transgender, a person of color or heterosexual: these were the drivers of isolation. If the lonely city has a clear message, it is that loneliness is political and should never be a source of shame.

At least some of that shame has disappeared since my book was first published in 2016. Loneliness is no longer a taboo condition. It is widely discussed, both as an emotional experience akin to depression or anxiety, and as a social problem, the subject of academic research and government policy. It is even considered a global public health concern. The Health Survey for England 2024 reported that 22% of the adult population feels lonely at least some of the time, with 6% – around 4 million people – feeling lonely often or always, while the World Health Organization’s 2025 report on social connectivity found that one in six people around the world feel lonely.

Although Theresa May appointed the world’s first female loneliness minister in 2018, I suspect the decline in stigma is largely a result of the collective confrontation with loneliness that has occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has affected even previously vaccinated people with a wealth of social connections. According to the British Red Cross, 41% of people reported feeling lonely during the pandemic.

Even lonely people have a tendency to believe that loneliness is their fault, that it is the result of something intrinsically unlovable about them. It is difficult, when one suffers from something culturally despised, not to blame oneself. But loneliness is often contingent on circumstances such as new motherhood, moving house, loss or bereavement. Lockdowns were global evidence of this basic randomness, confronting many previously socially secure people with evidence that life could change, leading to frightening isolation.

But the biggest change in loneliness over the past decade has been related to the Internet. Social media has weaponized loneliness, manipulating it in ways I could not have imagined 10 years ago. During my lonely times, the Internet was such a source of solace that I now find it astonishing. Twitter in particular was a place for connection and community, not the trolling and death threats that characterized “X” under Elon Musk’s ownership. Although I was skeptical about technology’s ability to alleviate isolation, I did not anticipate how social media might facilitate the rise of the far right, ushering in a new era of violent exclusion, in which the right to belong is permanently revoked. Nor did I doubt the role that unity would play in this process – although it does not surprise me that loneliness is also among the consequences of this ugly new landscape of hatred and division.

Reports on the “loneliness epidemic” have long discussed the alienating and fragmenting impact that our online migration has had on the public sphere. Whereas ten years ago the focus was on the loss of physical togetherness to screens, attention has now shifted to the powerful algorithms that drive us to digital pens, and information silos that mean people live in disparate and increasingly extreme realities, with distorting effects on our shared civil society.

Loneliness is not just a result of an increasingly digital world. It is also an exploitable weakness that underlies much of the violent extremism that spreads online. As Hannah Arendt put it in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Unity is the common ground of terrorism.” The process by which you turn to anger and a desire for revenge does not occur in a vacuum.

Far-right groups exploit loneliness, use feelings of backwardness, isolation, neglect and neglect as a recruitment tool, presenting powerful narratives that stoke grievances and convey vulnerability to other bodies they can hate and attack. Tommy Robinson’s racist and Islamophobic “Unite the Kingdom” rallies even promise to “strengthen community bonds” and “bring people together regardless of background, belief or circumstance.”

One of the many spaces in which this process occurs is the atmosphere. Mass killer Elliot Rodger, a self-described “pervert” and “lone virgin”, explicitly blamed loneliness for his actions in his misogynistic manifesto “My Twisted World”, describing the 2014 Isla Vista attack as an act of revenge against those who rejected him. As his manifesto makes clear, the atmosphere attracts lonely people by presenting a compelling ideology that recasts personal rejection and isolation as deliberate and systematic exclusion, providing a ready enemy to blame in the form of women. Like many far-right movements, the language used is one of grievance and entitlement. While there is no cure available except violent punishment for those who refuse their right to have sex, there is a sense of belonging and meaning, however distorted.

These ideas have seeped into the mainstream through influential figures such as Andrew Tate, who promotes toxic masculinity as a solution to loneliness in a cartoonish way that particularly appeals to boys and young men. The problem with this supposed treatment can be seen in Tate’s recent absurd assertion on X: “If you’re a straight man and you have a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” By promoting these totalitarian levels of hatred and suspicion towards women, toxic masculinity actually reinforces feelings of loneliness, closing off the vulnerability and empathy that are essential conditions for love and intimacy. Even friendship.

If big technology has generated troubling new forms of loneliness, it also promises new solutions. AI-powered chatbots and avatars like MyAI, Replika, and Gylvessa are aggressively marketed as cures for isolation: great alternatives to human friends and lovers. Ultra-realistic AI girlfriends with names like Grok’s “Lolita-style” DreamGF, Candy, and Ani are always available and compatible, with no needs or requirements of their own. While these images of relationships may provide comfort and solace, they risk once again entrenching feelings of loneliness, this time by weakening the user in the demands of two-way intimacy, reducing their tolerance for the necessary give-and-take, hard work and potential disappointment that befalls any human relationship.

This may come as a surprise, but I don’t think a romantic partner is necessarily the answer to loneliness anyway. I was determined that Lonely City would not end up solving the “problem” of loneliness by meeting someone and thus taking away my passport out of unhappiness. If unity is political, the result of stigma and exclusion, then the solution is not a partner, whether human or artificial intelligence. Instead, what is needed is solidarity based on difference. We make the world less lonely by rejecting stigma. We do not defeat it by stigmatizing others. The real lesson of loneliness is collective vulnerability and shared obligations of care.

One of the most interesting findings from the Health Survey for England 2024 is that loneliness shows a strong relationship with deprivation in the region. Practical solutions put forward by bodies such as the Red Cross, the Campaign to End Loneliness and the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness focus less on dating or friendship than on community assets such as transport, green spaces and social centers and activities.

These are places where people can experience what sociologists call “weak ties,” feeling connected, seen, and important within a sustainable community. But these spaces and resources – from mother and baby groups, parks and libraries to rural bus routes, youth clubs and surgeries – have been destroyed by austerity and years of systemic underfunding.

It is no coincidence that the areas of the country experiencing the highest levels of loneliness are also the areas where the far right is gaining popularity. Over the past few years, I have come to think of loneliness as the key to our turbulent politics, the root cause that must be addressed if we are to avoid a growing wave of violence and mistrust. Focusing on it as an underlying wound is a way to avoid the continued polarization of issue-based positions. If the best cure for loneliness is to mend the tears in the social fabric, then this work may be one of the most powerful tools we have to resist the far right.