Publié le 07/01/2024

What if solitude were the real evil of the century?

Find the new article by Cécile DUTRIAUX, Doctor in Management Sciences at Sorbonne Business School.

On November 15, 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it had taken up "the issue of loneliness as an urgent threat to health", echoing numerous studies, the most recent of which was conducted by the Gallup company from June 2022 to February 2023 in 142 countries and led to the highlighting of a figure that could not be more alarming: a quarter of the world's population is said to feel lonely.

In this hyper-connected world of ours, doesn't loneliness seem a curious paradox? As economist Daniel Cohen points out:

"while social networks are supposed to connect people, the evil of the century is solitude."

In an attempt to understand this growing phenomenon in the Western world, questioning the evolution of the individual's relationship with the collective seems essential, and enables us to broaden on a societal level what each of us may have felt, one day at least, in our innermost being, in that sometimes so distressing face-to-face encounter with ourselves. [...]

> Consult the full article in french on The Conversation