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Chapter 3

Isolation: The Genesis Of Loneliness

Rohan’s story

As we leave Jill and her increasingly fragmented life, let’s move across the world to the centre of Mumbai where, later that morning, Rohan, an Indian brain surgeon, comes online. Though skilled and masterful, Rohan experiences the dark side of the future every day of his life. Here is how.

As he wakes in the morning he moves into his home office, where he is preparing for the day’s work. You might expect a doctor like Rohan to spend much of his time at a hospital, working with colleagues and meeting patients. However, like many specialists in 2025, Rohan spends much of his time working from his home office. Within an hour of waking he has accessed the technology of the Cloud to download some of the most advanced visualisation technology that he needs for the day, and takes out a subscription for three hours of use.

By 11.00 a.m. he is ready to begin surgery. Today he is leading a team of surgeons in China who are performing a particularly tricky operation. That is why earlier in the week they had contacted Rohan to provide expertise for the operation. A young woman has internal bleeding from her brain and needs to be operated on to stop the bleeding. Rohan activates his telepresence unit, and within seconds can see clearly the other members of the team and the young woman patient who is already anaesthetised and ready for surgery. As his colleagues begin to open the skull, Rohan directs the holographic representation attached to the on-site camera to show him clearly the site of the bleeding. He then activates the robotic instruments and begins to gently manipulate the brain tissue. As Rohan leads the team, he speaks in his native Hindi language, which is automatically converted to the Cantonese of the rest of the team. This instantaneous translation technology, introduced in 2020, has made the learning of specialist languages redundant, save for those who speak languages as a hobby.

For the next half hour the team work skilfully to move to the site of the bleeding. It is a relatively shallow bleed so that stopping the blood flow can be done quickly. Within an hour the flow has been stemmed and the Chinese surgeons have begun to reconstruct the portion of the skull that was removed. The surgery seems to have been a success, so it is with a good heart that Rohan sits down for lunch in the bright dining room of his apartment.

By 2.00 Rohan is ready to join the second team he will be working with that afternoon. As the afternoon begins, he connects to the team from Chile which has come online to ask his advice about a particularly difficult case they are treating. They are due to operate on a young man with a brain tumour the following day. Over the next couple of hours Rohan again uses holographic representation – this time of the young man’s brain – to decide the best strategy for the operation. It takes over three hours of deep conversation and visualisation of the tumour to decide the strategy, but by 6.00 p.m. the team feels prepared and agrees to the timing for tomorrow’s surgery.

It is just time for Rohan to have a quick supper before he hooks up with colleagues at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to talk about a young boy who has been brought in this week with a suspected brain tumour. Rohan specialises in the treatment of the young, so he is pleased to be able to share his advice and good wishes for the surgery. While he will not be involved with this one, he will observe the surgery in order to give feedback to one of the junior team members.

So by 11.00 p.m. Rohan is ready for bed. He has a busy day tomorrow with a follow-up to the young man from Chile and the observation of the London surgery. It has been a busy week for Rohan, and as he thinks back he realises that he has rarely left his apartment.

Amon’s Story

Amon in Cairo rarely leaves his apartment either that week. He is an independent freelancer, who works on complex IT projects. As soon as he wakes, the first action he takes is to check in with his virtual agent. He knows that every minute of the day his virtual agent is scanning the world for work that may suit Amon. It uses an exact profile of Amon’s current skills and knowledge base to find the project match. It also knows something about his working preferences – when he likes to work and the sort of client with whom he wants to work.

This morning the virtual agent has presented a range of possibilities for Amon. A drinks outfit in Brazil wants a program written for their customer care team, and needs it within three days. Another possibility has come through from a Malaysian entrepreneur with whom he has worked before. He wants a particularly complex piece of software written and is prepared to pay Amon 2000 Euros for it. He also spends the next hour taking a look at two open bids for work that his virtual agent has brought him. Amon knows that he will have to respond within the next two days if he wants to enter the competition for the work.

Over the following hour he works out how long the project will take him and comes to a decision about the lowest price for which he is prepared to work. By mid-morning he has decided to go with the drinks company in Brazil. By late morning he has begun the programming and over the next six hours he works in the virtual office of the project, dropping a note to others he is working with, and chatting to a fellow programmer. By 5.00 p.m. he is ready to attend a conference call with all the project team. By now he is at full steam and so decides that if he works into the evening he can probably get this finished. Before he finishes that evening Amon updates his personal profile, adding the recent work he completed for the Brazilian client.

Amon is a neo-nomad, picking up programming work from people he has never met, working with teams whose names he does not know, for companies far, far away.

Both Rohan and Amon have interesting working lives. Both are engaged with work tasks they enjoy and which stretch their competencies. They have found work they love and which they see as hobbies to be enjoyed, focused on and relished.

But do you notice what’s missing from their working lives? Neither Rohan nor Amon spends time during much of their working day with real people. Yes, they interact with people all day – Rohan with his fellow surgeons in China and Amon with the Brazilian team. However, what they are interacting with is cognitive assistants, avatars, holographs and video presence. Neither of them frequently encounters warm flesh and blood in their daily lives. Amon’s closest ‘friend’ is his virtual agent – and that’s a computer.

They are not alone. By 2025 we face the possibility that much of the fabric of our working lives is denuded of face-to-face relationships. It could well be, of course, that these virtual relationships become as rejuvenating as face-to-face relationships. But somehow I doubt this. When you strip away daily face-to-face relationships, then you strip away the joys of easy companionship and you strip away all the possibility that relationships have of nurturing work – and, indeed, of work nurturing life.

Rewinding to the past: a day of easy companionship in 1990

To let the extent of this sink in, let’s replay the 1990 memory experiment again – but this time look at the day, not through the degree of fragmentation, but rather through the lens of human interaction. In my case I will go back to the consulting practice I worked for – but this time view it as a series of social conversations. As I track my day, what’s interesting is that I spent most of the day in an office with my colleagues. Sure, I have my own room – but I can glance down the corridor and see others working in their offices. The place has a feeling of easy companionship. Not that we were all friends, by the way – there were certainly people I could not stand and I am sure the feeling was mutual. The place was riven with politics, power play and hierarchies – it could be infuriating, but it was also real. You may recall that in the day I described earlier I went in the afternoon to a meeting with a group of prospective clients. Again, this was a physical meeting, and we talked for an hour or two. In the early evening in the pub, the team comes together to chew over the events of the day, share more gossip and continue the marvellous power plays.

It might have been frustrating, annoying and at times downright irritating – but I never actually felt lonely during the working day. This was a world of easy companionship. Rohan and Amon have working companions whom they know well and whom they trust. However, they rarely actually physically meet these people.

What’s missing in the working lives of Rohan and Amon is the possibility of simply pushing your head through an open door and saying ‘Hi’, or wandering down the corridor to goad people into having another cup of coffee. Or even inviting a group out on the spur of the moment to a curry down the road.

The death of easy companionship

It could be that this loss of easy companionship, which was so much a part of working lives in 1990, will be one of the dark sides of the future of work. We humans, in the past, in the present and I would imagine also in the future, are intensely affected by the state of our relationships with others. For many of us, the aspect we value, above all other aspects of work, is our relationships with our co-workers.¹ It is no surprise that when asked why people chose to stay at work, one of the top predictors is ‘I have a friend at work.’² And we should also not be surprised that longitudinal studies carried out by researchers at the Harvard Medical School of the lifetime health and happiness of thousands of people reveal a similar effect. Those who are the happiest in their lives are not the richest, or indeed those who have achieved the most. The researchers found consistently that the single greatest link with lifetime happiness was the extent to which people have close friends in their lives, while loneliness was associated with ill health – and was, interestingly, contagious, rapidly spreading to others. That’s why easy, close, relaxed friendships have been described as such a key part of human mental health and happiness.³

I cannot imagine this being different in 2025. After all, across the whole history of the human race we have been intensely social, clannish people. Yet the coming forces of technology and globalisation could impact on this natural sociability in a way never experienced in the history of mankind.

So where does that leave Rohan and Amon and billions of others who in 2025 could spend much of their working day interacting with others in cyberspace rather than establishing physical contact? The simple truth is that we simply don’t know. Perhaps humanity will adjust to these cyber relationships to such an extent that they will bring the positive effect that face-to-face relationships do now. After all, the early experiments with Sony’s PET computer AIBO suggested that, with its puppy-like appearance and mischievous way of behaving, people rapidly learnt to enjoy it as a companion and as a playmate. Even in 2010 in Hong Kong and Japan, ‘virtual girlfriends’ can be downloaded to your 3-G mobile. In cyberspace and in chatroom salons a gigantic world of relationships has been flourishing. In the future we can imagine that avatars won’t simply be the mainstay of the sex trade, but will also be the logical development, from call centres to financial advisers.⁴ Perhaps one of the outcomes of advancing technology is that we humans will be able to substitute virtual, avatar relationships for real, flesh-and-blood relationships. Or perhaps technological developments will be such that, as some have predicted, by 2025 brain implants will ensure positive relational emotions – whatever the situation.⁵

However, I’m going to assume that by 2025 neither of these ‘transhuman’ adjustments has taken place. Instead what we can imagine is the slow but continuous disappearance of face-to-face contact at work, bringing with it the possibility of deep loneliness and isolation.

The dark side of the future is a working world of isolation. Advances in imaging, holographs and virtual technologies, combined with developments in the Cloud, have put the most sophisticated techniques into the homes of people like Rohan and Amon. They no longer have to go into the office to access information – it’s all available to them on their handheld device or through their personal home computers. Theirs is a virtual, global existence. Their clients, patients and teams are scattered around the world – their colleagues are not in the next office cubicle, and they may not even be in the same city, region or country.

It’s not that their colleagues are strangers. Ask Rohan about his peers in China and he will tell you much about them – after all, he has been leading the Chinese team in these specialist operations for more than a year and has twice spent a week with them. From his encounters over the year he has learnt whom to trust at certain times, whom to keep an eye on and who will need the most counselling after the operation. As fellow professionals he has a keen eye on their strengths and weaknesses and in the case of a couple of them has even gone so far as to mentor them outside the operating theatre. He knows them pretty well and would count a couple as friends.

However, like Amon, Rohan’s relationships with his working colleagues are more often virtual than face-to-face. In the past he went to conferences around the world to meet up with other specialists in his field, but increasingly the carbon tax on flights is such that these are now being held virtually, so he simply briefs his avatar about whom he wants to meet. In his own hospital there are few people with his deep expertise and so he does not spend much time there. For Amon, his work is completely virtual. He works from his home all of the time and has never met the other programmers with whom he routinely collaborates.

Taking families out of the mosaic of work

Our relationships at work are an important part of the mosaic of our whole life relationships. However, they are only one part. For many people, what compensates for the possible lack of relationships at work is their relationships with their family members.

Work and home life can spill over in terms of energy and emotion.⁶ Our work and our lives outside work are rarely hermetically sealed from each other. More often, there is a spillover between the two that can be an emotional spillover, or could be the spillover of networks and competencies.⁷

On occasions the spillover between the two is positive. Our family home can be a place where we feel relaxed, authentic and loved. These are the positive feelings and emotions with which we enter our working day and they create the emotional foundation that plays an important role in helping us deal with the stresses and strains of working life. This positive cycle between work and home life can also be reversed. Instead of positive home emotions spilling over into work, it is our positive experiences of work that spill over to the home. We leave work and enter the home feeling positive and uplifted. Work is a place where we can gain valuable networks, develop new skills and deepen our knowledge, and these are competencies and connections that can be brought back to home as we enter it in the evening.

Of course there are also occasions when the spillover between the two is negative. Our work becomes a place where we feel angry, under-appreciated and wound up. It is these negative emotions that we bring back home, and it is these caustic emotions that can have such a negative impact on our capacity to find happiness at home. Or the caustic cycle can start with our home – perhaps it becomes a place in which we feel insecure, guilty and overwhelmed by the demands of others. So it is these that become the emotions and feelings that we bring into work.⁸

There has also been a spillover in how relationships are developed. Over the last couple of decades, relationships at home have become increasingly ‘negotiated’ and worked out. In part this reflects the growing economic independence of women, and also profound changes in the roles of men and women. The point here is that as we develop more relational ‘muscle’ at home, so we use these same relational muscles at work. If future generations become increasingly skilled at negotiating their relationships with their partners, so we can expect them to become more skilled and indeed inspired to negotiate their relationships with their co-workers, managers and businesses.

Work and home are also intimately connected in other more physical ways. If you have work that takes you physically away from the family – in overnight trips or longer projects – then this impacts on the family. If you leave early in the morning and return late at night after a long commute – then this impacts on the family. And of course the decisions you make about where to work will be influenced by the impact it will have on your family and your own personal goals for them.

So, if we want to really understand the future of work, we also have to at least acknowledge, indeed understand, the ways in which home and family are likely to change over the coming decades.

This endeavour is not as difficult as it might at first seem because what constitutes a ‘home’ and a ‘family’ began to change significantly from the time of the Industrial Revolution, and this transformation in many ways set the scene for what is to come.

Rewinding to the past: changes in family structures

To get a feel for the magnitude of the transformation of family life, rewind to the past by taking a look at your own family tree for the last two generations. As you do so, you may want to ask the following questions. How many children did my parents and grandparents have? Did any of them or their parents divorce? What is the current family structure?

For myself, both my grandmothers, Annie Evans and Minnie Stanwell, came from families of seven children. Their own childhood was interrupted by the First World War, and as a consequence in both families a number of their sisters remained spinsters because their sweethearts were killed in the early battles of the war. Those that married had smaller families than their parents – Annie had two children, one of whom, Barbara, is my mother; Minnie had only one child – my father David. None of my grandparents’ brothers or sisters was divorced. Sure, there was much family gossip about a couple of marriages that had obviously hit a sticky patch – but in the main these families stuck together through thick and thin. The unravelling of families began in my family in my own generation. Of the four children that my parents Barbara and David had, only one stayed with their first partner. All the other three children divorced, and two had second families.

Perhaps your family history reveals a steadier matrimonial environment. But if it has, then it will be in the minority. In much of the world divorce is becoming the norm, not the exception, and even in countries such as India, in which divorce is still very much frowned upon, some of the old ways of staying married are breaking down.

So let’s take a closer look at how Rohan and Amon relate to their family members, particularly when their daily work is complete. Like the majority of people in 2025, both live in cities – far removed from their parents and from their childhood friends. By 2025, families, even those in India, have shrunk in size. Amon has one sister, and Rohan an older brother who moved some years ago to Brazil to set up an internet trading company. They get to hook up their holograms on family birthdays, but it’s been years since they actually met. Neither Amon nor Rohan has parents who live in the same city. Rohan moved from his home town of Jaipur to study at the Mumbai Medical School and left his parents there. Amon also moved from his home town to be educated.

And like many other people around the world, both Amon and Rohan have parents who live far away from them – so surely they can come and stay? Here is the other reason why Amon and Rohan see so little of their parents. Both their parents have been caught in a series of demographic trends which has meant that – even though they are now in their late 60s, early 70s – to some extent or another they continue to work. It’s not that their parents wouldn’t love to see them, it’s just that they are still working and they live hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Rohan’s parents are now in their mid-60s and both work full time; his mother teaches at the local primary school and his father mans the family store. The same is true for Amon’s parents. They divorced when he was a young child – his mother moving back to the home town of Luxor in southern Egypt, while his father moved to join the extended family in Canada, and while they are now almost 70 both are still engaged in work.

So when Rohan closes down his avatar station and Amon switches off his computer, both are on their own. They are far from their family, and from their working colleagues and peers. Theirs are isolated lives with very little human contact.

So one of the real potential downsides of this steady erosion of real (rather than virtual) relationships that could be the case in 2025 is that the positive energy flow from home to work ceases, and with it some of the opportunity to tolerate work-related stress. My guess is that if we took a closer look at the health and well-being of Rohan and Amon, both will be suffering from anxiety and possibly also depression.

The forces that created isolation

When you look at Rohan and Amon’s working life, at first glance they look interesting and meaningful, and in many ways their working lives are. However, as we peel back and observe their working lives in the context of their whole life, the extent of the gaps becomes apparent. And it is not just Rohan and Amon. Around the world we can anticipate that many billions of people will live isolated working lives. How did this happen?

Some of the clues can be drawn from their stories. Did you notice that Rohan and Amon both live in one of the many megacities of the world in 2025? Like billions of others, in the course of the last 100 years their families moved from rural villages to urban sprawls. Isolation came in part as a result of the world becoming urban. Another clue is that both of them have family members that migrated, Amon’s father to Canada, and Rohan’s brother to Brazil. The migration of vast numbers of people has also served to break up the family ties that can be so important to reducing isolation. But it is not just the globalisation forces of urbanisation and migration that are impacting on the lives of Rohan and Amon. It’s also the increasing cost of energy and fuel. Two decades earlier, and Rohan would have flown to spend time with his colleagues in China and Amon may have made the trip to his clients in Brazil. But with a strong focus on the cost of carbon footprints and the rise of virtual technologies, they are both more inclined to stay at home rather than to commute or indeed to fly to meet others.

There is also something deeper going on in the working society of 2025 that we can glimpse in the stories of Rohan and Amon. Perhaps the most obvious is that the traditional families that Rohan and Amon’s grandparents grew up with have been replaced with rearranged families in which divorce has become much more prevalent. In the case of Amon’s parents, once they had separated his father remarried in Canada and Amon now has three stepbrothers and sisters in Toronto. But it is deeper than this. Perhaps some of the loneliness and isolation of both Rohan and Amon is that they are the members of a global society that simply does not trust each other. Amon notices how cynical people are about ‘big business’, and that’s one of the reasons he decided to work independently – he did not want to line the pockets of one of the ‘fat cats’. Rohan, as a surgeon, is in the world’s most trusted profession, but like Amon he distrusts the government and is worried about corruption and sleaze.

Another general emotion in the societies in which Rohan and Amon live is a feeling of unhappiness. Rohan notices this in the patients he treats, and Amon knows himself the quiet desperation he can sometimes feel. There are many pundits asking why so many people are unhappy, and one of the reasons people have pointed to is that so much leisure time is spent passively watching television.

Together these pieces form a particularly potent recipe for isolation. From the globalisation force, the pieces around urbanisation and global migration play a role; from the carbon and natural resources force, the piece around soaring energy costs puts a break on travel and encourages virtual working; from the demographic force the piece on the rearrangement of families breaks many of the natural bonds that keep isolation at bay. Finally, the societal force brings three pieces – ebbing trust, declining happiness and increases in passive TV watching. It’s a toxic brew that could potentially bring isolating work to billions of people by 2025.

The force of globalisation: the world became urban

One of the key drivers of isolation has been the explosive growth of cities and urban areas across the whole globe. In 1800 just 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and by 1900 this had only increased to 14%. Yet by 1950 – when the Baby Boomers were born – it had moved up to 30%. The extraordinary fact is that in their lifetime that percentage had shifted to 50% – and there is no evidence that the trend will decrease. By 2010 in many Western countries more than 75% of people lived in an urban area.

Urban and rural living have different communities and rhythms. In the mid-nineteenth century in Europe or America most people lived in the countryside, on a small farm or in a small town. The typical family grew some of its own food, raised livestock and took their surplus to the market to exchange for goods they did not produce. If, like me, you love the novels of Jane Austen or Henry James, then their vivid descriptions of life in the nineteenth century resonated with the scale and domesticity of life. Jane Austen’s Emma and Henry James’s Isabel do occasionally go into town – but remember that in the 1860s London was home to 3,189,000 people, New York to 813,000 and Boston to 177,000. Had our heroes been explorers, when they entered Bombay or Shanghai they would have found cities of around 600,000 and 700,000.

This all changed in the West around 1870 when a host of innovations in transportation, energy creation and manufacturing created remarkable industrial growth, which sucked the population into the towns. The great chroniclers of this migration, Charles Dickens in the UK and Émile Zola in France, described both the excitement and the misery that this created. Between 1870 and 1900 New York’s population tripled from 942,000 to 3.4 million and London’s nearly doubled from 3,841,000 to 6,507,000. In the East, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Shanghai also grew – from 645,000 to 813,000 in Bombay and from around 600,000 to 1,000,000 in Shanghai. 2008 saw the balance tip from a majority of rural to a majority of urban world inhabitants. By 2030 it is estimated that the number of people living in urban spaces will have risen to almost 5 billion.⁹ In China, by 2010, it was almost half and half between the urban and rural populations, although of course the 54% of the population living in rural China produce a much lower share of its GDP.

What this move to the cities means is that more and more people are dislocated from their roots, living in cities where they know very few people, often in neighbourhoods with very little community spirit and activity. It’s from this dislocation that isolation grows. But it is not just the migration to the cities that could be a cause of isolation – there are other migration patterns that could impact on the way we relate to work and our working communities.

The demographic force: global migration increases

The isolation that many workers feel in 2025 has also emerged from the dislocation of families and communities as people migrate to get better jobs or to escape war or natural disasters. It is true, of course, that people have always migrated ever since the first homo sapiens ventured from Africa across Eurasia 60,000 years ago; people have continued to migrate in order to establish new communities, move their existing communities and join other communities.¹⁰ Since that time the pace of migration has accelerated as a consequence of commercial and technological developments, and is often spiked by occasional grand economic ventures, as well as political and ecological crises. The colonisation of the Classical period, the forced migration of the transatlantic slave trade and the mass emigration from Europe to the New World were all significant in determining the present distribution of cultures across the face of the globe. We can anticipate that while the direction and strength of migration flows are unpredictable, migration will increase. The actual rate will depend on environmental factors (rising sea levels forcing people to migrate, earthquakes leaving areas uninhabitable, drought decimating areas), political factors (refugees moving away from war-torn regions) and technological developments (labour-saving inventions putting people out of work).