Connection and community for the lonely

After seeing a poster recently about the problem of loneliness in aged people, I wondered how bad the problem actually was. So I looked at the latest results from the Office for National Statistics about loneliness in the UK (for November).

It wasn’t as bad as I expected. Overall, only 7% feel lonely often or always, but men more than women when you break it down. As far as I could tell, the highest percentage in the “I feel lonely often or always” was 9%, and that was in the 30– 49 age group. The over-70s were actually the lowest, at 4%.

That’s only a survey for one month, and the total sample size was only a few thousand. Also, when you add in the category “I feel lonely some of the time”, the percentages jump to about a third. It’s still a bad thing for people to experience, and we still need to work at building community. Whatever the statistics, I still read stories in the news of people dying alone in flats and not being found for weeks; I still come across those who are alone and hating it.