Robots, grocery stores, ‘happy cabs’: How governments are stepping in to tackle loneliness
In the UK, France, Australia, South Korea, loneliness ministers and multi-million-dollar budgets are powering evocative and sometimes dystopian efforts.
“All the lonely people, where do they... belong,” The Beatles asked, in Eleanor Rigby (1966).
Well, the answers are changing. They now involve chatty robots, carpool cabs, loneliness ministers and neighbourhood-wide brunches.
See how citizens, communities, governments and researchers are working to bring people back together.
Seoul connection: South Korea
“Just about anyone is vulnerable to social isolation in South Korea,” says Kim Seonga, a policy researcher at the government-run think-tank Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.
This is a country so plagued by this condition that an estimated 500,000 people aged 19 to 34 years were found to suffer from extreme social withdrawal, according to a 2023 survey by South Korea’s ministry of health and welfare.
Many of these young adults simply do not leave their homes or rooms. They work or study from home, or have given up on such pursuits; they have groceries and food delivered, or slip into penury and financial dependence. They have nobody in their lives any more that they are motivated to meet, Seonga says.
How did it get this bad? Once again, the shift can, in a sense, be dated.
After the Korean War in the 1950s, South Korea went from being an underdeveloped country to a highly industrialised, almost-futuristic, developed nation, in 60 to 70 years, Seonga points out. “This compressed economic development led to a breakdown in traditional family and neighbourhood structures.”
Households morphed from large joint families to nuclear families to childless couples to single-person households. At 0.75 births per woman, the country now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
Success was and still is defined by how hard one works, how highly one is valued by one’s employers, how much material wealth one has accumulated, and then by how one contributes to society. That last one used to top the list, Seonga says.
This order of priorities, increasingly common around the world, left young professionals busy but socially disconnected. And it left the country’s large and growing population of elders lonely and socially disconnected too.
Older South Koreans began buying robots to help with housework and keep them company decades ago (a trend that made global news when it first emerged, but has since shown up in other countries as well).
Younger South Koreans, meanwhile, are so lonely, they invented mukbang, that genre of eating videos on YouTube and Instagram — because turning their cameras on at lunchtime made them feel like they weren’t eating alone.
The government of Seoul is now stepping in. In 2024 it launched a No More Loneliness initiative with a $327-million budget. Measures include a 24-hour hotline, free counselling centres, and Seoul Mind convenience stores where citizens can shop in a space where everyone is lonely and looking for a chat. Tables, chairs and hot-ramen stations have been added, to encourage such encounters.
Community and sports events, outings into nature and wellness centres are part of the plan too. As are more green spaces, and direct outreach to isolated citizens.
“Loneliness and isolation are not just individual problems, but tasks that society must solve together,” Seoul mayor Oh Se-hoon said in a statement last year. The city will help the lonely “return to society”, he added.
More Pepper in the UK
“Happy” cabs, wide-eyed robots and a minister for loneliness are some of the measures the UK has been taking, to tackle the problem.
In 2018, it became the first country in the world to appoint a minister for loneliness, to tackle what then-prime minister Theresa May called “the sad reality of modern life”.
Among the things it has done so far is set up a Loneliness Engagement Fund that offers small grants of £15,000 ( ₹17.5 lakh) to £50,000 (about ₹58 lakh) to grassroots organisations working to boost engagement within a high-risk community. In another step, postal workers have been roped in to check in on older residents.
A Happy Cab programme has been launched in Leeds, made up of carpool taxis whose drivers have undergone special training to ensure they are warm and welcoming. The back seats have also been modified to face each other, to encourage passengers to interact.
Meanwhile, in a trial study, a series of robots named Pepper — 1.5 ft tall, wide-eyed, button-nosed, and run on AI-driven software — were used to help the elderly and keep them company in care homes. Phase two will involve more social interchanges and “conversation-making”.
An open brunch: France
In Paris, it had to involve food.
Tired of hearing about how brusque and unfriendly his city was, former journalist Patrick Bernard decided to organise a super-brunch in his neighbourhood, the 14th Arrondissement. It would be open to all residents across 50 streets, with the meal eventually laid out on a 200-metre table. This was in 2017.
The Republic of Super Neighbours (La République des Hyper Voisins) has since expanded from street brunches and dinners to memory-sharing sessions with elders, and activities for children. During mid the pandemic, the group made masks and delivered groceries to the vulnerable. The number of members currently stands at an estimated 15,000.
“City living doesn’t have to be unpleasant and anonymous. We want to create the atmosphere of a village in an urban space,” Bernard told The Guardian in 2022.
The motto on their Facebook page, admittedly a bit of a mouthful, encapsulates the larger mission: “Make conviviality the sustainable and renewable energy of tomorrow’s society.”
Forest-bathing in Australia
Much of the conversation around loneliness revolves around the absence of quality relationships. “This has resulted in a conventional narrative of blame, shame, and weak solutions,” says Xiaoqi Feng, professor of urban health and environment at the University of New South Wales School of Population Health.
In a shift, Feng and Thomas Astell-Burt, a professor of cities and planetary health at the University of Sydney, have conducted a series of studies to show that loneliness is not just the result of individual choices, driven by cultural and societal factors.
Urban planning plays a key role too. Loneliness, they argue, is at least partly a function of how our cities and spaces are built.
“The environments we create are ‘lonelygenic’, or of a kind to cause loneliness,” Feng says. “Recognising this expands our solution space and places the onus for change on those who design these spaces too.”
In particular, Feng adds, access to trees and nature helps. This has become the specific focus of the research.
A paper she and Astell-Burt published in the journal Environmental Research in 2024, for instance, showed how contact with nature could help people form human connection or find solace in three key ways: through regular social interaction with like-minded people; through activities enabled by nature, such as outdoor games and barbecue parties; and through the experience of nature itself, which can create what Feng calls “a sense of connection with something bigger than us”.
A culture that promotes such activity, rather than making it increasingly difficult to access and make time for, would have a greater chance at tackling the “loneliness epidemic”, they argue.
If that sounds a little hippy-dippy, it might help to know that studies conducted in the US, UK, Singapore and India, on the links between nature, heightened social connection and alleviated loneliness, have turned up similar results.
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