It’s Not Just the Pandemic: Understanding Urban Loneliness

In a city high-rise, sitting in the balcony on the 25th floor, sipping tea, you look out into the horizon, city lights glimmering in the distance, cars fading away as they rush across the highway. You are surrounded by silence though you can hear the faint noises of the horns honking on the road. You look across at the building angularly adjoining yours and see shadows move across the large expansive windows. You wonder what they would be doing—their conversations, their actions, the scuttling and scurrying movements. You can feel the melancholy, the lonesomeness. You reflect how it was never like this before.*

As people navigate their way towards growth and success, they find themselves ‘busy’ and others around them ‘unavailable’. This urban existence with its multidimensional challenges has led to an upsurge in the experience of loneliness and taking stock is a matter of pertinent significance. This book explores the spaces from which the problem of urban loneliness arises. It portrays in detail the facets of our lives which are contributing towards the emergence of this scenario.

In Alone in the Crowd, the authors go beyond highlighting the existence of the problem to enlisting ways in which this loneliness, in the midst of the current pandemic, can be tackled. Encouraging readers to concurrently focus on the need to live mindfully, this book also highlights key learnings from the pandemic.

*Excerpted with permission