Places of belonging,loneliness and lockdown

Loneliness and belonging among young adult Australians (aged 18–29)

From the earliest studies of loneliness it was clear that loneliness was elevated in, and endemic to, late adolescence and early adulthood (Weiss, 1973, 1987). This is not only a period of churning transition in social status, from childhood to adulthood, but for many it is also a time of moving away from the main place-settings of their life to unknown places and ‘lives’ elsewhere. In these precipitous moves, individuals become both ‘single’ and ‘living away from home’. Being single places considerable new demands on people to frequent new places where new social relationships, experiences and connections are sought. Away from home and the ready-made interpersonal networks of their childhood, workplaces and work cohorts take on greater significance for young migrants. They may also find new friends and connections from the affordances of gathering places specific to their age cohort where other connections might be made. The lockdowns and restrictions on mobilities highlighted this significant age specific activity. With rudimentary accommodation and resources increasingly in small, rented rooms and apartments, much of their life is thus spent ‘out’, in settings more orientated to the extended geographies of the public sphere and its associated places: cafes, clubs, pubs, restaurants, theatres, sporting, festive sites and so on. While this time of life is a cliched period of hectic sociability, freedom and leisure, for many it is actually one of the loneliest times of their life and far more so during pandemic lockdowns and restrictions.

Among recent belongingness studies are those that show how a sense of belonging to some places (especially large cities and peri-urban areas) depends on access to transport technologies – the lack or absence of which causes loneliness among inadequately resourced young people especially (Batsleer and Duggan, 2020). Other research demonstrates that loneliness is positively associated with perceived distance from public parks and sport/leisure facilities as well as objective regional remoteness (Buecker et al., 2021). In both cases, restricted access to the critical age-related affordances of place (of the sort experienced during lockdown) may have significantly impacted how lonely young people felt during the recent Covid lockdowns and restrictions.

Vanessa May’s (2018) study of the connections between belongingness and time are also relevant to our inquiry here since it drilled down into the way belongingness changes through the life course, often being based around very different mixes of things, activities and places. It seems clear from this that the normative expectations of people in this age group might well have been scuppered by the Covid lockdowns in Australia.

May (2018: 307) argues that ‘time itself can be an important source of belonging, but one that is unequally accessible to people of different ages because of contemporary cultural scripts that present life as a linear progression into the future and construct the future as a more meaningful temporal horizon than the past’(my emphasis). Her research shows, for example, that younger people in particular actively construct a sense of belonging in relation to the future.

People of all ages will take many things from their pasts into the future, since they come to define who they are and who they will remain, but as we shall now show, younger people are also more distracted and seduced by the future in a way in which older people are not, and are thus more actively focussed around presents and futures (often multiple places simultaneously), that may, or may not, deliver a sense of belonging. May’s study was conducted in 2017 using a panel of writers from the British Mass Observation Project (MOP) responding to her questions about ‘belonging’. The younger cohort in their 20s and 30s saw this period of their lives as a transitional period prior to ‘settling down’, once key career and life milestones have been achieved. Settling down was seen as a time when a more stable sense of belonging is achieved; but acknowledging this also recognises early adulthood as the ‘proper’ time for ‘growing up’, part of which means seeking (and hopefully attaining) a sense of belonging. Critically, May (2018: 309) concluded that: ‘Measured against such social clocks, the majority of the younger MOP writers seem to feel they are “on time”’ (emphasis added). These cultural narratives orient the younger MOP writers’ temporal focus toward a particular kind of future (a career and typically home ownership), and the present is read through this anticipated future. The ‘arrow of time’ moves from past to future in a relatively linear fashion in these accounts, and there is next to no sideshadowing, little sense of a life that could have been different’ (May, 2018: 313). Paradoxically, the constant churning change of younger people’s ‘present’ takes place against a sense of certainty of the future, ‘as a forgone conclusion’ (May, 2018: 313). Thus, they inadvertently ‘set themselves up for future disappointment if their lives do not follow an expected path’ (May, 2018: 313). This, we would argue, contributed to the lockdown effect we found in Australia. As the lockdown and restrictions deepened and extended over a greater period of this ‘critical time’, their lack of progression was felt as a loss. Many mentioned what Jessica Shaw (2022) called ‘the regret of missed opportunities’.

It may be that during this relatively short and critical period, our younger cohort of Australians caught in Covid lockdowns felt their lives had been ‘derailed’, ‘such that they feel they are “off time”’ (May, 2018: 313). Or, equally, that they found themselves in the wrong place – in bedrooms at home, stalled in front of computer monitors rather than ‘out there’ where the proper business of addressing the future though securing a sense of belonging to multiple sources – place, career, work, residence and other connections – might be done.

Some light is cast on this by a recent report on the impact of Covid 19 restrictions in the EU. According to a recent European Union study of their 27 member countries, young adults (aged 18–34) had by far the highest proportion of ‘negative feelings by age and gender’ during the lockdowns of 2020, where 34% of men and 45% of women reported feeling tense, 25% of men and 30% of women reported loneliness and 21% of men and 28% of women reported depression. As a result of the lockdowns and restrictions through 2021, these figures rose significantly to 48% of men and 52% of women feeling tense; 35% of men and 38% of women reporting loneliness and 34% of men and 40% of women reporting depression (Ahrendt et al., 2020). Perhaps May’s analysis goes some way toward explaining the increases in the second year of lockdown, given that their orientation to the future at this juncture in their lives is so time critical. As one 18-year-old from Barcelona in the EU study reported, being ‘locked’ for months in a small flat with her large family, and sharing one computer, had left her in a ‘dreadful’ mental state. A 23-year-old student in Estonia said: ‘I feel constantly anxious.…It’s the uncertainty about the future that hurts the most’ (Butler and Bannock, 2021: 3).

Summarising this study, Katherine Butler and Caroline Bannock (2021) argue that the impact of anxiety, loneliness, academic stress and chronic insecurity was conveyed in crushing terms by these respondents: ‘“a rollercoaster”, an “ordeal”, “overwhelming”, “terrifying” and “burnout” are words used to describe how lockdown life felt for many young adults’. But to cap it all, their already precarious material security was undermined during this period too: the study found that ‘people aged 18–29 was the age group most likely to have lost their job’.

Loneliness and belonging among middle-aged Australians (aged 40–49)

In previous articles Franklin and Tranter (2008, 2011, 2019) have drawn attention to this age group as consistently showing a high frequency of loneliness and relatively high levels of experiencing loneliness as a serious problem. Thirty-one per cent of this age group reported feeling lonelier than usual since the restrictions had begun, and while much higher rates were reported by the younger age cohort, this might nonetheless be regarded as a significant increase on already high levels of loneliness.

We might expect this mid-career group to be well settled into career and family life, and therefore experiencing a strong sense of belonging through both family and work. Workplaces have long been known to provide a strong sense of belonging for Australian workers (Franklin et al., 2019), not least because workplaces ‘have come to compete with families as people’s primary “emotional culture”’ (Hochschild, 1997, cited in Crow, 2002: 68). However, in the past decade ties to workplaces have been undermined by new labour processes, corporatisation and declining unionism (Uhlmann, 2013). While they may have established themselves in terms of occupation and track record, in a trade or profession, as well as attaining a degree of seniority and leadership, in recent years this group has arguably faced a different kind of problem to do with dramatic and continuous industrial and workplace restructuring. This particular cohort of 40-somethings have been battered and bruised by this ubiquitous neoliberalising process, and while workplace cultures have survived, much of the sense of belonging they once promised has been lost, an individualising predicament that Michael Rustin (2014: 145) described as ‘belonging to oneself alone’.

The era of social stability and growing welfarism (1945–75) that Zygmunt Bauman (1994, 2006) refers to as ‘solid modernity’ is of particular interest to loneliness studies since it explicitly sought to protect industries, individuals, regions and communities from the vicissitudes of the market and genuinely experimented with ways and means to produce durable and progressively improved replacements for ‘traditional’ forms of belonging. New industrial places of belonging such as New Towns and garden suburbs were widely incorporated, for example. The arrival of aggressive neoliberal governments at the end of the 1970s in Australia and elsewhere set about reversing solid modernity, asserting that there was no such thing as ‘society’, just the individual and the family (Harvey, 2005; Rustin, 2014). They re-established the market as the arbiter of life chances and they marketised the very public institutions and organisations of solid modernity, producing what Bauman (2006) called liquid modernity. Corporations dispensed with the former loyalties, affiliations and bonds between employees, employers, workplaces and place in the companies they acquired, amalgamated and rationalised. In a meaningful sense, freedom from binding social ties and fluidity of social arrangements was systematically prioritised over historic concerns about community and belonging (Harvey, 2005; Meek, 2017). As Taylor-Gooby and Leruth (2018: 29) argued: ‘The analysis of the person associated with neo-liberal political economy centres on individual independence rather than membership of society’. As the same time, Brenner and Theodore (2002: 35) identified important ‘place effects’: they showed how local contexts were disaggregated and reassembled in new ways, according to ‘place specific forms and combinations’, resulting in the fragmentation and polarisation of people’s experiences of place.

All this is not to suggest there was a golden age prior to contemporary neoliberalism. As Bauman’s notion of solid modernity around the mid-20th century suggests, it was a response to a period in which liberalism and free markets had produced crippling inequality, market and social instability and suffering. Indeed, the emphasis might reasonably be put the other way around: individualism had been a long-standing and powerful policy pursued by Puritan/Protestant political cultures across much of northern Europe and places colonised by Puritan religious groups since the 16th century. That said, it is arguably the case that the phase of contemporary neoliberalism has entrenched forms of individualism and decollectivized communities and workplaces in new and intensified forms over a greater global compass.

For Bauman (2006), loneliness was therefore a metaphor for his concept of ‘liquid modernity’ since it threw lives everywhere into flux and uncertainty. As he put it: ‘The conditions of uncertainty, loneliness and fear for the future of the global citizen do not find solution in the institutions: thus “society” is no longer protected by the state: it is exposed to the rapacity of forces it does not control’ (Bauman, 2006: 147). Changes in the workplace and in domestic/intimate relationships shifted from being relatively secure to being ‘until further notice’ – not ideal conditions for ‘settling down’, buying/renting expensive Australian housing and raising a family.

High levels of relationship break-down; high levels of occupational change, job loss and income loss; high levels of housing stress (associated with high house prices and low supplies of affordable rented property); high levels of geographical mobility and precarious labour markets combined to unsettle and undermine once stable, secure and supported lives (Flood, 2005; Forrest and Hirayama, 2009), with loneliness named as a new social issue for millennial Australia (Flood, 2005).

In recent decades, neoliberal conditions at the workplace intensified work practices and work hours, eliminated the ‘wasteful’ spaces and times of work canteens, common rooms, and the celebration of birthdays; it introduced individual work performance metrics and management surveillance systems that undermined cooperation in favour of competition; it changed secure jobs into short-term contracts; it distracted workers from the job at hand and the social value of their work with individualising performance expectations and rewards (Rustin, 2014) and, above all, it introduced new sources of workplace stress (Fisher, 2011).

Franklin et al. (2019) suggested that dual income households, dual career marriages and partnership, internet use, streaming technologies, social media and new labour processes and managerial practices at work have pulled apart social groupings that were once stable sources of belonging. As they wrote:

We ask: what does it mean to ‘belong’ to a relationship (family, community, work, etc.) when everyone in it is doing their own thing? When they are preoccupied with progressing individual careers, spiralling off into cyberspace pursuing interests not embedded in their immediate social circles or locality? What does it mean to belong to a company where workers find themselves in competition, seeking salvation through personal metrics rather than collective objectives; when tea rooms and sporting facilities disappear; when the observation of staff birthdays is discouraged; when short-term contracts replace continuing positions. What does it mean to belong to a community when its factories, jobs and plant are offshored once cheaper sources of labour are secured? (Franklin et al., 2019: 127–8)

So, if the younger adult age group were impacted most by being locked out of transition into the status of independent adulthood, then this older working cohort of independent adults were impacted most by a significant and scary disruption to their emotional connections with workplaces and to their finely balanced, multiple dependencies on dual income employment.

While working from home barely disrupted the labour process for many people, zoom meetings and social media evidently were perhaps no substitute for the atmospheres, rhythms and embodied dimensions of workplace socialities and its various place contexts.

Loneliness and belonging among Australians aged 60–69 or more

As Australians aged 60–69 were the least likely to report being more lonely than usual as a result of the lockdown (only 16% reported feeling more lonely), they are a useful reference group. Unlike the youngest cohort, for those aged 60–69 and over the future becomes less and less relevant to the sense of belonging and can even become a source of alienation (May, 2018). For many older people around retirement age, the past begins to take on a special, positive allure as it becomes possible to take stock of their main achievements and their struggles with some degree of completeness and closure. They are reaching out less often to find work, build/extend a career, family and household and so therefore their active everyday habitus is less wide ranging, even if their knowledge and experience of the world may be considerably greater. Vanessa May (2017) showed how their lifespan and biography now form a source of belonging in its own right, relived and remembered with less stress than when it was as yet ‘secured’, and as something more solid and narrativized – and often pleasurable to recall. The past may not have been a bed of roses but in later life it can be recalled in a selective way. Mistakes and disasters might be forgiven and forgotten; careers that were less than hoped for might have been worthwhile, on the whole. Reaching this age can be regarded as a significant success in its own right. It is a time when individuals can become absorbed into a more distributed sense of belonging with the multiple times and places of children, grandchildren and local community. However, there is now an opportunity to cultivate a new form of belonging with the past.

Based on data generated from the Mass Observation Project in the UK, May’s (2017) exceptional qualitative work showed how older individuals may lack a busy social life, a significant inner circle of close interpersonal relationships, or even significant social connections in their current locality, yet never be lonely because it is possible to feel a sense of belonging in the present by drawing more and more on one’s connections from the past. Older people may thus be able to ‘belong from afar’, as she puts it, both by drawing on past times and past social connections as well as ‘golden periods’ and life in previous places (May, 2017). Equally, where older individuals currently lack dense social connections because they moved later in life (as many do), they might be lonely or not depending on the type of place they moved to. Where this was back to a place of belonging from the past, where they were born and raised a family and where that place is deeply etched in their being and a receptacle of memories (this too is common), they may never experience loneliness – even if they have no partner or few remaining social connections. This is because we take in our experiences of place in embodied ways as well as memories. As Bennett (2012) showed in her work in Wigan, UK, a powerful sense of belongingness can be embodied through a person’s accent and dialect, which not only allows them to feel a strong connection to a place (even as a returning migrant) – because they sound like ‘it’ – but equally, it qualifies them as belonging to place among local people who have never met them. As May (2016: 757) put it: ‘Though the members of such an imagined community do not all know each other personally, they can experience a sense of affinity when their paths cross, whenever they speak’. As a retired counsellor reported, ‘Casual encounters with Liverpudlians on zebra crossings can make me feel connected’ (May, 2016: 757). And as May (2017) found, these kinds of encounters occur continuously, in the everyday spaces of corner shops, high streets and bus stops, where affirmations of belonging are effortless, unlooked for and unhurried and thus built-in, authentic and trustworthy.

Thus, everyday spaces of belonging are of special relevance for our study since, with some exceptions, many of them (local shops, local parks, local centres and neighbourhoods) were not restricted during Covid 2020–22, or not for long. These home quarters, seen as confining and claustrophobic to young adults, as hostage to fortunes that lay further afield, could be places of comfort, security and meaning for the oldest cohorts and not least since Covid-19 was more dangerous to those aged 60 or more. Moreover, that such nearby places of belonging were ‘protected’ from normal flows of people outside during the pandemic, it only added to their value. A sense of belonging to place in the everyday little backwaters of cities and country, where so many older Australians dwell contentedly, is often a complex and aesthetic configuration of materialities, times, performativity, sensualities and culture.

Citing work by Downing (2003: 213), Fortier (2000), and Savage et al. (2005), May (2011: 371) showed that belonging ‘is a multidimensional experience that interweaves many aspects of our being in the world’. She continues:

…in addition to people and collective ideas, we also construct a sense of belonging to places and material objects (Downing, 2003: 213; Fortier, 2000; Savage et al., 2005). In this aspect, habitus…covers some of the same terrain as belonging. In her study of Italian immigrants, Fortier (2000) uses Bourdieusian terms to describe how people experience a sense of belonging in spaces where there is a correspondence between their body hexis and the social field. Such habitual spaces feel familiar to us and we know instinctively what to do and how to behave just by stepping into them (e.g. churches). What the concept of belonging offers, however, that habitus does not sufficiently take into consideration is an understanding of how our connections with our natural and built environments are sensory. (May, 2011: 371my emphasis)

For May (2011: 371) also, belonging has to be achieved through performance: ‘We come to know the world through our sensuous embodied experiences of touch, sound, smell and taste that help us achieve “a holistic way of understanding three-dimensional space”‘ (O’Neill, 2001: 3). From a phenomenological point of view, it can be argued that our knowledge of the world ‘is not just a matter of thought about the world, but stems from bodily presence and bodily orientation in relation to it, bodily awareness’ (Tilley, 1994: 14, emphasis in original).

However, the multidimensionality of belonging also means that places are not only ‘taken into’ our bodies as a material basis for belonging, but our bodies and life events etch biographical trails onto the particularities of spaces and surfaces of places, so that they become witnesses, repositories and memorials to the human lives lived within them – sometimes personal but often also shared with others. Eschewing the term life course in favour of lifetime, Vanessa May (2017: 307) lays stress on how we continue to ‘live in all our times’: ‘Each person exists as a temporal field that embraces past and future’ such that our experience of ‘now’ is not ‘the pinpoint of a lived present devoid of history’, but rather ‘the rich but complicated time of initiative wherein we acknowledge the past and anticipate the future’. We constantly exfoliate part of ourselves into the fabric of place and in doing so become part of the place itself: this is why humans are so certain when they say they belong to country, city or town, why they are an omnipresent haunting, constantly encountering themselves there as ghosts or phantasmagoria (Edensor, 2008).

In a very real sense we live in these narrations. Nobody puts this better than Will Self (1999) in ‘Big Dome’, an essay on his home in London:

But now the city is filled in with narratives, which have been extruded like psychic mastic into its fissures. There is no road I haven’t fought on, no cul- de-sac I haven’t ended it all, no alley I haven’t done it down. To traverse central London today, even in a car, even on autopilot, is still to run over a hundred memories. (Self, 1999: 113)