ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

If you‘re about to leave for work in an office, especially a large one, then a charity’s research published yesterday might not come as much of a surprise to you, as it did to me. It was reported yesterday by the Marmalade Trust, a charity dedicated to challenging loneliness, that 42% of people who work in offices don’t have any friends there and are lonely at work.

In an office. With lots of other people around. Almost half are feeling lonely.

Habits that reinforce this loneliness are…..emailing the person next to you instead of talking to them, texting the person in the next room instead of going to see them, hot-desking surrounded by people wearing earphones, and flexible working from home that means, in the words of one respondent, you can spend days in your pyjamas not seeing anyone but still working with them.

While many people value this flexibility and increased technological capability, I wonder why we’re creating workplaces that are making us lonely? What’s at stake for us, that we’re avoiding having actual conversations in the moment? A practice that started as a time-saving thing can, it seems, end up as something like emotional constipation that means we grow simply unused - and frankly unwilling either - to deal with other people’s reactions, as the jargon goes IRL – in real life. We don’t want to take any risks. We don’t want to waste our time.

At its best, faith tries to deal IRL – in real life. And for Christians, meeting together in person to eat and drink together, to read and discuss together, to listen, to pray, to work for justice – is a vital aspect of what it means to be part of a religious community. Online prayers are fine – but will never be a substitute for turning up in person to meet other people who have turned up in person too. In his amazing poem about love, St Paul, as well as saying that love is patient and kind, also said that there is a trajectory in human living from the opaque to the clear – from, in our terms the virtual to the real. Now I see through a glass darkly he said. But then I shall see face to face.

If this is something like what love does, then no wonder some of us are lonely at work – because we’re creating environments that encourage us in the other direction. St Paul’s words have a deep wisdom about them that’s borne out by this research: that there is no better way to combat loneliness than to get up, get out and speak face to face. Take the risk, and watch loneliness dissolve into the ether saturated with the emails we’ve left behind.

Show less