I wonder if future generations will ask why our generation carried on with the current economic and social structures we currently have that seem to be doing so much damage to so many – and for what?
Image – from the EU’s Emptiness project
It’s hard to put into words my long term outlook – and what it has been for over 15 years. Yet the sculpture piece by Albert Gyorgy below more than captures it.
Above – Melancholie (Melancholy) by Albert Gyorgy in Geneva, Switzerland
Academic research on emptiness and loneliness
I spotted this piece by Shona Joyce Herron of University College London which also pointed me to an international research project on Emptiness hosted here.
Shona Joyce Herron defines Emptiness as:
“A feeling that one is going through life mechanically, devoid of emotions and purpose, and therefore is empty inside, with emptiness often being bodily felt in the form of a discomfort in the chest.
“This is coupled with feelings that one is disconnected from others, in some way invisible to others, and unable to contribute to a world that remains the same, but from which one is distant and detached.”
Shona Joyce Herron
In terms of the research which, to be honest has gone over my head, you can see the papers here, and also here.
“Results: A two-factor structure encompassing ‘nothingness’ and ‘detachment’ was identified, and found to have acceptable fit. The resulting 19-item PES was found to have internal consistency (α = 0.95), convergent validity and test-retest reliability.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38299317/
Above – I just want to know what those 19 items are and whether or not I tick any of the boxes
Or alternatively, I want to know what those 19 items are to see if any of them point to potential public policy solutions rather than pharmaceutical ones. Because when I look at my own life history (I’m in my 45th year so haven’t been ‘young’ for decades), there are a host of ‘issues’ I have with institutional decision-makers to put it lightly!
Life on a piece of paper – exams: and your worth as a person being judged and defined by the letters someone as pinned to your name.
In my case, that sense of going through life ‘mechanically’ was set down by our education system, and the government’s desire for data on how children progress through school. Hence the examinations’ industry that has built up around it – especially somewhere like here in Cambridge.
Every summer between the ages of 12 to 22 the months of May and June were ruined by having to revise because I was convinced that something bad would happen to be if I didn’t do well in them. Although by the time I got to university I was so schooled in the process of annual examinations that in the face of declining mental health, I ended up ‘gaming’ the system just to come out with a 2:1 – i.e. choosing subject options that I had studied at A-level some three/four years before.
At no point were we ever encouraged to ponder or think in depth about:
- Why we had to go to school
- What we had to study at school
- Why we had to go to church while children of other families did not
- Why someone else made choices about what we could and couldn’t do
And inevitably in later years that caused, and still causes tensions. This was something that Prof Alice Roberts picked up on with her own childhood in her guest edition on Desert Island Discs. Because in her case, her decision to accept the nomination to become President of the Humanists in 2018 was one that unexpectedly caused a split in her family – which she talks of on the show. Ultimately looking at the press coverage of late 2018, the usual suspects took great delight in accusing her of all sorts of things when like many parents, she was unable to secure state school places at non-religious schools, hence having little choice but to send her children to faith-based state-funded primary schools because that’s all there was.
If anything, their response to Prof Roberts reflected how much of a threat they saw her mere existence as being. After all, here is one of the best science and history communicators in the country who smashed so many negative stereotypes, glass ceilings, and silos while both widening the scope of research and bringing through new generations of young people into sectors that have previously been closed off to many.
One of the things that struck me about the music choices from the days of a teenage Alice Roberts is how much heavier the music was compared to what became mainstream indie/britpop of the mid-1990s. But as she’s several years older than me, she’d have been in her late teens at the time I started secondary school. At that time, the music and culture scene was still trying to wean itself off of Stock Aitken and Waterman’s Hit Factory. (Their magic had well-and-truly worn off when PWL released a cover of Baker Street by ‘Under Cover’)
Part of my permanent state of emptiness comes from knowing church and state combined to prevent my generation learning about the world out side as it is, not how some people with a very strong ideological lens thought our generation should see it through.
Prejudice-based politics led to ignorance-based education.
These days I look back with horror at how entire academic years in school seemed utterly wasted due to repeated content, or made unnecessarily painful because we were being taught at a level that we had not been prepared for – only to find out that when we got to university we had ‘over-prepared’.
At the same time, there were things that we should have covered but did not. Look at the contents page of On Citizenship – English and Social Studies from 1966 here. Imagine the generation of teenagers in the 1980s & 1990s being taught about
- central government,
- the media,
- the systems of purchasing and insurance like they were not abstract concepts for other people,
- trade unions,
- the co-operative movement, and even
- the existence of Citizens’ Advice Bureaus.
And I’ve not even mentioned Section 28 – which was known as “Clause 27” when it was being debated in the House of Commons during the passage of the legislation. You can read the Hansard debate transcript here – with trigger warnings of extreme homophobia. What’s all the more striking is that the original section was not included in legislation about schools, but rather as a miscellaneous provision attached to the end of a local government bill, which when you read the original Act of Parliament shows the previous three sections have nothing to do with education and schools.
“You need to forgive yourself – you were not to blame for being educated within a broken system”
Which is what LGBTQ+ trainer Anna Marsden said to me at an event in Cambridge when, amongst other things I raised issues of how we as a city train and educate today’s parents, and adults in my generation of the things learnt and discovered by science and society since we left school in the 1990s – noting that the Education Select Committee called for a new generation of lifelong learning centres in every town (indicating a huge shortage).
The presence of new lifelong learning centres that don’t look like ‘school’ – and have so many things that would make people want to be there, is ever so important.
World in Action on 27 June 1977 looked at the case of a number of young people in Liverpool who left school and were struggling to find work.
“I’d still like to work – even if it was for very little, because it’s an experience more than anything else, to be part of a team. Because even if you are only in a factory, you are part of a team. And I s’pose that would be good because you strengthen yourself, your morale, everything about you. But when you’re on the dole you feel as if… …you’re wasting everyone’s time, money, and you’re living off other people’s taxes.”
Teenager Karen Gill, World in Action broadcast 27 June 1977
Ms Gill’s comments made me think about the ‘Gig Economy’ that has polarised opinion. For some, it’s the ‘free market’ in action – where workers compete for each individual delivery slot for takeaway deliveries. For others, it’s one of the worst examples of capitalism because they bypass workers’ rights on things like sick pay and holiday pay. It’s only at the very high end with very high commissions/hourly rates and where there is some sort of equal power between the worker and commissioning organisation that it seems to work better.
Combine that too with the choice of eating out at a cheap local venue versus ordering a takeaway, where each individual has their takeaway in their own rabbit-hutch of a newbuild flat. Instead of strengthening economies, it weakens them because it breaks the bonds of communities. It might make some individuals a lot of money – those owning the brand property rights. But the time being ‘on call’ and waiting? There’s no money in that.
The housing crisis compounding emptiness and loneliness
The phenomenon of young families being priced out of Cambridge isn’t new. Furthermore, the sense of emptiness of being left behind as those you grew up with ‘move on’ isn’t new either. I remember feeling similar as my cohort started university on that mechanical conveyor belt while I had opted to take a ‘year out’, but had not started full time work yet. I also recall a sense of Cambridge having ‘nothing left for me’ both just before I left for university a year later, and again in 2006 before I moved to London with the civil service. What was all the more striking looking back on it was that there was no active civic society movement actively inviting people to get involved in improving the city.
That seems to chime with some of the experiences other parts of the world have with people in towns and villages leaving because there’s nothing left. Dr Dace Dzenovska explains in a video for University College London here.
Above – Dr Dzenovska on emptying places.
For me there are two strands to this. The first is as Dr Dzenovska explains – the emptying of villages and small towns as people move towards jobs in the big and/or prosperous cities. This represents something of a public policy failure by ministers in terms of industrial strategy and transport strategy.
The second is a failure of housing policy where people are unable to stay living in their local area even if they want to because that is where their social support networks are. And because ministers have not put any value on those social networks. Hence combined with their policy of austerity in local government, we ended up with this horrible concept of London’s councils looking to ‘export’ council tenants and those on council house waiting lists. And where did they end up? In towns far away from their communities and in slum-like conditions.
“Ms Smith is one of hundreds of residents placed at Terminus House in Harlow by councils in and around London, often many miles from everything and everybody they once knew.”
BBC News April 2019
The haphazard nature does not feel like the lessons from Basingstoke’s local history have been learnt, nor does it feel like policy makers have remembered lessons from previous attempts to improve the housing situation for the many – such as this introduction to the public on housing policy from 1939 by Elizabeth Halton
A lack of a shared history
Without the employment and community institutions to bring people together on an informal and day-to-day basis, and without the tools and the means to go about improving their local neighbourhoods collectively, we end up in a situation where too many of us lack that shared history. Ironically for someone who researches on the local history of my home town, I feel that disconnection intensely – one also compounded by Cambridge’s high population turnover. I’ve lost count of the number of people I got to know over the past decade who for various different reasons found they had to leave Cambridge.
In my case, combine all of the above with my not great health, and my ability to connect or re-connect with anyone is now something that is beyond me. CFS/ME means that I’m already exhausted by the time I get to a venue for anything. Which is hardly the most sociable state of mind to be in when meeting up with other people.
“Emptiness as a phenomenon looks like it’s caused by a combination of very strong forces and also major government policy failures”
I’m not qualified to go into the detail of the individual healthcare analysis or psychological analysis – but that is something that medical researchers and social scientists need to get together and work through. I also wonder whether that sense of despondency, despair, and disillusionment is caused by the multiple public policy failures over that extended period of time starting with David Cameron’s premiership – or even before then with the Banking Crisis. For which no one in the UK’s banking industry got jailed.
Above – both Tory and Liberal Press came up in the top two hits on Britain Everything Breaking.
The ultimate paradox for me is that emptiness feels like a very personal and individual burden – yet is also one that (from my perspective) is not something that can be responded to on a one-to-one basis alone, but rather through some very big public policy actions. And at the moment I can’t see many of these on the horizon.
Can you?
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Below: The House of Commons Library published this briefing pack on loneliness as a public policy issue back in June 2021
The Cambridge Town Owl 