麻豆传媒在线

In sociology, isolation is generally understood as a physical lack of interpersonal relationships, while loneliness is understood as a subjective lack of interpersonal relationships. This means that while isolation is an objective concept, loneliness is a subjective one.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunities for social contact were restricted, and for many people, the time spent at home increased. According to the results of the "Survey on Changes in Lifestyle Attitudes and Behavior under the Influence of COVID-19" conducted by the Cabinet Office in May and December 2020 among approximately 10,000 people, more than 70% of child-rearing households responded that "time spent with family increased," and about 26% responded that "the husband's housework and childcare increased." As a result, about half of the total respondents stated that they "became more aware of the importance of family." For these people, feelings of loneliness are not apparent. This is because family is at the very center of the social lives of people raising children, and the pandemic concentrated family relationships rather than thinning them. However, it must be noted as a separate issue that the number of cases of domestic violence and child abuse has increased compared to before due to the prolonged time spent at home.

So, what about the younger generation who have not yet formed their own families? Even if interpersonal contact is restricted, many young people maintain interpersonal connections through SNS, so an isolated situation does not necessarily arise immediately. However, it must be noted that interactions on SNS overwhelmingly occur on top of existing interpersonal relationships, and their effectiveness tends to be limited to those who already have stable interpersonal relationships. For those at a stage of forming new interpersonal relationships—namely, new students in high schools and universities—the reduction in face-to-face contact opportunities means they cannot have the chance to form real-world interpersonal relationships, and it can be expected that they will often experience isolation and subsequent feelings of loneliness. In a survey conducted by the National Federation of University Co-operative Associations between October and November 2020 among approximately 11,000 people, about 35% of university freshmen cited "not being able to make friends" as a concern in their daily lives, and those who said "student life is fulfilling" stood at 56.5%, the lowest figure since the survey began. In this way, for people at a stage where they must form new relationships, the restriction of interpersonal contact opportunities due to the pandemic is thought to be creating feelings of loneliness, making them the group of greatest concern. In the case of our university, it seems that it is not easy for new members of seminars to make close friends within the group because they lack opportunities for face-to-face contact. In my own seminar as well, interaction across grade levels seems to have been extremely thin over the past two years.

On the other hand, for the elderly who are not very familiar with SNS, a decrease in interpersonal contact almost certainly leads to a state of isolation. In the aforementioned Cabinet Office survey, less than 20% of those aged 60 and over engaged in so-called online interactions "at least once a week," and more than half had no experience using them. Traditionally, the group for whom social isolation has been most concerning is unmarried men. Because men lead career-centered life courses, they often do not have a single friend in their local community before retirement. Consequently, their psychological dependence on their spouse becomes significant. In contrast, women often have stable interpersonal relationships in the community, such as those with "mama-tomo" (mom friends), and their kinship relationships are often more active than those of men, so their dependence on their spouse is not as great as that of men. For this reason, the death of a spouse signifies social isolation for men, but it is said that this is not necessarily the case for women. Furthermore, among the unmarried, those who are widowed or divorced often have children, and the relationship with their children often becomes a precious one, whereas in the case of those who have never married, they almost never have children, so family relationships are limited to siblings.

However, the problem of social isolation among elderly unmarried men has been pointed out independently of the COVID-19 pandemic. If interpersonal relationships were already thin to begin with, the impact of the pandemic is actually relatively small. Thinking about it this way, one cannot help but say that the problem of isolation and loneliness caused by the pandemic was greatest among the younger generation. People who seek to form new social relationships and "should have been able to obtain more social relationships under normal circumstances" had their interpersonal contact limited by the pandemic, leading to increased feelings of loneliness as they experience an unprecedented level of isolation. This problem can be predicted to be particularly large for those experiencing a new life that involves living alone away from their families for the first time. While such experiences of loneliness are accompanied by non-negligible problems such as deteriorating mental health in the short term, it cannot be said that there are no positive aspects in the long term, such as promoting individual growth. I intend to keep a close watch on these effects in the future.