Loneliest

It's been a big week for interesting stuff from History Extra and The Economist. I want to share the one story that most blew me away. It's from The Economist Xmas Special, which is a double edition; the extra stories, about 30 of them, are on more Atlantic-ish general interest topics than their normal fare. I read maybe 2/3 of them, they were all OK, but this one most caught my attention:

Consider loneliness across countries. If you are like me, and I suspect most people, you might vaguely believe that countries like Congo and Tibet, full of economic suffering as they are, at least have better interpersonal relations and therefore less loneliness. As opposed to countries like Canada and France, where, maybe, you have a mental image of people addicted to their phones and often deeply lonely.

Well, it turns out that, according to Some Study That The Economist Found Credible, the opposite is true. At the level of countries, there is a strong correlation between poverty and loneliness. For that reason, the posited Loneliest Country In The World isn't Finland or Canada.

It's Madagascar. A country so poor that more than half of the people don't have access to running water.

(It isn't the poorest country in the world, but it's close. Naturally definitions vary, but the last reliable list I saw named Malawi as the poorest).

Nobody can say for sure, but the general thought is that if you are dirt poor, you have no options. You might live in close proximity to lots of people, but you might hate all of them. In Canada, you, generally, at least have the option of living somewhere and doing things that might make you less lonely.

Cool, huh?