the times | Monday September 7 2020 1GT 7

life

Noreena Hertz and brainy (she took A-levels at 16,

finished her UCL degree at 18 and at

23 was setting up the first stock

exchange in Leningrad).

With an MBA and PhD to her name

and a controversial 18-month spell as

ITN’s economics editor (many decried

her as “too leftie”) behind her, she’s

now honorary professor at the

University of London’s Institute for

Global Prosperity. The first of her

books, The Silent Takeover, had Vogue

naming her “one of the most inspiring

women in the world” and earned her

the Nigella tag.

The real Nigella and her then

husband Charles Saatchi, as well as

the actress Rachel Weisz, were guests

at Hertz’s 2012 wedding to the former

BBC bigwig Danny Cohen. “But I’ve

definitely experienced episodes of

loneliness,” she stresses, sitting —

distanced — in a pub near her north

London home.

At primary school she was bullied

and excluded; she suffered bouts of

tonsillitis. “I didn’t understand at the

time, but now I know loneliness has

a physical manifestation.” Indeed,

research shows that lonely people

have a 32 per cent higher risk of stroke

and a 64 per cent higher risk of

developing clinical dementia. The

socially isolated are 30 per cent more

likely to die prematurely than those

who feel connected.

More recently, Hertz experienced

the loneliness of lockdown, home

alone with Cohen, but having to keep

two metres’ distance for fear of passing

on what she suspected was

I

n Manhattan last year the

academic Noreena Hertz,

dubbed the “Nigella Lawson of

economics”, was on a fun, girls’

shopping trip with Brittany, a

bouncy 23-year-old. The women

had never met before, but Hertz,

52, enjoyed Brittany’s company.

“She was attractive with a big smile,

she was an Ivy-league graduate, she

was smart and funny,” she says. “We

spent three hours wandering around

shops. It was fun. I felt like I was

making a new friend.”

The women were in Urban

Outfitters when everything changed.

“We were trying on sunglasses and

bucket hats when she looked at her

watch and it was like the meter had

stopped. She said, ‘That will be $120.’

Suddenly I remembered this wasn’t

a friendship, it was a transaction.”

Brittany had been leased by the

hour from Rent a Friend, a US

company operating in dozens of

countries worldwide, offering more

than 620,000 platonic friends who can

be ordered, like a Deliveroo, via a few

taps on an app. They, as the website

puts it, are available “to hang out... go

with you to a party or event... or to

show you around an unfamiliar town”.

“It sounded really suspect. I had no

idea if ‘friend’ was covert for ‘sexual

partner’,” Hertz says. “But Brittany

said sexual moves were incredibly

rare. Most of the people she saw were

thirty-to-fortysomething professionals,

women and men, who’d moved to

Manhattan, who often worked long

hours and didn’t have time to invest in

making friendships. They just wanted

someone to have dinner with.”

Hertz discovered the website while

researching her new book, The Lonely

Century, about the loneliness that —

even before social distancing — she

describes as the defining condition of

the 21st century. The result of

increasing automation, longer working

hours, growing use of social media and

the dog-eat-dog nature of many

societies, this sense of alienation

means that, even before Covid, one in

eight Britons didn’t have a single close

friend they could rely on, up from one

in ten five years previously, while

60 per cent felt lonely at work.

Services such as Rent a Friend are

booming, including one offering

professional cuddling. “Again, this isn’t

sexual; people are simply so starved of

company and affection they are

paying to be hugged.” Unsurprisingly,

the centre of such activity is Los

Angeles, where Hertz met Jean, who

for $80 an hour “strokes and holds”

people. “It sounded highly dodgy,”

Hertz says about her group session at

Jean’s “cuddle sanctuary”. “I was really

nervous, but the thing that blew me

away was how normal the participants

were, they looked like people you

might see at your local yoga studio.

“There was a bravery about them

because they were wearing their

vulnerability on their sleeves.

Someone would ask, ‘Can I put my

arm around you?’ and you’d give

consent. Cuddle groups weren’t my

cup of tea, but I could see the positive

benefit to others.” She was less

impressed by her one-on-one session

with Jean. “The group session felt

authentic; one-on-one felt very

transactional and uncomfortable.

I was constantly aware of the clock

on the wall.”

Yet others felt differently, as Hertz

discovered when Jean introduced her

to a regular client, Carl. “He was a

good-looking guy, in his fifties, nicely

dressed, divorced, who’d moved to LA

to earn a six-figure salary in media.”

Carl had no friends at work and often

went hours without speaking to

anyone. Online dating hadn’t worked

for him. “But going to see Jean

transformed his life. He made it very

clear this wasn’t sexual, but her

cuddles had helped him go from

feeling really down at work to being

super-productive.” So reliant was Carl

on this affection he had started paying

$2,000 a month to other cuddlers. “I

asked, ‘How do you afford it?’ He said,

‘I sleep in my car.’ This was a major

executive with no home, showering at

the gym, keeping food in the office

fridge, so he could pay for company.’ ”

Loneliness seems like an odd topic

for Hertz, who is glamorous, engaging

I paid a woman to cuddle me

Noreena Hertz

tried everything in

her search for an

end to loneliness,

she tells Julia

Llewellyn Smith

coronavirus (an antibody test later

confirmed this). “But at least I had

someone. On day four, my 82-year-old

widowed father messaged me: ‘I

wandered lonely as a cloud.’ That time

was very disconcerting for all of us.

We are hard-wired to connect.”

To Hertz, quarantine simply

accelerated a universal sense of

isolation that she had long been

observing, especially in the under-30s.

Many work in the gig economy, doing

antisocial hours and having no

meaningful interaction with

colleagues. One in five US millennials

says they have no friends.

“I’ve been teaching for quite a few

years and I realised my students were

much lonelier than they had been in

the past. They were coming into my

office to complain about it, but I also

saw it in the way they were so

uncomfortable interacting with each

other face to face. Group assignments

were very awkward.”

The president of one of the

US’s most prestigious Ivy League

universities told Hertz that so

many of its new intake was so

bad at interpreting face-to-face

conversations it was implementing

classes in “how to read a face in real

life”. “They were literally having to

be told, ‘If someone is frowning, that’s

a bad thing.’ ”

Hertz didn’t include the episode in

her book, but she rented a second

friend, Maria, a twentysomething

Hispanic American. “Maria confided

that the reason she’d signed up to

Rent a Friend was because she was

lonely. She felt bad when site users

didn’t pick her. I saw she was getting

fewer requests than Brittany; people

of colour were less requested generally

and having to charge less than the

white ‘friends’. She had serious

financial concerns and was obviously

very vulnerable.”

While isolation for the elderly has

always been an issue, Hertz was still

astonished to learn that in Japan

crimes committed by people over 65

— especially women — have

quadrupled in the past two decades.

Their goal is to be sent to prison,

which in the words of one 78-year-old

inmate, is “an oasis... with many

people to talk to”.

These stories aren’t just heart-

rending; from Hertz’s academic

perspective they are key to

understanding the worldwide rise of

far-right, nationalist movements.

“Loneliness isn’t just about craving

company, it’s also about feeling

unsupported by your neighbours,

colleagues, government,” she says.

“People who had joined organisations

like France’s Front National who have

maybe lost jobs, liked the sense of

community these parties offered

them.” Donald Trump, she

acknowledges, “redrew the political

map” by making people who had

previously felt abandoned feel heard.

This isn’t cheery stuff, but Hertz is

resolutely optimistic. “We’ve built a

lonely world, but, post-Covid, people

have revalued community, so we have

a chance to rebuild with compassion

and care. Writing the book could have

been depressing, but it left me feeling

empowered.” If you still feel dejected,

there’s always Rent a Friend.

Someone

asks,

‘Can I put

my arm

around

you?’ And

you give

consent

MARC NOLTE

The Lonely Century

by Noreena Hertz is

published by Hachette

on Thursday, £