The Loneliness Economy

The Liquidation of Belonging

von Arda Özta¿k¿n

68 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

What if loneliness isn't a feeling but a business model?

You've been told the cure is simple: go out more, join a club, download another app, learn to love yourself. "The Loneliness Economy" argues that this advice is a quiet act of misdirection. Modern isolation is not a personal failing. It is a predictable, engineered, and extraordinarily profitable outcome of the way we built the modern world.

In January 2018 Britain appointed a Minister for Loneliness. By 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General and the World Health Organization had declared it a public-health emergency. Loneliness has crossed from private sadness into public infrastructure - and a vast industry now profits from the vacuum where community used to stand.

Ranging across economics, sociology, and philosophy - from Polanyi and Durkheim to Putnam, Sandel, Klinenberg, and the latest data on social connection - this short, sharp book makes an unsettling case: markets cannot produce belonging, so they sell its synthetic substitutes instead. Recognition replaces significance. Networks replace communities. The signal of being needed is manufactured and leased back to us, one subscription at a time.

Inside, you'll discover: - Why the most hyper-connected cities report the highest isolation on record- The difference between being "recognized" and being "needed" - and why it quietly decides your wellbeing- How "machine customers" and the attention economy make the un-optimized human obsolete>This is not a self-help book. It won't soothe you. It hands you a colder, more useful tool: the truth about how your isolation became someone else's revenue - and the one question that can begin to undo it.

Where, and for whom, do you still matter?

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798181596566
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 14.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published