Loneliness, neoliberalism and 'enough' at work

One of our learners, in higher education, wrote this after a module on workplace mental health:

“We should value good mental health because it is healthy, not because it is profitable. I have learnt a lot in this module about how ‘the machine’ values our mental health, which has been enlightening, but also a little sad for me personally.”

They’ve noticed something we’ve been trained not to.

Loneliness as internalised neoliberalism

Richard Murphy argues that the loneliness crisis isn’t caused by phones, or by a generation gone soft. It’s caused by internalised neoliberalism. We’ve been taught to measure ourselves by income, status and what we own, and to compete instead of connect. The loneliness figures he uses, from the ONS, show the same trend. Between 2016 and 2025, the share of people who feel lonely often or always rose from 5% to 7%. The share who never feel lonely fell from 24% to 19%. It’s worst among 16 to 29 year olds, the ones who’ve never known anything else.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have spent years measuring what inequality does to people. Their work shows that the more unequal a society becomes, the harder we measure ourselves against each other, and the more anxiety, distrust and distress follow, not only for the poorest but across the whole population. Status competition isn’t a personality trait. It’s what inequality does to people.

Withdrawal isn’t weakness

You can see the withdrawal everywhere. Young people out of work and education. Fewer relationships. People spending more time scrolling and less time with each other. It gets read as fragility. A resilience problem. Something wrong with them.

I’d put it the other way round.

People aren’t withdrawing because they’re weak. They’re withdrawing from systems that only value what they produce. And the workplace is where that lesson gets taught most clearly. Ranked by output. Measured by job title. Always another target, never quite enough. Then we hand someone a self-care checklist and a mindfulness webinar, and wonder why they’ve checked out.

You can’t app your way out of a culture that tells people they’re only worth what they produce.

The antidote is a word we treat as soft: enough

Murphy’s antidote is a single word: enough. And a workplace can actually choose it. Set targets people can meet, and stop the next one arriving before the last is done. Decide that people matter because they’re well, not because they’re useful. Make connection the point of the place, not a perk bolted onto it. Notice the person before the output.

That isn’t the soft option. It’s the most direct fix we’ve got for a problem we keep calling complicated.

The learner who wrote that reflection never used the word “neoliberalism”. They worked it out for themselves, saw what the machine was really asking of them, and found it sad. I want more workplaces to be brave enough to see it too.