When Prison Feels Like Home: Lessons from The Lonely Century

Hi, it’s Diana from Healthy Seniors, and I’m continuing my series on books I’ve read and enjoyed. Last time I wrote about The Well-Lived Life by Dr. Gladys McGarey, the surgeon who lived to 103.

I’ve written about Noreena Hertz’s The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That’s Pulling Apart before, but writing this in mid-February, right after Valentine’s Day, it feels especially relevant to revisit. The book has been sitting with me for months now, and certain passages keep coming back to me, especially around holidays that highlight connection and loneliness.

Valentine’s Day just passed, and while some of us spent it with loved ones, the holiday has a way of highlighting what’s missing. According to recent research, about 23% of adults have negative feelings about the holiday. Fifteen million American adults say it impacts their mental health for the worse.

But Hertz’s book argues that our loneliness problem runs far deeper than one day on the calendar. And once you see it the way she describes it, you can’t unsee it.

The Stories That Stop You Cold

Hertz opens with stories that hit me in the chest.

In Japan, elderly women are committing petty theft deliberately to get sent to prison. Not because they’re criminals, but because jail offers something they can’t find outside: people to talk to, regular meals, someone asking how their day was.

Akiyo, an 81-year-old woman, was arrested for shoplifting food. Living on a pension of less than $40 every two weeks, she was hungry. But when CNN interviewed her at Tochigi Women’s Prison, she said something that should shake all of us: “There are very good people in this prison. Perhaps this life is the most stable for me.”

Her son, who lived with her before her arrest, used to tell her: “I wish you’d just go away.”

Inside prison, behind bars and locked doors, she found more warmth than she had in freedom. Guards at Tochigi report that some elderly inmates say they would gladly pay to stay there permanently. One prison officer noted: “At this point, it feels more like a nursing home than a prison full of convicted criminals.” You can read the full CNN story here.

Think about that for a moment. Prison became preferable to the isolation of everyday life. These women were stealing rice balls, small items, just enough to get caught. Just enough to go somewhere they wouldn’t be alone.

It’s chilling. But not hard to understand.

When You Have to Buy Friendship

Hertz didn’t just research loneliness from a distance. She lived it. In Manhattan, she rented a friend for the afternoon.

Her name was Brittany, hired through a company called RentAFriend, which now offers over 620,000 platonic companions for hire worldwide. Forty dollars an hour to grab coffee with someone. To attend an event. To just sit and talk.

Hertz also paid a woman to cuddle her, exploring the booming industry of professional cuddlers who charge by the hour for human touch. No sex, no romance. Just the physical contact that humans need and that so many of us are starving for.

These aren’t services for the deeply disturbed or the socially broken. They’re thriving businesses serving ordinary people. People with jobs and homes and smartphones filled with hundreds of social media “friends.” People who go days without anyone asking how they’re really doing. People who can’t remember the last time someone touched them with kindness.

One woman Hertz interviewed described her routine after her husband died: breakfast alone, a walk alone, lunch alone, TV alone. “I’m not sad,” she insisted. “Just... waiting.”

Another senior man admitted he would sometimes ride the bus all day, back and forth, just to be around other people.

These aren’t rare stories. They’re quiet echoes of what millions experience every day and don’t talk about.

When Benches Tell You to Move Along

Hertz shows how loneliness isn’t just a feeling. It’s being designed into our world.

Take the Camden Bench, a concrete block installed across London. It looks uncomfortable because it is. The design is intentional: no flat surfaces for sleeping, no edges for skateboarding, paint-repellent coating for graffiti, recesses at the base to prevent anything being hidden underneath. Every angle is calculated to make lingering unpleasant.

But what it really says to elderly people who need to rest after walking to the store, who want to catch their breath, who hope to strike up a conversation: you’re not welcome here. Move along.

The Guardian’s review notes how such benches are just one example of how our cities are being designed to fragment community rather than build it.

Some apartment buildings have “poor doors,” separate entrances for lower-income residents so they never cross paths with wealthier neighbors. Self-checkout machines replace cashiers who used to know your name. Warehouse workers wear wrist monitors that reprimand them for bathroom breaks, much less conversations.

We’ve built a world that treats human connection as inefficiency to be eliminated. And we’re paying for it with our health, our happiness, and sometimes our lives.

The Price We Pay

The statistics Hertz shares are staggering. Loneliness isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s deadly.

Being chronically lonely increases your risk of heart disease, stroke, and dementia by nearly 30%. It weakens your immune system. It raises your blood pressure. Statistically, it’s as harmful to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

More than 40% of adults over 65 report feeling lonely regularly. Nearly one in four seniors lives alone. Many go days without a real conversation.

But here’s what struck me most: it doesn’t have to be this way.

Hertz documents the Haredim community, an ultra-orthodox Jewish community whose members have relatively unhealthy diets, little exercise, low amounts of sunshine, and are relatively poor. Yet they have remarkable health outcomes. The secret? Their tight-knit community. Members spend nearly all waking hours together praying, volunteering, cooking, talking, being present for each other.

Community isn’t just nice to have. It’s medicine.

What We Can Do About It

This is where Hertz moves from heartbreak to hope. And this is the part that made me put the book down and think: what can I actually do? What can we do?

The Small Things That Matter

Even a “Good morning” to your mail carrier or a chat with the grocery clerk adds light to the day. We underestimate how powerful these micro-moments can be. They remind us we’re still part of something.

Try it next time you’re out: smile, wave, say hello. Make eye contact. You never know what that moment might mean to someone else, or to you.

Create Routines of Connection

Whether it’s a weekly coffee with a friend, a monthly book club, or calling a different relative each Sunday, social routines matter. They give us something to look forward to, a heartbeat of connection in the week.

One man Hertz mentions started a “chat bench” in his park with a little sign inviting people to sit and talk. At first, no one came. But slowly, people started showing up. Strangers became acquaintances. A simple bench helped build a community.

Make the First Move

Most people are waiting for someone else to reach out first. If you’re feeling disconnected, you’re likely not the only one. Call that old friend. Invite the neighbor over. Write that birthday card. Show up.

These gestures matter, and they ripple outward.

Redesign Our Spaces

Cities can install welcoming benches instead of hostile ones. Libraries can evolve into community centers with classes, meeting spaces, and programs. Parks can have playgrounds next to benches so grandparents and parents naturally interact while children play.

Community gardens, pedestrian plazas, and car-free streets create natural gathering points where conversations happen.

Build Intergenerational Connections

Some nursing homes now house preschools, allowing elderly residents to interact daily with young children. Studies show this reduces loneliness for seniors and teaches empathy to children.

Community centers can pair teenagers who need service hours with elderly people who need help with technology or just want someone to talk to.

Support Local

Chain stores optimize for efficiency. Local shops optimize for relationships. The owner who knows your name, remembers what you bought last week, asks about your mother creates small moments of connection that accumulate into community.

Every time we choose convenience over connection, we’re choosing isolation.

Join Something

Book clubs, hobby groups, volunteer organizations, religious communities all provide what researchers call “weak ties” that are surprisingly important for wellbeing. You don’t need deep friendships with everyone, but you need regular, repeated interactions with familiar faces.

Some communities organize “repair cafes” where people bring broken items and volunteers help fix them over coffee and conversation. Community kitchens, tool libraries, skill-sharing networks all create reasons for neighbors to interact beyond transactions.

Technology With Intention

Hertz is critical of how technology isolates us, but she’s not anti-technology. She advocates for tech designed to facilitate real connection rather than replace it. Apps that help organize neighborhood events, platforms that connect people with similar interests for in-person meetups, online communities that supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interaction.

That’s what we’re building right here on Substack. This platform brings us together around shared interests in health, aging well, and living meaningfully. When you leave a comment, share your story, or respond to someone else’s experience, you’re creating real connection. The key is using technology as a bridge to connection, not a replacement for it.

This Is Even More Relevant Now

The Lonely Century was published in 2020, just as the pandemic was forcing us into isolation. Reading it now, years later, its relevance hasn’t faded. If anything, it’s sharper.

The pandemic accelerated trends already underway: remote work, online shopping, digital-first interactions, the normalization of going days without meaningful in-person contact.

We saved time. We gained convenience. And we lost something essential.

The mental health crisis continues to worsen. More people live alone than ever before. And yet we keep designing systems that push us further apart.

But here’s what gives me hope about Hertz’s book: she shows that loneliness isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice we’re making collectively through our policies, our designs, our daily habits.

And choices can be unmade.

Akiyo, the elderly Japanese woman who found more community in prison than in freedom, told CNN: “Being alone is a very difficult thing.”

She’s right. Humans aren’t built for isolation. We’re built for connection, for belonging, for mattering to others and having others matter to us.

The Lonely Century puts into words things you may have felt but couldn’t quite name. It offers hope without sugarcoating the problem. And it’s a roadmap for finding our way back to each other.

Because the cost of our loneliness is too high, measured in shortened lives, damaged health, fractured communities, and the quiet desperation of people who would rather be in prison than alone.

If you haven’t read The Lonely Century yet, I genuinely encourage you to. It’s not just full of research—it’s full of real stories that stay with you. Keep a pen handy. You’ll find yourself underlining a lot.

Your Turn

What are you reading? I’m always looking for book recommendations, especially on themes of health, community, meaning, and how to live well in our complicated world. What’s on your shelf that I should add to mine?