On June 25th 2010, Softbank’s Chairman & CEO Masayoshi Son has presented SoftBank’s Next 30-Year Vision. He tried to build the corporate vision working backwards from the answer on the question: “What would be the saddest thing in a human life?”. And the answer was: “Loneliness”.
Over the next 30 years and beyond that, technologies will change, new businesses will rise and fall, astonishing achievements in AI will surprise us. But the fundamental human desire to love, to be loved and to be needed are not going to change. As long as our species inhabit the Earth, the need for companionship and social connection will be around.
I recommend you to read Softbank’s vision here, as it truly thinks big. I don’t know any other company who even tried to outline something similar to it. 13 years passed after the publication and many things predicted by Masayoshi-san became a reality.
I have started to think about a concept of loneliness after I watched this video from Kurzgesagt. Our societies around the globe are on the path towards more isolation and lack of social connections. Coming back to Japan again, there is an appointed Minister of Loneliness from 2021. And Japan today is the projection of Europe 20-30 years from now.
Why loneliness is a very sad thing for humans and how does it affect us? The book Loneliness gives a detailed answer on this question. The first part explains how loneliness impacts physical and mental health, it shares details from different researches to demonstrate impact of loneliness on executive control, ability to self-regulate and etc.
The second and third parts of the book shows how social cooperation works in the nature and Homo Sapiens societies and why it is extremely beneficial for both society and individual to be cooperative and collaborative. It proves one more time that we are truly social animals.
The book has a lot of explanations of various experiments and research in social studies and behavioral psychology. I highly recommend the book to anybody how interested in learning more how to deal with loneliness. Overall, 5 out of 5 book.