Transcript: Episode 18 - Kodokushi: The Lonely Death Epidemic Nobody in the West Is Talking About

Hey everybody, and I hope you are having a great week so far. Today's show is going to be a little deep. It's a conversation that I've been wanting to have for some time and for some might find it depressing.

Some might find it absolutely ludicrous that this is occurring, but we need to have this conversation as a society and as just human beings. And I want to start it off with a word, and it's a Japanese word, and that word is Kodokushi. And it translates roughly to lonely death.

And it means exactly what it sounds like. A person dies alone in their home and nobody notices. Not for days, sometimes not for weeks, and even sometimes, unfortunately, not for months.

Now in Japan last year, nearly 77,000 people died that way, 77,000. And in over 7,000 of those cases, the body wasn't found for more than a month. Now I want you to sit with that number, I really do, because this is what bothered me.

Not as a statistic, as 77,000 individual human lives, each of which ended in complete silence, with no one close enough to notice that they were gone. That's exactly what I want to talk about today. Not because it's a Japan problem, because it isn't.

It's like I said, it's an us problem. Now Japan started tracking lonely death seriously about a decade ago, so about 10 years ago. And what they found was disturbing enough that they eventually created an entire government ministry to address this issue.

A minister of loneliness. Now let that sink in for a second. A country so alarmed by the scale of its isolation crisis that it appointed a cabinet level official to specifically fight it.

Now Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world. About 30% of its citizens are over 65. And the birth rate has been falling for decades, and we've heard this through the news and through reports that you've read.

Younger generations have moved to cities for work, you know, especially like big cities like Tokyo. You know, the traditional family structure, multi-generational homes, elders at the center of community life, that has been steadily eroding over time. And what happens when you combine an aging population with weakened community structures and the steady disappearance of the touch points that used to keep these people connected? You get kodokushi.

Now a man in his 70s stops answering the door. Nobody thinks much of it. Maybe he went to go visit family or whatnot.

A week passes. Two weeks pass. A neighbor mentions they haven't seen him.

And then someone calls. No answer. Eventually, keyword there, eventually, someone goes to check.

And they find him. Days or weeks after he has died. Alone.

Now, again, you see why this bothers me. Because here's the detail I can't get out of my head. Now, researchers who study this say in many cases, the deceased had no idea they were isolated.

They thought they had a life. To them, it was business as usual. They had acquaintances.

They had routines. They had their television, their phone, their habits. What they didn't have was anyone who would notice within a reasonable amount of time if they had disappeared.

That is a different kind of alone. Not the occasional loneliness we all feel. Not the sadness of a quiet Saturday.

It's a structural aloneness built into the architecture of how their life was organized one small withdrawal at a time until the web of human connection had thinned to nothing. And as I said to you before, this isn't a Japan problem. And I know what some of you are thinking listening to this, if you've listened for some time here.

You're like, Michael, that's terrible. But Japan has specific cultural dynamics. It's an island nation with particular social pressures.

It's different here where we're at or wherever you're listening from. And I have just one question for you. Is it really? Let me walk you through something.

Because for here in Canada, think about what we've been watching here in Canada. If you're Canadian listening to this. Specifically in Ontario over the last few years.

Rural bank branches have been closing. The nearest branch is now 32 kilometers from Brussels, Ontario. And one is three and a half hours away from Marathon if you want to bank in person in northwestern Ontario.

Post offices consolidated. Hospitals and small communities are losing services. Main streets that used to anchor community life, they're hollowing out as big box retail and online shopping pulled people away from town centers.

And we're seeing this happen. You're witnessing it. I mean, church attendance is declining.

And I say that not as a religious argument, but as a community infrastructure argument. For millions of older adults, church was not primarily about faith. It was about showing up somewhere regularly.

And that's where people noticed if you didn't. If you're used to seeing this person on a weekly basis and then all of a sudden they're gone. And for a long time.

And that's gone for a lot of people. Or it's in the process of going. Now, layering the pandemic, two years of telling older adults to stay home, stay away from people, conduct their lives through a screen, which I've talked about over and over in episodes you've listened to or if you've gone onto our website.

For younger people, that was just disruptive. But for many older adults, it was the point at which the last threads of regular human contact quietly snapped. And nobody helped them to rebuild them.

Now, the conditions that produce kodokushi in Japan are not unique to Japan. They are assembling right now, as we speak, in small towns across this country, your country, wherever you're listening from. In apartment buildings in Toronto and Ottawa where a person can live for years without knowing a single neighbor's name.

And you know what I'm talking about because how many of you listening know your neighbors? Some of you don't. In rural communities where the infrastructure of daily life is being systematically stripped away in the name of efficiency. The only difference is we don't have a word for it yet.

We don't here have a minister of loneliness. What we have is a minister of finance. So how is Japan responding to this? Some of the responses are genuinely moving.

Neighborhood associations that organize regular door knocking. Community meal programs. Volunteer welfare check networks.

Human beings deciding that noticing their neighbors is a civic responsibility. And then there's the other response. AI companions.

Sensor systems in apartments that monitor whether an elderly person has moved recently. Chatbots designed to simulate conversation. Robots that sit in the corner and talk to you.

Now I need to be careful here because I don't want to be flippant. I understand why these technologies exist. I understand that a sensor system that detects when an 82-year-old woman hasn't moved in 24 hours might genuinely save her life.

I'm all about that. That's real and that is worth something. Because we all have loved ones that we care deeply about and this would be an amazing resource to have.

But I want to ask the harder question here. Is the goal to help people survive their isolation or to help them not be isolated? Which is it? Because those are not the same goal. And the technology being deployed is very good at the first one and structurally incapable of the second.

A sensor knows you haven't moved. It doesn't know you're lonely. It doesn't know that what you need is not a wellness check but a reason to get dressed in the morning because someone is expecting you somewhere.

An AI companion can simulate conversation. It cannot provide the thing that makes conversation matter. Which is that the person on the other end genuinely gives something of themselves and genuinely receives something from you.

That it costs them something to show up and that therefore their showing up means something. A machine shows up for free. Always with no effort, no sacrifice, no real presence.

That's not a connection. That's a simulation of connection though. And I think, I genuinely believe that a steadfast diet of simulated connection makes the hunger for real connection harder to satisfy, not easier.

So we are building increasingly sophisticated ways to help people feel less alone without actually making them less alone and calling it progress. I want to get uncomfortable for a moment because I think this problem, and we're honest about it here, is not primarily a technology problem or a policy problem. It's a moral one.

We live in a culture that has decided largely without saying so out loud that productivity is what gives a person value. That busyness is virtue. That efficiency is the point of almost everything.

We're all not project managers. Okay? And within that framework, an older adult who moves slowly, who needs time, who wants to talk, who can't operate an app without help, who makes demands on your patience and your schedule, is a problem to be managed rather than a person to be accompanied. That's what I was talking about earlier.

It's a society and it's human beings. This is a moral failure, not a personal one, a civilizational one. Now, Marcus Aurelius wrote, and I come back to this more than almost anything else he wrote, what injures the hive injures the bee.

Now, he understood something that a lot of modern thinking doesn't want to acknowledge, that we are not individuals who occasionally interact with a community. We are community creatures who have the illusion of individual independence. Our well-being is not separable from the well-being of the people around us.

When 77,000 people die in Japan in a single year with nobody close enough to notice, the hive is injured. Not just the bees who died alone, the entire hive, because a community that allows that to happen has lost something essential about what it means to be human. And the damage doesn't announce itself all at once.

It accumulates quietly year by year, withdrawal by withdrawal, closed branch by consolidated service, by deleted community, touchpoint, until one day you look around and the web is gone, and you don't know when exactly it happened. Now, I think about Epictetus a lot when I think about this too. He was a man who was enslaved, who had everything taken from him, property, freedom, autonomy, who lived under conditions of complete external powerlessness.

And he built a philosophy of radical responsibility, not the toxic kind, not the kind that says, if you're lonely, it's your fault, pull yourself up, because we've heard that one all way too much. That's not what he meant, and it's not what I mean. He meant within whatever circumstances you find yourself, you have a choice about what you do with your attention and your care and your effort.

For those of us who are not isolated, and if you're listening to hear, you're blessed. For those of us who are, by some measure, okay. Who have community and family and a reason to get up in the morning? Okay.

Some of us do, some of us do not. But his question, the one that sits inside everything he taught would be this. What are you doing with that? Who on your street do you not know? Who in your building has a name you've never learned? Who used to come to things and stopped showing up? And you noticed, but you didn't follow up because life is busy and it's probably fine.

The technology response to Kodakushi instills a sensor in a stranger's apartment so someone will know within 24 hours when they stop moving. The Epictetus response is, know your neighbor well enough that you would notice before a sensor does. Listen to that.

Now I'm going to say something that might sound political. It isn't actually, or it shouldn't be. The infrastructure of community is not a luxury.

It is not an amenity. It is not a nice-to-have that we fund when things are going well and cut when we need to balance the spreadsheet. It is the thing that determines whether people die alone.

When a bank branch closes in Brussels, Ontario and the nearest one is now a 32-kilometer drive, it is not just a banking inconvenience. It is the removal of a touchpoint, a reason to go to town, a place where a teller knows your name and notices if they haven't seen you for a while. These things are connected.

All of it is connected. The branch closures, the hollowed-out main streets, the consolidated services, the digital-only options that assume everyone has reliable internet, the confidence to use it safely, and someone to call when something goes wrong. Every one of those decisions is made in isolation by someone looking at a spreadsheet and justified on economic grounds.

But the cumulative effect, the thing that no single spreadsheet ever captures, is that the web holding older adults inside a community gets thinner and thinner and thinner until one day it isn't there anymore. And then someone installs a sensor. We need to have the conversation about what kind of country we want to be before we get to the sensor stage.

And again, wherever you're listening from, this pertains to you. Because once you're building the infrastructure to detect lonely deaths efficiently, you've already lost the argument about preventing them. Now, I want to leave you with something.

There is a Japanese word for the opposite of korokushi. It's called kizuna. It means bonds, connection, the ties between people that hold them inside a community, the invisible threads that mean someone would notice if you were gone.

Kizuna doesn't require a subscription. It doesn't require an algorithm. It doesn't require a sensor or an AI or even a government ministry.

It requires the decision to pay attention to the people around you. Look how basic that is. To learn names, to knock on the door, to notice something, to notice something, the absence of someone and do something about it before a machine has to.

It requires, if I'm being honest with you here, a kind of courage that our culture doesn't talk about much. The courage to make yourself responsible for someone else's visibility in the world. To say, I will be the person who notices.

That is not a small thing. It never was. Marcus Aurelius wrote it.

Seneca practiced it imperfectly for a lifetime. Epictetus built a whole philosophy on the premise that how we treat each other is the only thing that actually matters. And 77,000 people in Japan last year died to remind us what happens when we forget it.

I'm Michael. This is Tech 4 Grown-Ups. And today's question, the one I want you to sit with, it's pretty simple.

Who in your life would notice within a week if you disappeared? And who in your life would you notice if that list is shorter than it should be for you or for someone you know? Maybe that's where we start. Talk to me in the comments. I read every single one of them because I love the feedback and hearing from you.

And stay safe out there. Have a wonderful week. And I will see you next time.

Have a great day.