90-year-old man writes tips to combat loneliness after losing his wife and sister
LONDON -- After 90-year-old Derek Taylor's partner and sister passed away, he felt extremely lonely.
Faced with the prospect of no-one to talk to, he decided to do something about it.
"I thought, what can I do to stop being lonely?" said Taylor, who is Manchester based, in a BBC interview. "The older you get, the less people seem to contact you."
Sadly, Taylor isn't alone in experiencing loneliness at a later stage in life. According to Age UK statistics, only 35 percent of people over 65 spend time with friends most or every day and, alarmingly, 12 percent never do.
Nine percent of people over the age of 65 say they feel cut off entirely from society, and half of all older people -- around 5 million people in the UK -- consider television their main source of company.
So he wrote a list of ways to combat loneliness.
"Some of the tips were to use the phone more often," says Taylor. "Get in touch with neighbours. Try and socialise and meet as many people as I possibly could do."
He shared his tips with Manchester City Council, who put them in a leaflet about Manchester's "Age-Friendly" outreach work.
Taylor followed his own advice.
He went along to coffee clubs and made friends. Now he's involved in all sorts of local activities including gardening and helping to get resources for his local communities.
"Coffee mornings are an ideal chance to discuss current events, including plans for future projects for the over-50s, and how homes and neighbourhoods can be designed to be age-friendly," Taylor explains in the leaflet.
"You feel as though you're alive again," he said.
BRB, sobbing. ðŸ˜
Topics Mental Health
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
