Antidote to Loneliness

There is a statistic that, more than any other, tells the story of how Italian society is changing. For the first time in the country's history, living alone has become the most common living arrangement. Single-person households are now the most widespread type, surpassing both couples with children and couples without children. According to the latest Istat data referring to 2025, 37.1% of Italian households consist of a single person, whereas twenty years ago it was barely a quarter. The turning point, demographers explain, was 2022—the year in which singles outnumbered couples with children for the first time. And it is not just a matter of household numbers. According to Istat, 26.8% of Italians over sixteen state that they felt lonely at least part of the time, while 6.5% experience this feeling almost all the time; percentages that rise to 38.5% among those over 75 and reach nearly 47% among those living alone. And this picture does not only concern those who have already passed a certain age. Istat also estimates that within twenty years, 40% of the elderly will live alone without a cohabitant to rely on, but in reality, the phenomenon spans every generational bracket, from young people to fifty-somethings, from big cities to small towns.

But how is it possible to feel lonely with all the stimuli we have every day? We must immediately dispel a common myth: loneliness isn't felt only by those living alone within four walls. Increasingly, it is what one feels even when surrounded by colleagues, clients, and people. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, one of the world's most authoritative research institutes on work and employee engagement, in Italy one in five people grapples daily with a constant sense of loneliness at work, and the percentage rises to 25% among remote workers under 35. It comes as no surprise, then, that only 10% of Italian workers report being fully engaged in their work, one of the lowest figures in Europe.

It is a topic that the most attentive companies have stopped treating as a mere detail of individual well-being. Gartner, an international research and advisory company on work and organizational structure, openly defines it as a corporate risk, emphasizing that real connections among colleagues are in crisis, with a measurable impact on commitment, creativity, and productivity. And simply returning in person is not enough to solve it. People who feel isolated or lacking bonds with colleagues show a measurable decline in performance, even when sitting at the same desk every day. The real difference, analysts explain, is not made by physical presence itself, but by the quality of what happens within that shared space—whether it becomes an opportunity for authentic connection or remains a succession of hours side-by-side without anything truly meeting.

This is where the topic of loneliness stops being just a problem to describe and becomes a direct question for those who, like Teddy, build workplaces, offices, and retail stores every day where thousands of people spend a large part of their days.

Belonging is the opposite of being alone

If loneliness is, in the definition of experts, a discrepancy between the relationships we desire and those we actually live, its most natural antidote has a precise name: belonging. It is not an abstract concept, nor a corporate hallway slogan. It is something much simpler and much more concrete that manifests in knowing you have a place—whether a table, an office, a shift—where someone notices if you're not there, where you can share how your day went, where a joke shared during a lunch break or advice asked of a colleague before opening the store matters more than it seems.

It is the difference between being present and being present for someone. Between clocking in and feeling that, to some extent, that place belongs to you and you belong to it.

For Teddy, which lives through the people who enliven offices and stores every day across Italy and the world, this is not an incidental topic: it is a responsibility. Because a store is not just a place where a product is sold, just as an office is not just a place where a task is completed. They are, above all, daily communities. Small ecosystems of relationships where one can feel heard or, on the contrary, invisible. But stepping out of invisibility is not impossible. Alessandro Bracci, CEO of Teddy, reiterated this referring to colleagues during the latest company convention, the Teddy Happening. Sometimes, in fact, caught up in numerous activities, team managers might not notice the distress experienced by a person. This, however, does not mean you are alone. You can always turn to other colleagues; there is an entire community to ask, to trust with your questions and difficulties, and to connect with.

The antidote to loneliness, ultimately, does not require grand programs or complex solutions. It begins with minimal gestures, such as the possibility of truly talking with those working beside us—not just about operational tasks, but about how we are doing. It is no coincidence that the strongest teams—the ones where people stay longer and work better—are often also those where people feel freer to be human beings, even before professionals.