Noreena Hertz

“Laszlo Bock, the former head of human resources at Google, has investigated the optimal amount of “work from home” time.45 He found it to be one and a half days a week. With this combination, employees both have time to connect and build bonds with each other and also time on their own to do deeper, undistracted work.”
― Noreena Hertz, The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart

“Arendt wondered what drives an ordinary person to participate in or at least tolerate an industrialized plan to commit genocidal murder. Arendt sought to find out the main elements of Nazism to trace them back and to discover the underlying real political problems. In 1951 she published an iconic and controversial book on the subject the origins of totalitarianism. It is a wide ranging volume encompassing the rise of anti-Semitism, the role of propaganda and imperialism's fusion of racism and bureaucracy, but at the end of the book she turns to what appears to be a surprising factor loneliness. Totalitarianism bases itself on loneliness which is amongst the most radical and desperate experiences of man. Finding it said Arendt in those whose chief characteristic is not brutality and backwardness at his isolation and lack of normal social relationships, she argues that for those who feel they have no place in society it is through surrendering their individual selves to ideology that the lonely rediscover their purpose and self respect. Loneliness or the experience of not belonging to the world at all, is she writes the essence of totalitarian government, preparation of it’s executioners and victims. The loneliness Arendt echoes key aspects of my definition, feelings of marginalization and powerlessness, of being isolated, excluded, and bereft of status and support, and these dimensions of loneliness are clear and growing danger here and now in the 21st century.”
― Noreena Hertz, The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World That's Pulling Apart