Young people are far more lonely than I realised.

The issue came up in a conversation this week with some youth workers at Dreamscheme. We were reflecting on the concerns emerging from mentoring sessions in local schools, and one youth worker highlighted a major issue with loneliness.

Another worker fully agreed: “Last week was half term. I’d have been out playing football with my mates all week long. But when I asked young people what they did, almost every single one just said, ‘nothing’. They literally sat in their house all week, on their phones or playing video games.”

All were agreed that a growing number of the young people in our care are low on confidence and are extremely anxious about making friends with new people. One worker pointed to the pandemic as a possible cause.

“I suppose they’ve lost two years of learning how to communicate. Now it’s keeping them from talking to new people.”

The conversation got me thinking. Loneliness used to be primarily associated with the elderly - why is it now that young people are feeling lonely?

Why so lonely?

Loneliness happens when there is a mismatch between the quantity and quality of social relationships we have, and those we want.

This is one of the key insights from the work of Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau.

The concept of this discrepancy helps us understand why being alone does not necessarily mean being lonely. An elderly widow living alone may be quite content with her few remaining relationships. A 16-year-old girl may be surrounded by peers in school, have hundreds of connections online, and yet still may feel lonely.

According to multiple surveys, young adults are now the loneliest age group in the UK.

For example, in the Community Life Survey for 2020-2021, people aged 16-24 were more likely to say they feel lonely often/always (11%) than every other age group (3-7%).

Figure 1. The Community Life Survey is a household self-completion survey (online survey, with paper survey for adults not digitally engaged) of adults aged 16+ in England

What surprised me, however, was that youth loneliness is not a new, post-Covid problem.

Youth loneliness has been a growing problem over the past decade

In 2018 (pre-Covid), the BBC published these findings from their online survey called the ‘Loneliness Experiment’:

Figure 2. Findings from Loneliness Experiment, a survey of 55,000 people.

Another graph from the USA shows the decline in time spent with friends by age-group over the past 20 years. During the period 2018-2020, the Gen Z line was in free-fall:

Figure 3. Daily average time spent with friends. Graphed by Zach Rausch from data in Kannan & Veazie (2023), analysing the American Time Use Study. 

One reason for this decade-long decline in face-to-face relationships is technology.

Commenting on the Time with Friends graph in a recent post, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes:

‘…look closely at the line for the youngest group, ages 15-24, in blue. This age group used to spend 2 hours a day hanging out with friends because these are teens and young adults. Most are students, few are married. So 2 hours a day with friends was the norm right up to the time when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones, in the early 2010s.

Once they did that, they moved their social lives onto a few large social media platforms, especially Instagram, Snapchat, and later Tiktok. They were spending vastly more time online, even when they were in the same room as their friends, which meant that they had far less time for each other (in face-to-face interaction or physical play).

I suggest that this is why the effect of covid restrictions on teen mental health was not very large: Gen Z’s in-person social lives were decimated by technology in the 2010s. They were already socially distanced when Covid arrived.’

My Take

Those last two lines are worth repeating: ‘Gen Z’s in-person social lives were decimated by technology in the 2010s. They were already socially distanced when Covid arrived.’

Despite its considerable benefits, technology makes it too easy for young people to retreat from real time, face to face friendship.

The more time spent scrolling or gaming, the less time young people spend building confidence and making friends in real life. The danger is that young people reach adulthood without building the real-life social skills they need to form quality friendships, navigate work relationships and contribute as a good neighbour in the community.

Look up and say hello

More than ever, we need to call young people away from their screens and towards rich, three-dimensional community. It is here, face-to-face or side-by-side, that young people will find the cure for loneliness. The company of a few true friends will satisfy their hunger for relationship in a way that a 10,000 connections online cannot.

It is also in real-life community that social skills will flourish. The practice of talking to new people will build the confidence to talk to more new people. In the habit of conversation they will learn the art of conversation.

To be honest, we all need this challenge. Instead of retreating into the perceived comfort of our phones, we need to step out and engage with people right in front of us: the neighbour in the morning, the person in the queue, the stranger on the bus. And we need to prioritise the practice of conversation to maintain old relationships and make new ones.

As Adrian Chiles put it in his new opinion piece this week, “Loneliness is awful – so every day I try to start a conversation with a stranger”.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your comments. Feel free to reply!

Stephen