Why today’s young feel lonelier than grandparents

Helen Coffey, The Independent

Recently, an academic told me a story so bleakly indicative of the times we’re living in that I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. It concerned her 18-year-old students, and the way they behaved in the first lecture of the year. In times gone by, these freshly minted adults would have instinctively introduced themselves to each other — said hello to the person sitting either side, exchanged names and pleasantries for a few minutes. But she had observed something very different occurring over the past decade. These young people would now sit down and wait in silence, avoiding eye contact and usually scrolling on their phones, until she began her lecture.

“I have to ask them to introduce themselves to each other now,” she told me. “They don’t talk. They’re tense, they’re anxious, they’re nervous. They need to be invited to engage with their neighbour in a way that I find concerning. It seems part and parcel of an increase in isolation that gives you the false friend of a TikTok video as an unfortunate replacement for a human interaction.” As Australia introduced a blanket social media ban for the under-16s yesterday, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, urged children to instead spend time playing sports, doing hobbies, and hanging out with friends and family.

“Above all, make the most of the school holidays coming up rather than spending it scrolling on your phone,” he said. “Start a new sport, learn a new instrument, or read that book that has been sitting there on your shelf for some time. And importantly, spend quality time with your friends and your family. Face to face.” While he was mocked by some for his condescending tone, underneath it lay an important point.

The word “loneliness” conjures up, for many, a picture of someone elderly — silver-haired, morose and staring plaintively out of the window. But that is an outdated picture. The more data we get about loneliness, the more apparent it becomes that this is now a young man’s — and woman’s — game. The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey, for example, found that 31 per cent of adults aged 16 to 29 in England and Wales reported feeling lonely “often, always or some of the time”, compared to just 16 per cent of over 70s. Research from the UK government has suggested that those aged 16-34 are over five times more likely to struggle with chronic loneliness than individuals over 65.

Stereotypes can prove pervasive though, regardless of the truth. According to a recent poll commissioned by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), older people were believed to be lonely at least some of the time by 87 per cent of those surveyed, the highest proportion of respondents. This was double the reality: only 43 per cent of those aged 65 and over actually reported feeling lonely. Meanwhile, Gen Z had the reverse image problem: 57 per cent of people surveyed thought the younger generation were lonely, when in fact 70 per cent of them reported feeling this way. At a time in life when we might expect people to be at their most social and gregarious, there seems to have been a stark behavioural shift. Compared to 20 years ago, Gen Z are spending far fewer “in-person” hours hanging out with friends, with those in their teens and twenties socialising about as much as someone 10 years their senior did in the past. Research has shown that today’s teens are far less likely to go to parties, go out with friends or date.

The decline in young people socialising at late-night bars or clubs has led to a quarter of all late-night venues in the UK having closed since 2020, amounting to nearly 800. And, while the dip in drinking culture among young people has been a win for public health in some ways, it has arguably proven detrimental in others; chronic loneliness has been linked to the kinds of poor health outcomes and early death more often associated with smoking.

Even for those getting lucky, they’re less inclined than ever to put a ring on it. Marriages in England and Wales have hit record lows, according to the most recent census data, as fewer and fewer young people tie the knot. The percentage of people who had never been married rose to 48 per cent last year, up from 44 per cent in 2002. Why does it matter that marriage seems to have fallen out of favour? The statistics suggest it is one of the most surefire ways to swerve loneliness. The Centre for Social Justice’s 2024 “Lonely Nation” report found that 30 per cent of married people felt lonely often or occasionally, compared to 39 per cent of couples who were cohabiting and 57 per cent of single people.

According to one US study, socialising times had already been declining since the 1970s but took a massive hit after 2010 — a time when, surprise, surprise, smartphones started to become ubiquitous. The dwindling of time spent face-to-face with friends has coincided with a huge uptick in screen time for young people. Between 2013 and 2024, the average number of hours a UK adult spent using a device or devices rocketed from 1 hr 36m to 4hr 20. But this is just the average — Gen Z were found to spend far longer glued to a screen, around six hours per day. In a 2024 report from the Pew Research Center, 62 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds said they are “constantly” online.

One might argue that screen time is socialising time. After all, a high proportion of those hours could be spent messaging friends or interacting with them via social media. However, these kinds of interactions seem to be a hollow facsimile of the real deal in terms of how they make us feel. In previous generations, happiness followed a U-shape — higher in the relatively care-free years of youth and retirement, lower during the grind of middle age.

But all that has changed. A paper commissioned by the UN and published earlier this year concluded that life satisfaction and happiness had fallen among young people over the past decade after analysing responses to surveys in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Researchers highlighted a link between this “happiness recession” and the rise of smartphones and social media.

“The young have become isolated,” co-author and former Bank of England policymaker David Blanchflower said at the time. “It’s also not so much that people are sitting there on the phone, it’s what they’re not doing. They’re not going out as much, playing with their friends, interacting with others. I don’t think there is any doubt you have an absolute global crisis.”