Loneliness in young people: the most connected and the loneliest generation?

Sunday evening in a rented room. On your phone there are three group chats in which, for several days now, nobody has written anything meant for you. You scroll through forty stories: someone is at a concert, two are in the mountains, one is celebrating a birthday you weren’t invited to. You have a few hundred people in your contacts. When you think about who you could ring right now, just like that, for no reason, nobody comes to mind.

The next day, when someone asks “how are you?”, you answer “fine, lots of work”. Which is true. It just isn’t the whole answer.

Loneliness in young people has been written about a great deal in recent years, often under big headlines about a lost generation and phones. In this post I would like to do something calmer: look at what the research really shows, what it doesn’t show, and what you can do if you recognise yourself in the first paragraph. Without a sermon about how you ought to get out more.

Loneliness, solitude and isolation are not the same

Three words we tend to use as one. Solitude means you are on your own. That can be rest, it can be a choice, it can be something you badly need. Social isolation is a measurable fact: few contacts, few people, rare meetings. Loneliness is a feeling, the painful gap between the connection you have and the connection you would like.

The difference matters especially for young people, because often nothing shows on the outside. You can be at lectures, at work, in a sports team, in five groups on your phone, and be lonely. And you can spend a whole weekend alone with a book and not be. Anyone who measures loneliness by how many people are around you will miss exactly those who are finding it hardest. I explain the difference in more detail in Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything.

As early as 1973 the sociologist Robert Weiss distinguished two kinds of loneliness. Social loneliness lacks a circle to belong to. Emotional loneliness lacks one person who truly knows you. A young person may be missing one, the other, or both at once, and each calls for something different.

What the research shows about age

For a long time loneliness was thought of mainly as a problem of old age. Research in recent years has been correcting that picture. In 2018 the BBC, together with researchers from three universities, ran a large online survey known as the BBC Loneliness Experiment. More than 55,000 people took part. Among those aged 16 to 24, 40 per cent said they felt lonely often or very often. Among those over 75, the figure was 27 per cent.

That number needs to be handled honestly. The people who took part chose to do so, which means the sample is not representative. It is possible that those for whom the subject is personal were more likely to respond. Manuela Barreto and colleagues later published a scientific analysis of these data in which the same pattern appeared across different countries: reported loneliness was higher among younger people and declined with age.

Studies with representative samples point in a similar direction. Using a large German sample, Maike Luhmann and Louise Hawkley found that loneliness does not rise steadily through life. It is elevated in young adulthood and again in very old age, and fluctuates in between. So youth is no protection against loneliness. If anything, it is one of the periods when there is most of it.

It is interesting why this went unnoticed for so long. A young person is surrounded by people: classmates, flatmates, colleagues. From the outside it looks as though nothing is missing. And because it seems to them that everyone else is connected, they keep quiet about it.

Why now: circles on the move

Until the end of secondary school, life itself mostly provides your circle of people. The same class, the same bus stop, the same training session. You don’t have to do much for friendship; turning up is enough. Then, within a few months, it all scatters. Some go to study in Ljubljana, others in Maribor, others abroad, and some stay and start work. For the first time in your life, the circle that was simply given has to be built.

On top of that, more transitions are packed into these ten years than into any later decade: university, a first job, moves, the beginnings and ends of relationships, returning to your parents or leaving them. Each transition severs some ties. In Slovenia this has a particular flavour. Young people here leave the parental home among the latest in the European Union, and many students travel home every Friday. So you can live for years between two places and never really put down roots in either: in your home town the old crowd is gone, and in the city where you study you are the one who is gone at weekends. More on this period in Between 20 and 35: why this is the key time for becoming independent from your parents.

The third part is expectations. If loneliness is the gap between what you want and what you have, it grows not only when contact runs short but also when expectations rise. And at twenty they are high. These are supposed to be the best years, the time of great friendships and great love. Anyone spending them mostly in their room feels, on top of loneliness, the shame of failing at something that is supposed to happen by itself.

Is this generation really lonelier than earlier ones?

The headline “the most connected and the loneliest generation” sounds good, but it is firmer in its first half than in its second. That young people today are technically more connected than ever is true. Whether they are also lonelier than their parents were at the same age is harder to show, because that would require the same measurements across decades.

The closest we have is a meta-analysis published in 2021 by Susanne Buecker and colleagues. They combined studies in which young adults in different decades had completed the same loneliness questionnaire. They found that average loneliness among young adults had risen over time, but the shift was small. That is rather different from the picture of a sudden epidemic.

What is more solid than the comparison between generations, then, is what we see within one: young adults are among the loneliest age groups. It is entirely possible that this was also the case thirty years ago, only nobody asked.

Social media: neither culprit nor cure

The quickest explanation for loneliness in young people is the phone. Understandably, since it is the most visible difference between today’s twenty-year-olds and earlier ones. The research is more cautious than the headlines.

In 2019 Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski analysed three large datasets on adolescents. The association between digital technology use and well-being was negative but very small: it explained at most 0.4 per cent of the variation in well-being. Their study measured adolescents’ general well-being, not loneliness specifically, and it speaks of an association, not a cause. Even so, it is a good reminder that a single explanation probably does not carry all the weight.

On the other side is an experiment led by Melissa Hunt at the University of Pennsylvania. It involved 143 students. For three weeks one group limited their use of three social media platforms to ten minutes a day each, while the others used them as usual. In the first group, loneliness and depressive symptoms decreased. The experiment is small, short and from a single university, so it should not be turned into a rule. But it does suggest that, for some people, less scrolling means less of a feeling that life is happening somewhere else.

A review by Rebecca Nowland, Elizabeth Necka and John Cacioppo helps bring the two findings together. Their conclusion: what matters is what social media is used for. When you use it to supplement contact in person, to make plans, to keep up a bond with a friend who has moved abroad, it reduces loneliness. When you use it to replace contact and to retreat from the discomfort of meeting face to face, it increases it. And lonely people, the authors warn, are more inclined towards precisely the second kind of use.

For everyday life, this means a more useful question than “how many hours” is this: how do you feel when you put the phone down? More connected, or emptier? What constant measuring against others does to your self-image is the subject of Comparing yourself on social media: what constant measuring does to the brain, and when a habit becomes a problem is covered in Phone and screen addiction: habit or problem?

What loneliness sounds like at twenty

It rarely sounds like “I’m lonely”. More often it sounds like “I haven’t got time”, “everyone’s boring anyway”, “I prefer being on my own” or “I do have people”. Sometimes it looks like too much work, sometimes like nights of box sets, sometimes like a relationship you stay in mainly so as not to be alone.

What carries the most weight is what doesn’t get said at home (the conversation is composed; this is not a real person):

“How are things in Ljubljana?”
“Fine. Lots of work.”
“Have you got people to spend time with?”
“Yeah, yeah. We’re all in lectures together.”
“And at weekends?”
“… Mostly I’m in my room. I didn’t know how to tell you without worrying you.”

There are two things in that last line. The first is loneliness. The second is the effort to make sure nobody notices. That effort is often more tiring than the loneliness itself, and it prolongs it: as long as everyone thinks you are fine, nobody invites you, and because nobody invites you, you conclude that nobody misses you.

Loneliness research describes one more trap. When you have been lonely for a while, you become more alert to signs of rejection. You read an unanswered message as “they don’t want me”, although it is far more likely that someone forgot. So you withdraw before anyone has the chance to turn you down. How much even the suspicion of rejection can hurt is described in Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD): the sensitivity we rarely name.

What helps, without the sermon

The advice “get out and meet people” is about as useful as “be less sad”. If it were that simple, you would have done it already. A few things that make more sense:

• Repetition before depth. Friendship rarely comes from one good conversation. It comes from meeting the same people again and again, without any special effort. That is why a club, a choir, a climbing wall or volunteering work better than a one-off event where you know nobody. More in the entry on Friendship in adulthood.
• One person is enough to start with. You don’t need a crowd. You need one person you can text “bad day”. The circle usually builds from there.
• You do the inviting. Many people are waiting for an invitation and are glad to get one. Whoever invites risks a no, but is also no longer waiting.
• Voice before text. A voice message or a short call carries more than ten texts. A ten-minute walk to the bus stop with a classmate is worth more than an evening in a group chat.
• Old ties cost less than new ones. Writing to a friend from school whom you lost touch with, without any falling-out, is easier than getting to know someone from scratch.

And one thing that is not a task: solitude that suits you is not a problem. If you like being on your own and feel nothing is missing, there is nothing to fix just because others think you ought to be more sociable.

Exercise: one contact a day for a week

The exercise is not meant to get you friends in a week. It is meant to test the belief “nobody cares about me” against real responses rather than in your head. You can start today.

1. Write down three names. Three people you have at some point felt comfortable with and are not in conflict with. It could be a classmate, a cousin, a former flatmate, a colleague from a student job.
2. Write to the first one today. Short and specific, without apologising for the silence: “I thought of you when I walked past our old canteen. How are you?”
3. Don’t measure how fast they reply. Put the phone down. If there is no answer by evening, that says something about their day, not about you.
4. The next day the second, the day after the third. Suggest something small in person to one of the three: a coffee between lectures, a walk, lunch together.
5. At the end of the week, write down what actually happened. How many replied, how you felt before sending and how you felt after. Compare it with what you expected.

With an exercise like this it often turns out that the hardest part was pressing “send”, not the reply.

Where this explanation falls short

So far I have written as though loneliness in young people were mainly a matter of transitions and habits. Often that is true. But not always, and then advice about invitations sounds like mockery.

When depression lies underneath. If nothing gives you pleasure any more, if you are tired for no reason and feel you would be a burden to others, you are not withdrawing because of loneliness; the loneliness is a consequence of the withdrawal. More in Why depression makes you withdraw just when you need people most. In that case the first step is a conversation with your GP.

When fear of people lies underneath. With social anxiety you miss people no less, but every meeting is tied to such a strong fear of being judged that you avoid it. “Just invite someone” does not help here; what helps is gradual work with the fear, with professional support where needed.

When people really did reject you. Someone who has been excluded or bullied, who is different from the majority around them, or who, being neurodivergent, finds the unwritten rules of socialising harder to navigate, is not lonely because they haven’t tried hard enough.

When the reasons lie outside you. Expensive housing, working alongside your studies, long commutes and insecure jobs take away the time and space in which friendships could form at all. Loneliness is not only a personal matter; it is partly a consequence of how young people’s lives are organised.

When the thought comes that nobody would miss you. This is no longer a subject for an exercise. In Slovenia, call the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day) or the mental distress line on 01 520 99 00 (between 7 pm and 7 am); under-18s in Slovenia can call the TOM helpline on 116 111. In immediate danger, call 112. More in When you think it would be better if you weren’t here: on suicidal thoughts.

When it makes sense to look for help

Loneliness in itself is not an illness and needs no diagnosis. It is a signal, rather like hunger, telling you that you need something. Talking to a professional makes sense when it has lasted for months and isn’t shifting, when you notice you are avoiding people even though you miss them, or when the same feeling returns in every new group and every relationship. Then it is worth asking where you first learned the belief that there is no room for you. Long-lasting loneliness is also linked to physical health; I write about that in Loneliness and health: what the research shows and what it doesn’t.

As a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision, I am being trained in relational family therapy, which is interested in exactly this: how we learned to be close in our first relationships and what we carry forward from them. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. I do not work individually with under-18s; if you are the parent of a teenager who is withdrawing, family therapy may be the right route.

What to remember

• Loneliness is a feeling, solitude a state, social isolation a fact. You can be lonely among people, and not necessarily lonely when alone.
• Research shows that young adults are among the loneliest age groups. That this generation is substantially lonelier than earlier ones is less certain.
• The main reason is transitions: the circle that was given breaks up, and a new one has to be built under high expectations.
• Social media helps when it supplements contact in person and harms when it replaces it.
• Friendship comes from repetition. One person and one small step a day is a better start than a grand plan.