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What do the loneliness epidemic, falling rates of adolescent drinking and dating, and worsening mental health among teenagers and young adults have in common?
For starters, two of them are disputed to some degree. The paucity of solid historical data on loneliness has led some to question whether there has been any rise at all, let alone an epidemic. And on young adult mental health, some argue that a significant portion of the observed increase in problems is simply picking up cases that would previously have gone undiagnosed, while others point to misleading statistics.
Sceptics are not wrong to raise doubts, and there has almost certainly been a degree of overstatement. But as time passes and both data and testimony mount, there is growing acknowledgment that the absence of concrete causal evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. Indeed there is an increasing sense that these phenomena may not only be real, but all part of the same wider shift: plummeting in-person socialising among young people.
Until recently, the evidence on loneliness was weak at best, but surveys that previously showed it declining among US high school seniors now show steep climbs. In the UK and Europe, new data published in 2024 shows a marked rise in loneliness among people in their twenties. This mirrors patterns in socialising, or rather the lack thereof. As the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote last week, we are increasingly living in the antisocial century. Far from being a US-specific trend, this is sweeping the western world. The share of young people on either side of the Atlantic who regularly meet up socially with friends, family or colleagues has dropped sharply. In Europe, the share who don’t even socialise once a week has risen from one in ten to one in four.
People in their teens and twenties now hang out about as much as someone 10 years older than them did in the past. Not so much a case of 30 being the new 20, as 20 being the new 30. Less hanging out and less partying means less sex and less drinking. Both are developments that have been welcomed by the public health community, but they mask a darker side.
Trends in time spent alone are an almost exact parallel of trends in mental health, where rates of mental distress are mounting among the young, but not the middle-aged or older. A wealth of public health research suggests the two are not merely coincidental but causally linked. Time spent alone is strongly associated with lower life satisfaction and even elevated mortality.
Some of the most valuable evidence comes in the form of detailed time-use records from the US and UK, which show a marked increase in time spent alone among teens and young adults over the past decade, but little to no change among older groups. Most importantly, this diary data also captures how people are feeling over the course of their day as they do different things with (or without) different people.
A clear and consistent finding is that more time spent alone is associated with lower life satisfaction, and people report lower levels of happiness when performing the same activity alone compared to with a companion. Using the levels of happiness and meaningfulness that Americans ascribe to various activities in these records, I find that the deterioration in young people’s life satisfaction between 2010 and 2023 can be explained to a substantial degree by changes in how they spend their time.
The most obvious culprit in terms of timing and age gradient is the proliferation of smartphones and hyper-engaging social media, which has kicked into overdrive with the era of short-form video. Of all the dozens of activities rated in the American time-use data, solitary hours spent gaming, scrolling social media and watching videos are rated as the least meaningful.
The fact that these ratings are given by the very teens and young adults spending hours glued to their devices underscores the tragedy at the heart of this story: the people suffering are on some level aware of what’s going wrong, but seem powerless to prevent it.
The last decade is a story of young people retreating from the pursuits that bring them the most fulfilment, and replacing them — consciously or otherwise — with pale imitations. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the damage in any given moment is too subtle to cut through, but several years in we may be starting to reach a roiling simmer.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch
