What do the loneliness epidemic, declining rates of teen drinking and dating, and worsening mental health among teens and young adults have in common?
First, two of them are controversial to some extent. The lack of reliable historical data on loneliness has some questioning whether there is an increase in loneliness, let alone an epidemic. When it comes to young people's mental health, some believe that much of the observed increase in problems is simply the identification of previously undiagnosed cases, while others point out that statistics are misleading.
Skeptics are not wrong to raise doubts, and there is almost certainly a degree of exaggeration involved. But as time went on and data and testimony grew, there was a growing recognition that the lack of specific evidence of causation did not constitute evidence of non-existence. In fact, there is a growing awareness that these phenomena may not only be real, but all part of the same broader shift: a sharp decline in in-person social interaction among young people.
Until recently, the evidence on loneliness was tenuous at best, but previous surveys showed loneliness among U.S. high school students was declining and are now showing a sharp upward trend. In the UK and Europe, new data released in 2024 shows a significant rise in loneliness among people in their twenties. This reflects social patterns, or rather the lack thereof. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote last week, we increasingly live in the sociopathic century. This is not a trend unique to the United States, but is sweeping across the Western world. The proportion of young people who regularly gather socially with friends, family or colleagues has fallen sharply on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the proportion of people who do not attend a social event per week has risen from one in 10 to one in four.
Teens and twenty-somethings hang out just as much now as people ten years older than they did in the past. Instead of saying 30 becomes the new 20, let’s say 20 becomes the new 30. Less hanging out and partying means less sex and less drinking. Both developments were welcomed by the public health community, but they masked a darker side.
Trends in alone time parallel those in mental health almost exactly, with rates of mental distress rising among young people but not among middle-aged or older adults. A large number of public health studies have shown that the two are not just coincidental but have a causal relationship. Time alone is strongly associated with lower life satisfaction and even higher mortality.
Some of the most valuable evidence comes from detailed time-use records in the United States and Britain, which show that the amount of time spent alone has increased significantly among teenagers and young adults over the past decade, but has shown little change among older age groups. Most importantly, these diary data also capture how people feel as they do different things with (or without) different people throughout the day.
A clear and consistent finding is that more time spent alone is associated with lower life satisfaction and that people are less happy than when they perform the same activities with peers. Based on these records of Americans' levels of happiness and meaningfulness across a variety of activities, I find that much of the decline in young people's life satisfaction between 2010 and 2023 can be explained by changes in the way they spend their time. .
In terms of time and age gradients, the most obvious culprits are the proliferation of smartphones and high-engagement social media, which have gone into overdrive with the advent of the short-form video era. Of all the dozens of activities assessed in U.S. time use data, solitary time spent gaming, browsing social media, and watching videos ranked as the least meaningful.
The fact that these ratings are given by teenagers and young adults who spend hours glued to their devices underscores the tragedy at the heart of this story: the people who are suffering are at some level aware that something is wrong problem, but seems powerless to stop it.
The past decade has been a story of young people abandoning the pursuits that brought them the greatest sense of fulfillment and replacing them, consciously or unconsciously, with pale imitations. Like the proverbial frog in the pot, the damage at any given moment is too subtle to undo, but in a few years we may start to reach a boil.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch