The Loneliest Generation: How New Initiatives Emerged to Help Young Adults Navigate Loneliness During The Pandemic
Jesse García, a 21-year-old Filipino American, struggled to adapt to college. García, who had come from a special education school, thought he lacked the educational resources of his Manhattan College classmates, where he began a major in psychology in August 2019. He suffered from impostor syndrome and grew increasingly lonely. His mental health, steady for several years, deteriorated, and he started to experience breakdowns.
“I started scratching and causing abrasions to my arm in a way to cope out of fear of having an anxiety attack,” García said.
Loneliness, García said, contributed to his mental health decline, and after a few weeks enrolled in the program, he went on medical leave.
While he was at a day treatment program that helped him deal with anxiety and depression, he learned about College Re-Entry, a mental health support initiative for young adults, those aged between 18 and 30 years old. After getting a scholarship, on January 27, 2020, he enrolled in the program. He has fond memories of his first day there, of socializing in a common area filled with colorful chairs and a comfortable couch. “I felt it was so fun just to be there,” García said. “It felt intimate because of how it makes you want to gather around.”
Before COVID-19 hit New York in early 2020, he loved going to the College Re-Entry headquarters, located in a three-story brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen. “It was in a nice area and it really appealed to me,” he said. There, García went through a simulated university experience where he learned to act independently and felt empowered. College Re-Entry, part of the New York-based nonprofit Fountain House, provided García with an inclusive community of people of similar age.
“I felt like I wasn’t alone,” García said.
College Re-Entry is one of a rising number of initiatives dealing with the loneliness epidemic faced by young adults, which was already sweeping the country before the coronavirus. According to a 2019 study authored by Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, roughly 27 percent of 12th graders were getting together with their friends in 2017, down from close to 52 percent in 1976. Moreover, while entering college, students reported more than 13 hours a week of socialization with friends in 1987; that number dropped to nine in 2016.
Compared to other generations, Gen Z and millennials are the loneliest cohorts. According to Cigna’s 2020 Loneliness and The Workplace report, surveying a sample of 10,441 adults, almost 50 percent of Gen Z (18–22) and 47.7 percent of Millennials (23–37) suffered from loneliness in 2019. To compare, 43.2 percent of Boomer respondents (52–71), the oldest cohort surveyed, experienced this feeling.
COVID merely exacerbated an existing sociocultural challenge. According to a CDC report published in August 2020, 62.9 percent of people aged 18–24 coped with anxiety or depressive disorder related to COVID-19. Additionally, a Harvard Graduate School of Education study on the pandemic’s effects on loneliness stated that 61 percent of people aged 18–25 declared “serious loneliness” in October 2020.
Paula Yanes-Lukin, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University who specializes in anxiety and mood disorders, believes COVID has particularly heightened the social challenges of this age cohort. They are “missing out in a crucial period when they would be connecting with people on a deeper level,” she said.
García believes that this data reflects his generational struggle. As a Gen Z himself, he agrees that loneliness was a major concern before COVID, but the social isolation that lockdowns imposed worsened the issue. “Quarantine forced us to face those demons that we were trying to run away from,” García said.
COVID forced Anna Guimaraes, the program director of College Re-Entry, to adapt their in-person curriculum to the Zoom era. On Thursday, March 19, 2020, the licensed social worker told her students that their next class would be online. Guimaraes and her team thought they were going to temporarily replicate their program, but adapting to virtual became an ongoing process.
At first, her priority was to assist her students as they navigated the challenges of Zoom technology. Next, with the help of Orlando Solorza, a social work therapist who was interning there at that time, she learned how to engage students remotely through entertaining activities. For the fitness class, for example, they drew inspiration from Richard Simmons’ cheerful exercise videos and created visual content adapted to the physical constraints many students faced while locked at home.
“People were next to their bed, with whatever space they had, limited access to internet and family members watching,” she said. And, despite the Zoom fatigue they eventually faced, she added, “It worked. We were still there connecting.”
When College Re-Entry moved online, García didn’t feel really concerned, since he believed normalcy would return in a matter of weeks. His laptop was heavy and unwieldy, so he used his five-year-old phone to attend the classes from his room. He echoed Guimaraes thoughts: College Re-Entry offered an escape from the bleak environment.
“Because of how literally isolating COVID could be for a lot of people, having at least an hour, two hours, three hours in a day” in the company of others, García said, “really helped.”
Getting youths out of isolation and reducing the feeling of loneliness had always been one of College Re-Entry goals since its inception in 2014. According to Guimaraes, who started working at Fountain House in 2010, schools were not offering enough support services to students with mental illnesses, and many of them dropped out.
Through a 14-week semester core program that combines academic skills with peer support, College Re-Entry tries to foster bonds among people with shared struggles.
“Our program was created to provide a space for students who really didn’t have many other spaces set up for them,” Guimaraes said.
Until March 2020, College Re-Entry mainly took place close to the Fountain House’s headquarters, located in a building bought in 1948 by its founders, a group of formerly-interned patients at Rockland State Hospital. The collective, known as the We Are Not Alone Society, originated as a “mutual aid program for people discharged from state mental health institutions,” Alan Doyle, Julius Lanoil and Kenneth Dudek wrote in the book “Fountain House.” Building a community, added the authors, was the organization’s approach to recovering from mental illnesses.
Although the entire curriculum deals with loneliness in a holistic way, according to Guimaraes, courses like “The Art of Connecting” specifically teach the skills needed to deal with the issue. Introduced in 2020 as a seven-week course, it focuses on the interpersonal skills needed to build and maintain a relationship. However, even workshops not directly related to loneliness, such as those that prepare the students for a future job, can have a positive impact, said García. Having a greater purpose in life made him feel hopeful and more connected. “I feel like loneliness is also connected to boredom, and the more bored you feel, the more likely those lonely thoughts start to seep in your mind,” said García.
When the pandemic hit, strengthening connections became even more important, Guimaraes said. She and her team reached out to the 146-alumni network and developed affinity groups. Through a book club, a cooking class or an anime night, former and current students of College Re-Entry navigated through the challenges of social isolation together based on their common interests. For people like García, whose parents were working throughout the pandemic, these initiatives helped them cope with their monotonous routine.
The engagement rate varied and the in-person initiatives felt more active, but, as Guimaraes said, “The silver lining was a creative connection from students that we might not have otherwise been able to see.”
Unity is, indeed, what moves College Re-Entry’s youth forward. “We have people going through the same thing that [they] often do alone,” she said. “It’s a lot better if we can do this together because there’s momentum, energy, empathy [and] understanding.”
Combating loneliness has long been an aim of the Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact. As part of the 92ndStreet Y Jewish community and cultural center, located in New York, fostering community is one of its core values. In March 2020 however, the staff of the Center, led by its managing director Rebekah Shrestha, knew that they needed to tackle the problem more directly.
“With the pandemic hitting, we felt like there’s really a moment right now where there’s a crisis and we need to take action,” said Shrestha.
Last November, after several months of preparation, she and her team launched the Less Lonely Project. As an online campaign led by and for Gen Z that deals with COVID-related loneliness, it tries to normalize the conversation about the issue and raise social awareness. The Project is based on one of the Center’s most successful initiatives: Giving Tuesday, a digital movement launched in 2012 around the idea of radical generosity that eventually evolved into an independent nonprofit.
The focus on Gen Z youth loneliness is not casual. When they began to develop the project, they were surprised to learn that, contrary to popular belief, young Americans report feeling lonelier than their older generational counterparts. Despite the problem, they couldn’t find any program focused on this population, so they decided to direct their resources toward it.
“We noticed that there just wasn’t any conversation happening around the loneliness epidemic that Gen Z is experiencing,” said Alexandra Moreno, the Center’s project manager.
While younger generations have adopted a more open discourse towards mental health issues such as anxiety or depression, there’s a lot of stigmas attached to loneliness, understood as an individual failure instead of a shared social malaise. “It can be even harder for young people to talk about feeling lonely because it gives the impression that you’re doing something wrong, that you don’t have friends and that you’re not likable,” said Shrestha.
The Project is led by three 16-year-old Teen Producers: Queena Chen, Raphael Moy and Andrew Skoblov, who are currently pursuing a two-year paid internship at 92Y under Moreno’s supervision. Last semester, they were in charge of the development and production of the campaign content, and now they are currently focusing on the management, growth and monitoring of the campaign, said Moreno.
Moy, who said he struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, believes that Less Lonely provides the digital resources to deal with a pervasive struggle. “This program really made me realize how much of an influence loneliness has among the younger generations,” he said. “What we are doing, bringing connections and helping destigmatize loneliness, is very meaningful,” added Chen.
Through the use of #LessLonely, they hope to establish a global digital conversation where individuals create and amplify loneliness-related content on social media. Currently, they are focused on expanding their Creator Network, a virtual community for youths 15–25 that will meet once a month to share their perspectives and advise the Center on the campaign, said Moreno.
“We want to bring new voices to the space, we want to open up the room for people who might not know how to talk about this,” added Moreno.
The Teen Producers hope that Less Lonely will eventually help to reverse the negative impact social media has had on youth mental health. Reclaiming these digital tools for their benefit while fostering a sense of community is within reach, they believe.
“People should be comfortable on these platforms, sharing what they believe and who they are,” said Moy.
O n the freezing morning of January 22, Carlos Castellanos arrived in the Michael J. Buczek Ballfield, in Fort George, to prepare for the orientation of the Young Adult Leadership Development (YALD) Flag Winter League. When teenagers started to appear in the grass field enclosed by a high, black iron fence, Castellanos greeted them with an energetic “Good Morning!” Those who had been there before replied to him, but some of the new teens eluded his message, immersed in their own thoughts. The majority of them were people of color from the Bronx, Washington Heights, Inwood or Harlem. All of them were men, although Castellanos said that a woman participated in YALD for two years.
In 2011, Castellanos knew he needed to help his community’s youth. A Washington Heights native, Castellanos was worried about substance abuse among teens, and wanted to create a project that would help them talk about mental health and foster community. Teenagers wouldn’t gather on their own to talk about these issues, Castellanos said, so he founded YALD, a nonprofit to uplift underserved youth through sports.
“I wanted to use sports as a means to communicate with youths and foster a relationship among them talking about physical and mental health,” Castellanos said.
When he was a child, Castellanos used to play baseball in the dirt field that eventually became the Michael J. Buczek Ballfield, and he thought his community youth deserved the same opportunity. He invested his own money in the project, and with the support of local businesses, he developed two football leagues, in fall and winter, as well as two youth clinics that teach the basics of football and basketball. On Thanksgiving, YALD also holds the Turkey Ball, a one-day tournament open to any young adult who has participated in YALD since 2011.
After running several laps, the teens made a circle, and Castellanos explained to them what lay ahead. “You can’t be late,” he emphasized categorically. The cost of participation amounts to approximately $300: the individual fee is $75, while the rest is covered by YALD’s funds. With their registration, each player receives a uniform and a mouthpiece, and if they lose it, they will have to cover the expenses of an additional one with their own money. COVID diminished YALD’s funds, and Castellanos feared for its future.
“The pandemic affected me personally and mentally because I thought I was going to lose all this,” he said.
For Castellanos, the pandemic started on March 15, 2020. That day, he woke up, got dressed and drove to JFK with his girlfriend. They were planning to catch a connecting flight to Fort Lauderdale before arriving in Peru, where they were going to celebrate his birthday weekend. However, 30 minutes before boarding, as they watched TV hosts debate about COVID, a JetBlue supervisor told them their flight got canceled. “We recommend you try going back home as soon as possible, because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she added. They did. On the plane back, confused, they kept looking at each other eerily, unaware of what would come next. “I remember that day like it was yesterday,” said Castellanos.
With the closure of parks during lockdowns preventing Castellanos and his YALD team from playing, he had to develop a contingency plan. He bought a big whiteboard and, through Zoom, he divided the teenagers into teams and created different scenarios to explain to them the tools of football. “I wasn’t working, so I had a lot of time on my hands to teach these kids the mindset of a coach,” he added.
During that period, a lot of these young men asked him for help, Castellanos said, since they were physically isolated at home, lacking their team support. “A lot of kids felt lonely in the sense of not having somebody to talk to, as they did on the field,” he said.
Through teamwork and networking, said Castellanos, the youth learn how to express themselves with each other and become aware of their feelings.
“A lot of these kids have emotional loneliness, they feel they can’t communicate because they are men,” said Castellanos. “They start speaking to each other about what it is to be a man, and they start realizing that ‘I can cry and I’m still a man,’” he added.
Sean Medina echoed Castellanos’ words. The 18-year-old Washington Heights native, who joined YALD about five years ago, said that the program granted him a social safety net on which he could rely. “There’s a whole bunch [of] people I could fall on, I could depend on,” he said.
After canceling the first game of 2022 due to a New York City winter storm, the League kicked off on Saturday, February 5. Teenagers started warming up at approximately 9:30, running despite the low 20s temperature. Twenty minutes later, they gathered, shouted “1,2,3…go!” and started playing the first 24-minute game.
In 2019, Castellanos said that 126 kids were enrolled in YALD, but COVID decreased that number to 76 in 2020, almost 40 percent less. That morning, about 30 kids were present, although Carlos said that approximately 50 signed up.
“If you have mental issues, we take you. If you’re an athlete, we take you. If you’re not an athlete, we also take you. We don’t care, we take everyone, we don’t judge,” said Castellanos.
While their partners played, the rest of the youth chatted and continued practicing.
“YALD helps our lives, everyone comes together as a community,” said Michael Lambert, an 18-year-old Bronx native. “I’ve never seen some of these people, I’ve never played with them before, and I’m making new connections,” he added before running to get ready to play when the referee’s whistle blew.
Jason Cedeña, a 41-year-old coach and Washington Heights native, part of YALD since its inception, emphasized that peer support is vital for young adults to cope with loneliness. “We have to understand that it takes a village to raise a child, and we all have to start stepping up for each other,” Cedeña said.
Castellanos wants to continue helping his community youth for the foreseeable future. “Every year, we’re always looking at ways to improve, to get better, to offer these young men more opportunities,” he said. “I don’t know where I’ll be in my life without YALD.”
Abigail Cumberbatch, a 20-year-old Black woman who was raised in Queens, remembers feeling lonely already before the pandemic hit. As a third-year student of African American Studies and English at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, Cumberbatch struggled to find people who looked like her on campus. The University, founded in 1948 by a Jewish community in Waltham, reported an enrollment of 5.5 percent of Black undergraduates in 2020, while their White students accounted for 43.7 percent of the total.
“Even with trying to go out of my shell and make friends, it would always backfire, because people are not aware of their racial biases,” Cumberbatch said. “And that caused a lot of loneliness,” she added.
Loneliness is not a homogeneous struggle among youth, but rather it intertwines with other identities such as race. The CDC report published in August 2020 acknowledged that 30.4 percent of the Black respondents reported experiencing a COVID trauma and stressor-related disorder, more than 7 points higher than the White population. Moreover, a 2018 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health showed that only 21 percent of African-American college students with mental health problems sought treatment, while 48 percent of their White counterparts did.
Cumberbatch, a second-generation immigrant with family from Guyana and Barbados, started worrying about COVID in January 2020, when she stressed over the daily news updates of a mysterious virus that was spreading in China, leaving the population sick. In March, she received an email that would change her life: Brandeis, like many other universities in the United States and abroad, was shutting down the campus for two weeks.
COVID took the possibility of enjoying the transition to young adult life away from her and her classmates, since they could only experience one in-person semester before their world was upended. After two years, they are back on campus, but the scars of the pandemic are healing slowly. Each student carries different levels of trauma that complicates socialization and further isolates people.
“It’s so hard to connect with people,” she said. “Some people are just so traumatized from this event that they’ll just never be the same again.”
Cumberbatch believes that the main drivers of Black youth loneliness are structural racism and racial discrimination. “Growing up in such a racist, divided time that we’re living, it’s really difficult to not only see manifestations of racism on the news but also in your daily life,” said Cumberbatch. “It just produces that sense of difference,” she added.
Her words resonate with Janeen Cross, a licensed social worker and assistant professor of social work at Howard University, in Washington D.C., who stresses the effects that racial marginalization has on Black youth loneliness.
Dr. Cross, who has worked with young adults since 2013, pointed out that spaces where students of color are part of a shared community, like HBCUs, make them feel more welcomed. “There’s this understanding, there’s an acceptance of who I am and an uplifting of who I am,” she said.
“There were certain universities where nooses were thrown on campus, banana peels thrown on campus. Those things trigger trauma, generational trauma,” she said. “And that’s a whole other level of loneliness,” she added.
This situation has a relevant impact in D.C., an area where the Black population accounts for almost 44 percent of the total, more than any other racial group. Andrea Biel, a 28-year-old licensed clinical psychologist based in the District, acknowledges that, from her experience, Black people report higher levels of loneliness, a problem shaped by lived oppression.
“It comes back to this sense of feeling seen and feeling understood,” said Biel.
Additionally, Biel also identified the need to find specialists that reflect the intersectional identity of Black youth. “[There are] considerations around barriers to getting access to mental health care with a provider that they feel they’re reflected by,” she said. According to a 2020 study published by the American Psychological Association, 84 percent of the country’s workforce psychologists in 2018 were White, while Black professionals only accounted for 4 percent of the total.
However, isolation can also arise within identity groups. For Cumberbatch, there’s a “Black standard” that, if not achieved, may trigger feelings of loneliness.
“So, imagine, not only are you facing isolation from within your own community, also, when you venture out to different racial groups, you’re constantly being told explicitly and implicitly that you’re different,” she said. “It’s a lot of work all the time.”
Now that the pandemic seems to be finally receding, Cumberbatch says that she will avoid those who make her feel uncomfortable and isolated. “I realized my loneliness is heightened when I’m around certain types of people,” she said. “I want to live my life the way I want to live it.”
Skye Fields believes that it has always been harder for LGBTQ individuals to connect with people out of fear of judgment and rejection. Fields, a 22-year-old bisexual cisgender native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and a worker at a hardware store, felt isolated throughout her entire life. She went to three different high schools, and at each she had to deal with people who stopped talking to her when they found out about her non-normative sexuality.
“It makes it hard to want to meet people because if I meet them, and then they find out about me, they’re not gonna want to associate with me anymore,” she said.
Fields describes a prevailing feeling among many LGBTQ youths: loneliness, like a dark, haunting cloud, hovers above their life experience, isolating them from their peers and from the broader society.
Such a distinctive experience is rooted in the minority stress model, adopted by Ilan H. Meyer, from UCLA’s Williams Institute. This model, Meyer argues, proves that specific anti-LGBTQ social stigma provokes unique stressors that are responsible for LGBTQ physiological distress. Another study, published in 2020 in the journal Global Public Health, argues that higher degrees of loneliness correlate with worse mental health among LGBTQ youth.
Dealing with LGBTQ trauma has always been part of Sarah Lawson’s job at Whitman Walker Health. As a youth psychotherapist at D.C.’s nonprofit LGBTQ health center, Lawson described that, before COVID, many of her 25 clients struggled with an unsupportive family that didn’t accept their identities. Others, such as those who identified as transgender, reported heightened levels of social anxiety due to fears of being misgendered, suffering a hate crime or experiencing rejection.
Fields’ 17-year-old brother, transgender and bisexual, endured this social loathing. His ex-girlfriend had to keep their relationship a secret because her parents would never approve of his gender identity. They could only text through Snapchat because her parents would control the phone, checking her text messages.
Forcing people to stay at home, while necessary from a societal health perspective, trapped many LGBTQ youths in non-affirming spaces where they felt at risk, eroding their mental health, said Lawson.
“Any loneliness that existed before has been very exacerbated,” added Lawson.
According to the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit focused on LGBTQ young adults, 70 percent of LGBTQ youth reported poor mental health “most of the time or always during COVID-19.” In the case of transgender and nonbinary youth, the percentage reached 78 percent.
Fields, who was raised in an affirming environment, praised her luck, but acknowledged that not everyone has a supportive social network. “My mother always had gay friends, so there’s never been an issue for her when me or my brother came out, but I can see how that can affect a lot of other people,” she said.
Despite the shared distress, for some LGBTQ individuals the pandemic provided them time and space to explore their sexual orientation and gender identity from the safety of their room, said Hancie Stokes, communications manager at Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders, SMYAL. The organization, established in 1984, fosters community among D.C.’s LGBTQ youth.
When the pandemic forced their work to move online, SMYAL was able to offer a platform for LGBTQ young people who would otherwise suffer physical isolation. “Now that we’re virtual, we’re able to provide that space for youth who might be in the middle of nowhere where there’s no queer community,” Stokes said.
Now that the pandemic seems to be receding, Stokes emphasized the need to adopt affirming spaces for the LGBTQ population to find community and support. Without schools, workplaces, families and communities embracing LGBTQ youth, their loneliness will continue to be a major shared struggle.
“When someone feels like they belong there, that’s going to help them not feel as lonely. One of the things we can do is take a look at how welcoming the spaces are to LGBTQ youth, and if they’re not welcoming, how can we make them so,” added Stokes.
Due to her experience, Fields has learned to be cautious about the future, and she thinks that loneliness in LGBTQ young adults will persist. “It’s always going to be an ongoing battle,” she said. “No matter how progressive we get, there’s always going to be a group of people who just make you feel isolated and alone,” she added.
However, she also believes that there will always be supportive LGBTQ communities ready to include some lonely young person in their chosen family.
“As difficult as it may be, there’s always tomorrow. At some point, you will find somebody who cares about you,” she said. “Even if it’s like one or two people. That’s all you really need.”
