The Loneliest Generation?
Why many millennials feel alone, and what those affected can do about it.
Into a #hotgirl summer of royal babies and chicken sandwiches, YouGov (you know, Yougov) dropped a dreary data bomb that exploded across headlines around the world.
According to the report, millennials — those between the ages of 23 and 38, people whose social, if not financial, situation should be the envy of all — were feeling lonelier than anyone else. 30% of millennials polled said they always or often felt lonely, while 20% of GenXers and 15% of Boomers reported feeling that way. 22% of millennials reported having ZERO friends and 27% percent said they had “no close friends,” more than any other group surveyed. It appeared that the thing we regard as yet another bitter pill of old age, was in fact a scourge of the young.
And the YouGov study is far from a statistical anomaly. A 2018 survey of 20,000 Americans by health insurer Cigna found that Gen Zers and Millennials had higher “loneliness scores” than Boomers and Greatest Gen respondents (Gen X scores were all but equal to those of their millennial counterparts, but, you know… it’s Gen X, so who cares!). And the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment, a 2018 study called the largest of its kind in the world, found that 40% of respondents aged 16–24 reported feeling lonely often or very often, making them lonelier than any other group.
While society has hasn’t always treated the travails of this most studied generation with all due generosity or seriousness, (somewhere a boomer who’s worked for 30 years and is juggling both boomerang kids and ailing parents is looking at that “millennial burnout” story while waiting for a mammogram) the response to the YouGov data seemed empathetic. This problem hit close to home, for everyone, so the sad stats were picked up everywhere.
The study didn’t deal in depth with the causes of loneliness among its respondents. So, with an assist from some subject matter specialists, including one of the architects of the BBC project, we looked behind the numbers to find out whether millennials are really more lonely, what role social media plays, and what’s to be done.
This isn’t a bad batch — the young adult experience has always been lonely
In examining the roots of loneliness for this age group, it becomes clear that Millennial millennials — the people who came of age with Nickelodeon — are not alone in being alone; loneliness has been enduring part of the young adult years for as long as we’ve been measuring these things. Studies that pre-date MySpace point to a similar spike in lonely feelings at this stage of life. A 1990 “meta-analysis” of data involving over 25,000 respondents “showed that loneliness was highest among young adults, declined over midlife, and increased modestly in old age.” Data from the BBC study supports the idea that lonely feelings and the late-teen/young adult years go hand in hand. “We found that older groups in the study reported the 16–25 years as their most lonely period, confirming the normality of loneliness during this stage of life,” Pamela Qualter, Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester, and leader of the BBC study, tells us.
If it seems surprising that we feel lonely in our 20s or early 30s, perhaps it shouldn’t; it’s a time of transition, when people are, ideally, leaving school groups, moving, and building new identities. And it makes sense that we FEEL lonely at a time when we simply feel most things more acutely, before too much life deadens our stimulus receptors. Qualter notes that the BBC experiment not only found that the young group reported the highest levels of loneliness but a pronounced intensity of the feeling. “The fact that this feeling is particularly pronounced in terms of intensity is interesting and might reflect the fact that at this age, there is no sense that they will overcome the experience,’ says Qualter. “Intensity reduces with age because we learn that it won’t last forever!”
Social media is exacerbating an old human tendency
Allowing that loneliness is an enduring young-adult condition, there’s no denying the challenges unique to a generation that’s spent its socially formative years on platforms designed to create addiction. If this life stage itself is already an isolation trap, a steady stream of everyone else’s seemingly friend-filled, pool-float-filled life pouring into your eyeballs at all hours is unlikely to lift the spirits. There’s ample recent research that connects social media and lonely feelings, including a new Johns Hopkins study found that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day using social media may have an increased risk of mental health problems, particularly “internalizing problems” like loneliness, depression and anxiety.
But experts who predate Instagram, by decades, have noted that humans are predisposed to struggle with the tension between our inner and societally imposed identities. The authors of a 1982 paper, “Theoretical Approaches To Loneliness,” cite the writing and work of pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers, and others, who concluded, in the 1960s, that social pressure can create a gulf between our actual and our idealized selves and that this discrepancy can result in loneliness.
In other words, we’re already inclined to worry about comparing perception and reality. So, the always-on perception/reality distortion machines in our pockets are liable to exacerbate whatever loneliness we already feel, whatever our age.
Social media CAN help — by providing a vehicle for discussion
While social media is a factor in loneliness, for any age group, the experts we talked to were quick to emphasize that it’s probably not helpful to look at it as The Cause. Janice McCabe a Dartmouth sociology professor who has studied relationships among college students and post-college adults, says it’s hard to disentangle all the things that could factor into young adult loneliness, including the life course transitions endemic to these years, and the effects of social media (McCabe used social network techniques to analyze friendships and identified three distinctive types of friend styles. You can read more about her work here).
McCabe says that keeping lonely feelings bottled up could play a role in turning a lonely spell into a more ongoing problem. “I think especially if someone who feels this way isn’t expressing that to other people, that comparison of ‘everyone else has more friends than me,’ and the feeling you’re the only one,” she says, becomes problematic. And in creating a more open conversation around loneliness is where social media can be useful. “It could show people that they are not alone in feeling lonely, that it’s common. There are many good possibilities.”
And if Millennials and Gen Z are most afflicted by social-media-enhanced loneliness they’re also likely to be the ones to break the taboo around discussing loneliness, and use social media to amplify that discussion. In 2017, Cornell freshman Emery Bergmann posted a video to YouTube about feeling lonely and unable to adjust to college life. The video was made for a media class project but ended up earning hundreds of thousands of views, and mainstream media attention (and, wow, the comments under the Youtube video will shock you. They’re … nice). A year later, Bergmann wrote in a New York Times editorial that the reaction “was overwhelming in the most beautiful way, and was further proof that I wasn’t alone in my experience. It also showed how necessary it was for people to be open about isolation on college campuses.’
Social media. Best used sparingly, and thoughtfully
It’s obvious, but bears repeating: whatever your age or state of well being, limiting the time spent passively consuming social media content is recommended. McCabe cites a widely distributed University of Pennsylvania study showed a direct causal link between limiting the duration of social media use and reductions in loneliness in the undergrads it surveyed.
Among the measures Bergman took to alleviate her own loneliness was limiting use of social media, which she called “a platform for comparison” and a toxic influence. “I was under the impression that college was a non-stop party for everyone but me. I was continually devaluing my own experiences because they seemed less interesting than the things my peers posted on their feeds,” she said in another interview.
McCabe says she’s seen her students taking a more active stance on limiting screen time. She cites one Dartmouth alum who started a project called The Lookup Challenge. ‘They’re doing pilots where they get a group of people to engage in limiting their usage together,” she says. .
As McCabe and Qualter note, social media can be a helper, if it’s used with intention, and as a facilitator of other activities. With our phones and our social feeds as constant companions, there’s always something to do — until we realize that passively consuming social media isn’t something. There’s no there there. In an upsetting WSJ article, “The Lonely Burden of Teenage Girls,” psychologist Mary Pipher quotes girls struggling to navigate constant digital connection while simultaneously suffering the lack of in-person interaction. “After an evening online, I go to bed feeling unhappy,” says one teen. “I wonder, ‘What did I do all day long?’ Then I wake up and do the same things the next day.”
Some loneliness is good. A lot is bad
Loneliness didn’t become a song lyric standby and a driving force behind the human urge to make art because it’s nice. It blows. It’s also, as Qualter emphasizes, healthy. To a point. “I think we need to stop medicalising loneliness,” she says. “It is a normal experience that we need to respond to; as an inherently social species, it would be odd not to feel it sometimes. The trick is knowing how best to respond to it.”
Those responses can take many forms, but the most effective involve actively engaging others without fearing rejection, and simply pursuing activities that interest you. Qualter cites the aggregated tips from the Loneliness Experiment respondents (see them here and look for the most British tip imaginable: “carry on and wait for the feeling to pass”). “For me,” she says, “it’s about people being kind to themselves and accepting the loneliness experience, and then looking for solutions that they think might work for them.”
Acknowledging that a degree of loneliness is normal, Qualter says we — and science — should focus on understanding why loneliness becomes a constant companion for some and not others. “I think the key is to try and understand why some people manage to overcome this normative level of loneliness and why some people get stuck in loneliness, experiencing it over many years,” Qualter says. “We don’t know what characterises problematic loneliness. We know already that loneliness predicts increases in depression when it is experienced over long periods of time, but we need to learn more about the mechanisms that link loneliness to depression over time. That’s where the next set of studies should focus their resources.”
