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What do the loneliness epidemic, falling rates of teen drinking and have an appointmentand worsening mental health among adolescents and young adults have in common?
To begin with, two of them are to some degree in dispute. The dearth of solid historical data on loneliness has led some to question whether there has been any increase, much less an epidemic. And when it comes to the mental health of young adults, some argue that a significant portion of the observed increase in problems is simply due to the detection of cases that previously would not have been diagnosed, while others point out misleading statistics.
Skeptics are not wrong to raise doubts, and there has almost certainly been some degree of exaggeration. But as time passes and both data and testimony mountain, there growing recognition that the absence of concrete causal evidence does not constitute proof of absence. In fact, there is a growing sense that these phenomena may not only be real, but are all part of the same larger shift: the plummet of in-person socializing among youths.
Until recently, the evidence on loneliness was weak at bestbut surveys previously showed it was declining among U.S. high school seniors. now showing steep rises. In the UK and Europe, new data published in 2024 shows a marked increase in loneliness among people in their twenties. This reflects socialization patterns, or rather the lack thereof. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote last week, we increasingly live in the antisocial century. Far from being a US-specific trend, this is sweeping the entire Western world. The proportion of young people on both sides of the Atlantic who regularly meet socially with friends, family or colleagues has fallen dramatically. In Europe, the percentage of people who don’t even socialize once a week has increased from one in ten to one in four.
People in their teens and 20s now date as often as someone 10 years older than them did in the past. It’s not so much that 30 is the new 20, but that 20 is the new 30. Less going out and partying means less sex and less drinking. Both are advances that have been welcomed by the public health community, but they mask a darker side.
Trends in time spent alone almost exactly parallel trends in mental health, where mental distress rates They are increasing among the young, but not among the middle-aged or older. a wealth of public health Research suggests that the two are not simply coincidental but are causally related. Time spent alone is strongly associated with lower satisfaction with life and even high mortality.
Some of the most valuable evidence comes from detailed time-use records from the US and UK, which show a marked increase in the time teenagers and young adults spend alone over the past decade, but little or no change. among older age groups. Most importantly, this diary data also captures how people feel throughout the day while doing different things with (or without) different people.
A clear and consistent finding is that spending more time alone is associated with lower life satisfaction, and people report lower levels of happiness when doing the same activity alone compared with a partner. Using the levels of happiness and meaning that Americans attribute to various activities in these records, I find that the decline in young people’s life satisfaction between 2010 and 2023 can largely be explained by changes in how they spend their time.
The most obvious culprit in terms of time and age gradient is the proliferation of smartphones and hyperactive social media, which have accelerated with the short form video era. Of all the dozens of activities classified in U.S. time-use data, solitary hours spent playing games, browsing social media, and watching videos are considered the least significant.
The fact that these ratings are given by the same teenagers and young adults who spend hours glued to their devices underscores the tragedy at the heart of this story: the people who suffer are on some level aware of what is going wrong, but seem helpless. to avoid it.
The last decade is a story of young people moving away from the activities that bring them the most satisfaction and replacing them, consciously or not, with pale imitations. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the damage at any given time is too subtle to fix, but several years from now we may be starting to reach a boiling point.