A Loneliness Epidemic?

The lonely land
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2024/05/the-lonely-land
Sophie McBain:
The simplest definition of loneliness is that it reflects a gap between an individual’s desired relationships and their actual ones, but loneliness can be linked to other forms of disconnection too: one recent study found that feeling your life lacks meaning is a stronger predictor of loneliness than feeling a lack of social connection. In other words, it may not only be rising individualism and social atomisation that creates lonely societies, but also declining faith, apathy and the loss of hope. Data analysis by the Financial Times shows that since 2010 there has been a sharp rise in the number of American teenagers who say they lack hope or their life is meaningless.
Although we often associate loneliness with old age, it has long followed a u-shaped curve, rising among the youngest as well as the oldest in society. That’s because loneliness is often linked to periods of transition and transformation: bereavement, retirement, leaving home or being left behind, forging a new identity. Loneliness can be the price we pay for freedom, the freedom of self-expression, reinvention, relocation. It can be “adaptive”, a useful response to change, when loneliness alerts us to a need to seek out social connection. 

 

Related:

The Declining Mental Health of The Young and The Global Disappearance of The Hump Shape in Age in Unhappiness

David Blanchflower, Alex Bryson & Xiaowei Xu

NBER Working Paper, April 2024

https://www.nber.org/papers/w32337

Abstract:

Across many studies subjective well-being follows a U-shape in age, declining until people reach middle-age, only to rebound subsequently. Ill-being follows a mirror-imaged hump-shape. But this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in illbeing by age. The reason for the change is the deterioration in young people's mental health both absolutely and relative to older people. We reconsider evidence for this fundamental change in the link between illbeing and age with micro data for the United States and the United Kingdom. Beginning around 2011 there is a monotonic and declining cross-sectional association between well-being and age. In the UK the recent COVID pandemic exacerbated the trends by impacting most heavily on the wellbeing of the young, but this was not the case in the United States. We replicate the decrease in illbeing by age across 34 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, using five ill-being metrics for the period 2020-2024 and confirm the findings.