Young people around the world report feeling lonelier than any other age group, according to the 2025 World Health Organization Social Connection Commission report. Between 17% and 21% of 13-to-29-year-olds say they feel lonely, a greater proportion than any other age group. Another study, based on a survey of more than 1 million young people from 38 countries, found that youth loneliness increased in many regions between 2002 and 2022.
From Germany to Australia to the UK, studies show an uptick in loneliness and social isolation among teenagers and young adults. This widespread phenomenon has driven years of work for Dr Michelle Lim, a loneliness researcher and clinical psychologist whose new book, The Lonely Generation, examines what has changed this century to make many young people even lonelier.
Changing Childhood
Lim identifies a long list of aggravating factors: hyper-competitive education culture, digital technology, the long tail of Covid, smaller families, the decline of third spaces, the high cost of living, hybrid working and learning, the decline of religion, and automation that means a supermarket trip can be conducted without speaking to another human.
“It must be said that the nature of childhood has changed dramatically over the past few decades,” she writes. Young people are being offered fewer opportunities to form meaningful connections. “What I fear is social atrophy,” she adds. “People are getting used to being alone.”
Education’s Hidden Costs
Lim points to education as a primary culprit. “The current education systems are built to prioritise academic excellence from children and adolescents,” she writes, noting this focus entails “hidden costs”. After-school tutoring, high-stakes testing and extensive extracurricular activities leave little room for rest, free play and empty time that children need to practise organic social interactions.
“The more time you spend studying, it will come at the expense of [other] important skills,” she says. “We run the risk of raising them to be academically strong, but not socially well-equipped to manage the challenges of adulthood.”
Usha Makkena, a 22-year-old student at university in Sydney, resonates with this idea. “Something I realise as I’ve gotten older is that meaningful connection often develops in quite unstructured and almost unproductive times,” she says. “And for me, being very busy certainly didn’t protect me from loneliness.”
Awkward Transitions
Nenyasha Dongo, an 18-year-old from Zimbabwe, moved to Sydney for her studies. Despite being friendly and not wanting a huge group of friends, she struggled to establish relationships with peers. At the end of classes, she would return home to find her five housemates either out or in their bedrooms. “There’s a lot of silence,” she says. She carried on like this for six months. “You just have to get used to it.”
Lim says the transition from school to university, vocational training or work has always been an inflection point for loneliness. “Just to be clear, young people are just generally awkward,” she laughs. “They’re really awkward.” But this rite of passage is now charged in a new way. “Our young people in this generation are living in a world that is very different.”
Digital’s Role
Mihindi Pathinyake, a 20-year-old student from Sri Lanka, describes a new social script. “They take your Instagram and then you never talk to them again.” Hybrid online-real life attendance structures since Covid make it hard to run into the same people with the frequency needed for organic connection.
Makkena notes that “sometimes following someone or reacting to something that they post can almost be a substitute for reaching out, even though those interactions don’t meet the same need.” She is wary of narratives that pit technology as the silent assassin of social connection. “It also helped me maintain relationships.”
Lim agrees that “social media has not been an entirely negative development”. Her research shows it can fortify young people living in communities that don’t accept them or help others learn about the world. “Digital use is not the enemy.”
However, she imagines a future where her own daughter might tell her that her best friend is an AI avatar. In her clinical practice, she sees young people navigating romantic relationships with partners they have never met in real life. “It’s really common,” she says. “Do we run the risk of getting de-socialised with real humans?”
The Loneliness Loop
Lim writes about the “loneliness loop”, a trap where experiencing loneliness causes the lonely person to perceive social interaction as more threatening, so they retreat and become more lonely. There is also a bigger, community-wide loop, with society settling into a social disconnection crisis.
Lim imagines a world where social interaction becomes like exercise today: something once part of daily life, but now needing a concerted effort to schedule. Paid-for services are coming onto the market as apps or activities to facilitate human interaction and combat loneliness. “People are capitalising on that,” she says. “This is not to say that they are not a good thing, but I think that it’s really reflective of the erosion of other kinds of social life that we once had.”
Loneliness, particularly youth loneliness, writes Lim, is a signal that we need to reassess our social world. “There is an ‘us’ problem here. People just go, ‘well, it’s not my responsibility’. But the problem is, actually everyone’s responsible,” she says. “If everyone says that, then we are going to be living in a world, and raising kids in a world, where healthy social connection is ‘a nice to have’.”
