Lonely, alone, and on our own - how solitude is changing our world 🙍‍♀️

Matt Hussey

Jan 28, 2025 • 12 min read

We spend more time alone than ever before. We eat alone, we socialise alone, we entertain ourselves alone, and more recently, we’ve even started having relationships on our own.

Health organisations have been talking about the dangers of loneliness for years. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared loneliness to be one of its pressing global health threats. The US Surgeon General has said the impact of loneliness has the same impact on health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

And yet, we’re all slowly, quietly drifting into worlds of our own making. That’s why in this week’s Brink, I’m going to be talking about the quiet rise of solitude, and its impact not only on our health but our friends, families, and the societies we live in.

I think we’re alone now 🙁

While Covid meant forced us into solitude, we’ve been growing apart for years.

A case in point: the share of American adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night, for example, has gone down by more than 30 percent in the last two decades.

While in the middle of the twentieth century, going to the cinema was something most people did several times a month, today, the typical American adult only goes three times a year. In its place, they watch TV, for roughly 19 hours of television every week. That TV watching? Tends to happen alone.

In the UK meanwhile, the housing market has shifted radically to reflect our new found need for solitude. As of 2023, there were 8.4 million people living alone in the UK, making up 30% of all households. Solo dwellers are also the fastest occupiers of housing in the UK.

In-person socialising is down, too. According to the American Time Use Survey, we are spending 30% less time socializing face-to-face than we did just 20 years ago. For teenagers, meanwhile, that decline is approaching 50%. No wonder the UK hired a minister for loneliness. Japan did, too.

You might think that the world is getting lonelier. But something strange is happening: levels of loneliness have remained fairly stable throughout the last 20 years.

Loneliness, as defined by Campaign to end Loneliness is, ‘a subjective, unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. It happens when there is a mismatch between the quantity and quality of the social relationships that we have, and those that we want.’

That last part is important, “those that we want”. The rise in solitude is not a rise in loneliness because people’s expectations of togetherness have changed.

The rise in solitude, but a flatlining of loneliness is an important distinction here - and it’s important I set out my stall a bit before we go on. When social scientists look at a society and how it changes, it tends to be from the position of what it was before.

So if a new generation spends more time on their own than the previous generation, it’s considered an anomaly. But it’s important to not fall into the trap of suggesting the new generation has somehow failed to follow in the previous generation’s footprint and class that as a failure. Generations are neither good nor bad, but they are almost always different.

Younger people are spending more time on their own, but they are way more connected digitally. I was the last generation to be brought up before the internet became ubiquitous. This generation is the first to be raised in the smartphone era. The skills I had to learn aren’t as relevant to this generation, and vice versa.

So we must resist the temptation to say that our childhoods were somehow better for the world than young people’s, and that they should subscribe to our values. For young people, mastering the digital world might be way more important than mastering relationships IRL. Anyway, back to what I was talking about.

So we’ve noticed that people are spending more time on their own, how is changing people?

Together, alone 😞

While young people are more immersed in digital worlds, they are also doing far less in other areas, too

Young people are doing far less IRL than previous generations. They are less likely to learn how to drive, to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all.

Social interactions after school have collapsed by 50% since the 1990s, with the biggest downturn coming in the 2010s. That decade is important, because as I mentioned before, it was the first time smartphones became cheap and accessible enough for young people to own.

It was also the decade that social media exploded - 63.8% of the world’s population now uses it for an average of 2 hours and 19 minutes per day. Alongside that, streaming services, delivery services and shopping services all meant we could do way more at home, without having to interact with people. All of that convenience is changing people

Young people are reporting higher feelings of despair and hopelessness.

In 2022 more than a third (34%) of 18-24-year-olds said they suffered from anxiety or depression, up from 24% in 2000. Other reports paint an even bleaker picture - research by Girlguiding found that 89% of young women and girls felt worried or anxious in 2023, compared to 78% in 2016, and the number who reported feeling happy with their appearance fell from 72% to 59%. This is just the tip of the iceberg:

One in six children aged five to 16 were identified as having a probable mental health problem in July 2021, a huge increase from one in nine in 2017. That’s five children in every classroom.
The number of A&E attendances by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition more than tripled between 2010 and 2018-19.

But the rise in solitude is not only changing ourselves, it’s changing the world around us.

The three rings 🎯

While solitude has changed how we live, it’s also changed how we live with others.

Marc J. Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community has identified three distinct places or ‘rings’ in which we interact with the world (no giggling at how much I’m going to be saying the word ‘ring’ please):

The inner ring - partners and loved ones
The outer ring - the world at large
The middle ring - the world physically around us.

Dunkelman believes that solitude has affected two of those positively and one negatively - and it’s that one that’s causing the biggest shift around us.

The convenience of our digital world has deepened our contact with those in our inner circles. We can be engaged in an almost constant level of contact with those that matter - whether it’s through messages, phone calls or sharing videos of funny things on social media.

Phones have also connected us more to the outer ring too. It has never been easier to see and learn about the world from an information sense, but also in a community sense.

It has never been easier to find groups or communities interested in the same things as you. On Reddit, there are more than 100,000 active subreddits, ranging from things like gaming to Bread Stapled to Trees (334,000 members), to We Want Plates (1 million members) and Have We Met, where 145,000 people pretend to live in the same town together.

But where solitude and smartphones have had a detrimental effect is on the middle ring, what Dunkelman calls your village. These are the people you physically live near to, in your town, city or even the country.

We live in a world where we can know intimate details of the lives of people algorithms serve to us, but nothing about who lives next door. This is having a ripple effect that political scientists have been studying for a long time.

Everything from the decline of communal spaces, the polarisation of politics, to the rise in extremist views. When the internet serves us an increasingly tailored view of the world, trying to navigate a world that is chaotic and unpredictable seems less fun, and necessary.

To go back to my mini-rant earlier: young people have been weaned on a world that adapts to them, rather than learning to live in a world that is largely indifferent. They have become skilled at being always on, always connected, always distracted. This has meant the idea of solitude has changed, too.

Alone, Together 😔

Solitude used to mean it was just you, on your own. That choice for space was something you sought out. A temporary retreat from the world to help you recharge your batteries, to reflect, to not be so available. But that has changed. Solitude is a lot more crowded than it used to be.

When we are alone, we are often accompanied by our phone. I know I certainly am. Our phones are walking dopamine activators. They prod and nudge you to pick them up, they make you eternally available, they create a low level anxiety that you might be missing out. As a result, you are always on. That has an impact, too: we’ve become exhausted than ever.

It’s why Time Magazine and the New Yorker labelled this decade The Great Exhaustion. What does that mean? More solitude. We order dinner because we don’t have the energy to make it, we want to work from home more to avoid the two-hour commute, we pull back on our social calendars because we don’t have the energy to engage, we de-prioritize hobbies because they seem like chores. We withdraw, and withdraw and withdraw.

But the antidote to all this exhaustion might be the opposite.

Finding a way back 💗

In the 2010s, Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business wanted to test an assumption: how good were people at knowing what improved their mood?

So he and his colleagues jumped onto a commuter train and asked people: how would talking to a stranger instead of sitting alone make them feel? People naturally said, “uh, awful” preferring the alone time.

So he and his team created a now famous experiment: he got some people to engage in as many conversations with strangers as possible, and created a separate group who were asked to keep to themselves. When he asked both groups how they felt after a week, do you know what happened? The group who spoke more felt happier.

“A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Other researchers found the same thing: when people were pushed into being more social, they felt more connected, seen and understood than those who thought they needed to be more alone. We are a social species. In the therapy world there’s a debate about where we get our sense of self from. While Freud argued the self was a thing located inside of you, others argue that the self only exists in the relationships you keep.

I subscribe to the latter camp: the first experience you have is your relationship with your mother. That relationship shapes all relationships to come. What she can provide and not provide forms the foundation of how you experience and what you expect from the world.

That’s not to say it’s set in stone, but the point here is that our relationships are needed to help us know who we are. Those relationships are messy and difficult at times, but that mess and hardship allows us to grow.

The good news is, these ideas are starting to re-appear, and people are doing something about it. Places and spaces that shun technology in favour of people are starting to emerge. Board game cafes: physical spaces to just, well, chat and play board games have been growing rapidly over the last few years.

In Amsterdam, offline pop-up cafes have been springing up. People are free to do whatever they want, as long as it’s not on a phone or laptop. Companies that specialise in off-grid cabins and digital retreats have been doing increasingly brisk business.

Seeking solitude is absolutely fine. But if we want to be healthier, happier, and more fulfilled, the road to those things is the one we take with others IRL.

Things we learned this week 🤓

Here is a list of excellent mental health services that are vetted and regulated that I share with the therapists I teach:

👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 Peer Support Groups - good relationships are one of the quickest ways to improve wellbeing. Rethink Mental Illness has a database of peer support groups across the UK.
📝 Samaritans Directory - the Samaritans, so often overlooked for the work they do, has a directory of organisations that specialise in different forms of distress. From abuse to sexual identity, this is a great place to start if you’re looking for specific forms of help.
💓 Hubofhope - A brilliant resource. Simply put in your postcode and it lists all the mental health services in your local area.

I love you all. 💋

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