We've Never Been More Alone

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As a kid, I remember standing in the checkout line at Walmart with my parents as they would pick up one of those bright orange Vonage calling cards so we could call my aunt and uncle, who lived in Brazil at the time. You would buy a set amount of time, dial a long access number, and wait while the connection clicked and stuttered its way across continents.

Fast-forward to the early 2000s, Skype arrived. It felt revolutionary. Despite the grainy video and garbled audio that resembled me looking at someone without my glasses on, we could hear each other's voice. Technology brought us together. It connected us. Or so we thought.

And yet, we are, by every available measure, our society as a whole, particularly young adults, the loneliest we have ever been. Despite being infinitely connected.

In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic and compared its mortality impact to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). 

Fifteen cigarettes! 

For Millennials who grew up watching those anti-smoking public service announcements on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, people gasping through tracheotomy tubes warning you about what cigarettes would do to you, that word picture carries weight. Studies show that poor social relationships increase the risk of heart disease by 29% and stroke by 32%. Chronic loneliness in older adults raises the risk of developing dementia by approximately 50% (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). 

It might make sense that the older you get, the lonelier you get. More people move away. Quite frankly, friends die. Your network shrinks, your mobility declines, and your community grows quieter. 

But loneliness is not just a shrinking-network problem reserved for more mature generations. It is impacting those who are the age that should be thriving the most. 

The CDC's 2022 analysis of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the same study that initiated the Surgeon General to issue his warnings, found loneliness highest in the youngest adults: 43.3% of adults ages 18 to 34 reported loneliness, compared to 23.8% of adults 65 and older (CDC, 2022). Nearly double.

The Cigna Group, an insurance company, now tracks loneliness as a measurable health metric, which itself tells you something about how seriously this has become a problem. Their 2025 report found that 57% of Americans are lonely, with younger generations reporting substantially higher levels despite being more digitally connected than any generation before them (Cigna, 2025).

Research on loneliness across the lifespan has historically described a U-shape: elevated loneliness in young adulthood, declining loneliness through midlife, rising again in oldest age (Luhmann & Hawkley, 2016). That pattern held for decades. And it makes intuitive sense. As a young adult, you are often moving away from home for the first time, starting a first job, trying to establish yourself, leaving behind the community you built under your parents' roof. As your network thins in later life, the curve climbs again.

But while the U-shape has and likely always will existed, the depth of young adult loneliness today is staggering. And it is growing. Technology is not shrinking that gap. It is increasing it. 

Looking at this through the Generational Prism, this is not simply what happens to young adults at this stage of life. Something unique is happening to this cohort specifically.

The Survey Center on American Life found that 56% of Gen Z adults report having felt lonely at least once or twice a month during their childhood. Only 24% of Baby Boomers say the same (Cox, 2022). The American Adolescence Survey is even more direct: 61% of Gen Z teens reported feeling lonely and isolated often during their adolescence, twice the proportion reported by Baby Boomers at the same stage of life (Survey Center on American Life, 2023).

 Gen Z did not arrive at loneliness as young adults. For many of them, it was the environment they grew up in. Two-thirds of Americans who felt lonely every day during childhood report feeling lonely or isolated all or most of the time today (Cox, 2022). The formation years seemingly set the trajectory.

Among the Silent Generation, 84% reported having daily family meals together growing up. That number has declined with each generation: Baby Boomers at 76%, Gen X at 59%, Millennials at 46%, and Gen Z at 38% (Institute for Family Studies, 2024). A 46-point collapse across four generations in one of the most basic daily rituals of family life.

For the Silent Generation, the dinner table was not a lifestyle choice. It would have been unusual not to gather.

Gen X, the latchkey generation, often came home to an empty house after school, and yet 59% still sat down to dinner together. The table, even in stretched and overextended households, remained something families returned to.

Then with Millennials, something shifted more dramatically. The most scheduled generation in history, organized sports, enrichment programs, tutoring sessions, club activities at a pace no previous generation had experienced. Meals moved to the car. Breakfast happened at school.

The table was not just about food. It was daily practice in being in community with people you did not choose but were committed to. Americans who grew up having regular family meals have been shown to have lower rates of depression and stronger relationships with their parents (Cox, 2022). When it disappeared, something harder to name disappeared with it.

Here is what makes this more complicated. From 2003 to 2022, the average time spent at home among U.S. adults rose by one hour and 39 minutes per day. For young adults ages 15 to 24, the increase was even steeper, an additional 124 minutes per day by 2022 (Sharkey, 2024). At the same time, data shows social engagement with friends has declined and, in the researchers' own words, "plummeted for young Americans" (Hasan & Bhatt, 2022).

More time at home does not mean more time with family nor in community. When dinner tables are disappearing and screens are multiplying, being home simply means being alone in the same building as other people.

Think about it this way. There used to be one television in the living room. Everyone watched together, argued about what was on, and shared the same story at the end of the night. Now the screen is in every pocket and every bedroom. You are home. You are isolated. And in the same breath, we are calling devices a means of connecting us.

And who pays for those devices? Oftentimes, mom and dad. In fact, only 16% of adults ages 18 to 24 are completely financially independent from their parents today, with many relying on parents to cover cell phone bills, household expenses, and down payments on rent (Minkin et al., 2024). Not surprisingly, more young adults are physically under the same roof as their families than at any point in recent decades. And yet they are lonelier than any generation before them. The proximity is there. The community is not.

A friend of mine describes the transition from college to the real world this way. College is like a greenhouse. Everything is controlled… the temperature, the light, the environment, the people around you. You are incubated. Then graduation day arrives, and suddenly you are standing in the open field, facing extremes of weather, isolation, and the feast-or-famine of starting over with no built-in community around you. There is no real bridge.

A systematic review of 32 studies on educational transitions confirms what this analogy captures. Recently graduated students often feel lonely due to insufficient time to build connections and frequently experience loneliness from moving residences, being separated from previous networks, or lacking new social networks (Sundqvist et al., 2024). What disappears is not just the classroom. It is the daily structure that made belonging automatic. The clubs, the roommates, the shared routines, the weak ties that quietly held a social world together, all of it dissolves at once.

I wrote earlier this year about the evolution of love across generations, what I called Love 1.0 through Love 5.0, from duty and permanence in the Silent Generation to what we are watching emerge now: connection without cost, intimacy without risk. The data on dating confirms that trajectory. 

More than half of adults under 30 have used a dating app (Pew Research Center, 2023). A meta-analysis of 23 studies found that dating app users report significantly worse well-being, including loneliness, than non-users (Valkenburg et al., 2025). Seventy-eight percent of Americans report emotional, mental, or physical exhaustion from dating apps, with 79% of Gen Z specifically reporting that burnout (Forbes Health, 2025).

Whether that exhaustion causes disengagement or disengaged people turn to apps, the research is honest that it cannot fully separate the two. What it can say is that meeting online has displaced friends as the primary way couples meet, removing the social network spillover that used to come even from relationships that did not work out (Rosenfeld et al., 2019). Dating has become a transaction between two individuals rather than an event embedded in community.

When chronic dating does not deliver, some are turning elsewhere. A NORC at the University of Chicago study of 1,060 teens published in 2025 found that 72% of U.S. teens have tried an AI companion (TechCrunch, 2025). Nearly one in five U.S. adults have chatted with an AI designed to simulate a romantic partner, rising to nearly one in three young adult men ages 18 to 30 (VC Cafe, 2025). And research from MIT and OpenAI found that heavy AI companion users were lonelier, socialized less with real people, and showed more signs of emotional dependence, not less (Fang et al., 2025).

A culture that removes the cost from connection will quietly remove the relational growth that only comes through it.

If you are not sure loneliness is a real leadership problem, consider this: The Cigna Group, an insurance company tracking this as a health cost, estimates that stress-related absence linked to social disconnection costs $154 billion annually in the United States (Cigna, 2025). Lonely workers are more likely to be unfocused, miss work, and seek employment elsewhere. 

Every leader managing a team of Gen Z employees is managing people who, statistically, were lonelier as children than any previous generation. They arrived at your organization with a perception of community and belonging that no other generation encountered at scale: smaller families, fewer shared meals, more digital mediation of social life, and platforms designed not for connection but for engagement.

A young employee who has a hard day and has no one to process it with does not call a friend. They post to a subreddit. They vent on social media. These are not equivalent to the friction of a real conversation, the kind where you say something, someone pushes back, you adjust, and you both walk away closer to the truth.

Regardless of generation, we need to face this simple truth: Work is hard. It was never designed to be otherwise. That's why they call it “work.” But navigating that difficulty requires social infrastructure. For many young employees, that infrastructure was never fully built.

From the calling card at Walmart to Likes, Comments and Instant Gratification, we have spent a generation building tools to close the distance between people.

And yet, the distance is growing.

The solution, as simple and watered-down as it sounds, is that we need to be leaders who foster environments with real human connection. And in real human connection, it can get messy. But we have tried to replace such a fundamental part of our existence with technology. And in so doing, we have become lonely and isolated.

The more we use technology to try to connect human beings, the further it seems to be driving us apart. That is worth sitting with.