{"id":915141,"date":"2026-10-03T22:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T22:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/915141\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T22:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T22:30:11","slug":"theres-a-lot-of-silence-have-we-created-a-new-lonely-generation-loneliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/915141\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018There\u2019s a lot of silence\u2019: have we created a new \u2018Lonely Generation\u2019? | Loneliness"},"content":{"rendered":"

In September, a Reddit user identifying themselves as a 25-year-old man turned to the r\/ForeverAlone subreddit with a question<\/a>: How do you deal with touch starvation? \u201cIt\u2019s becoming obvious to me that I\u2019ll probably be alone forever,\u201d he wrote. He used to be worried about missing out on sex, but now he just misses hugs. Cuddles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have many friends and none with that kind of physical relationship. I don\u2019t really hug family either anymore. Some days, I feel so desperate for a hug with someone I love.\u201d<\/p>\n

On another thread, a user identifying as a 20-year-old woman took to the platform to ask if anyone else had experienced university <\/a>as one of the loneliest times in their lives. \u201cI eat lunch alone, go to class, drive home, study, and repeat,\u201d the user wrote. \u201cEvenings and weekends are the hardest because I crave social connection, but there\u2019s no one to go out with or even talk to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another user, on another subreddit thread<\/a>, expressed that they had tried to ease their unwanted solitude, but failed. \u201cThe loneliness is unbearable,\u201d they wrote. \u2018Is anyone else experiencing this\u201d No question mark. No full stop.<\/p>\n

The answer is yes.<\/p>\n

Around the world, young people, according to the 2025 World Health Organization Social Connection Commission<\/a> report, \u201cfeel the loneliest\u201d. Between 17 and 21% of 13 to 29-year-olds report feeling lonely, a greater proportion than any other age group, the report found. Another study<\/a>, based on a survey of more than 1 million young people from 38 countries found that youth loneliness had increased in many regions between 2002 and 2022. From Germany<\/a> to Australia<\/a> to the UK<\/a>, studies are showing an uptick in loneliness and social isolation among teenagers and young adults.<\/p>\n

That much of the world has produced a generation in which so many regularly feel unable to meet their needs for social connection is a curiosity which has propelled years of work for Dr Michelle Lim.<\/p>\n

The act of learning to be one human among many has always been a lonely, discombobulating exercise in parts, she says. But in her new book, The Lonely Generation, the loneliness researcher and clinical psychologist examines exactly what has happened over this century to make many young people even lonelier.<\/p>\n

In short, she writes, \u201cIt must be said that the nature of childhood has changed dramatically over the past few decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

The list of aggravating factors Lim identifies is long: our hyper competitive education culture, digital technology, the long tail of Covid (\u201cthey\u2019re grieving\u201d), the shift towards smaller families, the decline of third spaces<\/a>, the high cost of living, hybrid working, hybrid learning, the decline of religion, and the rise of automation which means that a trip to the supermarket can be conducted entirely without speaking to another human. Young people, she argues, are being offered fewer and fewer opportunities to form meaningful connections.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I fear is social atrophy,\u201d she writes. \u201cPeople are getting used to being alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Being very busy didn\u2019t protect me\u2019<\/p>\n

Lim is one of the world\u2019s pre-eminent loneliness scholars. Alongside her work as a psychologist and researcher, she leads the University of Sydney\u2019s School of Public Health\u2019s Social Health and Wellbeing Group, is CEO of the Australian Ending Loneliness<\/a> Together campaign, is on a loneliness advisory panel to the World Health Organization and in 2020 cofounded and led the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection, which has since expanded to six continents.<\/p>\n

In The Lonely Generation, she seeks to dispel myths around loneliness and expound on its many individual and societal consequences. But it is in diagnosing the cause of the \u201ccrisis\u201d levels of youth loneliness that she spends the most time. And the first among the culprits she identifies is education.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe current education systems are built to prioritise academic excellence from children and adolescents,\u201d she writes. And this focus entails \u201chidden costs\u201d.<\/p>\n

After-school tutoring, high-stakes testing, and well-intentioned enrolments in extensive extracurricular activities are the hallmarks of a 21st-century education. Lim says that parents tell her: \u201cIf I stop, then [my child] will fall behind and I\u2019m not doing the best job I can.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markSocial media has not been an entirely negative developmentDr Michelle Lim<\/p>\n

However, children need rest, free play and empty time in order to practise organic social interactions, says Lim. Interactions which are essential to developing their fledgling social skills and a sense of identity outside their family.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more time you spend studying, it will come at the expense of [other] important skills,\u201d she says. \u201cWe run the risk of raising them to be academically strong, but not socially well-equipped to manage the challenges of adulthood.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea resonates with Usha Makkena, a 22-year-old student at university in Sydney.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think when you\u2019re growing up with school, extracurricular activities and then later study and work, a lot of your time can become very structured and goal-oriented,\u201d she says. \u201cSomething I realise as I\u2019ve gotten older is that meaningful connection often develops in quite unstructured and almost unproductive times.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd for me, being very busy certainly didn\u2019t protect me from loneliness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Makkena, who is now a national reference group member for Australian youth mental health charity headspace, first started experiencing loneliness in her late teens, around her last year of high school. She did a lot of extracurricular activities and had an active social life, but she had a persistent feeling of disconnection. \u201cWhat I was missing wasn\u2019t necessarily having more people around me, but that deeper sense of feeling understood and genuinely connected to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her life did not have the contours of a lonely life. \u201cAnd I think that can make it harder to recognise,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you look at your life and you see all this happening, sometimes it makes you think \u2018I shouldn\u2019t be lonely.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Awkward anyway<\/p>\n

At the high rise campus of the University of Technology Sydney, in the centre of the city, students wander through chatting in pairs, threes. Some, solo, walk or sit with earbuds in and eyes fixed on their phones. Across the flight of stairs in the foyer of the main building are cast the words \u201cMAKE NEW CONNECTIONS\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nenyasha Dongo has struggled to do as the stairs advise.<\/p>\n

The Zimbabwean 18-year-old was excited to move to Sydney for her studies. She is a friendly person. She doesn\u2019t want for a huge group of friends, or for parties. Three good friends would do it. But at the end of a day of classes where she didn\u2019t really establish relationships with peers, she would return home to where every one of her five housemates were either out or had retreated to their bedrooms. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of silence,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I do get home, the loneliness,\u201d she shakes her head. She would watch movies and TikTok to fill time until she could call family or friends back home. She carried on like this for six months. \u201cYou just have to get used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dongo sits with Mihindi Pathinyake at a table in the sun outside a campus cafe. Around them, students and staff mill in and out. Often what the pair describe might have been a situation transplanted from university halls decades ago; the trepidatious step into a lecture hall, scanning to see who might be open to a greeting by a stranger, watching the one big group of old high school friends chat together in the front row, wondering whether the person you just spoke to might like you, might be interested in hanging out one day.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust to be clear, young people are just generally awkward,\u201d laughs Lim. \u201cThey\u2019re really awkward.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the transition from school to university, vocational training or work has always been an inflection point for loneliness, Lim says. Individual young people leave their highly structured environment of high school, with a set cast of characters with whom they are familiar and enter a new world populated by new \u2013 and often a vastly greater mass of \u2013 people. It is also a time when, often, the desire for a great deal of social interaction and a volume of connection is at its highest. Add to this their prefrontal cortex is still developing and adolescence has yet more years to run its course, the period can be one of flux, confusion, self-questioning and, of course, loneliness.<\/p>\n

But this awkward rite of passage is now charged in a new way, says Lim. \u201cOur young people in this generation are living in a world that is very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Digital is not the enemy\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cYou meet new people every day,\u201d says Pathinayake, an exceedingly bright-eyed 20-year-old student from Sri Lanka. But she describes a new social script to developing friendships in 21st century adolescence and young adulthood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey take your Instagram and then you never talk to them again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Due to the hybrid online-real life attendance structure to many tutorials and lectures which has proliferated since Covid, it can be difficult to be sure that you may run into the same people with the frequency needed to establish organic connection.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes following someone or reacting to something that they post can almost be a substitute for reaching out, even though those interactions don\u2019t meet the same need,\u201d says Makkena over a video call in late September. \u201cAnd then there\u2019s also that element of comparison.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, when I was already feeling lonely, constantly seeing other people\u2019s friendship groups or social lives could sometimes create the impression that everybody else had found their people and I somehow hadn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is, however, wary of narratives which pit technology as the silent assassin of social connection. \u201cIt also helped me maintain relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media has not been an entirely negative development\u201d, writes Lim. While the professor is concerned about the dopamine hit from social media blunting the rewards we feel from other interactions and that, for people who are already lonely, it can embed an aversion to real life connection, her own research has shown it can fortify young people living in communities that don\u2019t accept them, or help others to learn about the world. \u201cDigital use is not the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, she openly imagines (not happily) a future in which her own daughter might tell her that her best friend is an AI avatar. It does not feel like a big leap from what she already sees in her clinical practice, where she might be helping a young person navigate problems in their romantic relationship only to realise that they have never met their boyfriend or girlfriend in real life. \u201cIt\u2019s really common,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

These virtual relationships, whether remote between human beings on separate continents or between human and AI avatar, are lower in the friction typical of in-person relationships, and entirely absent of touch.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans are hard,\u201d says Lim. \u201cBut that\u2019s actually the beauty of relationships as well. We are being challenged, we are being pushed. Our ability to think more diversely, be empathetic are challenged by other humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo we run the risk of getting de-socialised with real humans?\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018loneliness loop\u2019<\/p>\n

Anxieties about the decline of social fabric and interaction \u2013 particularly for young people \u2013 have abounded for decades. Telephones and televisions were derided for their antisocial powers long before the term the \u201cantisocial century<\/a>\u201d was coined by US writer Derek Thompson.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there is a sense of feeling unsafe right now, generally, whether it\u2019s political safety around the world, or the lack of community,\u201d says Lim. \u201cIt affects the way we see our relationships, the way we relate to people, what we choose to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lim writes about the \u201cloneliness loop\u201d \u2013 a particularly nasty trap for young people \u2013 by which experiencing loneliness causes the lonely person to perceive social interaction as more threatening, and so they retreat, reduce their social interaction and in doing so become more lonely.<\/p>\n

But there is a bigger, community wide loop too. We have settled, she writes, into a social disconnection crisis.<\/p>\n

In The Lonely Generation, Lim imagines a world where social interaction becomes something like exercise has become today: something we once did as part of daily life, but which now we need to make a concerted effort to schedule in our diaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe already see this,\u201d says Lim. Paid-for services coming on to the market as apps or activities in order to facilitate human interaction and combat loneliness. Lim herself receives \u201cso many\u201d requests to endorse different offerings.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are capitalising on that,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is not to say that they are not a good thing, but I think that it\u2019s really reflective of the erosion of other kinds of social life that we once had.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loneliness, particularly youth loneliness, writes Lim, is a signal. A sign that we need to reassess our social world. \u201cThere is an \u2018us\u2019 problem here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople just go, \u2018well, it\u2019s not my responsibility\u2019. But the problem is, actually everyone\u2019s responsible,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf everyone says that, then we are going to be living in a world, and raising kids in a world, where healthy social connection is \u2018a nice to have\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In September, a Reddit user identifying themselves as a 25-year-old man turned to the r\/ForeverAlone subreddit with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":915142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[64,63,137],"class_list":["post-915141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/915142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}