Loneliness is often framed as a personal struggle—shyness, anxiety, or a lack of social skills. But the rise in loneliness is better understood as a broad shift in the structure of modern life. Over decades, changes in how we live and what we’ve come to expect from one another have made connection harder to build and easier to lose.
A teenager’s social life is shaped largely through phones and computers: coordinating homework, commenting on each other’s posts, virtual “togetherness” via online games, staying loosely connected but rarely fully together. Meanwhile, a college student juggles classes and gig work, and a roommate in their first job puts in 72‑hour weeks; neither have much time for friendship. A parent moves between job, childcare, caring for an aging parent, and errands—often done through self-checkout and delivery apps—leaving little room for unplanned connections. An older adult has fewer daily touchpoints after retirement or bereavement, especially in places where driving is required and community life is no longer built into routine. Across these lives, the common thread is the same: fewer shared physical spaces, fewer in-person encounters, and fewer settings where relationships can grow without constant effort.
SOURCES: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; NORC at the University of Chicago; Pew Research Center
Several shifts continue to thin out everyday contact:
- Time: Screens absorb discretionary hours, and work and school are more demanding and less bounded, leaving less energy for friendship, mentoring, volunteering, or caring for neighbors.
- Place: In many areas, car-dependent development has reduced walkable neighborhoods and left fewer places where casual, repeated encounters can turn into relationships.
- Institutions: Participation in clubs, faith communities, and local associations has declined, and the pandemic sped up remote routines, delivery infrastructure, and contactless services—making life more efficient, but also easier to live with minimal human contact.
- Technology: The digital layer doesn’t just compete with in-person time; it increasingly shapes the social ecosystem itself. When relationships run through apps and messaging, it becomes easier to exit with little cost: “ghosting” is normalized, “unfriending” is a click, and silence can replace the difficult work of repairing friction. At the same time, more essential tasks now require navigating digital systems, creating frustration, alienation, and a sense of disconnection for people who feel forced into technology rather than choosing it. Now A.I. is quickly becoming the next wave, with tools that can simulate conversation, companionship, and even intimacy at scale—further changing how people practice social skills, form expectations of relationships, and decide when human connection feels “worth the effort.”
SOURCE: Common Sense Media
As these conditions have become the norm, our expectations have evolved and our values increasingly push us toward self-optimization rather than mutual responsibility, and toward transactions rather than relationships. Success is framed as individual productivity and personal branding: build your resume, curate your image, manage your mental health, keep up. On-demand entertainment and digital communication normalize low-friction contact—likes and DMs—that substitute for the slower work of in-person relationship-building. In time, this trains people to avoid the inconvenience and vulnerability that deep connection requires.
These broad shifts affect everyone, but they appear to be hitting adolescents and Gen Z hardest—especially because they are still learning how to initiate, repair, and sustain relationships. “The interactions that make us less lonely come naturally to us, but they still need to be practiced, or our skills atrophy,” explains Ian Marcus Corbin, Research Fellow at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. “And in 2020 and 2021, a lot of people who were in a formative period of their lives saw those muscles atrophy.”
If people move through their days with little shared time, few common spaces, and few reliable settings for repeated human contact, loneliness becomes a predictable outcome rather than an exception. Addressing loneliness therefore requires attention not just to how people feel, but to how life is organized—how time is structured, how places are designed, and how opportunities for connection are woven (or not) into everyday routines. Without changes at that level, individual support can ease suffering, but it cannot reverse the trend.
"Friends have been replaced with followers and confidantes with contacts, with profound consequences for the depth and quality of our relationships."
~ Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA, 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States
NEXT: What Can We Do About It? →