Young people in England are lonelier than older people

The young are lonelier than the old, by the government's own measure. The story we tell ourselves about loneliness is the wrong way round.

Nine percent of people aged sixteen to twenty-four in England feel lonely often or always, against four percent of people aged sixty-five to seventy-four. By the government's own measure, the young are more than twice as likely to be chronically lonely as the newly retired. This is not a quirk of one survey. It echoes the global Gallup finding that young adults, not the elderly, are the loneliest group, and it deserves to be far better known than it is.

The reason it surprises people is that our mental picture of loneliness is fixed on old age. There are good reasons older people can become isolated, through bereavement, ill health, or losing the structure of work, and none of that should be dismissed. But the data keeps pointing at the other end of life, at people in the years we assume are socially crowded, and finding a deeper vein of loneliness there.

Part of the explanation is that young adulthood has changed. It now involves more moving for study and work, more short-term everything, and far more time spent online in place of the slow, in-person routine that used to turn a group of acquaintances into a circle of friends. Being constantly reachable is not the same as being connected, and for many young people the difference between the two has become painfully clear.

If you are young and lonely and had assumed something was wrong with you specifically, this figure is worth holding onto. You are in the group most likely to feel this way, not the exception to it. The Tribe is being built with that in mind, as a place to be known by a few rather than watched by many. It is early, and we would rather you help build it than wait. A statistic this counterintuitive only changes things if people actually hear it.