Young people are now lonelier than ever — and young men are the loneliest. For decades, young people have reported declining friendships, declining quality of friendships, and rising loneliness. This is more acute among young men and is affecting not just their personal health but is emerging as a societal concern as well.
In 2019, a YouGov survey found that 20 per cent of British men had no close friends, which was twice the rate for women. In recent decades, people had consistently reported feeling lonelier than before and the Covid-19 pandemic worsened the crisis as the world went into a yearlong lockdown and by the time the world reopened, many lost touch with friends, lost socialisation skills, and found themselves in near-permanent isolation — as if the lockdown never ended for them. In 2021, a study by the Survey Center on American Life found that since 1995, the number of men reporting a lack of close friends rose five times from 3 per cent to 15 per cent and the number of men having at least six close friends halved from 55 per cent to 27 per cent.
Only 20 per cent of men said they had got emotional support from a friend in the past week, compared to 40 per cent of women, according to the study. In 2023, the State of American Men report by non-profit Equimundo found that two-thirds of men aged 18-23 felt “no one really knows them”. While many such studies have not been done in India, mental health professionals say loneliness is not a first-world problem and .
