In September, a Reddit user identifying themselves as a 25-year-old man turned to the r/ForeverAlone subreddit with a question: How do you deal with touch starvation? “It’s becoming obvious to me that I’ll probably be alone forever,” he wrote. He used to be worried about missing out on sex, but now he just misses hugs. Cuddles.
“I don’t have many friends and none with that kind of physical relationship. I don’t really hug family either anymore. Some days, I feel so desperate for a hug with someone I love.”
On another thread, a user identifying as a 20-year-old woman took to the platform to ask if anyone else had experienced university as one of the loneliest times in their lives. “I eat lunch alone, go to class, drive home, study, and repeat,” the user wrote. “Evenings and weekends are the hardest because I crave social connection, but there’s no one to go out with or even talk to.”
Another user, on another subreddit thread, expressed that they had tried to ease their unwanted solitude, but failed. “The loneliness is unbearable,” they wrote. ‘Is anyone else experiencing this” No question mark. No full stop.
The answer is yes.
Around the world, young people, according to the 2025 World Health Organization Social Connection Commission report, “feel the loneliest”. 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, 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 to Australia to the UK, studies are showing an uptick in loneliness and social isolation among teenagers and young adults.
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.
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.
In short, she writes, “It must be said that the nature of childhood has changed dramatically over the past few decades.”
The list of aggravating factors Lim identifies is long: our hyper competitive education culture, digital technology, the long tail of Covid (“they’re grieving”), the shift towards smaller families, the decline of third spaces, 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.
“What I fear is social atrophy,” she writes. “People are getting used to being alone.”
‘Being very busy didn’t protect me’
Lim is one of the world’s pre-eminent loneliness scholars. Alongside her work as a psychologist and researcher, she leads the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health’s Social Health and Wellbeing Group, is CEO of the Australian Ending Loneliness 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.
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 “crisis” levels of youth loneliness that she spends the most time. And the first among the culprits she identifies is education.
“The current education systems are built to prioritise academic excellence from children and adolescents,” she writes. And this focus entails “hidden costs”.
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: “If I stop, then [my child] will fall behind and I’m not doing the best job I can.”
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.
“The more time you spend studying, it will come at the expense of [other] important skills,” she says. “We run the risk of raising them to be academically strong, but not socially well-equipped to manage the challenges of adulthood.”
The idea resonates with Usha Makkena, a 22-year-old student at university in Sydney.
“I think when you’re growing up with school, extracurricular activities and then later study and work, a lot of your time can become very structured and goal-oriented,” she says. “Something I realise as I’ve gotten older is that meaningful connection often develops in quite unstructured and almost unproductive times.
“And for me, being very busy certainly didn’t protect me from loneliness.”
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. “What I was missing wasn’t necessarily having more people around me, but that deeper sense of feeling understood and genuinely connected to people.”
Her life did not have the contours of a lonely life. “And I think that can make it harder to recognise,” she says. “When you look at your life and you see all this happening, sometimes it makes you think ‘I shouldn’t be lonely.’”
Awkward anyway
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 “MAKE NEW CONNECTIONS”.
Nenyasha Dongo has struggled to do as the stairs advise.
The Zimbabwean 18-year-old was excited to move to Sydney for her studies. She is a friendly person. She doesn’t 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’t 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. “There’s a lot of silence,” she says.
“When I do get home, the loneliness,” 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. “You just have to get used to it.”
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.
“Just to be clear, young people are just generally awkward,” laughs Lim. “They’re really awkward.”
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 – and often a vastly greater mass of – 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.
But this awkward rite of passage is now charged in a new way, says Lim. “Our young people in this generation are living in a world that is very different.”
‘Digital is not the enemy’
“You meet new people every day,” 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.
“They take your Instagram and then you never talk to them again.”
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.
“Sometimes following someone or reacting to something that they post can almost be a substitute for reaching out, even though those interactions don’t meet the same need,” says Makkena over a video call in late September. “And then there’s also that element of comparison.
“For me, when I was already feeling lonely, constantly seeing other people’s friendship groups or social lives could sometimes create the impression that everybody else had found their people and I somehow hadn’t.”
She is, however, wary of narratives which pit technology as the silent assassin of social connection. “It also helped me maintain relationships.”
“Social media has not been an entirely negative development”, 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’t accept them, or help others to learn about the world. “Digital use is not the enemy.”
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. “It’s really common,” she says.
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.
“Humans are hard,” says Lim. “But that’s 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.”
“Do we run the risk of getting de-socialised with real humans?”
The ‘loneliness loop’
Anxieties about the decline of social fabric and interaction – particularly for young people – have abounded for decades. Telephones and televisions were derided for their antisocial powers long before the term the “antisocial century” was coined by US writer Derek Thompson.
“But there is a sense of feeling unsafe right now, generally, whether it’s political safety around the world, or the lack of community,” says Lim. “It affects the way we see our relationships, the way we relate to people, what we choose to do.”
Lim writes about the “loneliness loop” – a particularly nasty trap for young people – 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.
But there is a bigger, community wide loop too. We have settled, she writes, into a social disconnection crisis.
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.
“We already see this,” 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 “so many” requests to endorse different offerings.
“People are capitalising on that,” she says. “This is not to say that they are not a good thing, but I think that it’s really reflective of the erosion of other kinds of social life that we once had.”
Loneliness, particularly youth loneliness, writes Lim, is a signal. A sign that we need to reassess our social world. “There is an ‘us’ problem here.”
“People just go, ‘well, it’s not my responsibility’. But the problem is, actually everyone’s responsible,” she says.
“If everyone says that, then we are going to be living in a world, and raising kids in a world, where healthy social connection is ‘a nice to have’.”
