TRYING TIMES FOR SINGLE PEOPLE?

Economists are trying to model how people are coping with the lockdown measures in place to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and the early results show single people living alone are weathering a perfect storm of mental health adversity.

The simulation works from a simple insight gained from massive studies of how people use their time: who we spend time with massively effects how happy we are.

Although ’90s sitcoms and gritty movies about the suburbs may suggest otherwise, the average person gets a big happiness boost from spending time with their spouse. And for the average single person, every minute spent alone makes them a little less happy.

This creates a fairly obvious disparity in how people are coping with the global lockdowns being employed around the world, writes Barnard College economist Daniel Hamermesh in a working paper released this week at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States.

Before accounting for the possibility of job losses or health anxiety, Hamermesh’s simulations suggest that the average married person is happier in lockdown, while the average single person is miserable.

Higher income also substantially boosts life satisfaction and, on average, people are more satisfied with their lives the more they work, so anyone suffering a job loss — no matter what their marital status — will see a plunge in life satisfaction.

“With more moderate assumptions about losses in work time and income, and with all non-sleep time listed as being with one’s spouse, the simulations suggest that the happiness of married individuals could have been increased slightly by the lockdown,” writes Hamermesh.

It’s hard to find a scenario, though, where single people who are enduring a lockdown by themselves don’t come out worse than they were before.

“Even under fairly conservative assumptions, their happiness decreases and with more extreme assumptions the decrease is quite substantial,” the study reads.

Compared to married people, single people tend to spend more time with friends and relatives, which is a good way to get a boost in life satisfaction. With stayat-home orders in effect for about one-third of the globe, it makes that kind of socializing impossible for a huge number of people.

Through all the simulations one thing remains constant. “Time alone remains highly significantly negative,” writes Hamermesh.