Have never felt so alone – be down to social media
THOUGHT THAT OLDER PEOPLE ARE LIKELY TO STRUGGLE ON THEIR OWN
Meetup.com is used by 20-million people worldwide and allows anyone to organise a real-life social group or event and Danny is one of them.
“For a good part of last year, I did feel like I was on my own.
“Sometimes I’d go to meet-ups and feel like a spare part. You have to be quite brave to go. But the more I went to, the more I noticed you see the same faces at them.
“You start to bond. I built proper friendships outside the meet-ups.
“When you’re in your teens you have a close-knit circle of friends.
“But when you get into your twenties, people start to drop out of friendships.
“Friendship groups shrink. What meet-up does is give another avenue to expand your social circle.”
Loneliness – including in the young – has been an emerging modern problem for some time, with some experts pointing to the isolating nature of social media an the decline of traditional communities.
Dr Zinnia Mitchell, lecture in social care at Manchester Metropolitan University, said she was not surprised by the levels of loneliness among our young – adding that it is ‘quite common.’
“It is definitely an issue of our time,” she said. “Quite often a lot of awareness tends to focus on older people – and there are a lot of fantastic work and initiatives around combating loneliness in older people.
“Perhaps there is less awareness of loneliness affecting younger people.
“It is times of transition and sudden life events that make people feel lonely.
“Changes to their identity and changes to their lives, such as becoming a parent, where you are likely to lose your social circle, can make people feel very isolated.”
She said the pressure of expectation created by social media use could also be a factor.
“There’s an argument that people interact less face-to-face these days and social media seems to play a part in that. Social media can depict an idealised lifestyle which can in turn make people feel like their social life isn’t as good as other people’s or they are less socially engaged.”
Our survey backs this up, showing that younger people were far less likely to know their neighbours and feel connected to their local community.
That problem is even worse in the most urban part of the conurbation.
Overall 18pc of people across Greater Manchester admitted to never having met their neighbours and feeling ‘isolated’ where they live – but that figure is far higher in Manchester than in outlying areas.
In Rochdale, an area that is bottom of the table in other parts of our survey such as earnings and job opportunities, just 14pc of people had never met their neighbours. Bury was even more community-minded, with 11pc of people in that category.
But in Manchester the figure was more than one-in-four – at 28pc.
Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Manchester Business School, said loneliness was a common trend among the younger population in Greater Manchester, partly because of its huge university population.
“People don’t know their neighbours who live three doors down and a lot more people live on their own,” he said.
But he said the problem can persist among people in their 30s – just for different reasons. “There’s a lot of mobility in the type of jobs we work in now which means we move around a lot more to areas where we don’t anyone,” he said.
Loneliness – particularly in the light of struggling mental health services, highlighted elsewhere in our survey – has lately risen up the political agenda.
Meanwhile, Manchester council is working with the Campaign to End Loneliness and health services to tackle the problem – but currently mainly among older people.