Adults 18-22 poll loneliest, but social media off hook
Generation Z adults — ages 18 to 22 — are the loneliest American adults, according to a new study.
And we can’t even blame Snapchat.
The health care company Cigna this month released the results of a survey that measured where 20,000 American adults fall on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a tool widely used to examine feelings of loneliness and social isolation. The scale ranges from 20 to 80, and a score of 43 or above is considered lonely.
The average loneliness score for all Americans, Cigna found, is 44.
For young adults, it’s even higher. Generation Z has an overall loneliness score of 48.3, and millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — scored 45.3.
It’s tempting to blame our devotion to devices, but social media use is not a predictor of loneliness, according to the survey. Respondents defined as “very heavy users of social media” scored 43.5 on the loneliness scale, compared with 41.7 for people who said they never use social media.
So what gives? And how do we fix it?
Author and educator Rachel Simmons is a good voice to tune in to on this topic. I interviewed her in February when she was in Chicago for her new book, “Enough as She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy, and Fulfilling Lives” (Harper). During our interview, she brought up loneliness among young adults as a topic that adults should be mindful of.
Simmons is the leadership development specialist at Smith College, and she told me students frequently confide in her that they’re lonely. When she encourages them to check in with a friend or hit the gym, they tell her they can’t afford to take the time.
“They don’t want to fall behind,” she said.
She touched on this phenomenon in a 22-minute Facebook Live chat about loneliness that is well worth your time.
“A lot of people on college campuses have the sense that, ‘I have to work and be busy all the time,’ ” she said. “‘I can never do enough work, and everyone else is doing so much work, and if I don’t work all the time and if I don’t keep up, I’m not going to be smart, I’m not going to have a good life, I’m not going to be successful.’ ”
It’s a habit that starts young, and it’s really hard to break.
And it’s sneaky.
It’s something to consider as we cart our kids from activity to activity, answering emails from our own dozen committees between stops.
“Constant busyness takes a toll not only on the quality of relationships, but also on the skills young adults use to forge them,” Simmons wrote in an op-ed this week. “To walk into a dorm living room where you know only one other person, make small talk with people at a party, connect spontaneously with a stranger in an orientation group — this comes naturally to only very few. Skills are like muscles: They need to be flexed repeatedly. Friend-making skills atrophy from underuse.”
Close to half of surveyed Americans (46 percent) said they sometimes or always feel alone, according to the Cigna survey, and 2 in 5 sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful.
A little more than half of Americans (53 percent) said they have meaningful inperson social interactions — extended conversation with a friend, quality time with family — on a daily basis.