On this week’s episode, we discuss a disturbing trend in America: the rise of loneliness, which Merriam-Webster defines as “being without company, cut off from others; sadness from being alone.” Some blame social media and the COVID pandemic as drivers of the loneliness epidemic, but are they the only causes? Daniel Cox joins to discuss how marriage and family formation play a role in a person’s ability to connect and why Gen Z is the loneliest of all generations. Finally, we discuss what you can do if you too identify as lonely.
Daniel Cox is the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a research fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in survey research, politics, youth culture and identity, and religion. Before joining AEI, he was the research director at PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), which he co-founded and where he led the organization’s qualitative and quantitative research program. Dr. Cox’s work is frequently featured in the popular press, including in The Atlantic, CNN, and The Washington Post. He is a contributor to FiveThirtyEight and Business Insider.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, we discuss a disturbing trend in America: the rise of loneliness. Some point to social media and the COVID pandemic as drivers of the loneliness epidemic, but are they the sole causes? On this episode, we’ll discuss how marriage and family formation play a role in people’s ability to connect and why Generation Z is the loneliest of all generations.
Finally, we’ll discuss what you can do if you find yourself in the loneliness camp. And here to talk about all of this is Daniel Cox. Daniel Cox is the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a research fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. He specializes in survey research, politics, youth culture, and identity and religion. Before joining AEI, he was the research director at the Public Religion Research Institute. His work is frequently featured in the popular press, including The Atlantic, CNN, and The Washington Post. He is a contributor to FiveThirtyEight and Business Insider. Daniel, it is a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Daniel Cox:
Thanks for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I wish it was for happier reasons because, as I just discussed, we’re talking about this epidemic of loneliness. And I went to Merriam-Webster to just look at the actual definition of loneliness, and it’s quoted as this: “being without company, cut off from others, sadness from being alone.” So obviously, loneliness is a sad topic, a sad thing, yet the data is showing that more people are lonely than ever before. So can you first of all break down some of those numbers for us?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. One of the studies that gets most cited from the work that I’ve done on this topic is from a friendship study that we did in 2021. And what we did for that study is we looked at some Gallup data from the early 1990s and noted that a lot of these questions were still really, really relevant but hadn’t been asked in a really long time. So we asked some new questions, but then we also drew from that old Gallup study to ask questions about, “Do you have a best friend? How often do you talk to your friends? How many close friends do you have?”
All these questions about friendship that we thought were really relevant during COVID when we had all withdrawn a little bit, our social lives were reduced. And so we asked these questions, and really stunning results; we found that for both men and women, there’s been a significant decline from three decades earlier in terms of how many close friends they have. But the decline was really, really stark among men. Men seem to be facing a much more severe friendship recession.
And just to give you some numbers on that, so in 1990, just 3% of men said they had no close friends. If you look in 2021, that increased fivefold to 15%. Now, it may seem like that’s not a huge number of people, but 15% who said they have no close friends at all. Another significant number said they just had a few close friends. So the overall picture is one in which we just have fewer close people in our lives. It’s not just friendships, either. It’s members of our family as well. Our families are shrinking. We’re spending less time with our families as well. So this is all part of a bigger picture, a bigger story.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I’ve often heard women say that they need friends, that they like the relationships, and I’ve heard plenty of men say that they don’t need close friendships, that maybe their spouse is enough of a friend, or they have kids. So do you find that the friendship is especially important for people who are single?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. So if you look at the empirical evidence, so I know there’s been these conversations on a variety of… If you look at male podcasts and if you talk to people, people who will tell you based on their own experiences how they feel. I have two young kids, so solitude and repose is actually really, really great. I like spending some time on my own.
But if you look at the data that you ask about friendship and companionship and spending time with other people, we are social animals. We all derive enormous benefit from having people who support us, who we can rely on, who we can feel connected to. And both men and women need this. It’s not unique to one gender. So when we have close intimate relationships with our friends, we’re happier. We feel less lonely. We derive personal support. Sometimes we can receive financial support. All these different benefits come from having friendships that we just need as part of our lives.
Beverly Hallberg:
You said that this started by asking people about friendships. How did that then translate to looking at loneliness? Was this a question you specifically asked them? And how do you measure loneliness? Is it how often you feel in a month that you’re lonely, or how do you measure it?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. So there’s a number of different approaches to this. So we tried to get some objective measures to [inaudible 00:05:47] experience. So that is, how often do you see your friends? How many friends do you have? Do you have a best friend? The loneliness can come — you can be surrounded by people and feel lonely. You could have 30 people on your favorite call list on your cell phone and feel lonely an awful lot. So it’s not just an objective measure of how many people you have in your life or who you feel close to. Those are separate things.
And a lot of what we tried to measure was just, what is the objective reality and experience for people? But we also asked some measures on loneliness. Do you feel like [inaudible 00:06:25] people who support you? That kind of thing. So we tried to get at it both ways. And where we saw some of the most significant declines was just on how many friends people said that they had. We found that people are less likely to have a best friend than they used to as well. And when it comes to men and women, too, I think it’s really worth kind of hammering this point. When men say they don’t need the emotional support from their friends, they’re happy just to go out and play a pick-up game of basketball or play poker, but we know for a fact that men need emotional support, too.
And we actually see this reflected in the data. For many men, it’s their girlfriends or their wives or a significant other. That’s the person that they rely on for emotional support, whereas women rely on both their spouse or partner, but also a constellation of different friends in their lives, often female friends. And we also know that when men have female friends, they’re more likely to rely on them for emotional support than their male friends. So again, we see this in the survey research that men do seek this out. They just feel more comfortable doing it in some ways more than others.
Beverly Hallberg:
And when people do feel lonely, and you say this loneliness is increasing, how does that manifest itself in how people respond to loneliness? Do you see, let’s say, negative impacts on how they relate to people, how they treat themselves, their bodies? How do you see that when you looked into this?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. So some of the best research out there finds really, really stark effects of being lonely. So prolonged loneliness is… I think some of the researchers found it was akin to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in terms of its effect on your personal physical health. Obviously, it’s associated with a lot of mental health issues as well, depression, anxiety. All these things are strongly correlated with feelings of loneliness. So it has adverse effects across the board.
Beverly Hallberg:
And what would you say to somebody that would say, “Well, the loneliness epidemic that we’re seeing is largely caused because of COVID”? Obviously, people were forced to be apart. So many people’s lives changed. They moved. Some people are still afraid to have that connection with people for fear of contracting COVID. How much did COVID play a role in the increase of loneliness?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah, so it’s a really good point. Our social lives were upended by COVID-19. For a long time, we weren’t traveling, we weren’t seeing people. So particularly for some people, if you didn’t call your friends on the phone, you weren’t really talking to them at all, maybe other than an email or a text. So people who relied a lot on in-person relationships or the folks who they shared a pew with or shared an office with, those more casual relationships, which are really important, those kind of drifted away overnight, right? People lost those. So that was a really sort of significant factor.
When we think about friendships, my work particularly focuses a lot on close friendships, and we know why they matter. But these more casual relationships, friendly acquaintanceships, they matter a lot too, particularly when you think about how it impacts other parts of your life. Those are the folks, more on the sort of peripheral ring of your friendship circle, who are more likely to help you connect to other types of people, to give you information that you might not have access to, whether that’s a lead to a new job or a potential romantic interest. And so those are also really, really important, and COVID upended those. But we know in terms of the broader changes in American society, the friendship decline predated the COVID stuff. When you looked at Americans’ attendance in church and places of worship, delayed marriage, these are all things that have worked to kind of contract our social circles.
Beverly Hallberg:
And you even point out that Generation Z is the most lonely generation. Why are we seeing it more in young people, and is that directly correlated to what you were just saying there? It’s the breakdown of our community, whether that’s delayed marriage, whether that’s people aren’t going to church as much as they once were, the breakdown of the family as a whole. Is that why you’re seeing Generation Z more lonely than previous generations?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. So something that’s worth knowing is that every generation of young people has, they have unique struggles, but they share this challenge of creating a life for themselves and developing relationships, often out of thin air. So they often, if you look at 18- to 29-year-olds, this is a difficult time socially in their lives. So yeah, they tend to be much lonelier than older Americans, who may be settled down in a community. They are members of maybe the PTA or they’re married or they’re members of a church.
And younger people are figuring out their place, where they’re going to be, their career. And so I think that that’s cyclical, right? — that that’ll happen every generation and young people will be somewhat more lonely than when they’re older. But the unique thing for Generation Z is how they were raised. And I’ve written about this, and I’m always like, “Don’t beat on the young people.” A lot of this is sort of an artifact of their childhood. So if you look at Gen Z and, for instance, the time they spend with their families having dinner together, that has changed dramatically.
So three-quarters of baby boomers had regular meals with their families. That has changed now for Gen Z. It’s only 38% of Gen Zers said they had regular dinners with their families growing up. So an entirely different experience. If you ask questions about how lonely they felt growing up, Gen Z was also a lot lonelier. And I think part of this is they’re less likely to be raised in a religious tradition, so they’re less connected to those kinds of communities.
They are being funneled into enrichment and achievement activities, so whether it’s music or sports camps. Particularly for middle-class and upper-middle-class parents, the idea is you need these on your resume to have a successful life, to get in the right school. But what it’s doing is taking them out of their neighborhoods, not allowing them the free time to roam and connect and socialize and build those really important social connections because they’re spending all their time burnishing their credentials for a career or for college.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so what is it about the family meal? I find that so fascinating. Obviously, it’s more than just the food. Is it the purposeful time that parents take to spend time with their kids? Is it just children just know when parents are focused on them and make them a priority? Is that really the crux of it?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. I think whatever culture, religious, racial, ethnic background, I think family meals are essential. We all live very busy, harried lives, so we have few moments in modern society where we can spend some time, uninterrupted time hopefully, with our family members and talk and share and connect. And so I think if you take that away, there’s not a lot of time where the whole family will often get together. We’re in an age, too, where most Gen Zers are being raised, if they’re being raised by two parents, both parents are working. They’re the first generation for which that is true. So with these kind of hectic, frenetic schedules, it was one of the last places or last activities that we had to pass on important information, to share feelings, connect again, all really, really important. And Gen Z simply, they weren’t able to avail themselves of that kind of experience.
Beverly Hallberg:
What if it’s a family meal, but the child is on their phone? How much does social media play a role in this, technology? Even beyond the family meal, I think of how we communicate so much with each other through technology, as you and I are today. How much has the digital age made us, I guess, less connected to each other, really made us so we’re disengaged in so many ways?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. So people have very different and very strong views about social media. I tend to come down on the way it’s used. And I think one of the biggest problems with social media is it’s often used as a insufficient substitute for in real life social interactions. So instead of sitting at home and talking to a friend on the phone, instead of going out and meeting a friend, going on a date, whatever, we’re scanning TikTok videos or on Instagram and liking things or commenting on things.
And it’s a really, really poor substitute for in-real-life social interactions, and I think that’s the problem. If you do both, spend a lot of time on social media and you’re very active, you live a very active social life, I don’t think that’s a huge problem, or maybe a problem in one way, but not in terms of creating and building a really healthy social life. I think the problem is when we say, “Oh, well, I didn’t talk to anyone today except for the people I interacted with on social media.” And I think that’s not a really great use of time, but I think it’s also not really a great outcome. That doesn’t help you build really healthy, stable social connections.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I remember when I first went from working full-time in an office to starting my own business and I was working from home, and I remember this time very specifically, where I went to the grocery store and the first person I had talked to in person in several days was the person who was ringing up my groceries. And I remember thinking how odd that was, and that I needed to be more consistent with making time with friends. Because I think when you’re in that office, you don’t realize how often you do interact with people and how important it is.
And I think especially after COVID, it is an important thing to be able to have those connections. And I want to pick up on something that you said there. You’ve talked a lot about family formation. You talked about single parents. So obviously, so many single parents are doing a great job out there who, due to no fault of their own, are picking up the slack for the other parent not being there. I think a lot of parents would look at this and say, “Well, what do we do? What do we do? I’m a single parent raising my child. How do I help them so that loneliness isn’t something that continues in their life or starts to begin with?”
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. It’s a really difficult question. I’ve been single parenting just for a couple days while my wife’s traveling, and I tip my hat and my heart goes out to single parents. It’s really, really challenging. What we know from our research and other research, children raised in single parent households tend to be lonelier. They tend to have more academic problems. It’s a really difficult situation. I think for many single parents, one of the key things that they lack is time. So between work, getting their kid if their kid is in school, helping them with that kind of stuff, spending just quality time together can be really difficult, even more so if it’s a joint custody arrangement.
So one of the things I think is really, really helpful is relying on institutions to help, so whether that’s a religious community, whether it’s a sports league, a neighborhood group, some sort of more formalized structure where you are relying a little bit on a community of folks to help where you’re not able to do it as a single parent. Even with two parents, you’re not able to do everything. And I think that we’ve kind of lost that sense of community building is essential. No single person, even a very capable pair of parents, we can’t do everything. You can’t work and be present at the kid’s ballgame all the time. So having a community of folks helping out, I think, is really important.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I want to take a brief moment to talk to you, our listeners. You may know the Independent Women’s Forum is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to enhancing people’s freedom, opportunities, and wellbeing. But did you know that we are also here to bring you, women and men on the go, the news? You can listen to our High Noon podcast, an intellectual download featuring conversations that make free society possible. Hear guests like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin discuss the most controversial subjects of the day, or join us for happy hour with At the Bar, where hosts Inez Stepman and Jennifer Braceras chat on the latest issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture. You can listen to past episodes at iwf.org or search for High Noon or At the Bar in your favorite podcast app.
And Daniel, before we let you go, I want to ask you a question about those of us who are adults. Maybe it is a young adult like Generation Z, but even those in millennials, Generation X, even boomers who are struggling with loneliness, because we know this isn’t just young people. You talked about the importance of community. Is that the answer for adults as well; is getting involved in something related in your community and where you live, more so than anything virtually that you may be part of?
Daniel Cox:
Yeah. I’m no friendship expert or guru, but I think one of the important things is to leverage the tools that you have. So if you’re working, maybe get more involved in workplace social activities, whether it’s happy hours or volunteering or other social-based things at work. We actually have a new study coming out that shows that women, particularly college educated women, are far more active, engaged in social activities in the workplace, and it pays off for them. We kind of think that, oh, the only reward you should get from work is financial. That’s where you should put all your money and energy.
But it turns out when you focus on the social side of things, you’re actually much better off in really important ways. Not that the money doesn’t matter. Of course it does. So I think that’s the kind of thing. So if your kid’s in school, maybe getting involved in the PTA. Again, leveraging the connections that you have and just being available. One of the things that we’ve seen in our data is that people who walk around their neighborhood a lot tend to have more friends in the neighborhood, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Beverly Hallberg:
So don’t be a recluse. That’s what you heard here from Daniel Cox. We so appreciate you joining us in sharing this important information. I think it’s important for so many different people to hopefully get beyond the issue of loneliness. And people can check out your work at the American Enterprise Institute. Really important research. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
Daniel Cox:
Thanks for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosities of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans, so please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That’s iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review. It does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
