The loneliest people (and places) in America

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/21/loneliness-epidemic-young-adults/

by wallflower • 1 year ago

57 58 1 year ago

washingtonpost.com

mitchbob• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/j0IOL

watwut6• 1 year ago

Interesting and much different then stereotypes thrown around would have you believe.

dgfitz2• 1 year ago

Across the data, nothing we tested relates more strongly to loneliness than a lack of social support. When you ask who’s “always” lonely, more than half of the people who say they never get social support raise their hands.

A lack of a sense of community makes people feel lonely. Wish this had been the first sentence instead of the last.

johnnyanmac6• 1 year ago

Yes, but it begs the question if you just leave it at that, no?

dgfitz2• 1 year ago

Sure, the article can support the premise to prove the point out, I just wouldn't have read the rest of it. Waste of time.

ethinton• 1 year ago

The headline reminded me of this piece from Alvin Chang that I really enjoyed:

https://pudding.cool/2023/09/invisible-epidemic/

bshacklett• 1 year ago

This is the first useful case of scroll hijacking that I’ve ever seen. Very intuitive and innovative.

dustincoates• 1 year ago

One thing jumped out: many of the states with high rates of "always" lonely, also have high rates of "never" lonely. Many of these states are in the Sun Belt. The article ties those always rates to poverty, these are also states that have had a high in-migration in recent years.

Could this contradiction instead be that many of those who report being always lonely are those who have moved recently to the states, and who don't have the connection (often familial) that those who have been around longer, or who have stayed back in the "less lonely" states, have?

selimthegrim• 1 year ago

I live in Louisiana, one of those states. We have the lowest in-migration and low immigration.

ttw443• 1 year ago

Probably the more likely explanation is that the general individual has slowly withdrawn from society due to the internet.

giantg26• 1 year ago

With how toxic many online communities are, I wonder what that says about how the real world must have treated them.

bluGill2• 1 year ago

Florida doesn't fit though. They have a lot of in migration yet low lonelyness rates.

mlinhares2• 1 year ago

Likely because people either move with a purpose (getting retired and living in a retiree community) or are moving to a specific community (an immigrant community, like myself), so there is plenty of other people just like you around.

The community I live is easily 30% Brazilian, my oldest kid pre-school class is 90% kids born to Portuguese speaking households, even the kids that don't speak Portuguese pick a word or two and join in our events.

I think the kids definitely change the equation, it is much easier to find other people in the same life period as you due to the kids being around the same age and being together anyway. Not sure how it would be if we didn't have kids but then again if we didn't have kids we would have stayed in PHL or moved to NJ/NY, we wouldn't come to Florida.

sudosteph• 1 year ago

If it was strongly influenced by southern states having transplants, I feel like NC would be much lonelier, but we actually did pretty good. That surprises me, because culturally and economically, our closest peer is Georgia, and they didn't do as well. The biggest difference between us and Georgia is that the a huge portion of Georgia's population is centered around Atlanta, while NC has two major metros (Charlotte / The Triangle) and lots of mid-sized cities spread all over. Would be interesting to see this data on a per-county or per-metro level.

alistairSH• 1 year ago

Maybe I misread some of the article, but seems like younger people just "suck" at being alone? IE, older people are less likely to feel lonely when they're physically alone? I wonder if that's because older people are more likely to have a solo hobby - reading a book, knitting, whatever - and younger people are more likely to "doom scroll" online?

johnnyanmac6• 1 year ago

It's a bit weird. They didn't find any loneliness among the gender divide, but it also did note that Gaming among males has drastically increased. But on top of that, Gaming seems to be average in terms of satisfaction but still highly rated as "the worst use of your time".

It may suggest some internal polarization. There's a lot of young people who can more or less get by being a pseudo hermit between gaming, remote work, and necessities. But the ones who can't suffer greatly on a mental level. I wonder if breaking down games by genre or format would reveal anything?

Regardless, it did also say the primary factors overall have to do with economic, social, and community strength. It's no real secret by now thst Gen Z has had all the structures of yester-decade pulled up from under them. Job market is stonewalled for graduates, third places are dead or near-dead for community building, and social media further ruined a lot of incentive to meet locals in a physical setting.

ttw443• 1 year ago

Being someone from gen z, it feels like there's no opportunity for anything. Not just jobs or economic opportunity, but social ones as well. I graduated high school and started college in the wake of covid so I feel extremely developmentally behind. I do some volunteer stuff in my area but I don't actually "know" or enjoy time with them outside of our volunteer work because they aren't my age or in my stage of life. I don't even play games anymore because the pressure of "making it" makes me feel worse than before playing a game.

watwut6• 1 year ago

Gaming is frequently social activity. People play games with their real life friends, schoolmates, colleagues and friends. And they chat while playing in a similar way they would chat over a beer. You can not just assume that "playing video game" equals being alone.

Young people who still go to school, including college, are in a company of peers massive amount of their time.

wbl• 1 year ago

Did we all agree to completely forget that the Great Recession happened and that the job market is right right now?

giantg26• 1 year ago

I game and I consider it a waste of time. But it is a decent way to not think, or distract your brain by thinking about what's happening in the game. It's an escape from the misery of life, even if it's only temporary.

briankelly• 1 year ago

Younger people who feel alone are missing out on life experiences. Older people who are alone now may have already had those and no longer need them.

merryocha• 1 year ago

The color shading on those maps seems deceptive to me. It suggests a starker contrast than what the numbers tell.

driggs• 1 year ago

The scale of each map is independent, and differs by an order of magnitude from the "lonely" top row to the "not lonely" bottom row.

A charitable view would be that they consider each category independent.

Another charitable view would be that they're focused on showing trends, not "absolute value of loneliness", and that you can view the order of maps Always-Usually-Rarely-Never to be an additional dimension. This would have better fit a linear layout, but as they note in the caption, a fifth map "wouldn't fit"; they are constrained by article layout.

If you think the WP is simply trying to push the premise of the article, that there is a "Loneliness Epidemic", then you may enjoy the book `How to Lie with Maps` by Monmonier:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo274005...

tasuki• 1 year ago

No matter how much time you think young men devote to video games, you’re probably underestimating it. Two decades ago, high-school- and college-age males (ages 15 to 24) spent about a quarter of an hour a day alone playing games. Now, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.4 hours a day.

Wat? I'd have expected it to be a lot more.

I'm sure there are quite a few who spend over eight hours a day playing games...

bluGill2• 1 year ago

There are also quite a few who never/rarely play games. Averages do things like that all the time. Which of course opens the question of is that an important factor?

giantg26• 1 year ago

Yeah, but a more useful analysis would be to look for a median instead of mean, or clean the dataset to remove outliers to say something like, of those who play video game, the average/median is... this would also lead itself to the next step of analysis about if it's an important factor like you mention by categorizing them into players vs non-players.

tokai• 1 year ago

Still way below average time spend watching tv then. Pretty surprising.

aziaziazi• 1 year ago

TV audience statistics are related to a lucrative branch of advertising. The higher the numbers, the higher that busyness is signifiant.

I’d be very curious to know how do they calculate “TV watching" statistics. Gaming is quite easier as you just count active playing time (=some input in the last ~5 sec) and there way less incentives to inflate the numbers.

andsoitis• 1 year ago

Still way below average time spend watching tv then. Pretty surprising.

Not to me. While games have replay and collaborative play fynamics, there just is a much higher volume of great TV and, as social beings, people get to be part of the zeitgeist.

asah• 1 year ago

1.4 hrs/day lol.

Same survey probably concluded that young men watch porn once a month.

aaronbaugher• 1 year ago

Yeah, it doesn't seem like much if you grew up in the 80s and remember the concerns about how the average household watched 4+ hours of TV a day. I consider my time spent playing games to be time wasted, but at least it's not entirely vegetative.

lanfeust6• 1 year ago

That's the thing with averages. MMO/online gamers sink more time, but even among gamers they are not the largest demo. 2 decades ago, there was even less of that.

I might have averaged 1-1.5h when I was younger, and now it's 30 min. Almost always single-player (made exceptions for FromSoftware games).

JumpinJack_Cash• 1 year ago

You can be alone in a sea of people.

It's not about quantity, it's about quality and depth.

However it would be ideal to feel content with superficial interactions but it's almost always not sufficient.

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

See https://archive.ph/ZByHo

throwaway13337• 1 year ago

These are survey questions. It seems to reveal most about cultural differences between what different groups feel like they are allowed to feel.

It would be difficult to control for this but it’s just naive to think these numbers should be interpreted in the straight forward manner presented.

It’s obvious that men and older people would likely report less loneliness as a cultural instinct, on average, for example. This is distinct from actual loneliness, though, which would be higher in both groups. At least if you think suicide rates are correlated.

It’s an important topic but this is unfortunately just going to muddy the waters.

sanj• 1 year ago

It is derived from the Census Household Pulse Survey which is designed, administered, and analyzed by the most sophisticated survey designers out there. They've had decades to create and refine approaches that deal with this problem.

I trust their interpretation over "throwaway13337" statements about what they find "obvious."

#gell-mann effect

weakfish• 1 year ago

It's a bit puzzling to me that they acknowledge statements like

Looking at people who identify as LGBTQ, the data at first suggested that they tend to be lonelier. But it’s largely because self-identified LGBTQ folks tend to be younger.

But then do not follow up with an analysis adjusted for this - wouldn't that be fairly straightforward?

jncfhnb2• 1 year ago

That sentence is the follow up analysis. The effect disappears if you adjust for age.

The loneliest people (and places) in America

Related Stories