The loneliness crisis
Even [with] my friends, I find it hard to converse face-to-face,” says my student T. “It’s easier to talk online rather than in person.”
This prompts me to give her coursemates an assignment—to chat, walk, eat lunch, socialize with T on campus. One says, “I will pick you up from your place even if you live far!” Another says he will accompany her in and out of class.
T promises to take up her friends’ invitations.
My colleague S, who mentors young people, narrates the tale of a barkada, who purport to stave off loneliness by physically getting together to play digital games. Sure enough, she comes across them seated beside each other in a room—but each wearing headphones, and glued to individual screens. They are playing the same game, but in the half-hour that she observes them, no one talks to another, no one looks at each other.
“When we play together, we feel better,” they tell S, who then suggests that they put down their screens, meet each other’s eyes and just chat. They confess, “It’s easier for us to bond in this way. We don’t know what to talk about outside the game.”
“What do the loneliness epidemic … and worsening mental health among teenagers and young adults have in common?” asks Financial Times columnist John Burn Murdoch. “[They are] all part of the same wider shift: plummeting in-person socializing among young people.”
Employers today demand that graduates display not only technical ability (which can be honed with training) but also the so-called soft skills of empathy and teamwork—emotional quotient aside from its intellectual counterpart. But how can they develop socially if they prefer to be alone?
“More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing,” says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic Magazine. “Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, to go on a date, to have more than one close friend or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s,” when not coincidentally, smartphone sales soared.
Thompson cites US data, but the same trend appears to be true here as well.
“Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood,” he says. “A popular trend on TikTok involves 20-somethings celebrating … when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy … But the sheer number … is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of … the most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.
“If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional costs of physical-world togetherness—and prone to keeping even close friends at a physical distance—that suggests that phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.”
A 2024 Ateneo de Manila survey of work habits reveals that while both Gen Z and Gen Y are technologically savvier than Gen X or Boomers, Gen Y are more used to in-person collaboration, as opposed to Gen Z, many of whom prefer the autonomy offered by hybrid or remote arrangements—a necessity these days.
Aside from malls, we need more safe public spaces (campuses, parks, pools, car-free roads, seaside promenades, etc.) for young people to hang out, sans gadgets, or else they will continue, as Murdoch puts it, “retreating from the pursuits that bring them the most fulfillment, and replacing them with pale imitations.”
