When I founded a befriending charity in 2018, I thought I understood loneliness. I saw how many older people were slipping through the cracks of a culture that prizes convenience and productivity over community. But seven years on, something unexpected has become clear: the group now most at risk of deep, chronic loneliness isn’t the elderly anymore, it’s young adults.
According to the ONS, 40% of adults aged 16–29 now report feeling lonely “often or always” or “some of the time,” compared with just 17% of those aged 70 or over. This is the first time in recorded history that our young adults are making up Britain’s loneliest generation. This is significant because it marks a social shift: youth is no longer a buffer against isolation, and the forces driving loneliness are increasingly environmental (tied to the structure of modern life itself) rather than age-related.
How did we get here? Some of this cohort came of age during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, their most socially formative years marked by cancelled rites of passage, isolation, and an undercurrent of fear. Yet this was only one chapter and it exposed how thin our communal life had already become.
But loneliness isn’t only a Covid story, it's a cultural, social and spiritual crisis.
We now live in the age of Amazon Prime, grocery apps, and next-day everything. Convenience has become an idol for many of us and community, optional. But convenience has a spiritual cost. When everything in life becomes frictionless, people become friction. And we start organising our lives to avoid them.
Just yesterday, I watched a young man open his door to a Deliveroo driver. He didn’t look up or smile; he simply muttered his confirmation number while staring at his phone, grabbed the bag, and shut the door. The driver wasn’t a person in that exchange; just a function, a service, a convenience. This isn’t simply a failure of manners; it’s a symptom of a society increasingly formed by utility. And when daily life becomes this transactional, this frictionless, we stop being shaped by the very encounters that make us human.
This creeping normalisation of solitude (not just as a living arrangement but as a lifestyle) whispers a dangerous lie of self-reliance. Recent data from the Marriage Foundation shows that only 58% of Gen Z women and 56% of Gen Z men are now expected to ever marry, with delayed marriage fast becoming the norm. But this isn’t just a shift in lifestyle preference; it’s part of the wider pattern of disconnection. When a generation increasingly chooses autonomy over commitment, it’s no surprise that loneliness fills the vacuum where long-term relationships and shared life once stood.
But isolated autonomy is not what we were made for.
From the very first pages of Scripture, this truth is written into our design. In Genesis, before the fall, God looks at Adam (a perfect man in a perfect garden) and says: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) In other words: solitude isn’t just profoundly disorienting, it is contrary to our created nature.
Catholic anthropology teaches that the human person is made in the image of a Trinitarian God; a God who is relationship, who is communion, who is the eternal self-gift of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This means we are designed not for self-containment but for self-gift. No wonder young adults today feel starved for connection: we’re trying to live a communal faith in an individualistic world.
Everything about modern Western life and ‘the new normal’ pushes us toward isolation. Living alone has become increasingly normal and remote work removes the daily human interactions that once structured our lives. Even our spiritual lives can become disembodied — streamed Masses and online Catholic communities that, while helpful, can never replace communio: the incarnational togetherness at the heart of the Christian life.
Young adults are not broken. They are simply trying to flourish in conditions that contradict their deepest identity: isolation, transactional relationships, and a society that rewards self-interest above service to others.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: isolation itself has become a temptation. Not the holy solitude of the saints, but the self-protective kind that tells us it’s easier to stay home. As Catholics, we know something the world keeps forgetting: community is not a luxury; it is the antidote to isolation. The early Church grew through sermons heard in community, fellowship, shared meals, mutual care, and belonging.
Today, by contrast, many young adults live alone in flats where neighbours are strangers, order meals with little human interaction, and commute with faces glued to their phones. The once-familiar rhythms of tight-knit neighbourhood life — grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbours, parishioners, coworkers — have largely vanished, replaced by fragmented, transactional relationships. In these conditions, service, shared sacrifice, and community presence are optional rather than woven into daily life, leaving a generation socially starved despite constant connectivity.
Loneliness is fast becoming a lifestyle because convenience culture has made isolation effortless. But we must remember that we are social, relational beings that flourish within relationships: familial, civic and ecclesial. At our deepest identity, we are creatures made for communion.
Of course, it costs something to belong. It costs time, effort and vulnerability, but there is no place for us to be mere individuals. When Jesus teaches us to pray, He does not say “My Father” but “Our Father.” So we must ask: what price do we pay for a culture that values convenience over communion? And are we willing to reclaim, and reteach this younger generation, the costly, beautiful and sacrificial work of belonging and community? The antidote to loneliness has always been community. Reintroducing intergenerational friendships (befriending those outside our age, state in life, or vocation) in a world fractured by identity politics is essential to strengthening community ties. By choosing real-life connection over convenience, we can begin to reweave the social fabric that holds us together.
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