Young people are suffering a social recession

Two images of lockdown life in 2020 have stayed with me. One is of the whole country banging pans and clapping together on spring evenings at the start of the pandemic to support health workers. The other is of the scene at our nearby taco restaurant on wet winter nights, where a procession of food delivery drivers working on apps such as Deliveroo would come and stand outside the window in the rain.

They would wordlessly press their phones to the glass so someone inside could see the order number displayed on them. After a while a hand would poke out of the door with a bag. It was safe and efficient while the virus raged, but it also felt deeply lonely.

Even before Covid-19, there were signs that countries including the UK were becoming lonelier places in which social capital was beginning to fray.

The UK’s statistical office describes social capital as “the extent and nature of our connections with others and the collective attitudes and behaviours between people that support a well-functioning, close-knit society”. Multifaceted and amorphous though that concept is, UK statisticians have tried in recent years to use a series of different metrics to measure it over time.

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Some of these metrics were deteriorating before the pandemic. Between 2014/15 and 2017/18, the proportion of people who said they regularly stopped to chat to their neighbours fell almost six percentage points to 62 per cent. The proportion who said they felt they belonged to their local area fell by a similar amount.

The share of people who were members of political, voluntary, professional and recreational organisations fell from 53 to 48 per cent. Tom Clark, a fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has raised the question of whether these trends might even amount to a “social recession”.

Did the first stage of the pandemic improve our social capital by reminding us of our dependence on each other, triggering acts of kindness and care? Or did it make it worse, leaving more people isolated and lonely and accelerating technological shifts that depersonalise our interactions?

The UK statistics suggest the answer depended on who and where you were. The share of people who say they borrow things and exchange favours with neighbours edged up between 2019 and 2021, a sign perhaps that local bonds were forged. But the rise was much sharper among women than men, and it was also women who reported a higher sense of trust in people by 2021.

Unsurprisingly, the share of those who are lonely also rose. But while many worried at the start of the pandemic about loneliness among the old, only 3 per cent of 65- to 74-year-olds and 6 per cent of over-75s said they often or always felt lonely in 2020/21, compared with 11 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds.

Similarly, analysis by local authority shows that areas with a higher concentration of younger people had higher rates of loneliness between October 2020 and February 2021. Areas with higher unemployment and lower average wages were also lonelier.

The effect of the pandemic on young people is a particular worry because their loneliness levels were already on the rise – and not just in the UK. A study published last year examined survey data gathered by the OECD from 15- and 16-year-old school pupils in an array of countries in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018.

The survey contained six questions about loneliness at school such as “I feel like an outsider (or left out of things) at school” and “I feel lonely at school”. In a sample of one million teenagers, school loneliness increased between 2012 and 2018 in 36 out of 37 countries. Nearly twice as many teenagers felt high levels of loneliness in 2018 than in 2012.

The researchers found that school loneliness was higher when more students had access to smartphones and used the internet for more hours per weekday. If the internet makes young people feel lonely, it’s no wonder the pandemic made them lonelier still.

Loneliness is bad for your health: researchers have found connections between chronic loneliness and heart disease, dementia, depression and anxiety. It can also change your perception of the world around you. One UK study asked young people about the friendliness of their neighbourhoods: it found that lonely youngsters ranked their neighbourhoods as worse than their non-lonely siblings.

If anyone is in a social recession, it is the young. As well as helping them to catch up with missed school work, we should think urgently about how to help them feel more connected to each other – crucially, in ways that don’t involve their phones. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022