Are People Really Lonely and Miserable?

I am really digging what the Census Bureau has been up to lately. And, yes, I fully understand how incredibly nerdy that last sentence sounds. But it’s true! I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting data and the Census Bureau rarely provides me with anything of value.

Of course they do the Decennial Census, which is constitutionally mandated. But honestly, that survey kind of sucks because it’s not a survey - it’s a census. It contains really basic demographic questions and little else. There’s a good reason for that, by the way. In some cases, they are legally prohibited from asking about certain topics, but also you want to keep that one brief so that response rate goes up. That’s really the goal.

They also have the American Communities Survey. Which is a bit better. It’s fielded on an annual basis and asks a lot more probing questions about education and finances among other things. It’s a really valuable tool for allocating things like grant funding and for businesses to understand where people live and what they want. But, again, not a whole lot in the area of traditional social science.

But things have changed! In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Census Bureau launched a new survey called the Household Pulse Survey. It’s an online instrument that takes about twenty minutes to complete, and the goal is to help policymakers and stakeholders understand what is happening on the ground in near real-time. They are constantly fielding the instrument and releasing the results for public consumption. Be still my data-obsessed heart. I am going to show you some data from the Phase 4.1 study, which was fielded between April 2 and July 22, 2024. That means that this data is less than six months old. Fantastic.

I am going to pull out some questions that piqued my interest when I was scrolling through the codebook. The first is a set of two questions about mental health. Folks were asked, “How often do you get the social and emotional support you need?” Response options ranged from “always” to “never,” and because the total sample size of this survey is over 72,000, that means I can break this down by individual birth year.

Among people born in the 1940s and 1950s, there’s quite a bit of evidence that they are getting a lot of support. For instance, among those born in 1950, 40% say they always get the support they need, and another 35% usually get that support. That’s clearly the vast majority. In contrast, just 10% of the sample say that they never or rarely get emotional and social support. The impression that I get here is that older folks are feeling pretty good about their support network.

Among younger people, the picture is a whole lot different. Tracing the ‘always’ line is instructive here. Among people born in 1940, it’s about 42%. Among people born in 1960, it’s 35%. For those born in 1980, it’s 24%, and for the youngest adults in the sample, only 17% say that they ‘always’ feel like they get the emotional and social support that they need. While that line is headed downward, the corollary is the ‘sometimes’ trend. It goes from about 6% among those born in the 1940s to about 30% among those born around 2000.

Let’s compare Generation Z to Baby Boomers on this question:

• Never: 7% vs 8%

• Rarely: 13% vs 8%

• Sometimes: 30% vs 15%

• Usually: 34% vs 32%

• Always: 16% vs 38%

It’s pretty clear that the only real divergence is between ‘sometimes’ and ‘always.’

How about this question - how often do you feel lonely?

Older folks do not report a whole lot of social isolation based on this metric. That’s incredibly apparent from these trend lines. Among those born in the 1940s, about 37% say that they ‘rarely’ feel lonely, and another 33% say that they are never lonely. That’s seven in ten folks born in the 1940s who just aren’t that lonely at all. Less than ten percent chose ‘usually’ or ‘always.’

But, again, there are clear trends happening in the trajectory of these lines as we move through each successive decade of birth. While 20% of older folks say that they feel lonely sometimes, it was twice that rate among people born around 2000. And what is more troublesome is how that line jumps up really quickly for those born in 1980 or later. It goes from 28% to 42% in just two decades of births. That’s worrisome.

Think about this: about a third of Americans in their seventies say that they never feel lonely. It’s only 10% of those in their late teens and early twenties. Also, younger people are a whole lot more likely to say that they ‘usually’ feel lonely. It was 5% of the older part of the sample and about 15% of the youngest adults surveyed. Young people feel lonelier. There’s no other conclusion that you can arrive at based on this data.

But let me show you the other side of the loneliness equation—a series of questions about how often people engage in social activities. Let’s start with one about how many times during an average week people get together with friends or relatives.

The ‘zero’ trend could launch a dozen dissertations. Among the Silent Generation, very few of them aren’t hanging out with their friends and family. Just a quarter say that they socialize less than once a week. But that percentage is much higher for each successive generation. About 37% of Boomers aren’t regularly socializing. But the two generations which are the least social are Generation X and Millennials. Nearly half of them report that they don’t hang out with friends or family during the course of a week. Only 16% are meeting up with others at least three times a week.

Generation Z looks a lot more like Baby Boomers than they resemble Millennials. I think there’s a pretty simple answer for that—they still have the college experience to help with socialization. And even in that early adulthood time period, there is a lot of flexibility for social interactions. It’s the middle-aged folks who are not socializing, not the very young or very old.

There’s also a question about how often people attend a meeting for a club or social organization. The full list is: church groups, unions, fraternal or athletic groups, or school groups. Here’s how those responses look across the age spectrum.

The blue line at the top denotes the portion of the sample that says that they do not belong to any clubs or organizations. That’s the huge story here. Among the older part of the sample, just 40% of them aren’t attached to any social club or other organization. But that trend line races upward with each successive birth year. In this sample, among people in their mid-twenties, about 70% are part of zero religious or social organizations. You should all be thinking about Putnam’s magnum opus right now, Bowling Alone.

The other two lines run on pretty similar tracks. It’s worth pointing out that about a third of Americans born in 1940 report that they attend a meeting of a club or organization at least once a month. But even among this group of 85-year-olds, you are more likely to find someone who is part of no clubs than one who is attending regular meetings. We just aren’t joining stuff. And that’s especially acute among the youth.

But this is a newsletter about religion, right? Let me show you how people answered the question about church attendance in the prior year.

There are only two lines worthy of discussion here: the zero instances of religious attendance in the prior year and those who attend at least once a month. On the left side of the graph, folks are just as likely to be regular attenders as never attenders (40% for each). But that doesn’t last for long. As one moves into those born in 1960, the gap is already huge. Among folks born in 1960, about half report never attending religious services, and a bit less than 30% are attending at least twelve times a year. That’s a twenty-plus point gap.

But the chasm only widens from there. It’s about 35 points among people born in 1980. And for people born around the millennium, being a churchgoer is just incredibly rare. About 70% of those folks have not been at a house of worship in the prior year, while about 15% were attending at least once a month. That’s a fifty-five-point gap. The kids aren’t going to church.

It’s hard to know how much the responses from the first two questions about emotional support and loneliness are tied to the second set of questions about social activity. I think we can all admit that being less social drives up feelings of loneliness and social isolation, but that may not be uniform across all respondents. Some folks are genuinely more introverted than others.

But one worrying trend that I have been seeing in the discourse lately is the near idolization of how introverted one can be. It’s almost become socially awkward to say that you are an extrovert. It’s admitting some kind of defect to say that you like being around people. I am wondering if this is just some kind of mental gymnastics that people engage in to justify the fact that they don’t go out with friends anymore. Almost no one is a true hermit. Everyone needs to hang out with other folks in the real world from time to time. The frequency and nature of those gatherings can clearly vary based on personality type.

But to say that you just don’t need to spend time with other human beings is either admitting a deeply troubling mental illness or trying to will your brain to rewire itself in a way that it wasn’t designed to be.

Stop scrolling TikTok. Turn off Netflix. Leave the house. Hang out with people. You probably won’t regret it.

Code for this post can be found here.