Are Young People Going Through a Loneliness Epidemic?

Unfortunately, a lot of this stems from the pandemic and its aftermath. Prior to it, young people never had a problem with hyper-independence and having a sense of community was highly encouraged. But when covid hit, everyone was locked away from physically seeing their friends and family, so they had to rely on phones, text messages and social media.

Social media use runs rampant on young people anyway so why would using it more during covid make people lonelier? Well, when your main (and at the time only source) of communication with others is your phone, it can be exhausting. It may get to a point where you need to put the phone down and do something else. When do you put it down, you lose that constant communication.

Now, my previous point may not fully explain my question, however it sets the basis for the main reason as to why the issue was created. The issue of inconvenience. What I mean by inconvenience, is that especially during the pandemic, messaging and phone calls are constant because there was nothing to do. After a while, communication dies down because no one wants to be a bother/ an inconvenience especially with everything going on in the world.

Due to that, young people would avoid daily/weekly check-ups because, “what if they’re going through something, they wouldn’t want to hear from me I’ll leave them alone.” Whereas their friend’s perspective may be the fact that they are upset with the fact they haven’t heard anything, and no one’s reached out. Both parties don’t communicate the issue to avoid conflict, the friendship dies down and this cycle begins with others.