Why Gen Z feels so alone

In the first episode of Much Much Media’s chat show, Parenting Aaj Kal, Ira Khan says something a lot of Gen Z has felt in their chest for years but rarely had the words for: loneliness isn’t an exception anymore. It’s becoming the default setting. 

And what’s unsettling isn’t just that young people feel lonely. It’s how quietly it has become normal.

When loneliness becomes normal, it stops sounding like an emergency. It starts sounding like personality. Like a flaw. Like “maybe I’m just bad at friends.” But that story doesn’t hold up, not when you look at what has changed around young people, what has been taken away, and what has been made harder to access.

“If you’ve never played like that…”: the kind of childhood many Gen Z kids didn’t get

A generation ago, the script for childhood friendships was simpler: you’d go downstairs, find kids, play, fight, make up, repeat. Not perfectly. But often enough that you learned the messy basics of being with other people.

In the episode, Ira names what’s missing now: the everyday, unstructured kind of play that teaches you how to belong without requiring a calendar invite. 

She puts it in a line that lands like a bruise: “If you’ve never played like that, how would you know you’re missing anything?” That question matters because it explains something many adults misunderstand about Gen Z loneliness.

You can’t “just go make friends” if you didn’t grow up in environments where friendship happened easily: in parks, corridors, sports grounds, building compounds, school buses, streets, without supervision, without productivity goals, without a performance pressure to be “likeable.”

If those spaces disappeared before you got to use them, connection starts to feel like a skill you were never taught.

The loneliness is real — and the numbers back up the feeling

Gen Z isn’t imagining this. Global data has been pointing in the same direction.

A Meta–Gallup global survey across 142 countries found that 24% of people worldwide reported feeling “very” or “fairly” lonely, nearly one in four.  And importantly, young adults aged 19–29 showed the highest levels, with 27% reporting feeling very or fairly lonely. 

Another Gallup measure (using a different question) found 23% of people worldwide said they felt loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday.” 

The point is: if loneliness is showing up at this scale, it’s not just an individual problem. It’s a social condition. And that’s exactly what Ira’s framing pushes us toward. A bigger, more systemic question: What happened to community?

Why this isn’t just about screen time

Yes, digital life shapes how Gen Z connects. But the deeper shift is what digital life replaced, and what society failed to build alongside it.

In many places, kids today have:

• less unstructured time

• more academic pressure and packed schedules

• fewer accessible “third places” (spaces outside home and school where you can just exist)

• more safety fears (often real) that keep parents from letting kids roam

• and a culture that treats rest and play like something you must earn

So friendships don’t form through “bumping into each other.” They form through planning, and planning requires time, energy, transport, money, and emotional bandwidth. That’s not neutral. That’s a filter. It decides who gets connection easily and who has to work for it.

When “hanging out” becomes a logistical project

Research is increasingly documenting a shift away from in-person social time. An OECD report notes that across OECD countries, longer-term trends show people are meeting in person less often, while digital interactions have become more frequent. 

The same report points out that people are often more likely to stay in touch remotely than meet up in person. For example, in European OECD countries, weekly remote contact outpaces weekly in-person get-togethers. 

This matters because digital connection can be meaningful but it doesn’t always meet the same needs as shared physical space: the micro-moments, the awkward silences, the inside jokes that happen when you’re simply around each other long enough.

And when in-person connection becomes rare, it can start to feel… intense. Like a date. Like pressure. Like something you must perform well. That’s how loneliness can deepen: not only do you feel alone, you start to fear the very closeness you want.

Loneliness isn’t a personal failure. It’s a public health issue

When large numbers of people feel disconnected, the consequences aren’t just emotional. They show up in bodies and communities.

The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory describes loneliness and isolation as a major health concern, linking lack of social connection to increased risk of physical and mental health harms.  It also notes that the mortality impact of social disconnection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

That framing is important because it shifts the question from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What’s happened to our social fabric?”

And once you see it that way, the “solution” can’t just be individual confidence hacks. It has to include social infrastructure: the spaces and conditions that make connection possible.

Why this hits disabled and neurodivergent young people even harder

Social issues don’t hit everyone equally. Loneliness intersects with disability, neurodivergence, chronic illness, mental health, and poverty not because disabled people are inherently lonelier, but because the world often blocks access to connection.

The Surgeon General’s advisory notes that studies find high prevalence of loneliness and isolation among people with poor physical or mental health and disabilities, alongside financial insecurity and other structural vulnerabilities. 

Now layer that onto everyday reality:

• public spaces that aren’t physically accessible

• social plans built around sensory overload

• stigma that makes people treat disabled and neurodivergent kids as “too much” or “too difficult”

• bullying and exclusion in schools

• fewer inclusive community activities that don’t demand masking or social performance

For many disabled and neurodivergent young people, loneliness isn’t about being “bad at socialising.” It’s about living in a world where social spaces weren’t designed with them in mind.

When we talk about Gen Z loneliness, disability and neurodivergence can’t be an afterthought. Accessibility is community-building.

So what do we do with this?

Ira’s point in Parenting Aaj Kal isn’t nostalgia for a “better” childhood. It’s a prompt to notice what vanished, and to stop blaming young people for adapting to that loss. 

If loneliness has become Gen Z’s default, then the question becomes: how do we rebuild the conditions where belonging is ordinary again?

Not through perfect friend groups. Not through forcing extroversion. But through small, structural shifts:

• protecting unstructured time in childhood (and honestly, in adulthood too)

• investing in accessible community spaces: parks, libraries, youth centres, hobby clubs

• designing social environments that don’t punish difference (sensory needs, communication styles, mobility needs)

• treating friendship and community as real life infrastructure, not an optional extra