{"id":161262,"date":"2026-01-06T16:36:46","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T00:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?p=161262"},"modified":"2026-01-06T16:36:46","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T00:36:46","slug":"social-media-isnt-driving-the-teenage-loneliness-epidemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?p=161262","title":{"rendered":"Social media isn\u2019t driving the teenage \u201cloneliness epidemic\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Social media isn\u2019t driving the teenage \u201cloneliness epidemic\u201d<\/h1>\n

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Americans of all ages suffer a \u201cloneliness epidemic<\/a>,\u201d former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced in 2023, fostering health damage rivaling smoking \u201c15 cigarettes a day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,\u201d Murthy lamented. \u201cAcross many measures, Americans appear to be becoming less socially connected over time\u2026 Instead of coming together, we will further retreat to our corners\u2014angry, sick, and alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s dark. We\u2019d better remedy why we\u2019re lonelier.<\/p>\n

One big \u201csocially isolating\u201d factor Murthy cites, among several (after all, Robert Putnam\u2019s [in]famous \u201cBowling Alone<\/a>\u201d essay first appeared in 1995, when primitive PC dial-up howled at 16 slow Mhz), is our devices: \u201csocial media, smartphones, virtual reality, remote work, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies, to name just a few.\u201d<\/p>\n

Psychologist\u00a0Jean Twenge argues<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s too wimpy: social media, particularly smartphones, are\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0villain. Severely truncating charts (i.e., chopping off the lower and upper 60 points on a scale of 100 to make trends look wildly more terrifying),\u00a0she declares<\/a>: \u201cThere\u2019s something about being around another person \u2013 about touch, about eye contact, about laughter \u2013 that can\u2019t be replaced by digital communication. The result is a generation of teens who are lonelier than ever before.\u201d [Correction 1: online videochats do transmit eye contact and laughter; imagine the panic if they also transmitted \u201ctouch.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his\u00a0After Babel<\/a>\u00a0disciples agree. They insist their own generations that grew up in the 1970s and \u201880s before social media were happy, well-adjusted, and never lonely or anxious (\u201cPhones?\u201d one boasted. \u201cNo. We had each other.\u201d) [Correction 2: teens of the 1950s-1990s logged\u00a0plenty of phone time<\/a>, along with hours of television and radio.]<\/p>\n

Haidt sold at least one young core follower on his nostalgia of past adolescent bliss: \u201ca time we never knew,\u201d\u00a0Freya India laments<\/a>: now, her psychically tortured Generation Z suffers \u201canxiety (in) a phone-based world\u201d of \u201cloneliness, yes, but also the grief. The loss. The feeling of wanting to be free from the only world we\u2019ve ever known.\u201d<\/p>\n

[This view has always puzzled me. If you feel so terribly\u00a0oppressed by cellphones and social media<\/a>, solutions abound: (a)\u00a0don\u2019t get<\/em>\u00a0a cellphone and online connection; (b) use the \u201coff\u201d button; and\/or (c) click online tabs to block sites causing loneliness, grief, loss, anxiety, and entrapment (controls so easy even this 75-year-old regularly works them); then (d) go outside and frolic with friends in the soccer field sun and froyo fern patio. Look around. There\u2019s no gun to your head! You don\u2019t\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0to spend dark lonely months hunched over porn, Nazi, bullying, pro-ana, hate-your-body sites!]<\/p>\n

Of course, there would be downsides, the same as if past generations had dumped their televisions, radios, Princess phones, arcade gaming, etc. (which likewise were lambasted as \u201caddicting\u201d). Still, a vocal fraction really seems to feel compelled to use technology to self-destruct.<\/p>\n

Haidt also fails to mention that cities, malls, downtowns, etc., were so terrified of the teens of his day that hundreds of jurisdictions enacted juvenile bans and anti-cruising ordinances, culminating in the Clinton (yes,\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0Bill Clinton; ironic, huh?) administration\u2019s mid-\u201890s push for daytime\/nighttime curfews so strict that teens would be allowed in public only a few hours most days of the year. And to stop the \u201ctouch\u201d Twenge celebrates, thousands of schools, youth organizations, workplaces, etc., adopted \u201c3-foot\u201d personal separation rules.<\/p>\n

All this leads to the final irony challenging the massive campaign berating us (and teenagers) that social media (especially smartphones) has horribly rewired today\u2019s youth, the ultimate shocker\u2026<\/p>\n

TEENS\u2019 LONELINESS HAS NOT RISEN OVER THE LAST HALF-CENTURY<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I graphed all 48 years of Monitoring the Future\u2019s survey, the only one to ask the same question (\u201ca lot of times I feel lonely\u201d) of a consistent number (around 2,000) of high school seniors under the same selection process every year.<\/p>\n

The change in high schoolers\u2019 reporting loneliness \u2013 using a standard regression trendline to incorporate\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>years in the series instead of just cherry-picking the years that show what I want \u2013 is far below even tiny significance levels (d = 0.047, nothing), as the figures illustrate.<\/p>\n

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Sources:\u00a0Monitoring the Future<\/a>, 2025;\u00a0Pew Research<\/a>, 2007-2025.<\/h5>\n

Demolishing Haidt\u2019s nostalgia, Twenge\u2019s celebration, and India\u2019s illusion of joyous warm-body togetherness prior to the social media\/cellphone era, teens\u2019 self-reported loneliness was high in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s \u2013 long before social media and cellphones \u201cdestroyed adolescence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00b7 When Haidt was 17 in 1977, 0% of youths had social media or cellphones, yet 37% of his teen peers reported to MTF feeling \u201clonely\u2026 a lot.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u00b7 In 2024, 95% of teens use social media and cellphones, and 38% report loneliness to the same survey.<\/h5>\n

Not exactly the Four Horsemen. In fact, teen trends have been better on loneliness and many other indexes than those for both\u00a0young adults<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0all adults<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How to rig your advocacy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Note how easily \u201ctrends\u201d can be rigged to show whatever an advocate desires by cherry-picking which \u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cafter\u201d years to compare \u2013 a disgraceful subterfuge routinely used in pop-academics\u2019 and media discussions of social media:<\/p>\n

\u00b7 Want to show teenage loneliness has\u00a0skyrocketed<\/em>\u00a0due to social media? Compare 2021 (46% reported being lonely) to 2007 (22%).<\/h5>\n
\u00b7 Want to show teenage loneliness has\u00a0plummeted<\/em>\u00a0due to social media? Compare 2007 (22%) to 1995 (36%).<\/h5>\n

Both comparisons are bogus. The first ignores that teens\u2019\u00a0social media and cellphone use<\/a>\u00a0were already\u00a0well entrenched by 2007<\/a>, with only small increases afterward (see first figure). The second comparison tracks true growth in teens\u2019 internet and cellphone use but then picks an arbitrary cutoff year (why 2007? Why not another year?)<\/p>\n

Twenge\u2019s exaggerated graphs fixated only on 2007-2019, a period when social media use stayed the same at over 90% and cellphone use rose only from 60% to 80%. By comparing two years in which a lot of teens used social media, Twenge actually shows\u00a0social media is not the cause<\/a>\u00a0of the rise in loneliness she deplores.<\/p>\n

Twenge obsesses over smartphones, whose popularity escalated in the post-2013 period. However, treating smartphones as somehow cataclysmic is also puzzling, since a smartphone is just a portable phone with internet capability, both of which teens already had. Further, teens\u2019 loneliness had already increased from 22% in 2007 to 31% by the early 2010s before smartphones proliferated.<\/p>\n

It would be interesting to study why (a) teens\u2019 loneliness plunged in the early 2000s (my best guess is Millennials\u2019 aforementioned froyo and soccer, replacing Gen-X mosh pits, mood rings, and pet rocks); and (b) both teens\u2019 and adults\u2019 loneliness rose in the 2010s before the COVID-19 pandemic, got worse during the pandemic, and now may be falling. Authorities\u2019 blinding obsession with social media has quashed investigating more promising explanations for teens.<\/p>\n

Perhaps teens\u2019 definition of \u201clonely\u201d have changed over time<\/strong><\/p>\n

How would a teenager of 1975 who talked on the phone for hours with friends, or a teen of today who videoed, gamed, messaged, and chatted with friends online, answer the open-ended question: \u201ca lot of times, I feel lonely\u201d? Has the rise of broader communications technologies in the internet era \u2013 sophisticated videochats and messaging supplanting the waxed string\/tin cans, walkie-talkie, post-it note, and voice telephone of the past \u2013 changed the standards for describing oneself as \u201clonely\u201d?<\/p>\n

The next substack deals with nuances no one, amid the emotional panic over teens, social media, and mental health, seems interested in exploring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Social media isn\u2019t driving the teenage \u201cloneliness epidemic\u201d Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026 Americans of all ages suffer a \u201cloneliness epidemic,\u201d former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced in 2023, fostering health damage rivaling smoking \u201c15 cigarettes a day.\u201d \u201cIn recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,\u201d Murthy lamented. \u201cAcross many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161263,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161262\/revisions\/161263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}