# Why Modern Society Makes Us Feel More Lonely

An episode of [SOLVED with Mark Manson](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247526593), 20 Mar 2024, 36 min.

Audio: https://claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/441/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/episode.flightcast.com/slcvfcfknvuww615bxcumhmz.mp3

I came across some mildly terrifying statistics on loneliness and wanted to figure out what was going on. In this episode Drew and I break down three paradoxes we're calling “The Three Paradoxes of Modern Loneliness” and they are as follows: • We are more connected than ever, yet loneliness is at an all-time high • The more urbanized our lifestyles become, the lonelier we become • Despite being more social, young people are becoming lonelier than older people Join us as we dig into the data and discuss why this all might be happening and what we can do about it. Check it out. CHAPTERS Chapters • 00:00:00 The Loneliness Crisis: Shocking Statistics • 00:00:55 Paradox 1: More Connected, More Lonely • 00:02:50 The Momentum of Intimacy and Social Sorting • 00:06:46 From Social Graph to Interest Graph: The TikTok Shift • 00:08:30 Empty Calories: Why Digital Interactions Don't Satisfy • 00:10:51 Dating Apps and the Superficiality Problem • 00:14:09 The Missing Accountability: Why Everyone's Meaner Online • 00:16:17 Paradox 2: Urban Loneliness in Crowded Cities • 00:19:13 Social Infrastructure: The Key to Urban Connection • 00:20:54 Living Alone: The 400% Increase and What It Means • 00:24:00 The Marriage Question: Quality Up, Quantity Down • 00:27:13 Paradox 3: Why Gen Z Is the Loneliest Generation • 00:29:14 Trading Weed for TikTok: The Teen Mental Health Crisis • 00:31:38 Interpersonal Neurobiology: Why Face-to-Face Matters • 00:33:48 The Takeaway: We're Failing Our Kids ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://bit.ly/4w46FMH FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

## Transcript

[0:00] So I came across some stats, Drew, and these are mildly terrifying. I want to go through them really quick. A 2023 Gallup survey found that over 50% of people say that they feel at least a little bit lonely in their lives. 27% of people said that they feel very lonely in their lives.
[0:15] Last year, 1 in 3 Americans say that they feel socially isolated from others. Since the 90s, the number of people who say that they have zero friends has quadrupled in the US and tripled in the UK. And the marriage rate has fallen by over 60% in the last two generations. It's at a record low. And a stunning 57% of single people say that they have given up or have no interest in dating. Yet this is happening in a time where the world is more connected than ever.
[0:40] more of us live in closer proximity to each other than ever, and it is easier to keep in touch with the people that we care about more than ever. In short, Drew, what the fuck is going on in the world right now? I thought that's what you were going to tell me.
[0:55] Oh, this is my job. This is what I'm here for. That is your job. I'm here for the numbers, I guess. I don't know. We're going to investigate three of these paradoxes today. We're calling them the three paradoxes of modern loneliness. And we're going to break these down one by one. The first one is paradox number one. We are more connected than ever, yet loneliness is at an all-time high. I actually heard a term just recently by the journalist Derek Thompson. He called it dopamine inequality. As soon as he said that, it hit home really, really hard because I've
[1:25] Social media, it's just a bucket of dopamine in your face over and over again. When you socialize with people in your real life, particularly people you don't know very well or people you just met, there's a lot of boredom and tedium that goes along with it. When you're sitting in front of a new person or a new friend, you'll fall into conversation topics that you don't find very interesting or that you don't necessarily agree with or that you don't really care about.
[1:47] And I think we've trained ourselves to just swipe away as soon as we hit that point. As soon as we hit anything that's like not very interesting to us or not stimulating or not giving us a dopamine hit, we swipe away mentally. The problem is, is that in-person social relationships require you to sit through a number of those tedious conversations or boring conversations that you don't really care about personally.
[2:08] Put the effort in to listen, maybe respond in a way that steers the conversation towards something that you care about. And I've definitely been guilty of this in my own life. I've absolutely found that my threshold for tolerating social interactions that are not interesting to me is almost like disengagement.
[2:25] zero at this point. And it's to the point that it's actually a problem. And this is a conversation that's been happening in my house with my wife quite a bit. It's like, we have to remind each other, give it another chance. Try again. They're probably a good person. Meet up with them more. I think the other aspect of this too is we're so used to just being satisfied immediately with an interaction with something that we don't realize that building a friendship takes...
[2:50] weeks, months, even years. Like you have to see somebody 10, 20, 30 times, yet we'll see somebody once, have a boring conversation, and then be like, ah, that person's boring. I don't wanna hang out with them. And then you go back to the phone. There's a momentum to intimacy and connection. To build up to the deep, meaningful stuff, you have to put in the hours, in the surface level, less meaningful stuff.
[3:12] And people don't like hearing that, but it's true. It's just human nature. We don't tend to feel good about opening up to people that we haven't invested a lot of time or energy with and who we don't know super well. And if you do go from zero to 100 in like two minutes and just start sharing your deepest, darkest secrets with essentially a perfect stranger, their reaction is not going to be meaningful to you. Like whether they reject you or give you advice or hug you and tell you it's okay, they're
[3:38] It's not going to feel nearly as impactful or profound as somebody you've been friends with for 10 years doing the same thing. I think the second issue around this is a social sorting effect. And I think this one is counterintuitive. The more connected we are with everybody around us, the easier it is to find like-minded people. This is well discussed when it comes particularly to politics, but I think this is true for everything.
[4:03] 30 years ago, if you were into meditation or yoga, you had to put in a lot of effort to go find other people who were in the meditation and yoga. If you were into pickleball, you had to put a lot of effort to go find other people to play pickleball with. Today, it's so easy. Whatever your interest or hobby or obscure niche obsession, you can find a subgroup of people who are also equally obsessed and interested in that thing. And that's great. That's actually...
[4:31] I would argue one of the biggest benefits of social media and the internet. The problem is, is when you remove that friction from finding people who have the same interests as you, your tolerance level for people who don't have the same interests as you drops. So you become less patient with those who maybe aren't into the same things that you're in and they want to show you
[4:49] the thing that they're into. Or it feels as though you should spend less time maybe hanging out with people who aren't going to do the same things that you're going to do. The same way this affects our politics of kind of putting us in an echo chamber, I think this puts us in a little bit of a social bubble where we really just want to cocoon ourselves with those who do the same things and think the same things as we do. And our tolerance level of people who are not into those things or who don't think those things drops.
[5:15] Yeah, that's what big tech missed, I think, too. I've said this before, but social media is really good at just what you explained is connecting us based on our similarities. It's really bad about getting us to connect on our differences. That's what they missed. That's what Zuckerberg missed. Yeah, you can sort us into these bubbles, but you can't get us to connect on our differences in any way, in any meaningful way.
[5:38] Do you think too, Mark, that the evolution of social platforms in recent years too is making them even less personal? There's data coming out now that people are sharing less and less on social media platforms. They're being less social on social media platforms. Sharing has gone way down just in the last three or four years. People enjoy documenting their lives less frequently. They're becoming more passive consumers of content on these platforms. And what that's doing is it's kind of consolidating the content production process.
[6:08] within a smaller group of people, celebrities, influencers, people like you, I would say too, that's probably leading down a road where social media becomes less social and less personal. I think 10, 15 years ago, social media was mostly social. I think today it's mostly media. There's a lot of stats around, I think it's on any given platform, 1% of the users will create 90% of the content.
[6:29] 9% of the users will respond. Basically 9% will create the other 10% and then the other 90% are responsible for less than 1%. So it's like 90% of users on social platforms are passive. They're not engaging. They're not commenting. They're simply looking.
[6:46] You also have things like so like the TikTok algorithm, right? The for you algorithm. When TikTok came on the scene, then everybody started copying that algorithm, which was we're not going to show you as much from your own real life network. We're going to show you more from the expanded pool of content that's out there all around the world. And so that is even yet another level of impersonalization of social media. Yeah.
[7:09] In the social media industry, the TikTok moment, if you talk to industry insiders, the way they describe it is going from the social graph to the interest graph, which basically TikTok's big innovation was realizing that everything pre-TikTok was organized around who are the people you want to follow.
[7:24] Who are your friends or the people you look up to or the celebrities you're a fan of? Tell us who those people are and then we'll show you their content and you'll enjoy it. What TikTok figured out is that people ultimately just want to follow what they're interested in. You could be a perfect stranger, but if you give somebody the exact content that they're going to be interested in, you don't really care who they are.
[7:45] And so, yeah, it does make it more impersonal. And again, it kind of comes back to this point. It's like it's becoming less social and more media. It's becoming less keeping up with your cousins and aunt and uncle and more the same way you and I treated television when we were kids. Like you'd come home from school, you'd turn on the TV, you had no idea what was on, but you would just flip channels until you found something that looked interesting. And that is essentially what social media is becoming.
[8:10] And it's why I personally think it's going to replace a lot of traditional media and particularly linear television. But that's a conversation for another podcast. The problem with this, though, is that I think there's a lot of data that supports the idea that even when we do interact with friends and family members and people that we admire through social media, it's...
[8:30] It's empty calories. The digital interactions do not provide the same emotional satiety that a face-to-face interaction provides. There's just something about being in the room with somebody, feeling their presence, reading the micro expressions of their body language, hearing the lilt in their voice, seeing the same things, hearing the same things, smelling the same things. You can't replicate that through an Instagram DM or a tweet thread.
[8:56] And it's kind of an obvious thing, but I think what we're seeing is that we're replacing quality social interaction with quantity. We're replacing depth of interaction with breadth. So we have access to more people than ever before, and we have access to more inspiring and smarter and more interesting people than ever before.
[9:17] But the quality of those interactions is a fraction of what it would be with somebody in person. But it's just the way we're wired, the way we seek reward and seek interesting things and novelty, it's hard to combat that within ourselves. Like it's just it's always going to be sexier to like...
[9:34] you know, hop on YouTube and find literally the best person in the world at this one thing and watch them and listen to them than to like walk down the street and play pickleball with your neighbor or whatever. It's always going to be more enticing, I think. It's also, I mean, okay, I hate to say this, but if you are a person who, let's say you don't have great social skills or you're kind of in a bad place in your life at the moment, a little bit depressed, maybe you suffer from a lot of social anxiety, right?
[10:01] Social media apps, like it's a quick fix. You can get a little bit of that satiation without any effort whatsoever. Like it's completely risk-free. You can hop on Twitch or YouTube or leave a comment somewhere and maybe send an email and it will feel good for a few seconds. And that's better than nothing, but at least you don't have to risk anything. You can do it from the comfort of your couch or your bed.
[10:22] So I think that's a real issue as well. And it probably plays into the mental health crisis, which I don't think we're gonna get too much into today. But if you are somebody who suffers a lot from depression or anxiety, the fact that you have this kind of empty calorie solution that requires no risk or no real effort on your part really keeps you in the same place. Yeah, it could be a very vicious feedback loop there, a very vicious cycle that you can get into. Should we talk about dating? I know like as the single guy on this podcast...
[10:51] Poor you just gets inundated with the dating app conversation. Oh, I have a lot of thoughts. Go for it. I feel like with dating, it compounds a lot of these things in a lot of ways, but I'm curious to hear your experience. I've been thinking a lot about this and dating apps prime people to look at the most superficial aspects of relationships, even if that's not something you value in a relationship. Let's say you're somebody who values intelligence or...
[11:17] you know, some kind of like fuzzier concept in another individual that you're prospectively gonna get with. First of all, they're very visual, right? Like what this person looks like. You usually in your bios are super short, so you're gonna put something like your job or maybe a few interests or something like that. A very superficial surface level things. It's like you're shopping on Amazon when you're using these apps, right? And so necessarily, I think it leads towards more superficial interactions and relationships and people.
[11:45] Because they are primed to look at those more superficial aspects of the person in general. So that I think is a big one that people miss. They think, well, it's easier to meet these people. Yes, it's easier to meet people, but you're meeting people and trying to connect with them on more superficial features of that person or the relationship.
[12:05] When I look back at my dating experience, one thing that regularly happened was the women that I thought I was going to be really into after a date or two, it turned out I wasn't really into them. And then the women that I didn't really think I would be that attracted to, I would hang out with them a few times. You know, they'd be like a friend of a friend or something. And after two or three times, I'm like, wow, she's really cute. Like, I'm kind of into her.
[12:30] You know, like never would have guessed, never if she had put a profile on a site, never would have picked her. And that happened all the time, all the time. A lot of my best relationships and dating experiences happened with women that I probably would not have picked on Tinder or Hinge or whatever the kids use these days.
[12:49] So whenever this topic comes up, I remember that. I think about that a lot because we are so bad at knowing what we want to begin with. And as you said, the easiest things to filter people for are generally the things that matter the least, right? It's like, I want a guy who makes this much money and is this tall. And I want a girl who's looks like this is into this hobby. Those are pretty superficial things. That's probably not going to map everything.
[13:18] super accurately to who you're going to be happy with in a long-term relationship, it'll map a little bit, but not a whole lot. Whereas things that cannot be filtered for personality, emotional history, culture, values, you can't filter for those things accurately without spending time with somebody and getting to know them for an extended period of time. So I just look at the whole dating app thing and it just feels like a system that is optimizing for the wrong things.
[13:43] It's optimizing for matching people based on what they think they want rather than accurately depicting what they actually want. And I don't think you can ever accurately depict those things because it's so hard to figure those things out in the first place. Yeah. I can't remember where I heard this, but I heard this recently and someone said, if you are on a dating app, say out loud what you're thinking while you're swiping and you will probably be appalled at what comes.
[14:09] When you actually say it out loud, because again, that's what these apps are doing. They're priming you for all of these, what you think you want or what they think people want in relationships. And it's not actually what you want. Actually, this just reminded me of maybe a fourth reason why the technology is making us feel more alone despite connecting us, which is that it removes repercussions for negative feelings or negative statements.
[14:35] Let's say you meet a woman at a party and she's attractive, but like, I don't know, like, let's say she's like a weird dimple or something. In person, you might notice it, but like you will immediately forget it and just be engrossed in whatever conversation you're having with her. But when you're online and you see her, it's like the only thing you can think of.
[14:56] Or it's the only thing you notice. And then, of course, if you're a piece of shit, you immediately go to the comment section and start trashing her for this weird dimple that she has on her face. And that's such an unrealistic facsimile of what a social interaction actually is. I wrote an article years and years and years ago. It might have even been before you started working for me.
[15:16] called Why Everybody's an Asshole on the Internet. And it really looked at when you combine the pseudonymity of being able to post something and people don't really know who you are, combine that with the lack of repercussions and the lack of friction to comment or say something, you basically create this fast lane for any antisocial person who wants to wreak some emotional havoc to go hog wild, just like start fucking throwing bombs at people. And there's absolutely nothing that any of us can do about it.
[15:43] Yeah, a big part of social connection, I think, in the real world is people who hold you accountable for your actions, for your words, for the way you behave. And that lack of accountability is missing online. But in the real world, it's actually part of the glue that holds us together, too.
[16:00] I would say too, the acceptance or tolerance of flaws or obnoxious things, right? Again, if I hang out with somebody in person and they say something like, kind of annoys me, I just let it go and I move on to the next subject. Online though, you end up in like a flame war for five days.
[16:17] Let's move on to the next one. I feel like we could just talk about technology all day. So the second paradox, which is the more urbanized our lifestyles become, the lonelier we are. One study found that being in an overcrowded environment increased a sense of loneliness by up to 38%. It's completely counterintuitive, but as somebody who lived in New York City for seven years, totally makes sense.
[16:38] Why is that? You could be surrounded by people. This one kind of blows my mind a little bit. Surrounded by people, all sorts of opportunities for connection, and yet still feel so lonely. What is that all about? So in New York, I think it was two things. One was there are so many opportunities to do interesting things with interesting people that you rarely run into the same people more than a couple times a year.
[17:00] And again, coming back to the frequency and the consistency piece, you know, real friendships are built by seeing the same person 10, 20, 30 times. In New York, it's so hard to see the same person 10, 20 times. I have friends in New York that maybe in the entire time I lived there, I saw them 10 times.
[17:18] Yeah, it's just everybody's doing their own thing. People are traveling all the time. People are busy. They're working. The second thing that I experienced in New York is once you hit a living environment of a certain critical mass, you don't feel valued. You feel insignificant. Every city that I've lived in that was, say, under 4 million people, 5 million people,
[17:37] Even though it's a big city and there's a lot of stuff going on, I feel like I'm part of the city. I feel like I'm contributing to the city. I'm contributing to the economy. I'm taking part in various events and activities. I'm meeting people in different areas of the city. New York is so big.
[17:55] that it just feels like this, it doesn't give a fuck. Like you could come, you could go. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how much stuff you do. New York City doesn't give a fuck. You are a gnat on the back of an elephant. And there's something that doesn't feel good about that. Coming back to your point about the accountability, I think if you live in a small town, anything you participate in, there's a certain amount of importance and meaning that comes with that. And you feel accountable to that. You're like, okay, I like showed up to this group
[18:25] in my town and I'm a part of it and people rely on me now. And like, that feels good. Like feeling that accountability and responsibility to something, being a part of something greater than yourself. If your participation feels pointless, then you don't feel that accountability or responsibility. I used to tell my friends that I felt like a tourist who was just staying in New York for seven years.
[18:47] I'm a little more optimistic about this one though, because I think we will figure that out. We've only been a majority urban species for less than 20 years, right? It was the late 2000s where finally more than half the population started living in cities. That's the first time in history that's ever happened. So it's been less than 20 years. I think we'll figure it out. I think we just urbanized so quickly that we haven't had time to think about what are the social implications of rapid growth and rapid densification of these cities. And
[19:13] There's new research coming out around like adding green spaces, for example, into cities. That actually reduces loneliness by quite a bit. There's this researcher, Eric Kleinenberg, who is a social scientist and a writer. And he talks a lot about the social infrastructure of places, which is very important. That's things like green spaces, parks, libraries, but also, you know, like a commercial area that's dense and people can walk to and interact with each other. And you go to your local butcher or whatever it is.
[19:40] Like you were talking about with the restaurants, if you have these restaurants that have been in a neighborhood for generations or something like that. I think there's actually a solution here. It's not as easy as people are saying right now. It's like, oh, you just need to talk to somebody more often. I think it's a deeper structural problem than that, but I think it is a problem we can solve.
[19:57] The social infrastructure point is really interesting because my experience of living in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, I feel like they do it a lot better. I don't know exactly why, but like when you actually go spend a bunch of time in like France or Germany, there are dozens and dozens of these little smaller cities and towns that are really interconnected and it's easy to get between them. And you see that each one has its own little individual community with continuity and people know each other. So I don't know how much of that's
[20:26] culture. I don't know how much of that's policy. I don't know how much of that's history, but it definitely seems clear to me that this is something that those parts of the world do better than North Americans seem to do. And from what I can tell, this shows up in the data as well. I mean, it seems that Europeans are doing better on these measurements than we are. I definitely think there is something to this social infrastructure thing, but I'm not sure how easily we can just kind of
[20:54] wave a magic wand and improve it. Yeah. I think along with the urbanization thing though, too, there's some other trends that go along with it. First of all, the rate of living alone of single person households, that's risen consistently for the last like 60 years across the developed world. And if you look at the United States, for example, it went from 7.7% in 1940, those single person households were 7.7%.
[21:19] And in 2020, it was 27.6%. I mean, that's a 400% increase in 80 years. This trend has been seen in other places as well. Across Europe, it's over 30% of the households are single-person households. In Sweden, it's over half. In Japan, it's 40%. However, those last two, Sweden and Japan, also report some of the lowest loneliness of any of the developed countries as well.
[21:42] So it's not just living alone. Again, I think it's that social infrastructure thing we're talking about. Sweden has a lot of social programs that get people out of their homes and interacting with one another. So, yeah, I think the social infrastructure really is the key part. It's not just getting people to live together or spending more time together necessarily. It's building cities in a way that get people interacting on a daily basis and getting into that more friction of life.
[22:07] One of the things that I saw, I saw this in a documentary. It was about happiness. One thing they did in Denmark, which I thought was brilliant, was they built these residential buildings with condos and stuff. And they would zone them specifically so that you could only live there if you were either retired or a single parent. And so they basically designed these condo buildings.
[22:28] So that single parents always had babysitters because the retired people were there all the time with nothing to do. And then retired people always had something to do because there's always a neighbor somewhere down the hall that needs their kids babysat while they're at work. So it was really fascinating. When I think social infrastructure, I think that strikes me as just an excellent example of thinking in those terms, of thinking of like, okay, how can we not only provide people housing but meaningful housing that's actually going to...
[22:57] maintain their emotional and mental well-being. That's one of the solutions I'm talking about, which is why I'm optimistic about this. I think there's going to be some cities to figure it out, and then we're going to replicate that eventually. The United States will be slow to do it like we are with everything else, but I think it'll happen. Why do you think... So more people are living alone. I can think of a few reasons why that would happen. One is just...
[23:18] I think as people individually, people get more money, it's easier to rent a place for yourself or buy a place for yourself. One of the things that we come across all the time is that marriages and cohabitation between partners, romantic partners is down at all time low, essentially.
[23:34] I feel like there's got to be some sort of connection there. And again, I just keep coming back to this point of friction of like the hidden cost of removing social friction. You know, marriages are hard. They're a pain in the ass. And so if you have the financial means to avoid them, I think a lot of people will avoid them. Yes. Yes. Especially women. The research has borne that out as well. Higher SES women, marry less.
[24:00] So women with more money marry less. That goes down a whole nother rabbit hole that we could probably spend an entire episode on. I mean, the whole marriage question is really fascinating because despite the erroneous statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce, that has not been true in like 30 or 40 years. Actually, the story around marriage is way more interesting and nuanced, which is fewer and fewer people are marrying. They're marrying later.
[24:26] And they're marrying after they've become economically independent. And so more of those marriages are succeeding since basically the divorce laws changed in the 70s. So marriage is actually in a really good place quality-wise, maybe the best place it's ever been.
[24:43] But quantity-wise, it's an all-time low. So it's almost like people are only getting married if they're really confident it's going to work. And since you're usually not confident it's going to work, they don't get married. Yeah, we grew up with all those stats of, oh, half the marriages went to divorce. And of the other half, 90% of those are probably not happy marriages anyway. So we heard all of that.
[25:07] I still hear those stats on podcasts. I heard it like two weeks ago. I heard it on a podcast, like a very reputable podcast too. And I was like, when are people going to update this fucking stat in their head? Like it has not been true in decades. The true divorce rate, it's been dropping for decades. And I think now it's down close to around 30%. So it's still, I mean, not great. Right. And as you pointed out, it's probably due to people marrying later.
[25:33] and waiting until they're financially secure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think this relates at all to the urban living? Yes, I absolutely do. They've shown like in developing countries, when people urbanize rapidly, when they move from the rural areas to the cities, they will marry less. And usually it is economically related what they find. While the people are...
[25:55] earning more money, the cost of living is higher. You have less space, right? So you're living in an apartment versus like a house, maybe on an acreage or something like that, or a communal plot of land out in the countryside. People just, they get married less. Part of it's probably too, you're just, you're surrounded by more people. So you think you have more options. Maybe there's a paradox of choice maybe going on a little bit there.
[26:16] The paradox of choice thing makes sense to me. And also, I just feel like people who live in big cities are busy all the fucking time. They're working 60 hours a week. They're going out. Dating is a little fun hobby maybe for them every now and then, but it's not taking up their lives.
[26:32] Yeah, I mean, speaking of New York, I had a number of friends who were just literally like, I don't have time to date, which maybe that's a big part. You know, I was really surprised by that stat. I think it was 57% of single people say that they are not interested in dating or not. They've given up trying to date.
[26:48] That's crazy to me. Yeah, that's mind-blowing. And I wonder how much of that is simply a lack of free time, how much of that is people in their 60s, 70s, 80s who are just like, yeah, whatever, I'm done. And how much of that is just legitimate burnout, frustration, hopelessness? Let's talk about paradox number three. Young people are more lonely than older people. And from what I can tell, this is a Gen Z first.
[27:13] Usually, and I think anybody who can think back to their own adolescence, when you're a teenager in your 20s, you're obsessed with your social life. It's like all you think about. And generally, when you're older, you have fewer closer friends and you spend less time with them. And I think that's been typical forever. And I think historically, older people have tended to be lonelier or more socially isolated. But Gen Z seems to be bucking this trend, which is interesting. Thoughts?
[27:43] I'm not sure if it's actually been the case that teens have always been less lonely than older people. As you just mentioned, when you're a teen, you are very, very focused on your social relationships. And so I think any change in your social relationship, you're very sensitive to that. Now, there's definitely some concerning trends with teens right now.
[28:04] the lack of face-to-face time. We've seen that plummet in the early to mid 2000s. It was about 80% of teens said that they would hang out with their friends at least twice a week. That's dropped to below 60% today, which is insane in just 20 years. Yeah, there's been a huge drop. That's concerning for sure. Mental health obviously is not real great with the teens these days either. And loneliness plays a big part in that as well.
[28:31] Also, you're right. There is kind of this paradoxical thing going on, though, where since the start of the millennium, middle aged people have actually reported that they're getting less lonely. There's been like a four or five percent consistent drop since they're like early 2000s to today that middle aged people are getting less lonely while teens are getting more lonely. So that's a strange thing. Lots of people have commented on this before, but, you know, we're.
[28:54] over-regulating the physical space for young people while we're under-regulating the digital space for them. So that's kind of where they retreat to. And so of course they're going to be more lonely. As you get older too, I think your expectations adjust and you're like, I don't need 10,000 friends, you know, or whatever. I don't need 10 friends even. I need one or two good ones. And so it's easier to find there. So I
[29:14] I don't understand completely what's going on. I talked to David Brooks about this when he was on. It's interesting to me that all of the classic measurements of teen health that we used to look at 30 years ago are actually in great places. Teen pregnancy, all-time low. Drug use, all-time low. Alcohol abuse, all-time low. Violent crime, all-time low. But the mental health side is...
[29:41] the worst it's been maybe ever. And, you know, as a very surface level reading of the data, it seems like kids are trading in their weed and booze for TikTok and Snapchat. And is that a bad thing, Mark?
[29:58] I don't know. I don't know. So when I say when young people are obsessed with their social lives, where their brain is in their development is they are trying to figure out who they are. They're playing this long term identity formation game. And to do that, they have to experiment a lot. They have to take risks. They have to...
[30:19] measure themselves against their peers, and they need to build the first meaningful relationships of their life aside from, you know, their parents. And I just feel like social media definitely scrambles a lot of that process for all the reasons that we talked about at the top of the show. You know, it provides the empty calories. It provides the semblance of connection instead of real connection. It prevents them from having to take social risks. But then when something does go wrong,
[30:46] they make a fool of themselves and it gets posted to TikTok and it goes viral at their school. Like they get punished excessively for anything that goes wrong. So it's like this fun house mirror of a status game that is not actually an accurate representation of reality. And so I can see how it completely scrambles their ability to figure out who they are and what they care about and build any confidence around taking social risks or emotional risks.
[31:11] I get that. Like that's definitely a mess. But then you throw on top of that, that they're being limited more in those face-to-face interactions, which are super important. I'm a big fan. There's a really obscure theory. Maybe, maybe we'll have this guy in the pod. He lives here in Santa Monica. Dan Siegel, he's a doctor at UCLA, psychiatrist. He's got this theory called interpersonal neurobiology. It's very catchy. I'm sure he's trademarked it. He's probably selling some t-shirts with it on it.
[31:38] But basically, interpersonal neurobiology is the explain it to me like I'm five explanation of it is humans are at our base, a social species. And when our brain is developing, we develop in tandem. So, you know, there's these the popular concept of mirror neurons. So it's like when I see your facial expression, when I see how you feel, you know, you express an emotion and they can go and look and see the neurons that are firing in your brain and
[32:04] as I am watching that expression on your face and sensing that feeling within you, similar neurons will fire in my brain and I will empathize and start to feel a little bit of the same feeling that you're feeling. That's what empathy is and that predominantly has to happen in a personal space. It's much harder for that to happen over a digital medium, even if you have Zuckerberg's VR headset.
[32:27] Siegel's hypothesis is that it turns out that that is a huge component of our brain's development, that when you deprive young people of social interaction, of face-to-face social interaction, that they are not developing that empathy muscle, and they are literally not developing the neuronal patterns to experience and express emotions efficiently and manage them within themselves, to regulate them.
[32:54] And you look at how there seems to be this like delayed emotional development in each generation. And meanwhile, you look at these charts of like how much time people spend face to face over the last 40 years, you know, and the charts just like fucking nosediving. Yeah.
[33:13] I don't know. It's hard for me to not see these things as related to each other. I know there's some talk of policy change around social media of like not letting kids under 16 onto it and not allowing phones at school. Those are probably good ideas. But for all the reasons I just said, like, I don't know if that's going to solve this.
[33:32] Like until we start letting kids go be kids, go outside and tell them they don't have to be home till sundown and not worry that like the neighbor is not secretly a serial murderer. I just feel like that that's a huge component that is maybe undersold.
[33:48] Well, yeah, to your point there, objectively, we are in one of the safest periods ever. There's been blips along the way, of course, but crime rates are lower. Violent crime especially is down. It really is a safer world than what we grew up in, and yet we had more freedom in the physical world than kids do today. You can't blame the kids there. This is on us. This is our fault. We're fucking the kids up. So when you wanna sit here and you wanna say, oh, kids these days, it's like, no, this is on us. They're not responsible for that. We're the ones taking that away from them.
[34:18] And I think we need to take some responsibility for that. For example, passing some legislation maybe to give some more protection digitally and then opening up the real world a little bit more for them. I do think probably when these kids grow up, they're going to look back and say, how did they just give us these screens and let us go fucking wild?
[34:35] and not let us into these real world spaces and socialize like we should have. I don't know if this was your case, but me growing up in middle America anyway, like smoking, you remember that? That was just, that was everywhere. Restaurants, bars, I'd have friends, parents who smoked and we'd be in the car and they'd just be smoking, you know, like three, four kids in the car with them and they'd be smoking.
[34:53] And we look at that today and we're like, that is crazy. I think there might be some sort of parallel when this generation grows up and they look back and they're like, oh, my God, they let us do that? Why? It's a wild and crazy world, Drew. Well, that's it for this episode. Be sure to like and subscribe. It helps out the podcast. It helps us get really, really cool guests to talk to. Be sure to leave a review.
[35:16] on Apple and Spotify. And be sure to sign up for the newsletter. It's called The Breakthrough. It's at marknanson.net slash breakthrough. And I think that's it. Anything else you want to say, Drew? Drew is shaking his head in resignation. I still don't know what's going on, Mark. What is going on? I guess that's the moral of this story, Drew. None of us know what the fuck is going on. Until next week, we'll still not know what's going on.
[35:47] Bye, everybody.

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