We've Never Been More Alone - Why the Most Connected Generation Is the Loneliest in History

We are the most digitally connected society in human history. We are also, by every measure, the loneliest.

The U.S. Surgeon General compared loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The loneliest adults are not in nursing homes. They are in their twenties and thirties. Generational futurist Ryan Vet unpacks the research behind Gen Z's loneliness epidemic, why it began in childhood and not in adulthood, and what leaders must understand about the first generation raised inside a connection paradox.

From the collapse of the family dinner to the rise of AI companions, Ryan applies the Generational Prism and the Friction Doctrine to explain why a culture that removes the cost of connection quietly removes the relational growth that only comes through it.

Topics Covered

• Why the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic
• How Gen Z became the loneliest generation in American history
• The collapse of the family dinner across four generations
• How AI companions are deepening, not solving, the loneliness crisis
• What every leader managing Gen Z employees needs to understand

Key Takeaways

• The U.S. Surgeon General compared loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (2023).
• 43.3% of adults ages 18 to 34 report loneliness, vs 23.8% of adults 65 and older (CDC, 2022).
• 61% of Gen Z teens felt lonely often during adolescence, twice the Boomer rate (Survey Center on American Life, 2023).
• Family dinners fell from 84% (Silent Gen) to 38% (Gen Z), a 46-point collapse (Institute for Family Studies, 2024).
• 72% of U.S. teens have tried an AI companion. Heavy users are lonelier and more emotionally dependent (Fang et al., MIT/OpenAI, 2025).
• Stress-related absence linked to social disconnection costs U.S. employers $154 billion annually (Cigna, 2025).

Who Should Listen

Leaders managing multi-generational teams, parents raising Gen Alpha and Gen Beta children, HR executives, and anyone trying to understand why hyperconnected generations report record isolation.

Research Cited

• U.S. Surgeon General (2023); CDC (2022); Cigna (2025).
• Institute for Family Studies (2024); Survey Center on American Life (2023).
• Fang et al., MIT/OpenAI (2025); NORC/TechCrunch (2025).

Connect with Ryan Vet

• Newsletter (COLLIDE): https://www.RyanVet.com/collide
• Website: https://www.ryanvet.com
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RyanVet
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet/
• Full essay: https://collide.ryanvet.com/p/we-ve-never-been-more-alone

About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Transcript

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On this episode of the Ryan Vett Show. In May 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic and compared its mortality impact to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. 15 cigarettes. For millennials who grew up watching those anti-smoking public service announcements on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, people gasping through tracheotomy tubes warning you about cigarettes and what they would do to you, the word picture carries weight. Studies show that poor social relationships increase the risk of heart disease by 29% and strokes by 32%. Chronic loneliness in older adults raises the risks developing dementia by approximately 50%. And now, a reading from Ryan Vett's newsletter, Collide. We've never been more alone. The Surgeon General says loneliness now kills like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The youngest generation is the most at risk. As a kid, I remember standing in the checkout line at Walmart with my parents as they would pick up one of those bright orange Vonage calling cards so we could call my aunt and uncle who lived in Brazil at the time. You'd buy a set amount of time, dial a long access number, and wait while the connection clicked and stuttered its way across the continents. Fast forward to the early 2000s, Skype arrived. It felt revolutionary. Despite the grainy video and garbled audio that resembled me looking at someone without my glasses on, we could hear each other's voice. Technology brought us together. It connected us. Or so we thought. And yet we are, by every available measure, the loneliest we have ever been, particularly when it comes to young adults, despite being infinitely connected. In May 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic and compared its mortality impact to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Fifteen cigarettes. For millennials who grew up watching those anti-smoking public service announcements on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, people gasping through tracheotomy tubes warning you about cigarettes and what they would do to you, the word picture carries weight. Studies show that poor social relationships increase the risk of heart disease by 29% and strokes by 32%. Chronic loneliness in older adults raises the risks developing dementia by approximately 50%. Who is actually lonely? It might make sense that the older you get, the lonelier you get. More people move away, and quite frankly, your friends die. Your network shrinks, your mobility declines, and your community grows quieter. But loneliness is not just a shrinking network problem reserved for the more mature generations, it is impacting those who are the age that should be thriving the most. The CDC's 2022 analysis of the behavioral risk factor surveillance system, the same study that initiated the Surgeon General to issue his warnings in the first place, found loneliness highest in the young adults. 43.3% of adults ages 18 to 34 reported loneliness compared to 23.8% of adults 65 and older. The Cygna group, an insurance company, now tracks loneliness as a measurable health metric, which itself tells you something about how seriously this has become a problem. Their 2025 report found that 57% of Americans are lonely, with younger generations reporting substantially higher levels despite being more digitally connected than any generation before them. Research on loneliness across the lifespan has historically described a U-shaped factor, elevated loneliness in young adulthood, declining loneliness through midlife, and rising again in the oldest ages. That pattern has held true for decades, and it makes intuitive sense. As a young adult, you're often moving away from home for the first time, starting a first job, trying to establish yourself, leaving behind the community built under your parents' roof. Then, as your network thins again later in life, that curve climbs yet again. But while the U shape has and likely always will exist, the depth of young adults' loneliness is staggering today. And it is growing. Technology is not shrinking that gap, it is increasing it. It all started before adulthood. Looking at this through the generational prism, this is not simply what happens to young adults at this stage in life. Something unique is happening to this cohort specifically. The Survey Center on American Life found that 56% of Gen Z adults report having felt lonely at least once or twice a month during their childhood. Only 24% of baby boomers can say the same. The American Adolescence Survey is even more direct. 61% of Gen Z teens reported feeling lonely and isolated often during their adolescence, twice the proportion reported by baby boomers at the same age and stage of life. Gen Z did not arrive at loneliness as young adults. For many of them, it was the environment that they grew up in. Two-thirds of Americans who felt lonely every day during childhood reported feeling lonely or isolated all or most of the time today. The formation years seemingly set the trajectory. The family table disappeared. Among the silent generation, 84% reported having daily family meals together growing up. That number has declined with each generation, baby boomers at 76%, Gen X at 59%, millennials at 46%, and Gen Z at 38%. That's a 46-point collapse across four generations in one of the most basic daily rituals of family life. For the silent generation, the dinner table was not a lifestyle choice. It would have been unusual not to gather. Gen X, the latchkey kid generation, often came home to an empty house after school, and yet 59% still sat down for dinner together as a family. The table, even in stretched and overextended households, remained something families returned to. Then with millennials, something shifted more dramatically. The most scheduled generation in history, with organized sports, enrichment programs, tutoring sessions, club activities, at a pace no other generation had seen before, meals moved to the car, and breakfast happened at school. The table was not just about food, it was about the daily practice of being in community with people you did not choose to be with but you were committed to. Americans who grew up having regular family meals have been shown to have lower rates of depression and stronger relationships with their parents. When it disappeared, something harder to name disappeared with it. Spending more time at home, more alone. Here's what makes this more complicated. From 2003 to 2022, the average time spent at home among U.S. adults rose by one hour and thirty-nine minutes per day. For young adults ages 15 to 24, the increase was even steeper, an additional 124 minutes per day by 2022. At the same time, data shows social engagements with friends has declined and, in the researchers' own words, plummeted for young Americans. More time at home does not mean more time with family nor in community. When dinner tables are disappearing and screens are multiplying, being home simply means being alone in the same building as other people. Think about it this way. Argued about what was on, and shared the same story at the end of the night. Now the screen is in every pocket and every bedroom. You are home, you are isolated, and in the same breath, we are calling devices a means of connecting us. And who pays for those devices? Oftentimes, mom and dad. In fact, only sixteen percent of adults ages eighteen to twenty four are completely financially independent from their parents today, with many relying on parents to cover their cell phone bills, household expenses, and down payments on rent. Not surprisingly, more young adults are physically under the same roof as their families than at any other point in recent decades. And yet, they're still lonier than any generation before them. The proximity is there, but the community is not. The Greenhouse and the Wild. A friend of mine describes the transition from college to the real world this way. College is like a greenhouse. Everything is controlled. The temperature, the light, the environment, the people around you. You're incubated. Then graduation day arrives, and suddenly you're standing in the open field facing extremes of weather, isolation, and the feast or famine of starting over with no built-in community around you. There is no real bridge. A systematic review of 32 studies on educational transitions confirms what this analogy captures. Recently graduated students often feel lonely due to insufficient time to build connections and frequently experience loneliness from moving residences, being separated from previous networks, or lacking new social networks. What disappears is not just the classroom, it's the daily structure that made belonging automatic. The clubs, the roommates, the shared routines, the weak ties that quietly held a social world together, all of it dissolves at once. Chronic dating and the AI Companion. I wrote earlier this year about the evolution of love across generations, what I call love 1.0 through Love 5.0, from duty and permanence in the silent generation to what we are watching emerge now, connection without cost, intimacy without risk. The data on dating confirms the trajectory. More than half of adults under 30 have used a dating app. A meta-analysis of 23 studies found that dating app users reported significantly worse well-being, including loneliness, than non-users. 78% of Americans report emotional, mental, or physical exhaustion from dating apps, with 79% of Gen Z specifically reporting the burnout. Whether the exhaustion causes disengagement or disengaged people turn to the apps, the research is honest that it cannot fully separate the two. What it can say is that meeting online has displaced friends as the primary ways couples used to meet, removing the social network spillover that used to come even from relationships that did not work out. Dating has become a transaction between two individuals rather than an event embedded in community. When chronic dating does not deliver, some are turning elsewhere. A study out of the University of Chicago across 1,060 teens found that 72% of US teens have tried an AI companion as of 2025. Nearly one in five US adults have chatted with an AI designed to simulate a romantic partner, rising to nearly one in three young adult men ages 18 to 30. And research from MIT and OpenAI found that heavy AI companion users were lonelier, socialized less with real people, and showed more signs of emotional dependence, not less. A culture that removes the cost from connection will quietly remove the relational growth that only comes through it. What leaders are inheriting. If you're not sure loneliness is a real leadership problem, consider this. The Cygna Group, an insurance company tracking this as a health cost, estimates that stress-related absence linked to social disconnection costs$154 billion annually in the United States alone. Lonely workers are less likely to be focused, they're more likely to miss work, and seek employment elsewhere. Every leader managing a team of Gen Z employees is managing people who, statistically, were lonelier as children than any previous generation. They arrived at your organization with a perception of community and belonging that no generation encountered at scale. Smaller families, fewer shared meals, more digital mediation of social life, and platforms designed not for connection, but for engagement. A young employee who's had a hard day and has no one to process it with does not call a friend. They post it to a subreddit, they vent on social media. These are not equivalent to the friction of a real conversation. The kind where you say something, someone pushes back, you adjust, and you both walk away closer to the truth. Regardless of generation, we need to face the simple truth. Work is hard. It was never designed to be otherwise. That's why they call it work. But navigating that difficulty requires social infrastructure. For many young employees, that infrastructure was never fully built. From the calling card at Walmart to the likes, comments, and instant gratification, we have spent a generation building tools to close the distance between people. And yet, the distance is growing. The solution, as simple and watered down as it sounds, is that we need to be leaders who foster environments with real human connection. And in real human connection, it can get messy. But we have tried to replace such a fundamental part of our existence with technology. And in so doing, we have become lonely and isolated. The more we use technology to try and connect human beings, the further it seems to be driving us apart. This is worth sitting with. Thank you so much for listening to this reading of Clyde. Until next time, I'm Ryan. Thanks for tuning in to the Ryan Bet Show. Be sure to subscribe, comment, and like this episode. Plus, share it with someone who needs to hear it.