The Rise of Loneliness & How to Make New Friends as an Adult
Friendship is one of the most important things in life for our happiness and well-being. However, people today have fewer friends than ever. One survey found that the number of adult Americans who reported having zero friends went from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021. Another study found that Americans went from spending on average seven hours a week with their friends in 2003 to only spending less than 3 hours a week with their friends by 2021.
Dating isn’t fairing much better, with the amount of single person households going from 20.6 percent in 1985 to 37.89 percent by 2022. Furthermore, 22 percent of people aged 18-30 reported having no sexual partners in 2011. This number rose to 29% in 2017 and jumped to 38% in 2021. Therefore, as seen in data from this source, here, and this news article, people are lonelier than ever before despite the critical role close relationships play in making sure we stay happy and healthy. Of course, Covid-19 and the following lock downs didn’t help all these statistics by any means however they were worsening steadily over time long before Covid-19 and so their current state can’t be fully explained by it.
Within this article, I will help explain some of the additional causes of these societal trends. Also, I will discuss some of the potential solutions you could implement in your own life if you find yourself needing to make new friends and meet people. The first piece of advice I have to give, which will also explain part of the rise of loneliness, involves the concept of opportunity cost.
Opportunity Cost & Excessive Screen Time
To put it simply, opportunity cost is what you lose out on when you spend time doing one thing instead of something else. For example, if you decide to spend a day on vacation while running your own business as its only employee, that will come with the opportunity cost of losing a day’s revenue as you could have spent that day working. Likewise, if you spend your time doing something on your own that comes with the opportunity cost that you could have spent that same time doing something with someone else, such as forming new relationships or deepening existing ones. This decision to spend less time with others and more time alone has been made in greater quantity over time since 2003. For example, from 2011 to 2021 time spent doing often solitary activities like looking at the internet, watching TV, listening to the radio, and reading magazines or the newspaper, went up about one hour and thirty minutes on average. People often now spend around 11 hours a day doing these activities. So, if these things are done alone then they come with an opportunity cost.
The cost is that this time could have been spent doing more social activities that result in meeting new people and deepening existing relationships. Therefore, alluding to a likely cause of the increase in loneliness over recent years is the rise of people spending too much time alone indulging in the usage of technology like TV, social media, and video games.
One important first step in meeting new people might be examining your own life and asking yourself if you’re spending too much time alone being entertained by technology. It will likely involve making the intentional effort to lower your screen time in favor of spending your free time in ways that are more socially productive. You may have to acknowledge potential habits/addictions you might be experiencing with things like your smartphone or video games, and then work on combating these detrimental habits. Once you manage to lower your screen time, what are some better ways to spend your free time that result in meeting new people?
The Importance of Third Places
One of the best ways to meet new people is through habitually visiting and participating in third places. What is a third place? For context, a first place is your home, a second place is your work, while a third place is somewhere you go to socialize with others that isn’t your home or work. Traditionally, this would have been something like church on Sunday. There you might have met and talked to people before and after the event, had a meal once a month with other members, attended bible study once a week, etc. By contrast, a third place might also be a bar where people go after work to unwind and talk to their friends who regularly go to the same place. For the sake of more examples, a third space could also be a gym where the same people regularly meet up to play basketball together or a comic bookstore where people meet regularly to play card and board games. What is important about a third place is that it is somewhere you can regularly go on a regular basis, and it has people who regularly are there you can talk to repeatedly over time. This consistent interaction with familiar people will allow you to form, maintain, and deepen relationships with other people through regular consistent interactions and conversations at the third place.
Overcoming Mental Health Barriers
Once the above boxes are checked, all you need to do is make it part of your routine. In time, a friendship should naturally form from repeated interactions. This may involve having to overcome social anxiety and might be something to work on with a therapist if this is something preventing you from going to a third place and meeting new people. Bettering your mental health is always possible so don’t be afraid to work on it and seek help. Additionally, regular third place attendance can be a great addition to your life and so is something worth fighting to have in your life. This is especially the case if you find yourself lonely and in need of making new friends and meeting new people, as is the case for an increasing number of people.
If you find yourself lonely it may be time to examine if there are some things you can give up in your free time in order to spend more time with others. For example, maybe you can decide to spend less time each week watching TV, playing video games, or looking at social media on your phone. With the time you now gain from doing this, you can then regularly start attending third places each week to meet new people and form all types of new relationships. You could also even reach out to old friends you haven’t messaged in a while and invite them to these third places to spend time with you, rekindling your friendship and beginning to deepen it again. If social anxiety prevents you from going to these places or they aren’t as successful at getting you new friends as you’d wish due to your social skills, then it might also be time to seek therapy for a time and work on these issues. After all, now that you have identified them as a problem you can work on solving them.
Once they are solved, you might begin to meet a lot more new people and lessen a lot of the loneliness you may be feeling as a result. With that, you would accomplish one of the most important things for your happiness and well-being, feeling loved.
By Gabe G. L. Jensen