A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed.
Furthermore, 22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had “no close friends,” 30 percent said they have “no best friends,” and 25 percent said they have no acquaintances. (I wonder if the poll respondents have differing thoughts on what “acquaintance” means; I take it to mean “people you interact with now and then.”) [...]
If this generation is truly lonelier, that’s concerning for a number of reasons: Research shows that loneliness tends to increase as we get older. What will happen to millennials, who are already reporting high levels of loneliness, when they reach old age? [...]
“As long as we then do what we should do — reconnect with people — then loneliness is a good thing,” Luhmann said. “It becomes a bad thing when it becomes chronic. That’s when the health effects kick in. And it becomes harder and harder to connect with other people the longer you are in the state of loneliness.”
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