“How are you, how’s it going? Over there, is it day or night?” I find myself humming this masterpiece (and I’m not getting off it) from 1995 in which Alejandro Sanz asked his beloved to call him because “my loneliness and I without you don’t get along.” Then, the day was spent imagining their imagined encounter…
Rereading it, I have thought a lot about that loneliness, about that call that never arrives, about that encounter that never happens. And as I do, no matter how many times I turn it over, I cannot understand how it is possible that Gen Z, the generation most hyperconnected in history, is also the loneliest generation.
Not me saying it; a report published on September 1 by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in the United Kingdom has analyzed the situation of young people aged 11 to 24 in the country, which, since 2018, has had a Ministry of Loneliness. And the data it yields are tremendously desolate. Terrifying. Devastating.
How is it possible that social isolation has quintupled in the last decade? That means that, as the report shows, “5% (1 in 20) of youths aged 16 to 21 report having no close friends.” But there is more. And worse.
“Friendship doubles joys and halves sorrows”
One in three young people aged 16 to 29 reports feeling lonely “often, always or sometimes,” which doubles the rate recorded among people over 70. About 10% acknowledge enduring chronic or severe loneliness, a figure that rose after the pandemic and has not returned to previous levels.
This, of course, has a direct correlation with the increase in symptoms of depression, anxiety and sleep disorders in young adults. So much so that the same study notes that 72% of youths aged 16 to 25 state that loneliness directly negatively affects their mental health and self-esteem.
And all of this is happening at 16, at 18, at 20 years old. Those magical years of endless plans and a desire to take on the world in which our friends are everything. I look back twenty years and I cannot imagine that era without them. Without those who were there, without those who are no longer there and without those who remain. And that is when I think that perhaps yes, perhaps some times past were better after all.
