This was the year of postponed celebrations and shrinking opportunities for spontaneous socialisation. No more small talk by the office coffee machine. Birthday parties were cancelled. Weddings—if they went ahead—were low-key and without the pomp.
But how lonely did you actually feel? The data suggests that while Britons have struggled with feeling lonely during lockdown, our levels of loneliness did not actually rise by that much throughout the year and in fact remained relatively resilient throughout.
University College London's Covid Social Study has been conducting ongoing research throughout the pandemic. Researchers have asked 70,000 Britons every week for updates on their mental health since the end of March.
The study found that that, contrary to what most would think, older generations seemed to be the least lonely this year. Their loneliness levels also remained pretty steady throughout the pandemic. Intriguingly, the study found that it was in fact young people—those aged between 18 and 29—who have reported the highest levels of loneliness this year.
It confirmed what researchers already know
While it may seem surprising, loneliness researchers believe this year just confirmed what they already knew.A study conducted in 2018 found exactly the same results as UCL’s. The BBC Loneliness experiment, which surveyed 55,000 Britons, found that those aged 75+ said they were the least lonely, while the youngest aged between 16 and 24 were the most.
It seems that loneliness is less determined by what happens to you and more by whether you have the close relationships you want and need (though of course the two can sometimes be linked). The pandemic has made socialising harder, but it has not altered this fundamental truth of the importance of our relationships.
“At the beginning of the pandemic many of us were really concerned about surges in loneliness because of the social distancing restrictions,” says Dr Angelina Sutin at the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy in Florida State University. “And certainly, there have been people who have become more lonely because of the pandemic, but there was not the exponential increase that we all feared.”
Though there wasn’t a surge in loneliness, young people in UCL’s study scored consistently higher on self-reported loneliness score. Their scores were also more likely to go up and down over the course of the year. Why this is the case is still “not something anyone can answer with any certainty yet” says Manuela Barreto, a professor at the University of Exeter who worked on the BBC Loneliness experiment.
"A less stable sense of self"
But researchers do have a few theories. “There is some evidence to suggest that at this age, the peer group is a stronger determinant of loneliness than the family, so family stability does not protect enough from these changes,” Barreto says. This is echoed by Chloe (not her real name), a 23-year-old PhD student at the University of Edinburgh who tells me: “I’ve been feeling quite shit.” “I’ve realised how much I rely on physical interactions and how much of my ‘personality’ is being with my friends in London who I can’t see,” she says.Young people also have a less stable sense of self, according to Barreto. “Close relationships are often being formed for the first time and they are volatile because many of those involved are undergoing the same kind of change” she says.
Meanwhile, Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University in the US says that rates of loneliness have consistently been higher among young people even before the pandemic, as seen by the BBC’s survey. She speculates that the unique expectations of being young may contribute to this higher level of loneliness. “There is an expectation that our social circles should be expanding, which combined with social media and social comparison, may heighten the discrepancy between one's actual and desired level of social connection,” she says.
Older generations may also be better equipped to deal with the pressures of a pandemic, according to Brian Carpenter of Washington University. “They've been through world wars, civil unrest, the Korean and Vietnam wars, economic tribulations, 9/11, and other stresses,” he says. They’re able to use what they’ve learned to cope better with this year, he says.
Caveats with the data
But there’s a lot of things going on this data that is not immediately clear. “I am not one for focusing too much on age because I fear that it can obscure important factors that we might be able to address,” says Barreto. If we solely relied on age, it would make us think that loneliness is not an issue at all for middle-aged people. “Then we would be ignoring all of those people who are very vulnerable in that age group, such as single parents and people with mental illnesses,” she says.This is clear when one looks at the findings of last month’s report by the Royal Foundation, which showed that 63 per cent of parents with young children reported feeling lonely this year, as opposed to only 38 per cent before the pandemic.
This analysis also overlooks the fact that the data itself may be biased in some ways. Barreto says that the 2018 BBC Loneliness experiment was conducted online and so this may have affected what types of older people responded: “The older people who participated may have been more 'connected' and perhaps even more eager to disconfirm the myth of 'lonely old people',” she says.
Nevertheless, 2020 has proved a big year for loneliness research. Its rise this year “has shown that people are willing to answer questions on loneliness, which is important because many people assume the opposite,” says Vinal K Karania, the research manager at Age UK, a charity for older people that regularly studies loneliness.
And though none of these studies have been perfect, Karania points to how they can be made better in the future. He says we should use larger sample sizes to focus on population subgroups and hopes we continue to follow peoples’ individual loneliness levels long after the pandemic. Such studies would go some way in proving or disproving these researchers’ theories on loneliness.
One small bright spot
Sutin feels hopeful for the future of the field. “The pandemic galvanized a lot of people to take loneliness seriously and the amount of data on loneliness has surged—even if actual loneliness did not,” she says.It points to one bright spot in a year with very few. Covid-19 shone a light on an issue that affects millions of people and was until recently woefully under-researched. This may be the year that all changed.
