One in Ten Is Alone: How the Pandemic Changed Our Lives

COVID-19 restrictions were lifted long ago, offices and universities have returned to their usual routines, and people can once again meet freely. But for some young adults, social life has still not returned to its pre-pandemic level.

This is the conclusion reached by the Financial Times in an article about the pandemic’s consequences for socialisation. The study’s main conclusion is far more complicated than the familiar story that “young people have started socialising less”: after the pandemic, social isolation became extremely unevenly distributed. The most sociable young people largely returned to their previous way of life, while the most isolated group practically disappeared from offline social life.

That is why what is happening is more accurately described not as “long COVID” in the medical sense, but as a long-term social consequence of the pandemic.

One in ten young Americans does not interact with people in person

Some of the most telling data comes from the American Time Use Survey, a study in which participants record in detail how they spend their day.

In 2023, roughly one in ten people aged 23–29 did not spend a single minute interacting with another person face to face during an ordinary day. Before the pandemic, there were significantly fewer such people: around 3% in 2019. In 2021, the figure rose to approximately 9%, reaching about 10% in 2023.

Nevertheless, the trend looks alarming.

The most socially active recovered — the most isolated have almost disappeared

This is what the Financial Times considers the most important part of the story.

Among the 25% most socially active young Americans, the share of time spent with other people accounted for about 87% of their waking hours before the pandemic. During the pandemic, the figure fell to approximately 78%, but later recovered to around 83%.

The situation is completely different for the opposite group.

Before the pandemic, the 10% most isolated young people still spent about a third of their day with other people. After the pandemic, this figure fell practically to zero.

This creates a kind of “social stratification”: people who had already socialised a great deal largely restored their previous way of life. But those who were most vulnerable during the lockdowns may still be unable to return to it.

Young people without work or education were particularly affected

An even more striking picture can be seen in Western Europe.

The Financial Times analyses European Social Survey data from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Spain and Portugal. Among people aged 25–34 who are neither working nor studying, the share of those who met friends or relatives less than once a month was about 7% before the pandemic.

In 2021, the figure rose to approximately 14% and subsequently remained substantially above its pre-pandemic level.

This is an important detail: the problem is not related to age alone. Being out of work or education also means losing one of the main forms of social infrastructure.

For a working person, the office is not just a source of income. It is dozens of casual interactions: a conversation with a colleague, lunch together, coffee, a brief chat before a meeting. For a student, the university plays the same role.

If a person is neither working nor studying, many of these natural opportunities for interaction simply disappear.

“One in twenty has no close friends”

A similar trend can be seen in the United Kingdom.

The Financial Times, citing forthcoming analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research, writes that the average young Briton has around five close friends — about the same number as in 2015.

At the same time, however, the share of those with no close friends at all has risen sharply: from approximately 1% in 2015 to 5% today, or one person in twenty.

This is a fundamentally important distinction.

It would be wrong to say that “one in twenty young people has no friends at all”. The issue is specifically the absence of close friends. At the same time, the average number of friends has barely changed.

In other words, the problem may not be that all young people are gradually losing friends, but that the gap between socially secure and socially isolated people is becoming deeper.

The pandemic may not have created the problem, but it sharply intensified it

It would be wrong to attribute everything that is happening exclusively to coronavirus.

The decline in the number of in-person contacts began before the pandemic. But lockdowns, social distancing, and the shift of education and work online sharply accelerated the process.

At the same time, everyday life itself was changing.

Remote work freed millions of people from the need to commute to an office. Online shopping reduced the number of trips to stores. Self-service replaced some interactions with staff. Entertainment content became available at any time, directly from a smartphone.

Each change may seem insignificant on its own. But together they create an environment in which people no longer need to interact with others to complete most everyday tasks.

The smartphone is not the only culprit

It would also be too simplistic to explain what is happening solely through TikTok, Reels or endless doomscrolling.

The Financial Times points to a whole range of factors: remote work, digital services, e-commerce and changes in the structure of everyday communication. At the same time, digital entertainment has made solitary leisure so accessible and appealing that leaving home to socialise requires additional effort.

And this creates an important psychological effect.

In the past, people often did not need to make a special effort to socialise. They simply lived their lives — and automatically encountered other people.

Now socialising is increasingly becoming a separate item on the agenda.

You have to message someone you know. Arrange a meeting. Travel somewhere. Find a sports club or group. Meet strangers. Maintain relationships.

For someone who has become accustomed to solitude over several years, even these basic actions can become psychologically difficult.

Social skills also require practice

This is one reason why prolonged isolation can have consequences extending far beyond the pandemic.

Meeting people, maintaining a conversation, initiating plans, taking part in a group — all of these are skills that are constantly used in everyday life.

When social situations become less frequent, people have fewer opportunities to practise these skills. As a result, communication may begin to feel more demanding and unfamiliar.

This creates a vicious circle:

less communication → less practice → greater discomfort with communication → even fewer contacts.

However, it cannot be claimed that the pandemic automatically “made people forget how to socialise”. Research shows a link between the pandemic and changes in social activity, but technology, the labour market, education and changes in lifestyle are also influencing what is happening.

Young Britons still experience loneliness more often

The problem has not disappeared in 2026 either.

According to the UK Office for National Statistics, between 7 January and 1 February 2026, 23% of adults in the United Kingdom said they felt lonely often, always or at least sometimes.

Among people aged 16–29, the figure was 27%, compared with 19% among those aged 50–69 and 16% among citizens aged 70 and over.

But here too, it is important to distinguish between the concepts: feeling lonely is not the same as social isolation. A person may have friends and communicate regularly, yet still feel lonely.

The pandemic’s main effect may be invisible

The most interesting thing about this story is that the pandemic did not necessarily leave behind a society in which everyone communicates less.

Rather, it may have created a society in which the difference between socially active and isolated people has become much greater.

Some people retained their friends, partners, jobs, universities and familiar social circles. Once the restrictions were lifted, they returned to their previous lives relatively easily.

For others, the pandemic coincided with moving to a new place, the beginning of adulthood, being out of work or education, and having a weak social network. When their familiar points of contact disappeared, new ones may never have emerged.

That is why the question today is not so much whether “young people have forgotten how to socialise”, but rather this: why does the modern environment create fewer and fewer situations in which people have to meet others and maintain relationships at all?

Offices, universities, shops, cafés and public transport created huge numbers of chance encounters for decades. The digital economy makes life more convenient, but at the same time removes many of them.

In this sense, the pandemic may have been not the final point, but an accelerator of a much broader process.

Coronavirus is over. The lockdowns are over. But the habit of living alone has not disappeared for some people. And returning to a normal social life now requires not the lifting of restrictions, but the conscious rebuilding of skills and an environment in which human connections arise naturally.