Imagine having the chutzpah to write a column called “Data Points” for a data-rich newspaper such as the Financial Times of London. Out of the hundreds of thousands of numbers that cross the transom at FT each and every day, author John Burn-Murdoch selects the very precious jewels to share with readers.

“Only occasionally in my work do I come across a statistic so astonishing that it stops me in my tracks,” writes Burn-Murdoch in a recent Data Points column. This is what he found in the usually mundane American Time Use Survey:

On an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.

Even that astonishing figure masks the true pain behind the numbers, because some young people are thriving nearly as much as they were before the pandemic, while those who were not very engaged before have socially disappeared. Burn-Murdoch reports:

The most socially connected quarter of young people used to spend 87 per cent of their day with other people, whether family, friends, co-workers or others. During the pandemic that dipped to 78 per cent, but it has rebounded to 83 per cent. The most isolated segment used to still spend roughly a third of their day around others, but that has now collapsed to essentially zero.

These numbers from the U.S. are mirrored in the U.K., where for young people, “the portion with not a single close friend has shot up from one in 100 in 2015 to one in 20 today.” The problem is most acute, researchers say, for adults who are neither in school nor working. Nearly 15% get together with relatives or friends less than once a month.

One culprit, frankly, is the steadily improving quality of the digital experience. Time online has not only elbowed out in-person time with other people, it is also stealing time from other activities, such as reading or listening to music. “While labour-saving mechanical innovations freed up more time for socialising,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “digital innovations have often had the opposite effect.”

What’s the problem with people substituting engaging with others online for engaging with others in person? How about death! Burn-Murdoch cites the Swedish Lundby Study, which began tracking 1363 individuals in 1997, of which 296 “were identified as lonely.”

The data through 2011 was analyzed, yielding the following conclusions: “Loneliness was associated with a significantly increased mortality risk of 27% compared with non-lonely individuals.”

A 2025 study from the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., with a much larger sample size of 47,318 individuals, yielded much more specific health outcomes besides increased mortality. Those who were “always lonely” reported the following impacts:

• Significantly higher probability of depression
• 10 more days on average experiencing poor mental health per month
• 5 more days on average experiencing poor physical health per month

When they say “significantly higher,” they mean it. Those who were “always lonely” reported depression at a rate of 50.2% vs. only 9.7% for the average person in this large survey. That’s the kind of statistic that stops me in my tracks!

When you tie together the problems caused by loneliness, you reach the level of a public health disaster, with a birth rate far below that needed to sustain the population. On both a personal and societal level, the epidemic of loneliness needs to be addressed before it is too late.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published August 28, 2026.

Sources:

“Pandemic lockdowns never ended for some people,” Financial Times, August 15, 2026.

“The impact of loneliness on depression, mental health, and physical well-being,” PLOS One, July 9, 2025.

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