How Lonely is Gen-Z: Is This a Loneliness Epidemic?

{ originally scheduled to be published on The Empower Magazine but this never saw the light of the day! }

What is loneliness?

Historian Fay Bound Alberti writes in his book, “A Biography of Loneliness,” that loneliness is a “whole body affliction.”
According to CNBC, an alarming 73% of GenZ report feeling alone sometimes or always.
Adding on to this, according to a Psychology Today article, the three major reasons for Gen Z’s loneliness include overstimulation, social media and a dependency shift.
In this post, we’re going to be looking at social media as a primary cause for loneliness among our generation.

While social media is a powerful tool, it can often make you feel powerless.
With the advent of features like “Notes” on Instagram and social media taking a boom in general, people tend to post items relating to their feelings in the hopes that other people reply to them.
As the days turn into weeks, we watch as our social media life and real life become two distinct parallels.
To prevent the spread of the epidemic, the gap between our online and IRL lives must be bridged.

While the extent of loneliness faced varies from person to person, all of us can unanimously agree that social media has, in one way or the other, made all of us take a negative serotonin hit.
Watching other people do “fun” things that we aren’t necessarily doing or going to places we haven’t been to, might spark up a tiny bit of FOMO within us, hence leading to the psychological effect of us feeling like we’re lonely.
Looking at Instagram models, or people that consistently photoshop their bodies gives us a distorted image of what we’re supposed to be built like, further adding into the negative connotations of both our lives and us feeling lonely, unworthy or not good enough.

According to Maslow’s pyramid, most GenZ going through these bouts of loneliness already have most of their needs met.
Instead of completely going cold turkey over social media and eliminating it entirely, we should focus on using it for measured increments of time!
We, as a generation, feel lonely because of the posts we see on social media, the highlights we re-watch and videos we subscribe to.
While most people claim to prefer talking over texting, we make a choice daily.
We prefer re-posting memes relating to the various events of our life or posting snide reels instead of addressing the situations we find ourselves stuck in.
The phenomenon of a “loneliness epidemic” is furthered
Hence all of these and more, have contributed to the loneliness epidemic.