Commentary: Pandemic lockdowns never ended for some people

Commentary: Pandemic lockdowns never ended for some people For too many young people, disrupted social ties have never fully recovered, says the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch. LONDON: Only occasionally in my work do I come across a statistic so astonishing that it stops me in my tracks. Last week was one of those times. While exploring data from the American Time Use Survey, which draws on detailed diaries to track how and with whom people spend every minute of a randomly selected day, I came across the following: 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. Much has been written about the decline in socialising among young people over recent years, but these analyses – including my own – have tended to focus on societal averages. Doing so misses a critical part of this story: Whether we’re talking about the long shadow of pandemic lockdowns, the increasingly enthralling digital environment or intensifying academic pressure, anti-socialising forces have had radically different effects on different young people. SOCIALISING INEQUALITY Many teens and young adults have lives that are just as socially rich today as they were a decade ago while others have become completely cut off. 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. Data from the UK paints a similar picture of what we might need to start calling socialising inequality. An upcoming report by the Institute for Public Policy Research finds that while the average young Briton has roughly five close friends – the same figure as in 2015, the portion with not a single close friend has shot up from one in 100 in 2015 to one in 20 today. The decline of socialising in modern society has been a steady process, but on many measures of isolation a gap really opened up after the pandemic. Lockdowns, social distancing and the shift from in-person to online education and work made many people’s days radically less social for a year or so. Where people lived with friends or partners, or had strong social networks before ties were temporarily severed, the effect was smaller and the rebound has been fairly robust. But people whose lives became particularly solitary during the pandemic, or who had previously relied more on circumstantial relationships than deep bonds, have suffered a lasting hit. The most acutely affected group is young adults neither in work nor education. In western Europe, the share of this group that met up with friends or family less than once a month stood at 7 per cent before the pandemic, but rose to 14 per cent in 2021 and has remained elevated. SLOW AND FAST SOCIAL SHIFTS The figures point to a corrosive coincidence of slow and fast social shifts. From the rise of remote working to self-checkouts and the displacement of bricks-and-mortar shopping by ecommerce, technology has steadily eroded the number of incidental interpersonal encounters that would typically offer even the most reserved person a baseline amount of human contact. At the same time, the proliferation of hyper-engaging all-you-can-eat digital media has made solitary leisure time the default, while in-person socialising becomes relatively more effortful – especially for those of a more anxious or introverted nature. While labour-saving mechanical innovations freed up more time for socialising, digital innovations have often had the opposite effect. Add to these slow anti-socialising background shifts the pandemic-era shock of disrupted habits and enforced solitude for many young people, and you tip some of this group into a new and damaging equilibrium from which they are struggling to escape. Social ties are hugely important for health and longevity, and the increasing co-occurrence of social and economic isolation makes the problem of rising youth worklessness harder to address. In fact, so much lies downstream of social connectedness that one could argue addressing growing poverty in this domain should rank above its financial equivalent. These shifts may not have happened by design, but mitigating their impact must be a priority for policymakers and the rest of us alike.