Cross-sectional comparisons are not informative about changes over time , because loneliness is not constant across the life cycle.
To be able to say something meaningful about changes in loneliness over time, we need to distinguish between changes for individuals over time do people become lonelier as they get older?
To understand how loneliness changes across our life cycle, we need loneliness data from surveys that track the same individuals over time, up until old age.
In a study published in the journal Psychology and Aging , Louise Hawkley and co-authors examine two such surveys, with data for adults older than 50 years in the US.
They found that after age 50 — which is the earliest age of participants in their study — loneliness tended to decrease, until about 75, after which it began to increase again. The authors explain in their paper that the increase in loneliness after 75 was explained by a decline in health and the loss of a spouse or partner. This shows that there are two forces at play. On the one hand, there seems to be a direct relationship between age and loneliness, whereby loneliness decreases with age as our social expectations adapt, and we become more selective about relating with contacts who bring positive emotions.
On the other hand, there seems to be an indirect association pushing in the opposite direction, whereby loneliness increases with age, because our health deteriorates and we lose relatives and friends. In our middle age the direct effect dominates, but once we enter advanced old age, the negative indirect effect starts dominating. This complex relationship between age and loneliness shows why comparing old and young people at a given point in time is misleading.
Cross-sectional comparisons are just not informative about the evolution of loneliness over time, because loneliness is not constant across the life cycle. This is based on the idea that there have been societal changes — such as the rise of living alone — that make newer generations more likely to feel lonely.
There was very little difference in self-reported loneliness of people born in different generations. Those that were born in experienced the same changes of loneliness throughout their lives as those born in There are studies with data from other rich countries pointing in the same direction.
In Sweden, repeated cross-sectional surveys with adults aged 85, 90, and 95 years old, found no increase in loneliness over a ten-year interval. These studies find no evidence of cohort effects across older adults.
What about evidence for adolescents? They also found no evidence of cohort trends. Newer generations of high-school seniors were not more likely to report feelings of loneliness than earlier generations.
The psychologists Matthew Clark, Natalie Loxton, and Stephanie Tobin replicated this analysis, using the same survey, but focusing on all age groups, not only high-school seniors. The chart here shows their results. They found no signs of increasing loneliness across all age groups. In fact, they found a very small but statistically significant decline in loneliness for high school students in the US. The vertical axis in this chart is truncated, following the presentation in the original paper.
The truncated axis is helpful to highlight the trend; but the takeaway is that the changes in levels are extremely small, so the trend is effectively flat in absolute terms, even if the slope is statistically different from zero.
But isolation does seem to be increasing, so loneliness may be too. Surveys from rich countries do not suggest there has been an increase in loneliness over time. However, inaccurate, over-simplified narratives are unhelpful to really understand these complex challenges.
Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, has 2. Other social media platforms including Youtube and Whatsapp also have more than one billion users each. These numbers are huge — there are 7. This means social media platforms are used by one-in-three people in the world, and more than two-thirds of all internet users. Social media has changed the world. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find partners , how we access information from the news , and how we organize to demand political change.
Who uses social media? When did the rise of social media start and what are the largest sites today? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand social media use around the world.
We begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the rate of adoption of social media relative to other modern communication technologies. The first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace — it achieved this milestone around This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it.
In the interactive chart we plot monthly active users, by platform, since This chart shows that there are some large social media sites that have been around for ten or more years, such as Facebook, YouTube and Reddit; but other large sites are much newer. TikTok, for example, launched in September and by mid it had already reached half a billion users. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained on average about 20 million new users per month over this period.
The data also shows rapid changes in the opposite direction. Once-dominant platforms have disappeared. In , Hi5, MySpace and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by they had virtually no share of the market.
The case of MySpace is remarkable considering that in it temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US. Most of the social media platforms that survived the last decade have shifted significantly in what they offer users. With 2. YouTube, Instagram and WeChat follow, with more than a billion users. Tumblr and TikTok come next, with over half a billion users. The bar chart here shows a ranking of the top social media platforms, year by year.
You can drag the slider in this chart to see the ranking for other years. The aggregate numbers mask a great deal of heterogeneity across platforms — some social media sites are much more popular than others among specific population groups. In general, young people are more likely to use social media than older people.
But some platforms are much more popular among younger people. This is shown in this chart, where we plot the breakdown of social media use by age groups in the US. If they do, the age gradient would narrow. This chart shows the percentage of men and women who use different platforms in the US. The diagonal line marks parity; so sites above the diagonal line are those more popular among men and sites below are those more popular among women. Bubble sizes are proportional to the total number of users of each platform.
For some platforms the gender differences are very large. The share of women who use Pinterest is more than twice as high as the share of men using this platform. For Reddit it is the other way around, the share of men is almost twice as high. From a back-of-the-envelope calculation we know that, if Facebook has 2. Young people tend to use social media more frequently. In fact, in rich countries, where access to the internet is nearly universal , the vast majority of young adults use it.
The chart here shows the proportion of people aged 16 to 24 who use social networks across a selection of countries. The increase in social media use over the last decade has, of course, come together with a large increase in the amount of time that people spend online. In the US, adults spend more than 6 hours per day on digital media apps and websites accessed through mobile phones, tablets, computers and other connected devices such as game consoles.
As the chart here shows, this growth has been driven almost entirely by additional time spent on smartphones and tablets. There is evidence that in other rich countries people also spend many hours per day online. This chart shows the number of hours young people spend on the internet across a selection of rich countries.
As we can see, the average for the OECD is more than 4 hours per day, and in some countries the average is above 6 hours per day. Even on a global stage the speed of diffusion is striking: Facebook surged from covering around 1.
How does this compare to the diffusion of other communication technologies that make part of our everyday life today?
The rise of social media is an extraordinary example of how quickly and drastically social behaviours can change: Something that is today part of the everyday life of one-third of the world population, was unthinkable less than a generation ago. Fast changes like those brought about by social media always spark fears about possible negative effects. Specifically in the context of social media, a key question is whether these new communication technologies are having a negative impact on our mental health — this is an important question and we cover the evidence at Our World in Data here.
Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, WeChat, and Instagram are the top five social media platforms globally, with over one billion active users each. The stories are often alarming, suggesting social media and smartphones are responsible for sweeping negative trends, from rising suicide rates in the US , to widespread loss in memory, and reduced sleep and attention spans.
These worrying headlines often go together with implicit or explicit recommendations to limit the amount of time we spend on social media. At the same time, most of us would agree that digital social media platforms can make our lives easier in many ways — opening doors to new information, connecting us with people who are far away, and helping us to be more flexible with work. In a nutshell: From my reading of the scientific literature, I do not believe that the available evidence today supports the sweeping newspaper headlines.
Yes, there is evidence suggesting a causal negative effect, but the size of these causal effects is heterogeneous and much, much smaller than the news headlines suggest. There are still plenty of good reasons to reflect on the impact of social media in society, and there is much we can all learn to make better use of these complex digital platforms. But this requires going beyond universal claims. Most of the news stories that claim social media has a negative impact on well-being rely on data from surveys comparing individuals with different levels of social media use as evidence.
In the chart below, I show one concrete example of this type of correlational analysis. The data comes from an app called Moment , which tracks the amount of time users spend on social media platforms on their smartphones.
As we can see there is quite a bit of heterogeneity across platforms, but the pattern is clear: People who say they are happy with how much time they spend on social media spend less time on these platforms.
Or put differently, using social media more heavily is correlated with less satisfaction. This is certainly interesting, but we should be careful not to jump to conclusions — the correlation actually raises as many questions as it answers. Does this pattern hold if we control for user characteristics like age and gender? Depending on what outcome variables you focus on, and depending on which demographic characteristics you account for, you will get a different result.
It is therefore not surprising that some empirical academic studies have found negative correlations; while others actually report positive correlations. Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski published a paper earlier this year in the journal Nature where they illustrated that given the flexibility to analyze the data i.
Different ways of measuring well-being and social media use will yield different results, even for the same population. Even the answers to some of the most fundamental questions are unclear: Do we actually know in which direction the relationship might be going? Does frequent social media use translate into lower happiness, or is it the other way around — are anxious, stressed or depressed people particularly prone to use social media? This takes us to another branch of the literature: longitudinal studies that track individuals over time to measure changes in social media use and well-being.
One longitudinal study that has received much attention on this subject was published by Holly Shakya and Nicholas Christakis in the American Journal of Epidemiology in It used data from a survey that tracked a group of 5, Americans over the period — , and found an increase in Facebook activity was associated with a future decrease in reported mental health.
They relied on a longitudinal survey from the UK covering 12, teenagers over the period — , and reached a different conclusion. They found that there was a small and reciprocal relationship: social media use predicted small decreases in life satisfaction; but it was also the case that decreasing life satisfaction predicted subsequent increases in social media use.
Our results indicated that In their paper Orben and co-authors argue again that these large datasets allow many different types of empirical tests; so it is natural to expect conflicting results across studies , particularly if there is noise in measurement and the true effect sizes are small.
Orben and co-authors tested thousands of empirical tests and indeed, some of these tests could have been interpreted on their own as evidence of a strong negative effect for social media — but clearly the broader picture is important.
When looking at the results from all their thousands of tests, they concluded that social media effects were nuanced, small at best and reciprocal over time. Establishing causal impacts through observational studies that track the well-being of individuals over time is difficult. First, there are measurement issues. Long-run surveys that track people are expensive and impose a high burden on participants, so they do not allow in-depth high-frequency data collection, and instead focus on broad trends across a wide range of topics.
Orben and co-authors, for example, rely on the Understanding Society Survey from the UK, which covers a wide range of themes such as family life, education, employment, finance, health and wellbeing. Conversely, individuals who always feel the need to be around others can be looked at as needy, clingy, and people who lack independence.
Furthermore, introverts and extroverts are generally not purely one or the other, but rather lie somewhere on a spectrum. Introverts should be cautious of excessive isolation. There is a key difference between being alone as part of self-care and being alone to isolate oneself from others. One needs to look inward and be self-aware if they are isolating because they are depressed or socially anxious, or if they are alone because they need time to relax, regroup and reenergize.
Several mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, personality disorders, eating disorders and addiction thrive on loneliness. Subsequently it is extremely important for individuals to have a strong support system of people they can be emotionally vulnerable with, and to be socially interactive from time to time.
Additionally, as with assessing if one is isolating or engaging in self-care, it is equally important to assess if one is introverted because they feel more comfortable and energized when they are alone, or if they are avoiding social situations due to social anxiety. If the latter is the case, such an individual may benefit from seeking out a mental health professional who specializes in anxiety disorders.
Isolation is not the only reason that introverts may be more susceptible to mental health issues such as depression. Neurological studies have shown that brain activity in introverts is much more active than that of extroverts.
As such, it makes sense that introverts do not require or crave additional stimulus through other people since they already have a great deal of inner thoughts. Although such brain activity can be a strength, as introverts are often great thinkers and very creative, it can also be a weakness as they may overthink certain feelings and emotions. Overthinking, especially in relation to negative thoughts, compounded by harboring such thoughts due to social seclusion, can lead introverts to trapping their emotions.
I am happy this way. The only reason I would force myself, is if it truly added years to my life. Even though, I would be miserable. What a relief it is to find others just like me….. Wish I knew how to end this terrible prejudice that is never spoken about.
At least those poor people have seen some progress over the years. I love to read, music, exercise, watch TV; anything to be alone. Funny that I found this today. I can entertain myself going for a walk, cleaning, music, gaming, listening to audible books etc.
I work in a highly sociable job in a supermarket. Some days arent as bad as this but I still hope for the day of finding a more emotionally suitable job. There is part of me that also craves a real, deep, genuine soul to soul connection. I Have always been happy with my own company and hated it when adults insisted that I played with the other kids, just give me a good book, a good video, and a glass of single malt scotch and I am happy.
I love people, my people, random people who are kind enough to say hi to me, even the ones who give me the finger in traffic really—the first time that happened to me I actually felt amused and a little proud? My point: sometimes being a loner fits better for those who really need to practice collecting thoughts, turning those thoughts into words and then making decisions. I dunno. I just appreciate this, thanks again.
Thanks on your marvelous posting! I definitely enjoyed reading it, you will be a great author. I will make sure to bookmark your blog and will come back very soon. I want to encourage continue your great posts, have a nice holiday weekend! Skip to main content menu icon. Facebook Instagram Pinterest YouTube.
That is unless YOU are there. So, really, how can you even think about having a life of your own? It can seem like they really need you. Parents who are helpless to do so many things on their own. They count on you emotionally too. Family is their entire life.
She tries to hide and has only one friend. Ruby struggles. Her brother is capable, her parents are too, once they start believing they have something people want a coop business to sell their own fish. And, she takes her first big, scary step.
She must choose an elective and decides on choir because she loves to sing. And, even though she runs away at first — she meets someone who wants to help.
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