Part of the answer lies in the strange geometry of digital connection. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok promise community but often deliver performance. One is seen, but not known. Messages are constant, but rarely vulnerable. Video calls replace face-to-face time, but the warmth of presence — the shared breath of proximity — is lost. In this theatre of curated intimacy, many young people have begun to feel invisible in plain sight.

And then there’s the world they’ve inherited. Public spaces have withered. Local clubs, youth centres, even libraries — the informal social infrastructure of past generations — are vanishing. The gig economy offers flexibility but no colleagues. Housing is transient, and neighbourhoods are no longer communities but staging areas for the next move. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated all of this. Years of formative social time were spent behind screens. The habit of being alone hardened into a lifestyle.

The result is a peculiar emotional climate: people are together online, yet profoundly apart in their inner lives. They scroll through images of others laughing in groups, but rarely feel part of one. They joke about loneliness on Twitter, but rarely admit it in person. Even in friendship groups, a strange solitude lingers — the feeling that everyone is too overwhelmed to reach out, or too digitally exhausted to meet in real life.

This loneliness isn’t just an emotional inconvenience. It’s a public health issue. Studies link chronic loneliness to higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even heart disease. But what makes Gen Z’s loneliness distinct is how covert it is. Because their lives are lived so publicly online, the pain is often private. There’s no visible marker of social isolation when your feed is active. But the silence, when the phone is off, is deafening.

Still, there is hope — not in grand interventions, but in a cultural reorientation. Loneliness is not solved by more content or better apps. It’s solved, slowly, by space for real presence. Cafés that let you linger. Conversations that resist multitasking. Eye contact that isn’t mediated through a lens. And perhaps most of all, by honesty: the courage to say “I’m lonely” without shame.

The irony is that Gen Z, for all its digital fluency, yearns for the analog: handwritten notes, deep talks, long walks with no agenda. This isn't regression. It's a kind of remembering — of what it means to feel truly accompanied. And in that remembrance lies the first step toward a less lonely future.