Welcome to the ‘antisocial century’: Are we lonelier now than ever?

Are we becoming lonelier now than ever? It’s not a rhetorical question. Or at least not for such lucid analysts of contemporary reality as American Derek Thompson, editor of The Atlantic magazine and author of essays such as On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity and Hitmakers.

In Thompson’s view, the United States, and perhaps the planet as a whole, is suffering from a self-imposed loneliness epidemic that is transforming “our personalities, our ideologies, and even our relationship with reality.” He has dubbed the era we live in “the antisocial century,” and says he is experiencing its ravages both in his own life and in the lives of most people in his immediate surroundings.

In an ambitious article in the magazine he edits, Thompson begins with an anecdote elevated to the level of the public, interpreted as a symptom: at the Mexican bar in North Carolina he’s frequented for years, hardly anyone comes to have a couple of beers and chat with the patrons anymore. Today, business seems better than ever, but it has become a prepared-food establishment that delivers dozens of trays per minute. People order them using an app, pick them up from a counter next to the kitchen, pay for them, and take them home. A delicate choreography of consumption executed with mechanical precision and, at least for Thompson, disheartening: completed in a matter of seconds and without anyone exchanging a single word.

An establishment that just a couple of years ago thrived on spontaneous and chatty social interaction has become a quiet hub for exchanging trays of food for money. The waiters no longer act as psychologists. The tables are rarely used; they are no longer social clubs or makeshift offices. The United States of Frasier, Norm, and Sam Malone is ceasing to exist.

Nothing to tell us

What happened? Thompon spoke with Rae Mosher, manager of the converted Mexican bar, and found in him a pragmatic professional who has managed to accurately interpret the expectations and habits of his new customers: they don’t want to interact with anyone; they’re content to integrate a simple, sterile act of consumption into their daily routines. Why persist in taking them out of their new comfort zone, out of their bubbles of social phobia balanced with autistic hyperconnectivity? Let’s give them what they want.

Thompson has a thesis: an invisible enemy (let’s provisionally say it’s been a coalition of the pandemic, cell phones, and the signs of the times) is causing us to spend more and more time in our homes, consolidated as refuges of comfort and leisure. This has reinforced two types of human connections: the closest ones (with nuclear family and close friends) and the most distant ones, the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of human beings with whom we interact sporadically on social media. What we are sacrificing with this change in habits and general reorganization of our time is the broad spectrum of relationships in between. Neighbors, people from the neighborhood, coworkers, waiters, and staff at the establishments we frequent. People, in short, who are part of our immediate environment but not part of our inner circle, and to whom not long ago we dedicated a substantial part of our time.

The unstoppable erosion of this intermediate circle would explain, again according to Thompson, why the only thing we exchange with familiar faces is a cautious and reticent greeting, and why, increasingly, we have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even a beer alone, with our cell phones or in front of a computer screen. But that’s not all. That ring of distant, superficial immediacy plays a major role in shaping the social fabric and building community networks. It is in places like bars that people give themselves (or gave themselves) the opportunity to explore, get to know each other, understand each other, and establish small or large analogical connections. Political parties and social clubs were formed in bars, quick friendships and romantic connections began there. All of these are antidotes to loneliness.

Lonely Ranch

For Allie Volpe, a social and mental health expert at Vox magazine, no generation of Americans has spent as much time alone (voluntarily or involuntarily) as the current one. For Volpe, the main symptom of this rise in antisocial behavior is that one in four Americans eats alone every day or almost every day of the week, up 53% from 2003.

The trend is so striking that the United Nations’ World Happiness Report has dedicated one of the main chapters of its latest annual report to it. We often eat alone because we choose to be alone, even if it’s in the crowded solitude of our digital interactions.

It’s not a decision without consequences. For Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and well-being at the University of Oxford and one of the index’s editors, “there is a very direct correlation between loneliness and unhappiness.” Furthermore, self-imposed loneliness, no matter how much it may seem to respond to an individual or generational trend and, therefore, may seem “short-term satisfying,” is a source of emotional imbalance and loss of well-being.

The happiest countries in the world, according to De Neve, continue to be Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. That is, precisely those where, among many other factors, the loneliness epidemic seems to have progressed the least in recent years. According to John Helliwell, another editor of the index, it is very significant that the percentage of Finns of all ages who eat meals in company has even increased in recent years.

Finland, incidentally, is also the place on the planet where you’re most likely to get a call saying you’ve lost your wallet and then arrange to meet up with someone to return it. In Helliwell’s words, having a welfare state funded by progressive taxes “tends to make a vast majority of citizens happier,” but “it doesn’t guarantee that a stranger will return your wallet or that your coworkers will be willing to sit down and eat with you.” The latter depends more on the existence of “individuals with a sense of community and who genuinely care about the people around them.”

This factor — the richness, variety, and frequency of social interactions — would also help explain why two Latin American countries, Costa Rica and Mexico, have entered the narrow elite of the 10 happiest in the world for the first time. The United States, on the other hand, has dropped to 24th place, a loss of relative happiness not attributable to inflation, the reelection of Donald Trump, or fentanyl use, but rather to the fact that a specific age group, those under 30 (yes, those who spend more time on social media and less time physically with other people), now report themselves unhappier than ever.

It’s tempting to conclude that Costa Ricans and Mexicans are increasingly happier because, unlike Americans, they eat together. But De Neve and his team insist that happiness, however objectively measured and calibrated it may be, depends on multiple factors and doesn’t allow for such reductionist interpretations.

Loneliness with an ñ?

What can we say about Spain? How does this (alleged) global epidemic of self-imposed loneliness, which is making human beings increasingly unhappy, translate to our country? After all, we live in one of the paradises of spontaneous social interaction, the land of 277,000 bars and restaurants (one for every 175 inhabitants), the place where no one is ever too far from a cold beer.

Recent data, such as a 2024 study by the consulting firm HSBC, suggests that Spaniards (like Americans, and unlike Finns and Costa Ricans) also feel lonelier today than ever. This trend has been clearly observed for at least a decade among those over 65, and used to be considered one of the tolls we pay for being one of the longest-lived societies in the world: Spaniards are living longer and longer, and sooner or later, they are left with little to no company.

The new development is that an increasing number (around one in four) of Spanish youth and adolescents feel lonely or very lonely. What’s more, three out of four say they know at least one person in their age group who suffers from unwanted loneliness. The study has detected correlations that could be highly significant. For example, nearly half of those who say they feel lonely say they have experienced discrimination or bullying at school. And, as is the case in the United States, young people who use the internet and social media the most tend to be the most likely to feel lonely and complain of a harmful lack of “real” relationships.

Other indicators point in the same direction. In Spain, the number of single adults (20.68 million) has surpassed the number of married adults (20.1 million) for several years now. Of course, among the 14.9 million single people and the 5.8 million separated and widowed people, there is a high percentage in informal relationships, but the figures nevertheless represent a sharp shift in the direction of a society with increasingly fewer plans for cohabitation and stable commitments.

The Continuous Household Survey of the National Statistics Institute (INE) also tells a very similar story: the number of Spaniards living alone is continuing to rise, reaching 4,584,200 individuals. Currently, this rate of residential loneliness primarily affects those over 65 (25% of the total), but is increasing across all age groups. More and more citizens report having spent almost their entire adult life in complete solitude.

Finally, the figure that perhaps brings us closest to answering a crucial question: is there an Iberian exception in terms of loneliness, or are we closer than we think to the United States described by Derek Thompson? That figure is the percentage of Spaniards who regularly eat lunch and dinner alone. And it seems to be growing steadily, now exceeding 20%, not far from the 25% recorded in the United States.

It’s been 43 years since Paul Auster wrote The Invention of Solitude. In our contemporary world of hyperconnectivity and crowded solitudes, we’re reinventing it. Even in the Spain of hundreds of thousands of bars.

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