You can have 47 unread texts, a group chat on life support, a church small group on Tuesday and still feel weirdly alone on a Friday night.
That’s the part we keep getting wrong about loneliness.
For years, we’ve treated it like a math problem: If people feel lonely, they must need more people. More plans. More reasons to leave the house.
A new international study suggests the problem is more complicated, especially for young adults.
Researchers led by Washington University in St. Louis found that nearly half of adults ages 18 to 24 report feeling lonely, compared to about 30% of adults 55 and older. Across all eight countries included in the study, nearly four in 10 adults reported loneliness. The findings were based on survey data from 7,997 adults in Brazil, France, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Turkey and the United States.
The mental health connection was stark. People who reported loneliness had almost three times the odds of meeting screening criteria for depression and nearly four times the odds of meeting screening criteria for generalized anxiety.
Still, the most useful insight may be what the study complicates. Loneliness among young adults isn’t always about having no one around. In many cases, young adults have people in their lives. What they often lack is stability.
Early adulthood is built on movement. Friendships shift. Jobs change. Living situations turn over before they have time to feel like home. A person can be socially active and still feel unrooted because the same faces don’t keep showing up in the same ways over time.
Dr. Marisa Franco, a psychologist and author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends, said friendship is often treated like a secondary category of love, even though the research keeps pointing in the opposite direction.
“I kind of just got really interested in the topic of friendship,” Franco said. “I just looked around and I was like, well, why doesn’t this love matter? Why do we treat it as so trivial?”
That question lands differently in a culture where young adults are surrounded by connection but often starved for permanence. Their calendars have plans on them. Their phones are active. They’re texting friends, attending church, showing up at work and trying to keep a social life moving.
Still, something feels unsettled.
Researchers have long made a distinction between social isolation and loneliness. Social isolation is more objective: the measurable absence of social contact or close relationships. Loneliness is subjective. It’s the painful distance between the relationships someone has and the relationships they want.
A person can have hundreds of contacts in their phone and still feel profoundly lonely.
Franco said the need for friendship isn’t a sign of weakness or immaturity. It’s built into the way people function.
“We are fundamentally social creatures,” Franco said. “It’s OK that you really want friends.”
Previous generations often entered stable patterns earlier in life. Many lived near family, remained in the same communities longer and developed ordinary routines that connected them to familiar people week after week. Today’s young adults are navigating a different reality. Career paths are less predictable. Marriage often happens later. Many spend years moving between jobs and churches before finding something that resembles permanence.
The result is a life full of relationships that can be meaningful but temporary.
Anyone who has moved to a new city understands the phenomenon. Friendships form quickly, often out of necessity. A church small group becomes a lifeline. Then someone takes a new job or moves away, and the process starts over again.
The relationships were real. They just weren’t rooted long enough to become sustaining.
Franco said friendship helps people metabolize the stress of ordinary life. It changes how hard things feel before people even begin dealing with them.
“There’s an interesting study that when people evaluated how steep a hill was, they saw it as less steep when they were with a friend,” Franco said.
That’s the part many young adults are missing. The issue isn’t always access to people. It’s access to steady people. The kind who make life feel less steep because they’re still there after the exciting new season becomes normal.
Social media makes the whole thing stranger. Digital platforms allow people to remain loosely connected to former roommates, college friends and church acquaintances for years. Everyone is technically around. Everyone is reachable.
That can create the appearance of relational abundance.
But knowing what someone posted over the weekend isn’t the same as participating in their life. Watching someone’s updates keeps people informed. It doesn’t create the kind of belonging that comes from repeated shared experience.
Belonging is usually less cinematic than people expect. It grows through ordinary routines: becoming a regular somewhere, showing up to the same church long enough to be known and keeping dinner on the calendar even when everyone is busy. Familiarity creates trust. Consistency creates connection.
Many young adults have relationships. Fewer have those kinds of rhythms.
Building a life with people means staying present long enough for relationships to deepen. It means resisting the temptation to treat every season as disposable. It means investing in people before they feel permanent.
That doesn’t mean everyone should stop moving or chasing opportunities. Modern life often requires flexibility. Some seasons really are transitional.
Still, the WashU study points toward a reality many young adults already sense: loneliness isn’t always solved by meeting someone new.
Sometimes it’s addressed by staying long enough to be known.
Franco said people often carry shame around wanting deeper friendship, especially when they worry they’re asking for too much.
“We have just internalized all of these harmful messages about wanting connection, being lonely, being upfront with that about ourselves,” Franco said.
Much of the public conversation around loneliness focuses on helping people make friends. The harder challenge may be helping people build permanence.
For many young adults, loneliness isn’t simply the absence of relationships — it’s the absence of roots.
