‘I don’t have any friends’: why do young people today have fewer mates?

On Tess Lavanda’s YouTube channel there is one video with substantially more views than the rest: it is titled “I don’t have any friends” and has been watched more than half a million times since she posted it a month ago.

Over on Instagram she has posted dozens of reels with titles like “I turned 22 alone”, “Living alone in London” and “Feeling alone this summer is OK”, each garnering thousands of views and hundreds of comments, many from people feeling the same way.

A quick search for terms like “solomaxxing”, “loneliness influencer” and “no friends aesthetic” brings up hundreds of videos and posts from people – many of them teenagers and young adults – talking about what life is like without friends.

“I think people feel relieved it’s finally being spoken about,” says Lavanda, 22. “No one felt brave enough to speak about it because there is this culture where people think being alone is embarrassing and wrong.”

New research from the Institute for Public Policy Research published this week found the number of young people in England with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, now standing at one in 20, and a growing number saying they are not happy with the friends they do have.

Lavanda says: “I think there’s a lack of drive for people to go out and meet people, and when you do go out, people are on their phones so it’s harder to approach them.”

She has always struggled with making friends but it was only during the pandemic when “that lack of a genuine friendship really hit” and she started to feel isolated. “I had no one to talk to and I went into quite a dark place,” she says.

Then one night when she was about to head out alone feeling “so scared and awful”, she put on her camera and started talking.

Lavanda says: “I had no intention of posting it. This was just purely a video for myself, about how I was feeling to try and hype myself up, really. But then I thought maybe this will help someone, so I posted it.

“I was fully expecting to be judged and bullied but the response was overwhelmingly positive. People were sharing their own stories, and I realised that so many people feel the exact same way.”

She says there is a growing trend for solo life to be “aesthetic or romanticised” but her videos are more about showing people without friends they’re not alone. “I think people take comfort in the fact there’s now a voice about this topic,” she says. “It’s more important to just be honest and speak up.”

There has been growing discussion around why young people today report having fewer friends than previous generations – a combination of social media, mental health problems, the Covid pandemic and financial instability are all often thrown into the mix.

Pamela Qualter, the UK’s leading scientific expert on child and adolescent loneliness, says there are no straightforward answers. But it is clear that, as a society, we’ve stripped back places where young people can practise basic social skills like saying “hello”.

“We’re really lacking those very simple conversations you have each day with somebody you just bump into,” she says. “More people are working from home, and people have less disposable income at a time when there are very few free or cheap places for people to come together.”

Qualter says it is these “weak ties” – small interactions with acquaintances – that form the building blocks and social skills that can build into solid friendships.

But she emphasises there is not much evidence to suggest young people are actually getting lonelier: those aged 14 to 24 report the highest levels of loneliness in the UK but this has always been the case.

“Maybe our expectations of friendships are changing. Maybe those people with fewer close friends are happy with that,” she says.

However, there is also evidence to suggest young people are increasingly dissatisfied with the friendships they do have.

Jodie-Leigh Foster,** a training and development officer **at UK Youth, teaches youth workers about youth loneliness and isolation, as well as empowering teenagers to launch their own projects tackling the problem.

She says it is the quality of friendships that many young people struggled with. “These are friendships that often play out on social media and group chats, which can quickly turn to bullying and harassment,” she says. “That leads to them becoming isolated and withdrawn.”

Money is also often an issue: some young people reported not being able to afford to get transport to see people outside school. Others struggle with large crowded spaces, especially since the pandemic, which increased levels of anxiety.

Foster says: “People make assumptions about being a young person, that it’s a carefree time in their lives, and the whole world’s at their fingertips. But for some young people, that’s actually really overwhelming and daunting. It’s a tough time to be a young person.”