Youthful Futures · Essay 10 of 12
Where Do Young People Go to Belong?
We have many places where young people are expected to perform. We may have fewer places where they can simply be.
There are many places where young people are expected to perform.
School.
University.
Work.
Sport.
The internet.
There are fewer places where they are allowed simply to be.
This may be one reason the global conversation about loneliness among young people feels both surprising and unsurprising.
WHO's recent global work on social connection estimates that about one in six people experience loneliness. Adolescents report the highest prevalence of any age group, at around 21 per cent. The rate is higher in lower-income countries, which is a useful reminder that loneliness is not merely a wealthy-country side effect of smartphones.1
The World Happiness Report offers another striking measure.
In 2023, 19 per cent of young adults globally said they had nobody they could count on for social support, a 39 per cent increase from 2006.2
Yet there are enormous national differences.
In a 22-country dataset used in the report, more than 30 per cent of young adults in Japan said they had nobody they felt close to, while the figure was below 10 per cent in Nigeria, Egypt and the Philippines. Mexico, India and Egypt were among the countries where the quality of social support among young adults improved over time.2
There is no single global loneliness story.
And that matters because the easiest explanation is usually the phone.
Phones clearly change social life.
They can interrupt conversation and turn every quiet moment into an opportunity to leave the room mentally.
Social media can produce comparison, harassment and the peculiar experience of watching people socialise without you.
But the same device allows a queer teenager in a hostile environment to find people like them, a migrant to remain part of a family thousands of kilometres away and someone with an obscure interest to discover a community that simply does not exist locally.
Connection and disconnection can arrive through the same screen.
Perhaps we should look at the physical world too.
Where exactly is a sixteen-year-old supposed to spend three unstructured hours with friends?
In many cities, space is expensive.
Cafés expect purchases.
Malls are commercial.
Streets may be unsafe or hostile to pedestrians.
Parks are unevenly distributed.
Schools close.
Homes may be too small or heavily supervised.
A teenager hanging around without a purpose is often treated as a problem to be managed.
Then we wonder why teenagers spend so much time online.
Adults have workplaces, restaurants and homes they control.
Younger people have far fewer spaces where they have legitimate authority.
The sociologist Ray Oldenburg used the term "third places" for spaces that are neither home nor work where ordinary social life happens.
Whatever terminology we use, young people need their own version.
A basketball court.
A library.
A tea shop.
A park bench.
A youth club.
A gaming café.
A religious community.
A street corner where nobody moves them on.
A friend's house where parents are nearby but not constantly present.
These spaces can look trivial from the outside.
They are where friendship acquires repetition.
That matters because belonging rarely emerges through one spectacular interaction.
It develops through seeing someone again and again without needing a reason.
Modern institutions sometimes make that harder.
University students may commute rather than live near campus.
Young workers may switch employers frequently.
Remote work can remove casual encounters.
High housing costs push people farther from friends or keep them in households where entertaining others is difficult.
Migration creates opportunity while breaking existing networks.
None of these changes is inherently bad.
But together they can reduce what we might call social infrastructure.
The World Happiness Report finds that social connection is strongly associated with young adults' well-being. It also describes something hopeful: people can underestimate how willing others are to connect with them, and interventions that correct those beliefs can increase social interaction and well-being.2
That suggests loneliness is not always evidence that people do not want relationships.
Sometimes people want relationships while assuming other people do not.
This is where the internet produces another odd contradiction.
Young people can know what hundreds of people are doing while being uncertain whom they can call.
The distinction between contact and support becomes important.
A person can receive twenty messages and have nobody they trust with bad news.
They can have thousands of followers and nobody to eat dinner with.
They can also have deep friendships maintained primarily through screens.
Counting interactions tells us surprisingly little.
Maybe the useful question is not how many hours young people spend online.
It is whether their lives contain relationships in which they are known, needed and expected to return.
This has implications far beyond mental health services.
If loneliness is partly an infrastructure problem, therapists cannot solve it alone.
Schools can design for belonging.
Universities can make friendship formation an explicit part of orientation rather than an accidental by-product.
Employers can understand that early-career workers are not only acquiring tasks but entering adult communities.
Cities can build places where young people can exist without continually spending money.
Families can recognise that unsupervised social life is not wasted time.
And perhaps adults can stop treating every apparently idle gathering of teenagers as suspicious.
We spend a lot of energy asking how to keep young people away from harmful communities online.
The more interesting challenge may be giving them enough good communities to belong to elsewhere.
Because telling someone to spend less time online does not answer the question waiting underneath.
Where should they go instead?