Pandemic lockdowns never ended for some people

Financial Times Europe15 Aug 2026John Burn-Mur doch john.burn-mur doch@ft.com

Only occa sion ally in my work do I come across a stat istic so aston ish ing that it stopsme in my tracks. Earlier this week was one of those times.

While explor ing data from the Amer ican Time Use Sur vey, which draws on detaileddiar ies to track how and with whom people spend every minute of a ran domlyselec ted day, I came across the fol low ing: on an aver age day in 2023, one in 10young Amer ic ans aged between 19 and 24 did not spend a single minute inter act ingface to face with another per son.

Much has been writ ten about the decline in social ising among young people overrecent years, but these ana lyses — includ ing my own — have ten ded to focus onsoci etal aver ages. Doing so misses a crit ical part of this story: whether we’re talk ingabout the long shadow of pan demic lock downs, the increas ingly enthralling digitalenvir on ment or intensi fy ing aca demic pres sure, anti-social ising forces have hadrad ic ally dif fer ent effects on dif fer ent young people.

Many teens and young adults have lives that are just as socially rich today as theywere a dec ade ago while oth ers have become com pletely cut off. The most sociallycon nec ted quarter of young people used to spend 87 per cent of their day withother people, whether fam ily, friends, co-work ers or oth ers. Dur ing the pan demicthat dipped to 78 per cent, but it has reboun ded to 83 per cent. The most isol atedseg ment used to still spend roughly a third of their day around oth ers, but that hasnow col lapsed to essen tially zero.

Data from the UK paints a sim ilar pic ture of what we might need to start call ingsocial ising inequal ity. An upcom ing report by the Insti tute for Pub lic PolicyResearch finds that while the aver age young Bri ton has roughly five close friends —the same fig ure as in 2015, the por tion with not a single close friend has shot upfrom one in 100 in 2015 to one in 20 today.

The decline of social ising in mod ern soci ety has been a steady pro cess, but on manymeas ures of isol a tion a gap really opened up after the pan demic. Lock downs, socialdis tan cing and the shift from in-per son to online edu ca tion and work made manypeople’s days rad ic ally less social for a year or so. Where people lived with friendsor part ners, or had strong social net works before ties were tem por ar ily severed, theeffect was smal ler and the rebound has been fairly robust.

But people whose lives became par tic u larly sol it ary dur ing the pan demic, or whohad pre vi ously relied more on cir cum stan tial rela tion ships than deep bonds, havesuffered a last ing hit.

The most acutely affected group is young adults neither in work nor edu ca tion. Inwest ern Europe, the share of this group that met up with friends or fam ily less thanonce a month stood at 7 per cent before the pan demic, but rose to 14 per cent in2021 and has remained elev ated.

The fig ures point to a cor ros ive coin cid ence of slow and fast social shifts. From therise of remote work ing to self-check outs and the dis place ment of bricks-and-mor tarshop ping by eco m merce, tech no logy has stead ily eroded the num ber of incid entalinter per sonal encoun ters that would typ ic ally offer even the most reserved per sona baseline amount of human con tact.

At the same time, the pro lif er a tion of hyper-enga ging all-you-can-eat digital mediahas made sol it ary leis ure time the default, while in-per son social ising becomes rel -at ively more effort ful — espe cially for those of a more anxious or intro ver tednature. While labour-sav ing mech an ical innov a tions freed up more time for social -ising, digital innov a tions have often had the oppos ite effect.

Add to these slow anti-social ising back ground shifts the pan demic-era shock of dis -rup ted habits and enforced solitude for many young people, and you tip some ofthis group into a new and dam aging equi lib rium from which they are strug gling toescape.

Social ties are hugely import ant for health and longev ity, and the increas ing co-occur rence of social and eco nomic isol a tion makes the prob lem of rising youthwork less ness harder to address.

In fact, so much lies down stream of social con nec ted ness that one could argueaddress ing grow ing poverty in this domain should rank above its fin an cial equi val -ent. These shifts may not have happened by design, but mit ig at ing their impactmust be a pri or ity for poli cy makers and the rest of us alike