The ancient roots of modern ennui

According to Office for National Statistics (ONS) research 33% of Britons aged 16 to 29 reported feeling lonely “often, always or some of the time” – the highest of all age groups (17% of over-70s said the same thing).

This year, the World Health Organisation reviewed various studies published across the world and found that young adults and adolescents report the highest levels of loneliness too.

The data are complex, and there are indications that, in some countries, among the very oldest group (over-85s), loneliness shoots up and could match that of 18-to-30s. But analysts say that in most research, young adults shine through as a particularly isolated group.

“Adults between 18 and 24 are the most lonely – followed by older people,” says Prof Andrea Wigfield, director of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. “It’s a growing problem.”

The 1990s sitcom ‘Friends’ paints a sociable picture of life for twenty-somethings – but according to young adults who have spoken to the BBC, along with academics, charity bosses and doctors, the 20s is a primary decade of loneliness.

“We tend to romanticise young adulthood as a carefree time – when it’s usually the most miserable time in people’s lives,” says Prof Richard Weissbourd, a lecturer in education at Harvard University.

In some ways, early adulthood has always been a time of instability. Young adults tend to leave their childhood home and move around. Friends depart, and family ties weaken. These transitory life events can, for some, lead to intense loneliness.

“A big problem is the scattering – everybody you ever knew now lives in a million different places,” says Dr Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist and author of The Twenty-Something Treatment.

This “scattering” proved difficult for Adam Becket. He had a rich social life when he lived in London in his early 20s – but after moving to Bristol, he had to make friends from scratch.

“Not only did I not know anyone, I didn’t know where to start meeting people either. You can’t just go up to someone and be like, ‘Can I join in this fun?’ It’s easy to spiral into self-doubt and self-flagellation – ‘I’m clearly not interesting or cool, or the right kind of person.'”

Things improved when he joined running and cycling clubs and met people that he “clicked with” – though he says his loneliness still comes and goes.

At first, David Gradon’s story was fairly typical. In his late 20s, his friends moved away from London. “My social circle really shrunk,” he remembers – and he developed symptoms of depression. It was an NHS counsellor who suggested this could be loneliness.

He tried meeting people over dating apps (a “terrible” idea) and joined a tag rugby club, but injured his leg in the first session. Increasingly despondent, he organised a park walk on social media.

One autumn day in 2021, Mr Gradon and 11 strangers met at Hampstead Heath in north London. He organised more walks and other events and in time this became his full-time job. He now runs The Great Friendship Project, a non-profit organisation to combat young adult loneliness, which runs social events for people in their 20s and 30s across London.

“Everyone’s in that same boat. And actually, that brings down barriers. Because you know you’re not going to be judged,” he explains.

There is no way out, and no way to attain success, or the situation has no solution or no end.

Moral Injury

Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), in collaboration with Canada’s defence, security, and public safety communities, defined Moral Injury as “The lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

Moral injuries happen when a person is faced with an impossible situation that will always lead to a critical loss. There is no way out, and no way to attain success, or the situation has no solution or no end.

The DRDC found that some individuals are more at risk of developing moral injuries if they have skills that allow them to make critical decisions; they feel a personal sense of responsibility toward humanity and may risk their lives for others; and they make critical decisions on a regular basis and are successful most of the time. In other words, they have come to expect that their knowledge, experiences, and decisions will lead to a desired outcome that is both necessary and correct.

Think of all the moral lessons we give to kids that contain mixed messages. We say sometimes it is important to turn the other cheek, to walk away from conflict. But we also say you should support your peers by standing together against bullying, racism, or sexism. We say, “stand up for what you believe,” but we also teach the importance of free speech and the right for others to have differing opinions.

Of course, as adults, we know these are not mutually exclusive. But they do require nuanced understanding, and sadly, there are times when ideals clash with reality. The person who spoke up may have very well been defending an ideal—one that is morally right even. To not defend the ideal is a betrayal of self. But if, in defending that ideal, others have experienced real harm, the question remains whether it would have been better to walk away.

Instant Gratification

The rhythm of American life has become twitchy, impulsive, allergic to lag—demanding one-click purchases, same-day shipping, and fast-lane checkouts. Our decisions are made mid-scroll, our interactions unfold in push notifications, and our enterprise—well, one ad campaign said it best: “Instant gratification just got faster. Shop Vogue-dot-com.”

We’ve grown so intolerant of delay that we can’t sit through a full microwave countdown before intervening—preferring to eat it lukewarm than wait for zero. We don’t read, we skim. We don’t date, we match. According to data from Spotify, listeners skip 24 percent of songs within the first five seconds and 49 percent of songs before they end.

On TikTok, meanwhile, users decide if the video is worth their time within three seconds of viewing; and if it doesn’t load within two—on to the next. Following suit, Hollywood writing rooms have been instructed to keep all scenes under five pages (i.e., five minutes) and to never let a character speak more than five lines uninterrupted. And still, 94 per cent of us make sure to keep our smartphones on hand just in case the next scene can’t hold off the itch to scroll.

A Crisis of Boredom

Some have labelled it more simply—a crisis of boredom. A nation where half the workforce says they are bored with their jobs (69 percent if measured by “feeling engaged”), close to 40 percent of all of us claim to be bored with our social lives, and two thirds  of  millennials report being plainly “bored with life.” According to research, young Americans today are more “boredom-prone” than at any time in history—so much so that Gen Z has been crowned the “the bored generation.”

And for many, the feeling is a strange kind of exhaustion where more than half our day is spent sitting and yet we feel tired—tired of work, tired of leisure, tired of a culture so fried with cynicism and unseriousness and pointlessness.

But perhaps the more useful distinction is between feeling bored and being bored. Like the difference between feeling alone and being alone; one is a psychological state and the other is a material circumstance. One a measure of subjective experience, the other a measure of objective conditions. What this means is that feeling bored is self-reported—you can only know if someone feels bored by asking them. But to know if they are bored, you don’t need words—you need observation: brain scans, environmental situations, introspective awareness, and so on.

Our survival would be short-lived if we were unable to engage our cognitive abilities in the service of achieving our goals or responding adroitly to environmental demands. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that we have been shaped by evolutionary forces to experience the aversive state of boredom when our cognitive resources are not being optimally utilised.

For billions of years, operating in high-stakes environments where life-sustaining resources were few and far between, natural selection has been relentlessly designing a system where psychological stress is only ever relieved by hard-earned bursts of feel-good endorphins like dopamine or serotonin. In short, our brains were wired to over-worry and under-enjoy; because seeing a stick and thinking it’s a snake is less costly than seeing a snake and thinking it’s a stick.

The root of today’s suffering is that we are operating on an inherited psychological system where the most stable evolutionary strategy is a life filled with stress and anxiety.

In a society where we have nothing (no predators, no famine, no war) to torment us, nothing itself becomes the torment. In other words, leisure curdles into boredom—a hell so unbearable that international law recognises it as a torture device (i.e., solitary confinement) and NASA assigns its astronauts busywork to safeguard against it.

Studies have found we’d rather blast our ears with the sound of a screaming pig than listen to nothing or engage in dangerous behaviours such as drug use, erratic driving, or high-risk financial speculation in order to avoid boredom. A series of studies, published in Science, found that two thirds of participants would rather self-administer electric shocks than endure just 15 minutes devoid of external distraction; with a similar majority saying they’d pay money to never experience such boredom again.

Is it any wonder that young people who feel bored, lonely and unappreciated turn to anti-social activities if only for the excitement? Maybe we should turn to education in order to instill some sense of purpose into their lives.