By Michael Robinson, European Conservative.
Recent studies consistently show that those aged between 18 and 24 report some of the highest levels of loneliness in Britain, in some cases even higher than the elderly. This is occurring in the most technologically connected society in human history.
Something has gone profoundly wrong.
We often speak about loneliness as though it were primarily a mental health issue, a regrettable emotional condition affecting isolated individuals. But loneliness at this scale begins to tell us something much larger about the society itself.
It becomes a social condition.
A sign that the structures which once rooted people within relationships, communities, and shared meaning are beginning to weaken.
For decades, Western societies have steadily elevated autonomy above almost everything else. Independence became the ideal. Freedom increasingly came to mean liberation from obligation, permanence, dependence, and inherited structures. The successful modern citizen was expected to be mobile, self-creating, endlessly flexible, and answerable primarily to himself.
At first, this felt liberating. But human beings are not designed for radical autonomy.
We are relational creatures. We are formed through family, friendship, neighbourhood, worship, shared memory, obligation, and community life. Remove these structures, and loneliness ceases to be an exception within society and instead becomes one of its defining characteristics. That is increasingly where Britain now finds itself.