>Middle-aged English people are the loneliest in Europe and are more likely to suffer from it than previous generations were, a study has found.
Focusing on those aged between 45 and 65, researchers compared Europeans with Americans, finding that those in the United States reported higher levels of “midlife loneliness”.
>But middle-aged Englishmen and women reported the most in Europe, scoring higher than those from three other regions: continental, Mediterranean and Nordic Europe.
>The researchers from Arizona State University also compared the loneliness reported by older generations, people who would now be 65 to 96 years old, when they were middle aged.
>They found that in England, those born in the latter baby boomer years from 1955 to 1964, and those born into Generation X between 1965 and 1974, reported higher levels of loneliness during their middle age than early baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1954, and the so-called silent generation, born between 1928 and 1945, did during their own middle years.
>In central Europe and Scandinavia there was no observed rise in loneliness among younger generations, but the study, published in the journal American Psychologist, noted: “Middle-aged adults in the United States, England and Mediterranean Europe today report higher levels of loneliness than earlier-born cohorts [did].”
>The study said that the US, England and southern European countries had weaker “social safety nets” than those in central and northern European countries. It noted that their policies “are not as comprehensive [for] paid family leave, unemployment and employment protections, subsidised childcare, and education programmes for parents with children”.
It added: “Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work–family conflict, as well as enhancing job security and workplace flexibility and addressing health and gender inequities.”
>Researchers used data from long-running surveys conducted in the US and in 13 European countries, including a total of 53,000 participants from three generations: the silent generation, baby boomers and Generation X. Data was collected between 2000 and 2020 and only included responses given when participants were aged between 45 and 65.
>Data for England came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (Elsa), which launched in 2002 and contains data on 9,793 people, 56 per cent of whom are women.
>Using a points system devised by the researchers, in England, late-era baby boomers scored 3.08 points lower than Americans for loneliness, but 2.83 points higher than those from central Europe, 2.87 points higher than those from Mediterranean Europe, and 4.17 points higher than those from Scandinavia.
>“Our research illustrates that people feel lonelier in some countries than in others during middle age,” said Dr Frank Infurna, the lead author of the study, who is a psychology professor at Arizona State. “We focused on middle-aged adults because they form the backbone of society. Middle-aged adults carry much of society’s load by constituting most of the workforce, while simultaneously supporting the needs of younger and older generations in the family.”
Middle aged is 45-65? Bah.
Life expectancy in the UK is down to 78 years on average, so if you’re approaching the ripe age of 40, welcome to your midlife crisis!
*Woo!* We’re number one! We’re number one! Now to celebrate this victory with all my… oh, right.
I looked into social clubs in my area, but everything is only open during the working day (what little was on offer in the NE), so until I retire none of them is an option. And it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll never even get to retire, so I literally don’t know what middle aged people are supposed to do.
My local village FB group has twice recently had someone post a message about loneliness and had 30+ replies from other people in the area also feeling lonely and expressing how hard it is to find community events to meet other people. First time was mostly singles responding, second time it was couples all saying they have very few local friends. It’s so sad how much community life has been abandoned by those who should have a responsibility for facilitating it (property developers, councils and government – all levels), and the health consequences will manifest everywhere. I know several of my problems are a reaction to loneliness.
To be fair, Scandinavian love to be lonely so it s also cultural
We sit in between those who don’t want to know us and those who don’t understand us!
Younger than this, but been lonely for years. WFH all the time doesnt help, i miss an office and human interaction. Can go weeks without a friendly type interaction.
Possibly because they lived a certain way and grew up doing certain things but it’s not allowed anymore. They need to start all over again to fit into this new society.
The weird thing is that despite people reporting being lonely, social events are struggling. The various friendly leagues in my town, for example, (darts, pool, quizzing etc) are really struggling for members. Like…I try and get you to get out of the house whoever you are, and if you won’t go and sit in a dingey pub drinking and being asked difficult quiz questions then really how lonely can you be?
When I was at school in the 1980s and 1990s having any kind of hobby or interest was frowned on – I actually got told off by the head of year when she found out that I build models. And schools worked really hard to ensure we left with an intense hatred of religion and sport.
Nowadays I look at things like the various events apps, and everything is not for my demographic or not for people with a 9-5 job.
The English being so insufferable they can’t even stand each other 🤣
I’ve just moved back here after a few years working abroad and can sense the isolation. When I lived abroad, I lived in a large city with great public transport connections within the city and cheapish options for intercity travel, all the services I needed within 30 minutes, calm weather and disposable income in my pocket to do things. I was easily able to meet my friends who could all reach the social areas of the city with public transport or we could go out and watch live sports for a tenner each.
I come back to the UK and its a 25 minute walk to my local village and railway station, public busses have been slashed, everyday things are expensive to do and the weather is absolutely miserable. Everything also closes at 6pm, which is when people finish work and can have a few sociable hours but if you walk to the local village everything besides the barbers and chicken shops have closed and you have to be picky with pubs because of the people that go in there.
We don’t make it easy for ourselves to be sociable here in the UK and I can easily see how people can get stuck in a rut of only having the TV for company. I feel awful for those who have had to suffer with loneliness for years because it is a truly miserable thing to experience and can be so hard to get through.
Mid 50’s. Work from home. Lost my wife many years ago. I can’t remember what a hug feels like. I am alone.
People need “third spaces” in order to feel comfortable in making such connections. Or at least being in them to interact to some degree with others.
Our streets are clogged with traffic and hardly make for a great environment to do that.
Parks have been neglected for years and are now showing it.
Pubs cost a fortune, and even at coffee shops you are set back the better part of £10 for coffee and cake.
People live further away from where they work than ever due to high house prices.
Everything about our life makes social connections transactional as opposed to meaningful. And we wonder why people are feeling lonely?
I don’t mean to sound like a twat – but don’t people have simple social skills?
I’m 50, and in all honesty I don’t have enough time to keep up with all the friends and acquaintances I’ve accumulated over the years – I don’t know how you get to this stage of life without having at least a small handful of people you’re friendly with unless you’ve made a conscious effort not to get to know anybody.
Old school mates (still my closest group), friends I made at different jobs over the years, friends I’ve made through my own hobbies and pastimes, the other local dads I got friendly with when my kids started school, plus the wider circle of my wife’s friends.
It’s not like I’m super-sociable, in fact I’m naturally fairly introverted – it’s really not hard to strike up a casual friendship here and there, and over the years they become stronger relationships.
The older I get the less time I want to spend with other people.
Our society is incredibly atomised. People don’t even know their neighbours. No idea why, or why it’s worse here than other places.
Plenty of valid suggestions on here already, but another I expected to see was mobile phone usage. The TV became the go to way to spend downtime decades ago and probably changed how most of us while away the hours between eat/sleep/work cycle.
We’ve had the Internet on tap in our houses for ~30 years and that was pretty addictive but mainly for youngish generations, I didn’t feel like 40 somethings were all on their computers for hours every night, but those who lived alone probably were drawn to it. In the good old days of dial up, many ISPs charged by the minute while you were emailing/browsing so it could burn a hole in your pocket. Even early home broadband packages had limits to monthly data allowance.
Smartphones have been with us for about 20 years, and I think the impact on behaviour has been wild, and even the last five years have seen a greater shift to how much time we spend looking at them. Every generation in any household, all looking at their phone for many hours every day.
You can use a smartphone to find friends, clubs to meet up at, chat with mates, read most books, learn pretty much anything. But you can also lose many hours doing the infinite scroll on many apps (including Reddit!)
I run most days, and now it feels like a huge number of people will pull out their phone whenever they are walking anywhere, or waiting/inactive for a bit – it’s instinctive to nearly all of us. That surely has to be having some impact on how much we interact with others?
But none of this is UK specific, so even if we have a loneliness problem slightly worse than other countries, I would be surprised if the trend wasn’t the same elsewhere where smartphone access with cheap data was easily available
I think folks totally sacrificing their social lives during the childrearing years has a massive impact on this. The kids leave home eventually, and then people realise they have nothing else.
Then factor in how bloody expensive eveything is these days and the closure of many community hubs – the local pubs.
The local Facebook group has an odd combination of people moaning there is nothing to do, and no where to go. And a few groups offering classes and events that are struggling for attendance.
As a south Asian we don’t really have this problem. We have community centre which does plenty of events. We regular see eachother in the mosque everyday. We have football tourneys, kids club etc. We also have kids we spend time with even when they move out. I went to the hospital with my dad and I seen an old South Asian man surrounded by family. While I seen plenty of old white British men on their own.
I think white British people, no longer having a religion, replacing having kids with dogs, not speaking to their parents much, relied on pubs that are now too expensive. The list goes on but white British community doesn’t look so great to me.
South Asians tend to be very family orientated, have a religion where they meet everyday not just for prayer but socialise. Have more community spirit with plenty of events and charities for all ages.
There is also a rise to people converting to islam and is one of the fastest growing religions
Us South Asians are not only doing okay I see plenty of other communities doing okay. I have Nigerian neighbours who have a ton of family and friends come over and every Sunday they go go church
Middle aged? It starts younger than that! I’m in my 30’s and I hardly see anyone.
It’s the cumulative effects of the cars, the TVs, the smartphones, the long hours at work, the high prices for small houses, the privatisation of everything, the intensification of parenting, the paedo panic and media warping perceptions, people moving to where the work is, etc.
Let’s break it down:
People often move away from established friends and family to persue economic opportunity. This means you don’t have an established pool of people you’d trust to share resources or responsibility, and even if you stay put your friends often move away. This ironically increases further costs because you have to use formal instead of informal childcare and that’s very expensive.
So people *have* to persue economic opportunity because we’ve build a culture that says the goal is to earn lots of money, and more importantly skyrocketing asset prices and rising inequality means you play the game or get left behind – but it’s mostly about our mainstreamed culture of unlimited greed and net worth equating to self worth.
So we end up with families where both parents work full time, while paying massive amounts for childcare and having 60-70% of their income creamed off by the parasite class of landlords and housebuilders/banks. This then means the parents are exhausted once they’ve finished doing their jobs and rearing their children and they really don’t have the oomph to go out.
And you have to pay attention to your kids all the time until they’re surprisingly old because UK kids have way less independence than children in many peer nations – mostly because parents are (wrongly) terrified every hedge contains a paedophile, and (rightly) terrified that their children will be run over and killed by cars.
And you can invite people over to your house but you have to sort of know them a bit before you do that, and the average UK home is very small so you have a very limited range of activities you can do together, or a quite low limit on how many people you can comfortably accommodate in your house at one time.
You can go out-out, but that’s increasingly expensive and many people can’t afford to do it regularly. Going to clubs and things is great, IMO the best thing to do – but sometimes you have to really travel to get to a club and that can become restrictive in terms of time or money if you’re only just staying above the waterline.
All of this is exacerbated by decades of building low-density amenity-less housing making everything further apart than it needs to be and contributing to the crisis of house prices and lack of availability.
So people stay home and watch TV, or scroll on their smartphones. It’s easy. It’s cheap. In the long run it’ll kill you dead.
The current government care so little about the people and so much about their own interests this is no surprise
This is the consequence of a society who doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves. It takes a huge personal sacrifice to maintain friendships and networks and not many are willing to do it. Maybe people are too busy chasing money or too depressed to leave their comfort zone.
Sounds about right. In my case it was partially living in Canada for 20 years then coming back but the biggest problem was house prices in London. I grew up there and went to college there but in those 20 years almost all my old friends fled the cost of housing to various towns and villages in the south. I’m the latest having just moved to St Albans. We’ve scattered.
They should adopt the German approach of joining “vereinen”.
It would also leave them less vulnerable to GBNews brainwashing.
Society has fallen. Social cohesion is non existent. It was all planned. Nobody goes to war when they are happy. They are preparing us to die for them again.
It’s a lonely, expensive, broken, miserable country that we live in.
29 comments
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ZMDfp
>Middle-aged English people are the loneliest in Europe and are more likely to suffer from it than previous generations were, a study has found.
Focusing on those aged between 45 and 65, researchers compared Europeans with Americans, finding that those in the United States reported higher levels of “midlife loneliness”.
>But middle-aged Englishmen and women reported the most in Europe, scoring higher than those from three other regions: continental, Mediterranean and Nordic Europe.
>The researchers from Arizona State University also compared the loneliness reported by older generations, people who would now be 65 to 96 years old, when they were middle aged.
>They found that in England, those born in the latter baby boomer years from 1955 to 1964, and those born into Generation X between 1965 and 1974, reported higher levels of loneliness during their middle age than early baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1954, and the so-called silent generation, born between 1928 and 1945, did during their own middle years.
>In central Europe and Scandinavia there was no observed rise in loneliness among younger generations, but the study, published in the journal American Psychologist, noted: “Middle-aged adults in the United States, England and Mediterranean Europe today report higher levels of loneliness than earlier-born cohorts [did].”
>The study said that the US, England and southern European countries had weaker “social safety nets” than those in central and northern European countries. It noted that their policies “are not as comprehensive [for] paid family leave, unemployment and employment protections, subsidised childcare, and education programmes for parents with children”.
It added: “Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work–family conflict, as well as enhancing job security and workplace flexibility and addressing health and gender inequities.”
>Researchers used data from long-running surveys conducted in the US and in 13 European countries, including a total of 53,000 participants from three generations: the silent generation, baby boomers and Generation X. Data was collected between 2000 and 2020 and only included responses given when participants were aged between 45 and 65.
>Data for England came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (Elsa), which launched in 2002 and contains data on 9,793 people, 56 per cent of whom are women.
>Using a points system devised by the researchers, in England, late-era baby boomers scored 3.08 points lower than Americans for loneliness, but 2.83 points higher than those from central Europe, 2.87 points higher than those from Mediterranean Europe, and 4.17 points higher than those from Scandinavia.
>“Our research illustrates that people feel lonelier in some countries than in others during middle age,” said Dr Frank Infurna, the lead author of the study, who is a psychology professor at Arizona State. “We focused on middle-aged adults because they form the backbone of society. Middle-aged adults carry much of society’s load by constituting most of the workforce, while simultaneously supporting the needs of younger and older generations in the family.”
Middle aged is 45-65? Bah.
Life expectancy in the UK is down to 78 years on average, so if you’re approaching the ripe age of 40, welcome to your midlife crisis!
*Woo!* We’re number one! We’re number one! Now to celebrate this victory with all my… oh, right.
I looked into social clubs in my area, but everything is only open during the working day (what little was on offer in the NE), so until I retire none of them is an option. And it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll never even get to retire, so I literally don’t know what middle aged people are supposed to do.
My local village FB group has twice recently had someone post a message about loneliness and had 30+ replies from other people in the area also feeling lonely and expressing how hard it is to find community events to meet other people. First time was mostly singles responding, second time it was couples all saying they have very few local friends. It’s so sad how much community life has been abandoned by those who should have a responsibility for facilitating it (property developers, councils and government – all levels), and the health consequences will manifest everywhere. I know several of my problems are a reaction to loneliness.
To be fair, Scandinavian love to be lonely so it s also cultural
We sit in between those who don’t want to know us and those who don’t understand us!
Younger than this, but been lonely for years. WFH all the time doesnt help, i miss an office and human interaction. Can go weeks without a friendly type interaction.
Possibly because they lived a certain way and grew up doing certain things but it’s not allowed anymore. They need to start all over again to fit into this new society.
The weird thing is that despite people reporting being lonely, social events are struggling. The various friendly leagues in my town, for example, (darts, pool, quizzing etc) are really struggling for members. Like…I try and get you to get out of the house whoever you are, and if you won’t go and sit in a dingey pub drinking and being asked difficult quiz questions then really how lonely can you be?
When I was at school in the 1980s and 1990s having any kind of hobby or interest was frowned on – I actually got told off by the head of year when she found out that I build models. And schools worked really hard to ensure we left with an intense hatred of religion and sport.
Nowadays I look at things like the various events apps, and everything is not for my demographic or not for people with a 9-5 job.
The English being so insufferable they can’t even stand each other 🤣
I’ve just moved back here after a few years working abroad and can sense the isolation. When I lived abroad, I lived in a large city with great public transport connections within the city and cheapish options for intercity travel, all the services I needed within 30 minutes, calm weather and disposable income in my pocket to do things. I was easily able to meet my friends who could all reach the social areas of the city with public transport or we could go out and watch live sports for a tenner each.
I come back to the UK and its a 25 minute walk to my local village and railway station, public busses have been slashed, everyday things are expensive to do and the weather is absolutely miserable. Everything also closes at 6pm, which is when people finish work and can have a few sociable hours but if you walk to the local village everything besides the barbers and chicken shops have closed and you have to be picky with pubs because of the people that go in there.
We don’t make it easy for ourselves to be sociable here in the UK and I can easily see how people can get stuck in a rut of only having the TV for company. I feel awful for those who have had to suffer with loneliness for years because it is a truly miserable thing to experience and can be so hard to get through.
Mid 50’s. Work from home. Lost my wife many years ago. I can’t remember what a hug feels like. I am alone.
People need “third spaces” in order to feel comfortable in making such connections. Or at least being in them to interact to some degree with others.
Our streets are clogged with traffic and hardly make for a great environment to do that.
Parks have been neglected for years and are now showing it.
Pubs cost a fortune, and even at coffee shops you are set back the better part of £10 for coffee and cake.
People live further away from where they work than ever due to high house prices.
Everything about our life makes social connections transactional as opposed to meaningful. And we wonder why people are feeling lonely?
I don’t mean to sound like a twat – but don’t people have simple social skills?
I’m 50, and in all honesty I don’t have enough time to keep up with all the friends and acquaintances I’ve accumulated over the years – I don’t know how you get to this stage of life without having at least a small handful of people you’re friendly with unless you’ve made a conscious effort not to get to know anybody.
Old school mates (still my closest group), friends I made at different jobs over the years, friends I’ve made through my own hobbies and pastimes, the other local dads I got friendly with when my kids started school, plus the wider circle of my wife’s friends.
It’s not like I’m super-sociable, in fact I’m naturally fairly introverted – it’s really not hard to strike up a casual friendship here and there, and over the years they become stronger relationships.
The older I get the less time I want to spend with other people.
Our society is incredibly atomised. People don’t even know their neighbours. No idea why, or why it’s worse here than other places.
Plenty of valid suggestions on here already, but another I expected to see was mobile phone usage. The TV became the go to way to spend downtime decades ago and probably changed how most of us while away the hours between eat/sleep/work cycle.
We’ve had the Internet on tap in our houses for ~30 years and that was pretty addictive but mainly for youngish generations, I didn’t feel like 40 somethings were all on their computers for hours every night, but those who lived alone probably were drawn to it. In the good old days of dial up, many ISPs charged by the minute while you were emailing/browsing so it could burn a hole in your pocket. Even early home broadband packages had limits to monthly data allowance.
Smartphones have been with us for about 20 years, and I think the impact on behaviour has been wild, and even the last five years have seen a greater shift to how much time we spend looking at them. Every generation in any household, all looking at their phone for many hours every day.
You can use a smartphone to find friends, clubs to meet up at, chat with mates, read most books, learn pretty much anything. But you can also lose many hours doing the infinite scroll on many apps (including Reddit!)
I run most days, and now it feels like a huge number of people will pull out their phone whenever they are walking anywhere, or waiting/inactive for a bit – it’s instinctive to nearly all of us. That surely has to be having some impact on how much we interact with others?
But none of this is UK specific, so even if we have a loneliness problem slightly worse than other countries, I would be surprised if the trend wasn’t the same elsewhere where smartphone access with cheap data was easily available
I think folks totally sacrificing their social lives during the childrearing years has a massive impact on this. The kids leave home eventually, and then people realise they have nothing else.
Then factor in how bloody expensive eveything is these days and the closure of many community hubs – the local pubs.
The local Facebook group has an odd combination of people moaning there is nothing to do, and no where to go. And a few groups offering classes and events that are struggling for attendance.
As a south Asian we don’t really have this problem. We have community centre which does plenty of events. We regular see eachother in the mosque everyday. We have football tourneys, kids club etc. We also have kids we spend time with even when they move out. I went to the hospital with my dad and I seen an old South Asian man surrounded by family. While I seen plenty of old white British men on their own.
I think white British people, no longer having a religion, replacing having kids with dogs, not speaking to their parents much, relied on pubs that are now too expensive. The list goes on but white British community doesn’t look so great to me.
South Asians tend to be very family orientated, have a religion where they meet everyday not just for prayer but socialise. Have more community spirit with plenty of events and charities for all ages.
There is also a rise to people converting to islam and is one of the fastest growing religions
Us South Asians are not only doing okay I see plenty of other communities doing okay. I have Nigerian neighbours who have a ton of family and friends come over and every Sunday they go go church
Middle aged? It starts younger than that! I’m in my 30’s and I hardly see anyone.
It’s the cumulative effects of the cars, the TVs, the smartphones, the long hours at work, the high prices for small houses, the privatisation of everything, the intensification of parenting, the paedo panic and media warping perceptions, people moving to where the work is, etc.
Let’s break it down:
People often move away from established friends and family to persue economic opportunity. This means you don’t have an established pool of people you’d trust to share resources or responsibility, and even if you stay put your friends often move away. This ironically increases further costs because you have to use formal instead of informal childcare and that’s very expensive.
So people *have* to persue economic opportunity because we’ve build a culture that says the goal is to earn lots of money, and more importantly skyrocketing asset prices and rising inequality means you play the game or get left behind – but it’s mostly about our mainstreamed culture of unlimited greed and net worth equating to self worth.
So we end up with families where both parents work full time, while paying massive amounts for childcare and having 60-70% of their income creamed off by the parasite class of landlords and housebuilders/banks. This then means the parents are exhausted once they’ve finished doing their jobs and rearing their children and they really don’t have the oomph to go out.
And you have to pay attention to your kids all the time until they’re surprisingly old because UK kids have way less independence than children in many peer nations – mostly because parents are (wrongly) terrified every hedge contains a paedophile, and (rightly) terrified that their children will be run over and killed by cars.
And you can invite people over to your house but you have to sort of know them a bit before you do that, and the average UK home is very small so you have a very limited range of activities you can do together, or a quite low limit on how many people you can comfortably accommodate in your house at one time.
You can go out-out, but that’s increasingly expensive and many people can’t afford to do it regularly. Going to clubs and things is great, IMO the best thing to do – but sometimes you have to really travel to get to a club and that can become restrictive in terms of time or money if you’re only just staying above the waterline.
All of this is exacerbated by decades of building low-density amenity-less housing making everything further apart than it needs to be and contributing to the crisis of house prices and lack of availability.
So people stay home and watch TV, or scroll on their smartphones. It’s easy. It’s cheap. In the long run it’ll kill you dead.
The current government care so little about the people and so much about their own interests this is no surprise
This is the consequence of a society who doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves. It takes a huge personal sacrifice to maintain friendships and networks and not many are willing to do it. Maybe people are too busy chasing money or too depressed to leave their comfort zone.
Sounds about right. In my case it was partially living in Canada for 20 years then coming back but the biggest problem was house prices in London. I grew up there and went to college there but in those 20 years almost all my old friends fled the cost of housing to various towns and villages in the south. I’m the latest having just moved to St Albans. We’ve scattered.
They should adopt the German approach of joining “vereinen”.
It would also leave them less vulnerable to GBNews brainwashing.
Society has fallen. Social cohesion is non existent. It was all planned. Nobody goes to war when they are happy. They are preparing us to die for them again.
It’s a lonely, expensive, broken, miserable country that we live in.