Almost a quarter of the world reported feeling very or fairly lonely. The Meta-Gallup Global State of Social Connections survey (pulished in 2023) put the figure at 24% across 142 countries and areas.

While this is shocking, perhaps the more interesting number sits underneath that headline. When responses were broken down by age, the loneliest group was not the old. It was young adults aged 19 to 29, at 27%, the highest of any age band measured.

The lowest loneliness rate in the survey belonged to adults aged 65 and older, at 17%. The gap runs in the opposite direction to the picture most people hold.

We are writers and editors, not clinicians or psychologists. What follows is journalism about a survey and the research around it, not guidance about your own wellbeing.

Why we picture the elderly

The old-age assumption is easy to understand. Late life carries visible markers of social loss: retirement, widowhood, mobility that narrows the radius of a day. Those are real, and for some older people they are genuinely isolating. But the aggregate picture in this survey runs the other way. Majorities of adults aged 45 and older reported not feeling lonely at all, while fewer than half of those under 45 could say the same.

One caveat worth holding: this rests on a single self-reported question, China was not among the surveyed countries, and the figures reflect how people described their own feelings rather than any clinical measure. It is a global snapshot, not the last word. Still, the age pattern held across a sample representing about 77% of the world’s adult population, which makes it hard to dismiss as noise.

Ellyn Maese, a senior research consultant at Gallup, framed the takeaway plainly. Maese told CNN that “loneliness is not just a problem of aging — it’s a problem that can affect everyone at any age.”

What is driving young-adult loneliness

The years from 19 to 29 are a stretch of near-constant rearrangement. People move for work or study, leave the social scaffolding of school, form and dissolve households, and rebuild their circle of close ties more than once. That churn appears to matter more than the raw number of friends a person has.

A 2025 study in PLOS One by Jeffrey Hall and colleagues, a survey of nearly 5,000 Americans, points in that direction. Hall argues that “most young people aren’t struggling to find friends; they’re learning how to hold onto them while adapting to frequent life changes.” That framing leans toward a hopeful interpretation. Hall suggests that for many in this group, “their moments of loneliness may not signal persistent isolation, but growing pains.” 

A competing explanation that gets more airtime is the way young adults connect online. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General at the time, has characterised a cultural drift in how relationships are maintained. In Murthy’s view, “we’ve moved from having confidants to contacts, from having friends, to having followers, a shift from quality of friends to quantity.” Murthy presents digital connection as one explanation among several, not a proven cause. The survey itself does not pin the age gap on any single factor.

What the finding does and does not mean

The word “lonely” here is doing a lot of work for a single survey question. Respondents were asked how lonely they felt, and 24% landed in the “very” or “fairly” categories. That captures a feeling, not a diagnosis, and feelings of this kind move with circumstance.

A separate Gallup measure of daily loneliness showed it ranging widely between countries, from a high of 45% in Comoros to a low of 6% in Vietnam, a reminder that culture and context shape how readily people name the feeling at all.

The finding does not say young adults are abandoned or that older adults have it easy. It says that, on average and at one point in time, the people most likely to describe themselves as lonely were those in the middle of building an adult life.

What the data cannot settle is the direction of travel. The open question is whether the loneliness young adults report is a phase that eases as lives stabilise, the growing pains Hall describes, or whether this cohort will carry a higher baseline forward as it ages. Only following the same people across the next decade could tell the two apart.

If any of this lands close to home, a qualified counsellor or therapist is a worthwhile person to talk to; reading about a pattern is not the same as getting support for your own experience of it.