Young men in the U.S. are among the loneliest in the western world, a new Gallup poll has found.
Those between the ages of 15 and 34 reported feeling lonely more than their counterparts across 38 higher-income democratic countries—ahead of countries including France, Canada, Ireland, and Spain (and surpassed in loneliness only by young men in Turkey).
This demographic is also one of the loneliest of all in the U.S., with 25% of men in this age group saying they felt lonely a lot of the previous day—significantly higher than the national average of 18% and the total for young women (also 18%).
That amounts to one in four men under 35 feeling lonely. And loneliness, which was declared a national epidemic by the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in 2023, has been found to increase the risk of developing depression, anxiety, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Only three of the countries in the poll—the U.S., Iceland, and Denmark—have a loneliness rate among young men that is higher than it is for other adults. In Iceland and Denmark, though, 15% of younger men report daily loneliness vs. 10% and 9%, respectively of the rest of the population. The gap is wider in the U.S., where 25% of young men are lonely as compared with 17% of all other adults.
And while they report feeling similar levels of other emotions as other measured in the Gallup World Poll—including sadness, anger, enjoyment, laughter, feeling well-rested, and feeling respected—young American men do feel unique levels of stress and worry.
Forty six percent of young American men say they experience daily worry, compared with 37% of other adults in the U.S. It’s an unusually wide gap, as, across the other countries, 36% of both young men and other adults report that they felt worried the previous day (with only Germany and Sweden showing a comparable difference between young men and the rest of the population).
And over half (57%) of younger American men say they feel stressed daily, compared with 48% of other U.S. adults.
This “phenomenon” of stress and loneliness, says psychologist Michael Reichert, founding director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania and author of How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men, “is the coming to a head of a set of forces that have been in existence in boys’ and mens’ lives for generations.”
Why are so many young men feeling lonely?
For young men, these prolific feelings of isolation—what some have even dubbed the “male loneliness epidemic”—is the result of a slew of factors, says Justin Yong, a New York City psychotherapist specializing in men’s issues. They include “digital disconnection” through toxic-male social media—what some researchers have called “the manosphere”—gaming, and porn, all of which “give this short term dopamine hit and relief that replaces real intimacy and acts as a barrier to being vulnerable to how they might be feeling,” says Yong.
Also an issue, he says, are “societal norms around what it means to be a man,” pointing to the idea of “alpha men” who attach stigma to being vulnerable.
Those norms are internalized early, says Reichert, pointing to research that followed a group of 4-year-old boys for two years. It found that “they changed from being present—authentic, direct, and expressive—to ‘pretense,’ learning to play the part by posturing the way the world wanted them to be as boys,” he says, meaning strong—in a macho sense—and unemotional. “The problem, of course, is that when they became less authentic they alienated themselves from even their important relationships, feeling that they had to hide a part of themselves because the world didn’t want that from them… Beginning at age 4.”
These ideas are explored in Reichert’s forthcoming book, No One Really Knows Me, based on findings of a State of American Men 2023 report, in which two out of three men surveyed (ages 18-23) agreed with that statement. Further, 49% of those men said they’d thought about suicide within the past two weeks.
“Those two things are related,” says Reichert, “and that’s a condition I’m calling ‘developmental precarity,’ which is the idea that you are on your own in your own head with no sense of someone you can trust to understand and know you. It means that when you’re stressed, you really don’t have anyplace to go, and that you are vulnerable to the echo chamber of your own mind.”
It’s something Yong sees with some of his male clients who are just out of college, struggling to form deep connections in the wider world.
“There’s this erosion of male friendships,” he says. “It seems like the depth of friendships with other men become more and more shallow, and they don’t connect on things beyond sports, work, stocks. So there are men out there who are afraid to open up even to someone they might consider a good friend.”
How young men can find connection
Yong, who recalls working in an all-boys high school and seeing students adhere to punishing workout and grooming regimens, understood what was motivating the behavior, though it made him sad to see. “They didn’t want to be rejected, so they acted macho about it,” he says. “But what they were really saying is, ‘I’m scared of being heartbroken. I’m sad, I’m lonely.” He suggests men try to get to the heart of what they’re really feeling.
Help for that, he says, could come in the form of a kind, compassionate mentor to look up to—Barack Obama, “politics aside,” is someone he likes to point to, though it could be a coach, a professor, “even the super in your building.”
He also recommends therapy—either individual or group, the latter of which has the power of allowing men to see other men “being vulnerable and open.”
Reichert, who recently spoke on these issues for an episode of the radio show On Point, recalls a young man who talked about how he and his peers are “in jail with our emotions.” He notes that’s where caring friends and family can really affect the lives of young men.
“When we give them permission to be real,” says Reichert, “they can break out of jail. But we have to help them.”
More on mental health:
