GIRLS – Freya India (1)

We are the most ‘connected’ generation in history, but we are by far the loneliest. One clear sign of how disconnected girls and young women have become is how lonely we feel. According to Jean Twenge, teen loneliness had been falling for years, but in the early 2010s, it abruptly reversed.

By 2017, nearly 40% of 17- to 18-year-olds said they often felt lonely, up from 26% in 2012. Around 38% also said they frequently felt left out, compared to 30% five years earlier. These were the highest levels of teen loneliness recorded since researchers began tracking in the 1970s.101 Today, in the UK, those aged between 16 and 29 are twice as likely to say they feel lonely ‘often or always’ compared to those over 70.102 Over 30% of young people say they don’t know how to make new friends, and have never felt more alone.103 Gen Z Americans are also much more likely to say they felt lonely growing up than any other generation: 56% felt lonely at least once or twice a month in childhood, compared to 24% of Boomers.104 We can see this growing disconnection online, too.

In 2023, Google Trends reported that searches for ‘how to make friends’, ‘where to make friends’ and ‘where to meet people’ had reached record highs.105 ‘Gen Z Are So Lonely They’re Posting Friendship Applications on Facebook’, VICE reported in 2024, describing how Gen Z girls ‘basically advertise [themselves] as a potential friend by discussing likes, interests and hobbies’, and tag their TikToks with the hashtag #friendapplications.106 Meanwhile online forums are full of girls admitting that they have no friends, and have never had them.

On TikTok, videos often go viral of young women in big cities feeling as though they are wasting their twenties on their own, and sharing tips to cope with the loneliness. Some put it down to remote work, others to the cost of living and not being able to afford to go out, but many blame social media.

Finding friends is not the only problem, though. Growing up with online communities, having less face-to-face interaction than any other generation before us, and coming of age during a global pandemic, many of us have not had the chance to develop social skills and are now too anxious to try.

We did fall apart, long ago. We were pulled apart from the pressure. But then we were remade, the fragments of us forged into products on display, objects to be optimised, things without feelings. For a long time I thought the problem was me. Growing up, I felt disconnected from the modern world. I have always been shy and reserved; I’m sensitive, I overthink things, and I spent most of my childhood hiding out in my own head, observing, thinking, feeling too much.

For me, every experience of girlhood – insecurity about my appearance, changes to my body, talking to boys, trying to fit in and make friends – felt excruciating. I hated how young I looked, desperate to be older but also terrified of growing up. I hated how shy I was, how I would finally find my way into a friendship group only to sit in silence, afraid to say anything, then wonder why I didn’t belong.

I hated how I was seen as frigid and insecure, being the last girl in my friend group to kiss a boy, and go on a date. These were things I spent most of my adolescence punishing myself for. In the early 2010s, when my friends and I were 10 or 11, social media apps arrived, and everything got worse.

All the girls I knew joined Instagram, and the face and body I hated suddenly had to be offered up to the market, ranked and reviewed. Now I had all these girls on my phone to compare myself to, not just from my school but from every school, always there to measure myself against. Sleepovers I hadn’t been invited to now had to be scrolled through. Boys I liked were now rating me in front of everyone. My worth was made public, measured in likes and followers. I had constant reminders of how lonely and left out I was, but knew that feeling would only get worse if I removed myself from it all.

The very thing hurting me became my lifeline. The only word I can think of to describe it is disconnected. I felt disconnected from everyone, from everything.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: b7d77b27a49ee84c
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,714,761 bytes (3.543 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 339
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 486.55 minutes
• Total Words: 97,310
• Total Characters: 663,244
• Average Words per Page: 287.05
• Average Characters per Page: 1956.47

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