Some 80 percent of Americans have at least one social media profile. About nine out of 10 Americans regularly use the Internet. Even though the World Wide Web has allowed us to communicate with countless millions of people from across the planet at will, recent studies have shown that, despite developments in mental health, Americans are suffering from things like depression and anxiety more than ever before. Social media has been proven to be at least partly responsible for the increase in mental health disorders over the past several years.
A recent study published by the American Psychological Association and in the popular journal Psychology and Aging, on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019, found that, as people grow older, they’re more likely to experience higher levels of self-reported loneliness on average as compared to similarly-aged people who were asked the same question a decade prior.
Also, people above the age of 75 are, in fact, reporting higher average levels of isolation and loneliness than 75-year-olds from a decade ago.
This average self-reported feeling of loneliness is likely to increase as people grow older, which is expected to apply to members of all living generations in their elder years — from baby boomers all the way to generation Z.
The study’s lead author, Louise Hawkley of the University of Chicago’s NORC, once known as the National Opinion Research Center, and her team members reported reading and hearing more mentions of the word “loneliness” and the phrase “loneliness epidemic” used more frequently in recent years. Hawkley and company, via the NORC — it’s formally known as the NORC at the University of Chicago — investigated a pair of nationwide databases on the modern American lexicon issue to see whether their anecdotal inferences were correct or not.
Three major reasons explaining why headlines have reported loneliness increases are that research indicates people are less likely to be involved in social or civic activities or causes, are getting married less frequently, and more likely to live on their own.
From 50 to somewhere in the mid-70s, according to Hawkley, self-reported loneliness actually decreased. After the mid-70s, however, people’s ability to keep loneliness at bay start fading away. People ranging in age from 80 to 99, also known as the “oldest-old,” according to Hawkley and other aging researchers, are currently experiencing peaks in loneliness in terms of their entire lifetimes.
