British historian Fay Bound Alberty writes that it is 30 percent more likely that yes lonely people die earlier than the less lonely, and the poor are more lonely than the rich. If you are rich, you can always pay for society. But most lonely people simply don't have enough money to provide themselves with a sympathetic ear, day in and day out. Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University Terry Ingleton concludes in an op-ed in "The Guardian" that Fay Alberti is right to politicize loneliness in today's age, unlike the neuroscientists who are racing to develop a pill to cure it. One cannot separate the feeling of uselessness and disconnection from others from the history of possessive individualism, even if that history of loneliness extends further than the author imagines. If, as she points out, "there are very few physical spaces where people can meet in the 21st century without paying for the privilege of being there," it is largely because the gospel of neoliberalism sees no purpose in doing so...
CLASS GAP OF LONERS
If something emerges from research on both sides of the Atlantic, it is a conclusion that loneliness is not evenly distributed, but follows lines of class, education, life transitions and institutional support.
According to research from the University of Oxford's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, people living in poverty are significantly more likely to feel lonely than those with higher incomes.
One in three Americans (29 percent) who earn less than $30.000 a year said they feel lonely, and that feeling is shared by one in five Americans (19 percent) who earn between $50.000 and $100.000, and 18 percent of those who earn more than $100.000.
For most American adults, social division is a significant source of stress in their lives. Economic insecurity, unstable employment and weaker involvement in institutions further influence loneliness, which is intertwined with inequality, thus becoming another form of social marginalization.
In research by Daniel Cox, director of the Center for Research on American Life, and Sam Pressler, a fellow at the University of Virginia's Karsh Institute for Democracy and Harvard's Program on Human Prosperity, friendless people are twice as likely to be found among those without a college degree than among college graduates.
And the "Stress in America" research, published in November 2025 by the American Psychological Association, shows that every third respondent with a high school diploma or lower education (34 percent) or some college experience (32 percent) is lonely, and every fourth (25 percent) with a bachelor's degree.
In the Monitoring the Future survey, as many as 44 percent of girls in the 8th and 10th grades of American schools say they often feel lonely, compared to 25 percent of boys.
Chronic loneliness is a tragedy for the young, but a grim fact of life for the old, writes "The New Yorker" quoting Sam Carr, author of the book All lonely people: Conversations about loneliness full of stories of widows and widowers whose social circles are slowly evaporating.
Analyzes of the loneliness epidemic most often talk about the loneliness of the young (zoomers born between the mid-nineties and the early 2010s as loners on social networks) and the loneliness of members of the oldest population of widows and widowers (the highest rates of severe loneliness are among former flower children, among those over 70 and baby boomers born in the decade after 1945).
In fact, in various studies, sometimes young people are the loneliest, and sometimes older people.
In a large European study of loneliness, in many countries younger age groups (15–29) were more likely to report moderate feelings of loneliness than older adults.
In the aforementioned report "Only the tip of the iceberg", Harvard researchers, however, note that in America loneliness is most common among people aged 30-44 (29 percent of them say they often or very often feel lonely).
In the working population, loneliness is significantly more common than in the elderly (65+ ~10 percent) and younger people (18–29 ~24 percent), perhaps because it is a period of high expectations from life, but also intense professional and family pressures: work, parenting, social circumstances, culture, urbanization without a community, extended working hours, insecure forms of employment and migration, more frequent migrations, later marriage...
One of the explanations for increased loneliness in the working age is provided by data from a Harvard study where 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: "We live in a society that is too individualistic, ie too focused on individual well-being, success and competition."
Six out of ten (62 percent) of those surveyed assessed that people are overloaded with work, too busy or tired. Every other respondent perceives the changing nature of work with more remote and hybrid schedules as a significant problem.
Nineteen out of one hundred Americans say that no one outside of their family cares about them at all, and one in seventeen (6 percent) adults surveyed have no one they can talk to about important things or who they consider "especially important" in their lives.
According to the "Stress in America" survey, published in November 2025 by the American Psychological Association, it seems that feelings of loneliness and emotional exclusion have become quite a key feature of life in America.
According to a large number of studies, it seems that the feeling of loneliness affects an increasing number of people and that it may represent one of the most massive global socio-psychological phenomena.
photo: pexels / sofia alejandraREGARDLESS OF AGE: Loneliness
THE CRISIS OF MALE FRIENDSHIP?
By the way, here and there, there is talk of the "end of the myth of male friendship" nurtured in popular culture: Butch Cassidy and the Sanders Kid, Once upon a time in America, Deer hunter, Easy Rider… Everyone remembers that Kazablanka ends with a hint of a friendship.
In 1990, only three percent of men in the U.S. claimed to have no close friends, and the University of Michigan's American Life Research Center American Perspectives from 2021 found that 15 percent of men and 10 percent of women had no close friends. More recent data from the Pew Research Center (2023) show a much smaller difference: nine percent of men and eight percent of women say they have no close friends.
Research by the American Institute for Boys and Men (American Institute for Boys and Men) shows that men and women socialize differently - women are more often with friends and family, while men are involved in group activities through clubs and organizations, and are less inclined to gatherings with friends, neighbors or "one-on-one" relationships. Men's friendships are often functional and contextual—related to work, hobbies, or marital status—and therefore change as life changes.
At the same time, men more often express the impression that they do not belong to any real community - neither a group, nor a club, nor a wider social circle - that they are in some way outside the flow, disconnected and marginal, and that their own place in the world, and even in the country where they live, seems weakly established. Older men, especially those who have never been married, are more likely to be socially isolated.
For both men and women, spouses are the primary source of support (85 percent and 72 percent, respectively). Admittedly, married men are more likely than married women to first turn to their spouse for personal problems.
American Perspectives research from 2021 shows that men are more likely to "call mom" in a difficult situation, to get support from their parents (56 percent of men versus 50 percent of women) than from friends (15 percent of men versus 17 percent of women).
Men are less satisfied than women with the number of friends they have. Young men were actually more satisfied than young women, while the differences narrowed in older age.
Women are more likely to nurture emotionally intense relationships. Young housewives, who have moved to a new environment as newcomers, often talk about social loneliness. Their husbands, however close or supportive they may be, cannot fill the void.
Contrary to expectations, many studies show that young women are lonelier than young men, especially in adolescence.
According to research, from 1985 to today, the average American has lost one out of three friends.
This is what Arsen Dedić sang about here in Matija Bećković's lyrics:
Two friends who meet every day
They meet in front of 'Three tobacco leaves'
A long and boring life
No one sees one without the other...
But one day suddenly...
An aphorism by Brana Crnčević reads here as a sociological diagnosis: "Friends to the grave - and from the grave, each to his own side."
In one Harvard study, 81 percent of adults who were lonely said they suffered from anxiety or depression compared to 29 percent of those who were less lonely. It is also associated with an increased risk of suicide, especially in men, although not directly because it is a more complex problem.
Namely, in a 1985 study, psychologists Shelly Boris and Daniel Perlman observed that lonely people carry a social stigma, so they don't always admit that they are lonely. Men seem to be particularly uncomfortable talking about feelings of loneliness.
In the introduction to the collection "From the abyss of loneliness to the bliss of solitude" (From the abyss of loneliness to the bliss of solitude), edited by clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Aleksandar Dimitrijević and Mihael B. Buchholz, professor of social psychology at the International Psychoanalytical University in Berlin, raises questions that await answers: "What then can we offer those who are haunted by loneliness? And are there ways to support or protect loneliness, in oneself and in others? Can loneliness be cured as a disease or is it a general human condition? Some strongly recommend 'doing nothing', refraining from the economy of attention, to turn off the computer, to not start the day by reading emails, to hear the birds singing, to enjoy the beauty of nature and the silence in the forest. Yes, there are ruined and destroyed landscapes where the birds don't sing, but that silence scares us. Throughout the history of mankind, no simple and quick solutions have been discovered for the problem of loneliness of loneliness – friendship, love, family, community, psychotherapy, you name it – these phenomena are equally complex to understand and fragile to maintain in real social life”.
ONE IN A LONELY CROWD...
A study by the insurance company Signa in 1985 showed that 46 percent of Americans sometimes or always feel lonely, and in 2019, when Signa repeated the survey, the number of lonely respondents increased to as much as 52 percent.
Midlife Americans feel lonelier than Europeans, perhaps due to greater economic inequality, weaker family ties, and greater geographic mobility.
"The other-oriented American lives in a glass house, not behind a velvet curtain," writes the influential American sociologist David Riesman in the aforementioned sociological best-selling study of the American character, "The Lonely Crowd."
Riesman draws the conclusion that the renaissance, reformation, counter-reformation, industrial revolution and political revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the most developed countries of the world, and especially in America, gave way to another type of revolution - a whole series of social changes related to the replacement of the age of production with the age of consumption.
He observes that three different relationships between societies and individuals are formed in that period.
He calls the first type tradition-oriented societies. The second type is represented by societies in which individuals in the conflict between their own and collective interests choose their own. This character of relations dominates Europe.
The third type, according to Riesman, are individuals directed towards others, where he classifies Americans, who try to harmonize their behavior with the norms of others, that is, with the automated habits of their social class or status.
As it is in the preface to Nolit's edition Lonely crowds written in 1965 by the professor of the Faculty of Philosophy, Zagorka Golubović, Rismanov's attitude towards others, the American, is therefore always exposed to the views of others. And yet, he is actually lonelier today than ever because he is lost in the crowd and is not "his own". American capitalism, providing an abundance of material goods, turns man into a consumer, passives him, depersonalizes the individual and demands complete conformity from him, writes Zaga Golubović.
The term "lonely crowd" was one of the cultural codes of 1968. A trace of it remained in Bob Dylan's song. I Shall Be Released about a man who, standing in a lonely crowd, he swears that he is not guilty and that everything was set up against him...
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he's not to blame...
THE SOLITUDE OF THE REGISTRAR
From the founder of modern sociology Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) onward, marriage has been seen as a way to alleviate social isolation and loneliness, write Jenny de Jong Geerveld of the University of Amsterdam, Perl Dykstra of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Theo van Tilburg, professor emeritus at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. But the nature of marriage as a social institution is changing.
According to data from the US Census Bureau, in 1949, 78,8 percent of households consisted of married couples, and in 2022, a record low 46,8 percent. In 2024, they were up by one iota -- 47,1 percent -- but in absolute numbers, fewer adults were married in 2024 than at almost any time since the Census Bureau began tracking marital status in 1940.
Women, who on average get married younger, stay alone much more often in later life, so among women over 65 years of age almost half (49 percent) are without a partner, while in the 30 to 49 age group that share is the smallest (19 percent); in the ages of 18 to 29 and 50 to 64, approximately three out of ten women are single (32 and 29 percent, respectively). This pattern reflects the shorter life expectancy of men, but also the fact that men, on average, marry later than women.
Since 1890, when it has been statistically measured in the USA, the lowest average age of newlyweds at marriage was in 1956, when it was 22,5 years for men and 20,1 years for women. In 2024, the average age of first marriage for men was 30,2, and for women 28,6.
But as the age of newlyweds has increased since the late 1950s, so has life expectancy. Compared to average life expectancy, these current Americans are therefore marrying earlier in their lives than previous generations.
At the same time, the marital structure of single people is also changing: the share of divorced people has grown strongly from about two percent of men and women in 1950 to 8,4 percent of men and 10,8 percent of women in 2024, while the share of widows and widowers has decreased - from 4,1 to 2,9 percent of men and from 11,8 to 8,1 percent of women.
The feeling of loneliness is, in many cases, the result of the breakup of a partner's relationship, even though the divorce is not accompanied by the stigma that the word "divorce" reflected in our country for a divorced woman. Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina it says that all happy families look alike, and that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. However, researchers find some similarities there.
When a partner's relationship breaks up, there is an emotional loneliness characterized by an intense feeling of emptiness, abandonment that lasts for a long period of time. Divorce in middle adulthood in some cases affects the feeling of loneliness in older years as well. Remarriage, extramarital cohabitation, and dating help address loneliness to some extent, as research has repeatedly shown the protective effect of intimate partner relationships on the physical, financial, and mental well-being of both men and women.
People who live alone have fewer friends than those who live with a partner. And people with a partner who does not give them the most support describe themselves as very lonely.
GEOGRAPHY OF LONELINESS
The prevalence of loneliness varies significantly from country to country, which can be explained by economic, cultural and demographic differences and, possibly, sampling differences – but the trend is common: loneliness has become a mass phenomenon.
The survey on loneliness (EU 2022), conducted by the Joint Research Service of the European Commission, shows that 13 percent of EU citizens feel lonely "most or all of the time", while 35 percent feel lonely at least occasionally.
Within the EU, the highest levels of loneliness are recorded in Ireland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria and Greece, while the lowest are in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Austria. It is interesting that in "introverted cultures" such as Finland or Lithuania, researchers do not record greater loneliness.
According to the health report of the pharmaceutical group Štada for the year 2024, which included 46.000 respondents from 23 countries, including Serbia, loneliness is felt by 52 percent of the European population. Six out of ten (63 percent) younger people (18-35 years old) are affected, and four out of ten (41 percent) Europeans over 55 years old are affected.
Residents of Poland (61 percent), Finland and Sweden (59 percent), Slovakia (58 percent) and Kazakhstan (57 percent) feel the most lonely.
17 percent of Swedes and 16 percent of Britons say that they often feel lonely, eight percent of Austrians and Danes and only four percent of Serbian citizens, as many as Hungarians and Italians.
OLD AGE IN SERBIA
That finding does not match the number of our songs, folk and other, about loneliness and parting. "The glass from which we drank the wine broke..." In our country, people cry a lot when they sing about loneliness.
"Now that we are not as young as we used to be, come and let us grow old together", sang Šaban Šaulić.
She is not crazy to come. Actor Ljuba Tadić liked to repeat the Montenegrin saying: "Old age is a great shame."
In the research "Loneliness and social isolation in the elderly - analysis of data for the Republic of Serbia", conducted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Center for Research and Development of Society IDEAS, 68 percent of the elderly in Serbia are lonely, which is 11 percent less than in the countries of the region.
Two-thirds (68 percent) say there are not many people they can fully trust.
Half of the elderly (52 percent) state that there are not many people they can rely on, and 57 percent of the elderly believe that their circle of friends is too limited.
Every third elderly person in Serbia (30 percent) feels rejected. 13 percent of elderly people in Serbia maintain contact with their family only by telephone. One in fifty elderly people (two percent) does not maintain contact with family or friends, either in person or by phone.
***
A statue of Eleanor Rigby by Tommy Steele was unveiled in 1982 on Stanley Street in Liverpool. The plaque bears the dedication "To all lonely people". It shows a woman sitting on a stone bench with a bag, a shopping bag and a copy of the Liverpool Echo newspaper. A bottle of milk sticks out of the bag.
Newspapers are printed less and less, milk is no longer sold in bottles. And there are more and more lonely people.
And the voice of the Beatles is still heard with the string octet from 1966:
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from??
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong??
