The Loneliness of Gen Z

by Christopher Hodapp

A recent Financial Times piece by John Burn-Murdoch dug into some depressing numbers from the American Time Use Survey. According to the data, "on an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person."

That’s not a typo. Or a rounding error. That's Zero. As in not one single person. 

And that is going to have an effect on Freemasonry going forward.

From the article, "Pandemic lockdowns never ended for some people":

"Many teens and young adults have lives that are just as socially rich today as they were a decade ago while others have become completely cut off. Back in 2019, the most socially connected quarter of young people used to spend 87 per cent of their day with other people, whether family, friends, co-workers or others. During the pandemic that dipped to 78 per cent, but it has rebounded to 83 per cent. The most isolated segment used to spend roughly a third of their day around others, but that has now collapsed to essentially zero."

But the folks at the bottom never recovered. Before Covid, the most isolated segment of young adults used to spend a third of their day around other people. But that collapsed to zero during the pandemic lockdown. 

And stayed there.

Americans today are spending more and more time staring at screens. Daily computer and social-media time for Americans rose from 25 minutes in 2015 to 37 minutes in 2025. Teenagers? They’re averaging about 90 minutes a day. And more than a third of employed people were still doing at least some of their work from home in 2025. 

"Whether we’re talking about the long shadow of pandemic lockdowns, the increasingly enthralling digital environment or intensifying academic pressure, anti-socialising forces have had radically different effects on different young people.

"Data from the UK paints a similar picture of what we might need to start calling socialising inequality. An upcoming report by the Institute for Public Policy Research finds that while the average young Briton has roughly five close friends — the same figure as in 2015, the portion with not a single close friend has shot up from one in 100 in 2015 to one in 20 today."

[snip] 

"The figures point to a corrosive coincidence of slow and fast social shifts. From the rise of remote working to self-checkouts and the displacement of bricks-and-mortar shopping by ecommerce, technology has steadily eroded the number of incidental interpersonal encounters that would typically offer even the most reserved person a baseline amount of human contact.

"At the same time, the proliferation of hyper-engaging all-you-can-eat digital media has made solitary leisure time the default, while in-person socialising becomes relatively more effortful — especially for those of a more anxious or introverted nature. While labour-saving mechanical innovations freed up more time for socialising, digital innovations have often had the opposite effect.

"Add to these slow anti-socialising background shifts the pandemic-era shock of disrupted habits and enforced solitude for many young people, and you tip some of this group into a new and damaging equilibrium from which they are struggling to escape.

"Social ties are hugely important for health and longevity, and the increasing co-occurrence of social and economic isolation makes the problem of rising youth worklessness harder to address."

None of this should surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. COVID kept a whole generation of young people inside during the very years when most of us learned how to navigate the real world with real humans. Some never fully came back out.

As Freemasons, this hits close to home. One of the quiet strengths of our Craft has always been that it pulls people out of isolation and into a room with a hopefully diverse group of other people—on purpose. Lodge is one of the last places (along with churches) where adults from all walks of life still regularly show up in person, look each other in the eye, shake hands, and talk about something something more substantive than the latest algorithm feed. In a world where a growing number of young adults are going entire days and weeks without that basic human contact, the simple act of gathering in a sanctuary from the outside arguments of life still matters more than we sometimes remember.

Worth thinking about the next time you’re tempted to skip a stated meeting.

What this means to us is that we need to actively reach out to these men and to society at large with the message that Freemasonry can help them. We’re needed MORE right now than in any time over the last century.

Less than half of American kids under 18 today live in a traditional two-parent first-marriage home. More than a third live with an unmarried parent — usually a single mother — without any father or live-in male partner of ANY kind, to help raise and educate and be the male influence or role model to the children. They have fewer flesh and blood friends, and even fewer brothers and sisters, because many adults have decided one child — or none — is enough.

These demographics all hit us hard as Masons. Fewer boys have a father or grandfather to pass along family traditions like Freemasonry to them. A young man today is 40 times more likely to wind up in jail than join a fraternal organization.

A buddy of mine, Dave Hosler, once said that of all the miracles attributed to Jesus Christ, the greatest was that at 33 He had twelve good, close friends. Or at least eleven. There’s a lot of truth in that.

In a lodge, we become Brothers. Brothers aren’t just friends. Brothers live by a code. They help each other, mentor each other, stick by each other, support each other. That’s why what we take at the altar isn’t merely an oath or promise—it’s an obligation. It binds us with duty and integrity, even to strangers halfway around the world. That’s the greatest genius of our fraternity. If you live an isolated existence with almost no family, no friends, few or no co-workers, maybe in a town far away from where you grew up, in the lodge you have an extended family that's truly global. Wherever you go in the world, you will find a Brother Mason. And you're connected to a family heritage that goes back 300 years.

Let's get that message out now. There's a whole generation of men out there that desperately needs to hear it.