EU loneliness doubled with the pandemic and mirrors a broader OECD associational decline

Evidence

A report by the EU Commission documented similar patterns: whereas 12 percent of EU citizens reported feeling lonely “more than half of the time” prior to the pandemic, the figure doubled to 25 percent in the first half of 2020, with young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five especially affected. The studies offer a window onto a process that has overtaken many OECD countries in recent decades. As the quintessential voluntary association, friendship circles are a microcosm of other 22social institutions—parties, sport clubs, membership organizations, guilds. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 89

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pandemic-era hyper-connectivity coincided with heightened social isolation — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 644; Political isolation differs from personal loneliness in kind and cause; Pandemic isolation reproduced the exact preconditions for collective shock. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 22
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Pandemic-era hyper-connectivity coincided with heightened social isolation — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 644; Political isolation differs from personal loneliness in kind and cause; Pandemic isolation reproduced the exact preconditions for collective shock. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 22