“What’s driving young men and women apart?”
It’s the sticky question a new book, Generation Uncoupled, seeks to answer, as it unpicks the “social malaise” afflicting today’s youth.
Its author, Dr Daniel Cox, a public opinion pollster and director of the Survey Centre on American Life, coined the term “friendship recession” in 2021 to describe the flagging number of close friends Americans had – single men fared the worst – which he observed in his research.
Since then, he’s talked to thousands of Gen Zs about the changing social landscape they inhabit, which, he argues, can be explained by three key shifts – the growing hegemony of technology in our everyday lives, a dominant culture of individualism, and the shrinking number of social spaces available to young people.
‘Experience deficit’
The defining trend of this century, Cox says, is “mass social separation”, referencing the words of The Atlantic reporter Derek Thompson.
Indeed, young people in the US and Australia are getting into relationships later (if at all), living at home longer, going out less and spending more of their free time online.
Social isolation in Australia has nearly doubled over two decades, while young people experienced loneliness at higher rates than other cohorts, according to University of Sydney research published last month.
In other words, they’re spending less time out in the world and more time living life by proxy, resulting in what Cox laments is an “experience deficit”.
“The best way to understand yourself is through engaging with other people, seeing what you like and don’t like, what is attractive and what is not. All these things are more easily able for us to understand if we’re experiencing them in real life,” he says.
Part of the reason for this is structural: participation in civic and social groups like churches, youth organisations and labour unions is dwindling, while third spaces like music venues and libraries have been disappearing.
Not only are these low-stakes environments conducive to regular socialisation, but, Cox argues, they “balanced this drive towards self-involvement and individual ambition by encouraging people to be in service of something greater than themselves.”
Gen Z’s romantic lives are “downstream” of this social separation, says Cox, as dating apps have largely absorbed a process once intertwined with daily life.
“Interactions once embedded in neighbourhoods, congregations, workplaces and extended friend groups now unfold in digital space largely invisible to public view,” he writes in the book.
Roger Patulny, professor of sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University and author of Social Connection in Everyday Spaces, says the shift has been similar in Australia. He points to the work of MP Dr Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell, who documented the decline of traditional structured community spaces in Australia in their book Reconnected.
The forced isolation mandated by the pandemic means many communities never recovered.
“Young people in Australia, like younger people overseas, all got impacted by COVID pretty badly. It wrecked networks that were in the process of forming and stunted people’s ability to learn how to form networks in the physical world, and it also had the effect of dramatically pushing a lot of young people online,” says Patulny.
This social deficit, Cox says, has made young people more fearful of the fricative forces that build character, like the rejection or disappointment that comes with taking risks.
“None of us like to be rejected socially or romantically, but it’s incredibly important to have these experiences, especially when you’re young, because then you learn to persevere.
“Learning that you’re capable of surviving these tumultuous, difficult experiences is an incredibly important lesson to learn when you’re young.”
Professor Dan Woodman, a sociologist and youth researcher from the University of Melbourne, agrees with the idea of a social deficit, but puts the shift down to structural factors, like housing affordability and cost of living, as opposed to changing cultural attitudes.
“It’d be great if you had a sociality that was affordable and where you could just turn up and see the same faces,” he says.
“Social life doesn’t just happen any more. It’s a new task on top of everything else.”
Digital technology
Unlike previous new technologies that prompted moral panics – like radio or internet – social media, Cox argues, is particularly pernicious because of the algorithms it’s built upon.
While ostensibly designed to show users more of what they’re interested in – and keep them scrolling for longer – these algorithms by and large split users along gendered lines.
Whether it’s pushing fertility content on women or the manosphere on men, Cox argues, the algorithm reinforces digital echo chambers which, when brought into the real world, create a negative feedback loop of fear and animosity.
“Social media presents an entirely different picture of the opposite sex that you cannot refute because you have such limited experience yourself – it lives a lot larger in our minds if we don’t have any sort of counterevidence,” Cox explains.
“If I had a negative dating experience, and my girlfriend or boyfriend broke up with me, what I’m going to see is a litany of all the ways that men can’t be trusted or women are only interested in men for their resources and financial status. And so it very quickly leads us to generalisations and stereotypes.”
In Australia, these algorithmic harms are something the Albanese government is pitching to circumvent with its Digital Duty of Care laws.
And while social media initially pitched a vision of a more socially connected world (it’s in the name, after all), increasingly, the platforms are being used less to actively connect with humans, instead favouring passive consumption of strangers’ content – be it fashion influencers, cat videos or reams of AI slop.
This imbalance in attention between our digital and physical worlds is eroding the quality of our relationships in what Cox calls “attention infidelity”.
“Attention infidelity is when the phone in our pocket buzzes, or just the knowledge of it being there takes us out of a conversation. Whether it’s two seconds or a minute, it takes us out of connecting with someone and building trust and rapport with them,” explains Cox.
“It happens in a moment, but I think the cumulative impact of this is incredibly damaging because it’s constant.”
‘We have become deeply incurious’
Young people, Cox says, still want sex, friendship, companionship and romance as much as previous generations. What’s changed is that these things feel less attainable or even feasible, with most finding it’s easier to just opt out of connection altogether.
For Cox, this has been supercharged by a “culture of individualism”, in which the process of becoming one’s “best self” is viewed as a solo pursuit (in the book, Cox references a genre of popular media, like Eat Pray Love, in which a major separation is necessary for personal growth).
Wellness and self-help content – be it in podcast, book or video form – is more popular than ever among young people, while “therapy-speak” has becoming part of our daily vernacular. But for Cox, Gen Z are far from better off.
“Sociologists have been talking about the idea of individualisation for a very long time. It is not just an American ideal,” says Patulny.
“Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, wrote about these things as early as the 1970s and ’80s: the decline in traditional institutions and the shift towards people finding life fulfillment through individual pursuits rather than group pursuits.
“At the time it was an emancipatory thing – it freed us from being constrained by religious traditions that didn’t suit us, to go out and construct a life for ourselves, including freedom to pursue any kind of sexuality we wanted.”
But what comes after, says Patulny, can be the “potential for you to become selfish, because you’re so involved in your own self-project … this has become hyper-accelerated now because of extreme digitalisation.”
This polarisation is exemplified for Cox by a survey he and his colleagues conducted, involving teenagers aged 13 to 17, in which they were asked to put themselves in the shoes of the opposite sex.
“There was for me, such a surprising lack of curiosity about what it would actually be like … I think part of the problem is that we have become deeply incurious about each other,” he says of the findings.
For Cox then, the path to greater connectedness and empathy is simple: cultivating curiosity and grace and getting more comfortable with risk. As he writes in Generation Uncoupled: “If there is one piece of advice I would give to young men and women aspiring to find romantic connections, it is simply this: Hang out more often with your friends offline in ways that maximise the potential for unpredictable outcomes.”
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