Dan Petrie: Sex drought a sign of loneliness and isolation among young Australians

So much for the COVID baby boom — the pandemic has only driven young people further into loneliness, writes Dan Petrie.

The term loneliness is often posed as a problem that is solved by taking up a hobby, joining a gym and just ‘getting out there’ or something that just happened to older people.

But society’s isolation scourge is damaging younger generations – and it’s between the sheets where it’s most apparent.

Despite social media apps, today’s Millennials are having less sex than previous generations as a by-product of socialising less.

US Millennials are in the grip of a “sex recession” where according to the US Centre for Disease Control, sexual activity among high school students had fallen from 54 per cent to 40 per cent.

Locally, the ABC’s Australia Talks survey in 2019 which polled 55,000 people on said topic provided a litany of reasons as well as a series of crisis style missives from the likes of the Guardian and Condomsales.com.au.

The factors of as to why younger people are not getting busy beneath the doona are many and varied from people living at home longer, easy access to visual sexual activity (i.e. porn), anxiety and a genuine fear of relationships.

While it is an interesting correlation, the vast majority of relationships, romantic or friendships emerge from people simply being in the same place.

However, loneliness has become a prominent issue for many young people now living their lives out on social media as disconnection from community and lack of socialisation start to present as major issues confronting our society.

Shuttering of state borders and snap lockdowns only compounded a problem that has been bubbling along years before the SARS variant that is COVID arrived.

Leadership in fixing our loneliness starts with Generation X, the cohort occupying the halls of power and statistically the last generation of great shaggers.

For a country with a low population density such as Australia, border closures are pyrrhic victories at best and announcements of new stadiums and trains to nowhere mean very little if our young people are living siloed lives.

Claire Lehmann, a psychologist and founder of online platform, Quillette wrote earlier this year in The Australian newspaper that the smartphone generation is the loneliest in age of COVID noting that social distancing measures required for COVID may have in fact made the problem worse.

The Young Australian Loneliness Survey conducted by Swinburne University in Victoria found that one in three young adults and one in six adolescents experienced problematic levels of social isolation and loneliness.

Loneliness has become a prominent issue for many young people now living their lives out on social media. Picture: iStock

Given the impacts on younger people, the community focus needs to be firmly on getting our people moving and simply hanging out more.

From a personal perspective and as someone who teaches at the university level, it is hard not to notice how students attend class individually as opposed to turning up in groups. Only two years ago, a student approached me to talk about the number of anxiety medications she was on and her depression.

I asked her what she did on the weekend and she told me she tended to hang out at home.

The phenomenon is real but the fixes are relatively straightforward and with some help from yours truly, the medicine does work.

Simply put, we collectively need to create the places where people can congregate. Economic and social policy has to work in tandem in a bid to unlock the challenge of bringing people together. Collectively as a society we need to make that investment in our people so that we don’t take for granted that critical pillar that makes Australia great.

Dan Petrie is the Chief Information Officer of data analytics firm, Grafa and a former Economic Data Editor at Bloomberg LP who also goes by the name of Data Dan. Email [e-mail]