Who are the loneliest Australians?
Who are the loneliest Australians? We break it down.
Who are the most persistently lonely Australians, the ones for whom loneliness isn’t just a bad day or two but nags away for months or longer?
If you guessed young adults, you’d be right, with 41 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds reporting that they felt long-term loneliness.
Perhaps surprisingly those aged 45-54 are the next loneliest age group at 32 per cent, while just 10 per cent of the 75+ age cohort felt the same.
Tasmania is by far the loneliest state, while the ACT is the least lonely. People in regional areas report being lonely in much higher numbers than those in the cities.
A tracking study asked more than 4000 people about loneliness and social isolation, finding one in four adults reported being lonely for a period of at least eight weeks.
Lead author Michelle Lim, chief executive and scientific chair of advocacy group Ending Loneliness Together, said the Why We Feel Lonely study also looked for the root causes of persistent loneliness, identifying financial hardship as the biggest contributor.
“If people perceive themselves to be performing poorly in a financial sense, they are nearly seven times more likely to be persistently lonely,” she said. “Very likely one’s perceptions of one’s finances and resources influences how we start and maintain relationships.
“So as we face the current cost-of-living crisis, it’s reasonable to ask what this is doing to our interactions with friends and the broader impact on social connectivity,” Associate Professor Lim said.
Loneliness is defined as “a subjective unpleasant or distressing feeling of a lack of connection to other people, along with a desire for more, or more satisfying, social relationships.” Professor Lim said loneliness is a significant public health threat. “We need to stop thinking of loneliness as a ‘soft’ issue. We are living in an ever-changing world. The speed and size of changes can … make it harder to develop and maintain healthy social relationships.”
Professor Lim said young people’s emotional wellbeing was still being affected by an interrupted path through the Covid-19 pandemic. “It was a time in their lives they should have been fostering social connections but the distancing rules kept them from forming these relationships,” she said.
Full-time student Cooper Seeley, 21, said his work as an operations co-ordinator mentoring young lifeguards at a Melbourne aquatic centre had been his pathway out of loneliness. “The feeling of loneliness is hard to describe. You feel like you want to reach out to someone but there’s just no one to talk to,” he said.
“Finding that relationship you can be vulnerable in is hard.”
He said it was difficult to break out of being lonely through his late teens as “the stuff I wanted to do on weekends doesn’t involve alcohol but that was the social outlet for so many people my age.”
Mr Seeley said his role training and mentoring young lifeguards gave him a chance to talk about his experience with loneliness. “Working with these people, talking about it, has actually been the way I have built connections and dealt with my own feelings.”
Professor Lim said she was surprised the middle age group (45 to 54 year olds) was second behind young people. “It’s not clear why from the study, but we do know this is the group that is often both raising children and looking after older parents,” she said.
Factors contributing to persistent loneliness included chronic health conditions or poor mental health, being single or divorced, and being unemployed.
