David Riesman, in his 1950 work The Lonely Crowd, wrote that “Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.” I would alter this to say “to be skilled and lonely consumers”—a change that I’m quite sure Riesman would approve of.
Riesman’s work was a profound analysis of middle-class America after World War II. Riesman looked at American culture and saw two types of people: inner-directed and other-directed. Inner-directed people were dominant in 19th and early 20th-century America. They internalized their values from their parents and community life—church, family, neighbors, and local politics. These communities instilled an “inner gyroscope” that guided their decisions despite what others thought. The societies that these inner-directed people lived in were, according to Riesman, “societies dependent on inner-direction.” A key point we will return to momentarily.
Post-war America saw the rise of another category: other-directed people. Other-directed people look to their peers and contemporary social signals for guidance, slowly replacing church, family, neighbors, and local politics. This social category has what Riesman calls a “social radar” which is constantly scanning the environment for subtle shifts.
Inner-directed people suit societies which emphasize production while other-directed people suit societies which emphasize consumption. As more and more people find meaning in how others perceive them, society shifts to meet the demand for consumption. As I type this, there are many examples of what I mean: Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, short-form texting platforms like X. These feed our insatiable desire for other-direction. Society bends itself to what its people want. Prior to World War II, the community instilled value and meaning and thus society was reflective of this. As we will see, this major societal shift has had massive implications for younger generations—especially Gen Z and below. Riesman wrote his work in 1950, but we are now seeing the end result of the society’s shift from inner-direction to other-direction. And the results are not encouraging.
Gen Z and the Engendering of Loneliness
For the past few years, discussions of Gen Z and loneliness have focused on gendered lines. I’ve even fallen into this trap. And while I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong, it is most certainly incomplete.
For example, there are specific gendered ways we deal with loneliness. Men tend to withdraw into themselves. Fearing the judgment of emasculation, they would rather handle it themselves than invite others into their struggles. Women, on the other hand, tend to invite others in, which can also lead to its own set of difficulties. In some ways Riesman’s thesis can also be a gendered thesis, though not a perfect fit.
Our first task is to ask why we tend to think of the loneliness crisis as a male phenomenon. For me, it’s the news. Dylan Roof, Tyler Robinson, and Bryan Kohberger are three of the most prominent recent examples. Three young men who were heavily engaged in online communities, and for the most part were loners. Severed from meaningful real-life communities.
So yes, the more prominent cases are certainly among young men, but this is perhaps an incomplete picture of what is happening. A recent study, sent to me by my friend Rod Dreher, highlights this very point. The study called ““The loneliness crisis isn’t just male,” was conducted by The Argument. They asked 23,000 young people various questions about loneliness—both how lonely they felt and how they dealt with feeling lonely. Here's how they conducted the study, which will be helpful for understanding the charts I've included:
Over the course of three national surveys of registered voters conducted between August and December, we asked 15 questions — five per survey — centered around loneliness, mental health, anxiety, and socialization. Each response was mapped to a numerical value between -1 and 1, with -1 indicating the most antisocial and 1 indicating the most social response.
With nearly 23,000 responses to survey questions distributed over more than 4,500 individual survey respondents, our dataset is rich and lends itself well to subgroup analysis.
The results are staggering. To start, they reveal that the loneliness crisis has been over-gendered. This gets back to my previous point: we’ve been conditioned to think of the crisis as a purely male issue. The narrative goes something like this: a young man feels increasingly antisocial so he goes home, searches online, finds a 4chan or Reddit thread, and accelerates into the manosphere, finding it easier to find connection online than in person. The study is not pushing against this narrative, merely showing that it is part of something larger: the crisis is defined by age; gender is merely a subfactor. Thus for our examples above, the key deciding factor is not that they are men, but that they are young.
The study also notes that there is a current “antisocial crisis” but that it is actually most common among young women. The chart below shows that among females 18–29, they predominantly identified their well-being as between “very negative” and “somewhat negative.”
I’ve argued elsewhere that this trend can be explained by the rise of several social movements which have uprooted young people and disintegrated their bonds to local communities. For men this leads them to connect with manosphere groups online, but for women, this leads to extended social media usage. Listen to some of the descriptions given in this study. Surveyors were asked to mark whether they disagreed or agreed with the following as a description of how they feel today: “I get easily overwhelmed.” “I dislike myself.” “I panic easily.” “I have a difficult time starting tasks.” “I am a worrier.” The results demonstrated that while there was a gender split, the real divide was age.
Women 30 and above were largely facing less emotional distress than women ages 18–29. Freya India has aptly diagnosed this issue among Gen Z women. Her piece “You Don’t Need to Document Everything” shows that, to use Riesman’s thesis, women are pushed to become more other-directed people online. In other words, they are pressured to document and demonstrate value for others. In our consumption economy, this leads to endless “unboxing” reels and reels showing beautification tips. Young women are being pushed to be unhappy, and it shows. But, lest we simplify it too much, we should highlight that millennial women use social media too—so why are they emotionally better off?
The Argument’s survey had some interesting, yet unsurprising information to explain this. As Jonathan Haidt has documented already, the most socially isolated generations are those that grew up in a digital other-directed consumer society. The internet gave young people more information than they could handle, and taught them they need to demonstrate their value to others. This tradeoff ensured that value among their local communities no longer mattered. The internet opened up the world to them, and by doing so gave them the tantalizing, but unrealistic idea that they can be the next big influencer.
Millennials certainly deal with the same issues, but, especially young millennials bordering on Zillennials (aged 28–32), can still remember a time before the internet and all of the issues that came with it. The late 1990s was a time caught between the full-fledged other-directed consumer society and the older inner-directed tradition-oriented society. Caught on the precipice, we (I am one such case) are able to recall some of those older communities and find a way of escape. Sadly, Gen Z does not know many of these communities, and they are finding substitutes in the manosphere (for men), and Instagram/TikTok (for women).
The Need for Community
So where do we go from here?
This is the prevailing question of the day. But in some ways it isn’t a new one. Tocqueville, in fact, predicted this when he, at the behest of the French government, traveled around 19th-century United States. He wrote:
“In some countries, the inhabitants seem unwilling to avail themselves of the political privileges which the law gives them; it would seem that they set too high a value upon their time to spend it on the interests of the community....But if an American were condemned to confine his activities to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.”
Tocqueville understood that the push for individualism would be a temptation for the young nation. We can say that he was very correct in his analysis and also very wrong in just how severe the problem would be. What Tocqueville observed was early inner-directed individualism—people oriented by internal values but still embedded in robust local communities. What we have now is something far more corrosive: other-directed isolation, where young people are simultaneously hyperconnected and profoundly alone. The lonely crowd.
The solution, if there is one, must involve a return to what Riesman called "societies dependent on inner-direction." This doesn't mean rejecting technology wholesale (and yes, I do think there are serious issues with the Machine) or pretending we can return to 1950s America. Instead, it means rebuilding the institutions that give young people an internal gyroscope: churches, civic organizations, stable families, local political engagement, and face-to-face communities. Robert Nisbet, drawing on this theme from Tocqueville as well as Durkheim, writes that this dislodging from community will have a profound effect not only on the emotional well-being of the person, but on his spiritual well-being as well. He writes:
“Man’s alienation from man must lead in time to man’s alienation from God. The loss of the sense of visible community in Christ will be followed by the loss of the sense of the invisible. The decline of community in the modern world has as its inevitable religious consequence the creation of masses of helpless, bewildered individuals who are unable to find solace in Christianity regarded merely as creed. The stress upon the individual, at the expense of the churchly community, has led remorselessly to the isolation of the individual, to the shattering of the man-God relationship, and to the atomization of personality. This is the testimony of a large number of theologians in our day.”
Reclaiming community is hard work. Even at the individual level, it takes time to create relationships. I'm not unfamiliar with this. Several years ago, I had just moved to a new area and was craving meaningful community. After church one day, I struck up a conversation with a guy who was my age and shared a love for history. We decided to try reading a history book and discussing it. This turned into two books, and two people turned into four. Eventually we were meeting regularly as a group. We're now on our tenth book. It takes effort to get out of bed at 6 am to meet as a group and talk about the book we're reading together, but in the end a communal bond is formed. We were created to live in community. My suggestion to young people is to start a reading group. It's a fairly low-stakes way to cultivate community.
Millennials and Gen Z are predisposed to other-direction. But there are some around today who remember what life was like before the dominance of other-direction. Another simple way to push against this is to ask questions and have conversations with older generations. There's something to be said for seeking wisdom from those who have gone before us, whether that's in person or through books. The only way to push against the "OK Boomer" stigma is to take time to learn about what life was like before our time. I've always loved history. If you haven't already sensed that, you will if you keep following my writing. I'm perennially interested in how we view the past and those who lived it. A sad reality is that there are only about 46,000 World War II veterans still living today in the United States. If we don't take intentional time to build relationships with those generations above us, we will not only lose what life was like before the internet, but we may fall into the same traps in our own lives.
In short, what I'm saying is that it requires intentionally choosing embodied community over digital connection, even when the former is more difficult and less immediately gratifying. For young people especially, it means learning to find value not in how others perceive you, but in who you are becoming within a community that knows you, challenges you, and holds you accountable.
The loneliness crisis isn’t just about young men or young women—it’s about a lonely generation raised to be skilled consumers in a society that has lost its capacity to create inner-directed citizens. Until we recognize this and work to rebuild the communities that create such citizens, we will continue producing skilled and lonely consumers, scanning their social radars for meaning that neither comes nor, when it does, fulfills.
