When I reflect on the dizzying fact that it’s been two years since graduating high school, off the back of a bizarre late adolescent experience, floating in 5km bubbles of government-permitted social engagement and filtering my life through a cycle of apps to make my tortured seventeen-year-old existence look like a dream, I have to wonder: how well do I know the people I graduated with? Are we friends? Would I call them my friend, but would they then smile awkwardly at the proposition?

Does an Instagram comment make someone my friend?

The results are in: we’re the loneliest age group in Australia. According to the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Report, 24.8% of Australians aged 15–24 ‘often feel very lonely’. This statistic rose steadily in the twenty years between 2001 and 2021 from 18.5% (some of the lowest rates of loneliness of any age group) to almost 25% (the very highest rates among all age groups). 

A spike in strong responses in 2020 shows us that the pandemic was not guiltless in this rise, and rightly so. We’re now left with a generation of 15 to 24-year-olds who spent their most formative years reliant on digitised relationships to maintain a sense of connection. As much as it sounds like a jab delivered down the nose of a disgruntled grandparent at family Christmas, it’s our reality.

It’s easy to turn to the most apparent cause of this resounding sentiment of loneliness to explain the phenomenon. Many teenagers, particularly in metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney, spent days on end seeing only the faces of their family and neighbours, hearing their friends’ voices only through FaceTime or grainy, mid-Among Us game Discord conversations (the darkest of dark times). Physical isolation is obviously conducive to immense loneliness, only worsened by the fatigue inherent to the need to make a consistent effort to connect when natural, passive connection is taken away. Already, today’s Australian twenty-something-year-olds have developed a perception of their own connectedness and loneliness — that they are perpetually connected, and immune to isolation — completely distinct from that of our predecessors.

But there’s an underappreciated phenomenon that permeates our social lives, and one which throws our certainty in our connectedness to others into limbo: the ‘D tier’ friendship, the serial commenter yet frequent brush-paster in the street, the capitalised text conversationalist yet quietly awkward in-person small-talker. The digitisation of our relationships has created a new force of loneliness: a false sense of closeness with those whose lives we observe online.

Our reliance on social media is both beautiful and disastrous. I cherish that a confessional second-account story post allows me access to the most complex inner thoughts of someone I talked to in one food tech practical in Year 9 and never spoke to again. I cherish that they likely have the most elementary knowledge of not only my life but, quite frankly, who on Earth I am at all. I cherish that I have never once had to wonder what almost every person I shared my high school graduation with is up to these days, because their beautifully curated spring photo dumps have comprehensively informed me of their new smoking habit, their well-highlighted hair, their somehow-prevailing friendship with the girl they claimed to despise at 13, and their proudly boasted techno expertise. I know what they’re doing. They know what I’m doing. We know each other, quite surely.

But upon recent trips home and circumstantial run-ins with high school semi-friends, I’ve become less sure. I haven’t spoken to them for two whole years, and upon bumping into them, have had very little beyond pleasantries to discuss. I’m not even sure what degree they do, or whether they study at all. I walk away with the humbling realisation that they might just be more than their highlights, hair-related or otherwise, and we might, in fact, no longer be friends. And for a moment, I feel lonely: how many of the people I remember as friends are actually strangers, whose Instagram stories just flash over my screen?

It is this illusion of closeness we gain from our almost-parasocial ties to old acquaintances that makes pangs of loneliness sting all the harsher. We have collectively constructed a culture where our connections are governed by brief online interactions — over-enthusiastic comments left on an artfully angled selfie in a Macbook photobooth tab, floating red hearts deposited into the like bank of a carousel post of cocktails — and for as long as they continue, how could we ever be lonely? When hundreds of people watch your life unfold, how could you possibly claim to be alone? But when these grounding interactions with the people I so confidently and dismissively label friends strike fear into my heart that perhaps having an active audience doesn’t make one connected, I unbalance, and fall unceremoniously off my (Instagrammable) high horse into a state of miserable, albeit dramatised, solitude.

There are then two ways for a young person with social media presence to be lonely. Conventional loneliness will never disappear; humans are fated to feel isolated, misunderstood, or alone, despite being surrounded by people, at some point or another. The difference for our generation, however, is that we have unfettered access to a fast-release sedative to this type of isolation, which we can tap into at leisure: online validation!

Feeling miserable at the state of your friendships or popularity? Post about it! Scroll your tagged posts! Check that you do indeed consistently get more birthday messages on your Facebook timeline each year, even though that’s the most archaic and meaningless possible way to be wished happy birthday!

The comedown from the high of this digital reassurance, however, is where this secondary loneliness lies. By plugging into easy-access ‘connection’, exempting ourselves from the reflection and humility that comes with a bit of good old-fashioned loneliness, we stand to suffer much more from the wearing-off of what has become our favourite drug. In those moments when we realise that knowing what someone is doing does not give us insight into who they are, we learn that the isolation cure we’ve created not only fails but creates a new problem: the illusion that our connections are sounder than they are, and therefore that they don’t require maintenance. By letting friendships lie in empty promises of drinks in TikTok comments, we risk losing sight of the need to make good on intentions to make them worthwhile. We are lonelier for our blindness to the falsehood of Instagram friendship, and we’ll only continue to become more so in growing up, and apart, and realising that the immediate proximity and ease of connection that high school gifted us cannot be replaced by perfunctory online interactions.

Loneliness and social media go hand in hand to make the inherent uncertainty of being in your early twenties all the more complicated, obscuring reality with illusions of prevailing friendships from our early teens and ever-close friend groups with everything in common. When ruined, these illusions leave us vulnerable to a deeper sense of aloneness — one which can be rectified not through yet another online broadcast, but only through making good on all those hang-out-next-time-you’re-in-town messages.

As much as my grandparents like to tell me that we’ve lost touch with real human connection, we haven’t. We’ve made unfathomably good use of an unimaginable tool of connection, and even if we may lose sight of the forest for the trees of this connection by prioritising conceptual connection over reality, we can be empowered by social media to create and maintain friendships in real, tangible ways.

Text your high school friends and tell them you’d like to hang out. Comment on your distant mutual friends’ thirst trap that you’d like to hang out. Reply to your ex-best-friend’s story while drunk, tell them you miss them, and you’d like to hang out. And then hang out. The internet is always a lonely place, but the real world certainly isn’t.