The Quiet Loneliness of Modern Life

I’ve been thinking lately about how strange adult friendship can be. You can have people you really like, people you would describe as close friends, and still only manage to see them every month or two.

When you do catch up, it’s great. You talk easily, fill each other in on what has been happening and probably say at some point that you really need to do this more often.

Then you get the calendars out and realise that between work, children, family commitments, weekends away and everything else, neither of you is free for another four weeks.

There’s nothing actually wrong with the friendship. You care about each other, you have a great time when you’re together, and you know they would probably be there if you really needed them. But somehow your lives don’t overlap very often, despite your best intentions. There is an inherent loneliness in that.

We tend to associate loneliness with not having people, but loneliness and social isolation aren’t actually the same thing. Social isolation is about the amount of contact and relationships we have, while loneliness is about how connected we feel and whether the relationships we have meet our needs.

Australian data suggests this is particularly relevant in the middle years of adulthood. In 2024, around 15% of Australians reported experiencing loneliness, with the highest rate among people aged 35–44, at 17%.

That interests me because these can be incredibly people-filled years.

You might have a partner, children, friends, colleagues, extended family and people you interact with throughout the week. If you have children, much of your time outside work might revolve around their needs and activities. If you work with people, particularly in a caring profession, you might spend most of your working day talking to people as well. You can have very little time alone and yet still feel like you’re missing connection.

For me, the kind of connection I’m thinking about isn’t so much having someone to call in a crisis. It’s the much more ordinary experience of having people who know what is happening in your life as it happens.

Someone knows you had a difficult meeting on Tuesday and asks how it went. You send a friend a message because something ridiculous just happened and you know they’ll get it. You go for a walk and spend half of it talking about something that has been bothering you and the other half talking about what you’re having for dinner.

None of this is particularly significant, but research into everyday social interactions suggests these smaller interactions matter to how connected we feel too.

If you only see someone every month or two, you can still have a close and important friendship with them. But a lot happens between those catch-ups, and when you finally see each other you inevitably give each other the edited version. The big things make it in. The smaller things often don’t.

When friendship requires planning

Adult friendship seems to involve a surprising amount of administration.

We compare calendars, organise dinners weeks in advance, reschedule when someone’s child gets sick, and say things like “after the school holidays things should settle down”, even though experience suggests they probably won’t.

For people in the middle years of adulthood, there can be very little genuinely unallocated time. Work takes up a large part of the week, weekends fill with children’s sport and birthday parties, and there are family commitments, housework, appointments and all the boring practical things required to keep a household running. Friendship gets fitted around all of that.

I don’t want to romanticise the past and pretend everyone once lived in wonderfully connected communities where neighbours wandered into each other’s houses and nobody was lonely. I’m sure plenty of people were lonely then too, and close communities came with their own problems. But I do wonder about the role of incidental contact in our lives now.

When you regularly see someone at work, walk together every week, live nearby or belong to the same community, you don’t have to create a special occasion every time you want to see them. You just keep seeing each other.

Social media doesn’t really fill that gap for me either. I can know where someone went on holiday, see photos of their children and know what they did on the weekend without actually knowing very much about how they are. It’s a way of keeping up with people, but I don’t experience it as quite the same thing as being part of their lives.

When friendship and loneliness coexist

I think this is where some of the usual advice about loneliness can miss the mark. We’re often encouraged to join a group, put ourselves out there, make plans or reach out more.

Those things can absolutely help, particularly if someone genuinely doesn’t have enough relationships in their life. But sometimes we already have people we really value. The problem is much more mundane: we don’t see them enough.

I don’t have a particularly neat solution to any of this. Most of us can’t suddenly clear our calendars or restructure our lives around friendship, and telling already busy people that they need to work harder at maintaining their relationships just gives them another thing to feel they aren’t doing properly.

But I do think regularity matters more than we give it credit for. A weekly walk means someone tends to know what happened last week, and sending the insignificant message when you think of someone keeps a conversation going between catch-ups.

Maybe friendships need to move towards catching up while walking the dog, sitting through a child’s activity or drinking a cup of tea in a messy kitchen, rather than always trying to find another free Saturday night. Finding ways to invite people into more of our everyday lives might give us back some of the connection we’re missing.

Related reading: Who Really Gets Me? Loneliness and Connection in Childhood and Adolescence — exploring what children and teenagers may be telling us when they feel lonely, even when they have friends.

Adult Counselling

If you recognise some of this in your own life and would like a space to think more about loneliness, connection or the relationships that matter to you, these are things we can explore together in counselling. I offer adult counselling in Wheelers Hill and online across Australia.

Learn more about adult counselling