If you asked me a few years ago to picture how my twenties would look, I’d have imagined a diary full of after-work drinks, spontaneous weekends away and a group chat that never went quiet.
The reality now, at the age of 24, is that I live three hours away from my closest friends and see them just once a year, some even less. And although this feels controversial to admit having such little face-time with friends, I am completely fine with it.
After moving from Buckinghamshire to Cheshire, my friendships changed. There’s no “fancy coffee tomorrow?” texts, morning walks or weekend shopping, it’s a constant battle of co-ordinating annual leave months in advance with plans that never come to fruition. If I judged my friendships by how often I physically saw people, I’d conclude that I don’t have much of a social life at all.
Shorts
We’re constantly told that Britain, specifically my generation, are in the grip of a loneliness epidemic. The “friendship recession” has become a phrase used to describe Gen Zers struggling to build and maintain close relationships, more so than other ages. According to the latest State of Friendship report, one in 10 Britons reported having no close friends at all and Gen Z were twice as likely as the over-70s to experience chronic loneliness. Young adults are supposedly the most disconnected in history.
