40% of Young Adults Report They Have No One to Talk to When They Are Struggling

The number emerged from the 2024 American Perspectives Survey, and it has not gotten easier to read with repetition. Four in ten adults under 35 say that when they are going through something hard — not necessarily a crisis, but difficulty of the ordinary kind — there is no one they would turn to. No friend. No family member. No partner. No therapist. Nobody. This is not the same as having no relationships. Most of these young adults have contacts, followers, roommates, coworkers. The social infrastructure exists in a thin way. What is missing is depth — the specific kind of relationship in which one person can say to another: I am not doing well.

How the Survey Was Conducted

The Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute has tracked social connection metrics across American adults for several years, with particular attention to changes since 2000. The 2024 wave surveyed roughly 5,000 adults with a representative sample by age, income, race, and geography. The question about who people turn to in difficulty was open-ended and followed by quantitative coding. The 40 percent figure for adults under 35 was substantially higher than in any prior wave of the same survey. The generational difference is large. Adults over 55 reported the same condition — no one to talk to — at a rate of 17 percent. Still concerning, but less than half the rate for young adults. The direction of the generational gradient runs opposite to what most people intuitively expect. Older adults, with smaller social networks and more loss, report having more people to turn to. Younger adults, with larger nominal networks and more apparent social activity, report having fewer.

Why Digital Connection Doesn't Fill This

The most common response to findings like these is that they fail to account for online relationships, which are real relationships and which provide real support. This is partly true. Online friendships can be genuine and sustaining. But the research on what kinds of support predict wellbeing in difficulty is fairly specific. What helps most is what psychologists call "responsive support" — someone who understands what you are experiencing, communicates that understanding, and demonstrates that they care about your outcome. This kind of support is available through digital means, but it requires something that most digital relationships do not sustain: depth, history, and a level of mutual investment that makes vulnerability feel safe. A research team at the University of Michigan studying young adult social networks found that the average young adult has substantially more digital contacts than their counterparts a generation ago but substantially fewer relationships they classify as "confiding relationships" — those in which they could disclose personal difficulty without fear of judgment, loss of standing, or social consequence. The digital networks expand the breadth of connection while the depth declines.

The Masculine Crisis Inside the Larger One

The aggregate 40 percent figure contains a significant gender disparity. Among young men specifically, the figure in multiple surveys approaches 50 to 55 percent. Young men report confiding relationships at about half the rate of young women. They are less likely to have friends they consider close enough for emotional disclosure, less likely to have initiated vulnerable conversations with family members, and more likely to describe their closest relationship as their romantic partner — with no secondary option named. This creates fragility. A romantic relationship ending can leave a young man without any functional emotional support system at all. The research on male mental health and social isolation tracks this pattern clearly: the mental health consequences of relationship dissolution are substantially larger for men than for women, and the disparity grows with age. The most isolated young men become the most isolated middle-aged men.

The Disclosure Problem

Here is the piece that makes this hard to fix at the individual level. The skills required to have vulnerable conversations — to say to someone else that you are struggling, to accept their response without defensiveness, to maintain the relationship through the exposure of need — are skills that develop through practice. And the opportunity to practice them is precisely what the 40 percent lack. This is a poverty that compounds. People who grew up with parents who modeled emotional disclosure, who had friendships in adolescence where vulnerability was reciprocal, who had therapeutic experience or reflective religious communities — they arrive at adulthood with a set of relational skills that make seeking support legible and possible. People who did not are attempting to build those skills in circumstances that require them most, without the foundation that would make building them easier. The problem is not that young adults do not want connection. Survey after survey shows that they do, intensely. The problem is that the conditions that develop the capacity for the specific kind of connection they need were not reliably present for a generation raised in the particular social context of the past twenty years.