All the Lonely Workers: Where Do They All Come From?

IT IS midmorning on a weekday, across Britain, millions of people of working age are sitting alone at a kitchen table or a spare-room desk, headset on, nobody else in the room. Multiply that scene across a decade and you have most of the answer to why young adults now spend so much of their lives by themselves. New analysis of UK time-use diaries finds that solo paid work has nearly tripled since 2014-15, and working from home, which has become standard practice for a large share of British workers since the pandemic, accounts for two-thirds of that rise among people of working age. Screens get the blame; the desk that moved into the spare room deserves more of it.

The analysis, an unreviewed Resolution Foundation briefing rather than a peer-reviewed study, draws on time-use diaries from 4,741 households surveyed a decade apart, alongside survey responses from the long-running Understanding Society panel. The shift shows up hardest at the young end of the age range. At the old end, over the same decade, the opposite has happened.

Young men aged 18 to 29 now spend more than two-fifths of their waking hours alone, roughly six and a half hours a day, up two hours since 2014-15. Young women in the same age group have gained one-and-a-half hours, to about five hours a day. Older adults have moved the other way: women over 60 and men over 70 now spend one to one-and-a-half fewer hours alone than a decade earlier. In 2014-15, time alone rose steadily with age; that gradient has since flattened, and in places reversed.

Blaming the Phone Is the Easy Answer

Screen use is the obvious suspect, and the data back it up as far as they go. Eighteen to 29-year-olds are three times as likely as 60-to-69-year-olds to say they are almost always online, and twice as likely to report feeling often lonely, 14 per cent against 7 per cent, a gap that shows up in a separate national loneliness survey too.

A regression analysis finds that young adults who are almost always online are four percentage points more likely to be lonely than those who are not. Adjust for income, household type and occupation, and the gap narrows to three points but does not close. Time-use diaries almost certainly undercount screen use in the first place, since checking a phone mid-meal or mid-commute rarely gets logged as the primary activity, a limitation confirmed by researchers who have used diary methods to study screen habits directly.

Nobody in this analysis gets quoted directly; there is no press officer standing behind it, only a researcher working through years of diary data alone at his own desk, which is either ironic or exactly the point. Even before that screen-time undercount is factored back in, recorded time alone among young people is still up substantially, which means something other than phones has to be doing real work here.

Where the Missing Hours Actually Went

Look instead at what people are doing while alone, and the pattern sharpens fast. Across the standard working day, from 9am to 5pm, the share of working-age adults doing paid work by themselves rose from around 5 per cent in 2014-15 to between 12 and 15 per cent in 2023, very nearly a tripling. Non-paid solitary activity (travel, hobbies, chores) fell slightly over the same period, from 16 to 14 per cent of the day. Men aged 18 to 29 gained one-and-a-half hours a day working alone; women in their forties, and women in their twenties, gained three-quarters of an hour. Older workers absorbed the same shift by cutting back elsewhere: less solo travel, less solo screen use, so their total time alone still fell even as work moved home for them too. Younger workers had far less slack to give up, so the extra solitary hours landed on top of an already thin schedule rather than replacing something else.

Screen habits split along the same line. 18-29-year-olds now spend just over half their screen time alone, up roughly ten percentage points since 2014-15, while 60-to-69-year-olds have moved the other way, their solitary screen-time share falling by ten points to under a third.

None of this makes solo work the villain. Flexibility and a shorter commute are real gains, and this analysis does not dispute them, but control over where the work happens cuts both ways, and newer employees typically have the least of it.

The timing compounds the problem rather than softening it. Young adults are also making weaker income progress than earlier generations did at the same age, plausibly limiting their ability to buy back company once the workday ends. Over-60s gained roughly an hour a day of leisure with other people over the decade, men over 70 nearly an hour and a half; 18-29-year-olds gained a quarter of an hour. Richer, older generations appear to have both the time and the money to offset extra solitude; younger workers, on this evidence, have neither in the same measure.

That points policy toward an unfamiliar target. Screens make an easy villain because there is a simple lever, an app limit, a curfew, a warning label. Solitary work is tangled up instead in productivity, cost and how much say an employee actually has over a rota that was set somewhere above their pay grade. One proposal from the analysis, synchronising which days a team works from the office together, is a small enough change that it barely counts as a policy at all, and that may be exactly why it has not happened yet.

Screens will keep getting the headlines, because a phone is a villain you can hold up and photograph. The quieter shift, a desk in a spare room with the door shut, is going to be harder to notice and harder to undo, precisely because so much of it looks, from the outside, like nothing happening at all.

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