‘I don’t have any friends’: why do young people today have fewer mates?

Tess Lavanda: ‘I think there’s a lack of drive for people to go out and meet people, and when you do go out, people are on their phones so it’s harder to approach them.’ Photograph: Tess Lavanda

On Tess Lavanda’s YouTube channel there is one video with substantially more views than the rest: it is titled “I don’t have any friends” and has been watched more than half a million times since she posted it a month ago.

Over on Instagram she has posted dozens of reels with titles like “I turned 22 alone”, “Living alone in London” and “Feeling alone this summer is OK”, each garnering thousands of views and hundreds of comments, many from people feeling the same way.