The spirit of the age: Trends that are reshaping our lives

The spirit of our age is revealed in the actions that have become so commonplace that we no longer notice them, even though they have become trends.

One of the major social innovations of recent decades is the increasing prevalence of withdrawal. Whether we’re talking about our circle of friends, relatives, or activities, the circle around us keeps getting smaller. Sociologists, demographers and psychologists have collected data in recent years which shows at least ten trends, documented through long time series and large samples. These trends bring this transformation into sharper focus, even if each study examines it from a different angle.

• We talk less.
• We are eating alone more and more often.
• We are spending more and more time at home and alone.
• Adolescence is becoming more subdued and perhaps less social, outside screens. 
• We are having fewer children and having them later. Households are getting smaller. 
• Religion is becoming more fluid. 
• We are actively avoiding information to an increasing degree.
• Working from home has become more common. 
• In many affluent societies, sexual activity is becoming less frequent.
• One of the most basic symptoms of this withdrawal is a visible change in spoken conversation.

We speak less

While the average adult spoke around 16,000 words a day in 2005, by 2019, this figure had fallen to almost 12,700. This finding was made almost by accident by two psychologists, Valeria Pfeifer from the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl from the University of Arizona, whilst attempting to replicate an earlier 2007 study by Mehl on differences between men and women in terms of speech. To do this, they analysed data from 22 studies conducted between 2005 and 2019 involving a total of 2,197 participants from several countries. Each participant wore a device that recorded snippets of their day. Using these recordings, the researchers observed that participants spoke fewer and fewer words per day year on year. Over the analysed period, the cumulative decline amounted to almost 28 per cent. The decline was even more pronounced among young people under the age of 25, with approximately 450 fewer words per day for each calendar year compared to around 314 for older adults.

On average, participants spoke approximately 338 fewer words per day year on year.

However, the authors point out that the figures should be interpreted with some caution. Although it is tempting to attribute this decline to technology, particularly as it coincides with the explosion of text messaging on social media, Pfeifer and Mehl are cautious, as their study was not designed to explain why the decline occurred. Furthermore, the study’s participants predominantly come from the United States, with smaller contributions from Mexico, Australia, and Europe. Consequently, the trend is not global, but rather indicative of wealthy Western societies. However, the most important point to note is that speaking fewer words does not necessarily mean communicating less. If people have replaced phone calls with text messages, they will speak fewer words, but this does not necessarily mean that they are communicating less. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, for fifteen years, year on year, people have been using their voices less in conversations, for whatever reason.

Conversation is not the only context in which closeness between people can be measured, though. A significant part of our social life centres on repetitive rituals that give structure to our existence. One of these is the ritual of eating a meal with others.

More and more often, we are eating alone

In 2023, around a quarter of American adults said they had eaten all their meals the previous day on their own, which is a 53 per cent increase compared with 2003. This information comes from a chapter in the 2025 World Happiness Report, which was written by researchers from Oxford, Gallup, and the Harvard Kennedy School. The researchers combined data from the Gallup World Poll, which was collected from over 150,000 respondents across 142 countries, with the US Time Use Survey, which has been continuously collected since 2003. The increase was most pronounced among young people. More specifically, the decline in the number of shared meals was most dramatic amongst adults under 35.

The report’s authors also identified another interesting statistical correlation: having at least one meal with someone else in the past week is statistically just as relevant to an individual’s well-being as employment status.

As with previous research, geographical limitations are important here, as the study relates strictly to the United States. Furthermore, the direction of causality remains unclear: the report leaves room for the interpretation that eating alone causes unhappiness, as well as for the view that unhappiness causes people to eat alone. 

What is certain is that the explanation cannot be attributed to a single factor. The fact that someone lives alone is not statistically significant, given that the number of solitary meals has increased even among people who live with others.

However, this finding also has a corollary. The data on meals only capture one segment of the day. Nevertheless, research into time use enables us to determine whether this shift from social to individual behaviour is also occurring in other areas of daily life.

We are spending more and more time at home and alone

Between 2003 and 2022, American adults spent an additional one hour and 39 minutes at home per day on average, which is an increase of around 10 per cent compared to the beginning of the period. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey from Princeton reached this conclusion by analysing nineteen years of data from the American Time Use Survey, a federal survey that tracks where Americans spend their time day by day. This increase is evident across almost all demographic categories and for most types of activities, suggesting that the explanation goes beyond a single social group or cause.

A second study by Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, published in the Journal of Population Economics, makes a complementary observation based on the same data. In addition to time spent at home, the proportion of leisure time spent alone has increased, particularly in the form of solitary activities such as watching television. Meanwhile, time spent with people from other households has steadily declined. This trend is more pronounced among men, those without a university education, and those on lower incomes, suggesting growing inequality in subjective well-being between social groups.

However, the link to well-being is more of a preliminary indication, as time spent at home can encompass very different lifestyles, ranging from isolation to spending time with family or a partner. Furthermore, the study, which documents behaviour solely in the United States, notes a sharp rise in loneliness in 2020, which coincided with pandemic-related isolation. It is therefore possible that we are not merely talking about a natural trend, but also a reactive phenomenon followed by a partial recovery.

The fact that we are spending more time at home alone does not tell us what we are losing or gaining from this change. To understand this, it is worth examining the stages of life most strongly associated with socialising outside the home. Adolescence is a case in point. Research shows that some of the behaviours that defined it a few decades ago are constantly changing.

Adolescence is becoming more subdued and perhaps less sociable when away from screens.

Data from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) covers thirty years of continuous monitoring. The latest statistics, gathered in 2024, are based on responses from 113,882 15 to 16-year-olds across 37 European countries. In the 32 countries with comparable data series since 1995, the proportion of people who have consumed alcohol at least once in their lifetime has fallen from 88 per cent to 74 per cent, while consumption in the last month has dropped from 55 per cent to 43 per cent.

The decline in substance use has gone hand in hand with a reduction in face-to-face socialising with friends in the evening, rather than simply shifting socialising to the online environment.

Smoking is following a similar trajectory: the proportion of people who have ever smoked has fallen from 68 per cent to 32 per cent — a reduction of more than half over three decades. However, there is a counterbalance: the use of e-cigarettes is rising steadily, suggesting that the decline in some forms of risk coincides with the emergence of others.

Similarly, data from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, which was conducted in over 25 countries, shows that the decline in substance use has coincided with a reduction in face-to-face evening socialising with friends rather than a shift towards online socialising. Therefore, to gain a deeper understanding of this trend, we must recognise that the risks of adolescence have gradually receded from the physical world, rather than merely concluding that young people are “better behaved”. In the longer term, however, this more cautious or delayed entry into certain aspects of adult life is also reflected in another decision, with far greater demographic consequences.

We are having fewer children, and we are having them later

The Global Burden of Disease study, published in The Lancet, tracks fertility across 204 countries and territories between 1950 and 2021, effectively covering the entire global population over seven decades. It concludes that there has been a widespread decline, evident on every continent, regardless of economic development levels. In OECD countries, the average fertility rate in 2022 was just 1.5 children per woman, while the average age of first-time motherhood increased from 26.4 years in 2000 to 29.5 years in 2022.

What sets this trend apart is that although the data are extremely robust, they do not provide a single explanation for these changes. Factors under consideration include rising housing costs, greater economic insecurity in young adulthood, the expansion of education, access to contraception, changing gender roles and the transformation of the labour market. These factors are intertwined, each likely contributing to the overall explanation, but none can be identified as the primary cause in isolation. The Lancet study itself avoids this sort of attribution, merely documenting the trajectory rather than its catalyst.

The decline in birth rates alters age structures and the intergenerational balance. However, it is also closely linked to the physical presence of a person’s family network.

Households are getting smaller

A 2024 study published in Genus, the journal of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, analysed 793 observations from 156 countries covering the period from 1970 to 2020. The key finding was a widespread decline in average household size of approximately 0.5 people per decade. This figure may seem small at first, but, accumulated over five decades, it significantly alters the typical household structure in which a child grows up or an adult grows old.

A second analysis based on 279 censuses from 90 countries and published in Population and Development Review adds the observation that, in almost all countries studied, the proportion of people living with relatives outside the nuclear family – that is, grandparents, uncles, cousins and adult siblings – is falling. Societies with the highest level of development also have the highest proportion of people who live alone.

In effect, the immediate physical context of everyday life, the space we involuntarily share with others, has been steadily shrinking in almost every region of the world. At the same time, another sphere that has served as a framework for community, identity, and continuity across generations for centuries is undergoing significant changes.

Religion is becoming more fluid

A 2025 analysis by the Pew Research Centre, based on over 2,700 censuses, surveys, and national registers, shows that between 2010 and 2020, the proportion of the world’s population affiliated with a religion fell modestly from 76.7 per cent to 75.8 per cent whilst those with no religious affiliation rose from 23.3 per cent to 24.2 per cent, an increase of approximately 270 million people.

During the same decade, the global proportion of the Muslim population increased by 1.8 per cent, mainly due to higher fertility rates in regions with a Muslim-majority population.

We are therefore witnessing a reshaping of the religious landscape; population growth here, and erosion through individual choices there. Pew attributes much of the growth in the unaffiliated population to religious switching: children who are raised in a religion but leave it in adulthood.

Consequently, the mechanism behind the figures is primarily biographical (linked to personal choice) and only secondarily demographic (linked to birth rates). As with work, meals, the household, or information, religious affiliation has traditionally been a given. People were born into and remained within the same faith community, just as they were born into and remained in an unchosen geographical location, or remained in a workplace for decades.

The Pew data suggest that this type of affiliation is fading and giving way to one shaped by personal choice. This choice is sometimes preceded by a re-evaluation, with religion becoming just one item on an ever-growing list of aspects of life that have shifted from being inherited to being chosen. Indeed, choice itself is playing an increasingly important role in the way people shape their everyday lives.

We are, increasingly, actively avoiding information

We have never had easier access to information than we do today. Yet, interest in the news is in freefall. The Digital News Report 2026, published by the Reuters Institute and based on almost 100,000 interviews conducted across 48 markets, reveals that the percentage of individuals claiming to be extremely or very interested in the news has plummeted by 13 percentage points since 2021, dropping from 59% to just under 46%. Deliberate avoidance of the news, a distinct category from mere disinterest, has increased to 42 per cent, up from 29 per cent in 2017, when the indicator was first introduced.

Will the current generation of young people return to the media consumption habits of older generations?

A systematic review from June 2026 synthesised 125 studies on this topic and identified three types of factors behind this phenomenon: some are individual, such as emotional fatigue and a sense of powerlessness; some are social, such as the desire to avoid conflict in conversations; and some are linked to the design and way in which algorithms amplify certain types of content. Therefore, there is no single reason why more and more people are deliberately choosing to opt out of the news feed; rather, it is a mix of reactions to an information environment that they perceive as being dominated by excess.

The year 2026 can also be seen as a symbolic threshold in this regard. For the first time, social media and video platforms have overtaken news organisations’ websites and apps as the main channel for accessing news, on average, across the 48 markets analysed. This trend is being driven by young people under the age of 25, leading researchers to wonder whether the current generation will ever return to the media consumption habits of older generations once they reach adulthood.

However, recent technological advances have given us greater control over our exposure to information, contexts, and other people, and this is not limited to media consumption. In recent years, they have become a feature of one of the activities that most firmly structures our departure from the private sphere: work.

Working from home

Perhaps the most visible change brought about by the pandemic was working from home. In 2020, it seemed to be a temporary and enforced experiment. Five years later, however, statistics show that a structural change has in fact taken place.

A study published in Labour Economics, based on over a billion job advertisements from 20 OECD countries, shows that the proportion of jobs offering the option to work from home increased from approximately 2.5 per cent in January 2020 to around 11 per cent in January 2023. This figure remained high even after health restrictions were lifted. Interest from candidates in such roles increased fivefold over the same period, suggesting that the change came not only from employers but was also sought after by employees.

The consequences for the way people interact in the workplace are harder to quantify, but two independent studies provide some statistical snapshots.

One experiment, carried out at Microsoft and involving 61,182 employees, found that working from home had made internal professional relationships more rigid and static, with clearer departmental boundaries. It also led to a shift in communication from synchronous methods, such as calls and spontaneous meetings, to asynchronous methods, such as email.

Researchers at MIT measured the effect of the disappearance of in-office work, finding a 6.2 per cent decrease in existing superficial social connections and a 38.7 per cent decrease in the formation of new connections during periods of full remote working. The same data shows that the partial return to the office has begun to rebuild these types of connections, though not yet reaching pre-pandemic levels.

While working from home reveals what happens to the forms of proximity dictated by the organisation of social life, another set of data concerns the opposite extreme: the proximity of people in intimate relationships. In several affluent societies, physical contact appears to be becoming less frequent.

In several affluent societies, sexual activity is becoming less frequent

In the UK, three waves of the Natsal national survey, published in The BMJ, recorded a decline in sexual activity frequency, including among married or cohabiting couples. At the same time, the study notes an increase in the proportion of people who say they would like to have sex more frequently than they currently do. Therefore, the data indicate not a decline in desire, but an increasingly pronounced gap between stated desire and actual frequency.

In the United States, a study published in JAMA Network Open shows that between 2000–2002 and 2016–2018, the percentage of men aged 18–24 who had not been sexually active in the previous year increased from 18.9% to 30.9%. More moderate increases were also seen among men and women aged 25–34, suggesting that the change is not strictly limited to younger adults.

A third set of data comes from Japan, where seven waves of the National Fertility Survey, collected between 1990 and 2015, show a steady increase in the proportion of young adults with no heterosexual experience. The social, economic, and cultural context in Japan differs sufficiently from that in the US and the UK for the repetition of the same pattern across all three countries to be an argument in favour of a more global phenomenon.

Explanations proposed in specialist literature include economic pressure and housing instability delaying the formation of stable couples, the increasing amount of time spent in the digital sphere to the detriment of face-to-face interactions that typically precede a relationship, and broader changes in norms regarding coupledom and parenthood. However, none of these hypotheses has yet been validated as the primary cause.

Between the lines

When viewed in isolation, each of the ten trends discussed in this article appears to tell its own story. Sometimes they are about technology, and at other times they are about family, work, religion or intimate relationships. However, underlying them all, we can discern a common thread that is less obvious until we place them side by side. An increasing number of life’s circumstances that were once simply accepted can now be selected, filtered, postponed or avoided. We can now decide who we talk to, where we work, what we see, when we respond and how much of other people’s lives we allow to enter our own.

The spirit of the age seems characterised by intensifying loneliness coupled with ever-increasing individual control.

Few previous generations would have turned down the freedom that the current generation enjoys in terms of control over their own lives. However, this freedom comes at a cost, with unwanted side effects.

A study published in PNAS involving over 50,000 people across eight countries shows that personal well-being is associated with both the amount of time spent socialising and the diversity of one’s social network (family, friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances, and even strangers). This link remains valid even after statistically controlling for the total time spent with others. Yet it is precisely this kind of diversity, the encounters we would not have chosen, that is most at risk when every aspect of life becomes a matter of choice. The neighbours we didn’t choose, the colleague who interrupts us at the wrong moment, the awkward cousin, the unexpected question from a stranger, and the five-minute conversation that wasn’t on the agenda. These are all the elements that are eliminated first when control is exercised consistently.

The ten trends, measured separately using different methods in different countries, all point to the same idea. There is a price to pay for a life controlled by choices down to the finest detail. And it is not yet clear whether only wealthy societies will feel the acute cost of these social transformations, nor whether we, as a society, will find effective ways to paying the price.