A 2025 report from The Cigna Group places Gen Z at the top of a stark US generational ranking: 67 percent were classified as lonely, compared with 65 percent of millennials, 60 percent of Gen X and 44 percent of baby boomers.

Those numbers come from survey data collected in 2024, not from a diagnosis of an entire generation. They challenge the familiar image of loneliness as mainly a problem of old age, but they do not prove that being young causes loneliness or that every young adult is isolated.

The result is a finding from this dataset, not a universal rule about everyone.

What the 67 percent figure measures

The source is The Cigna Group’s 2025 Loneliness in America report. Its generational chart draws on the company’s 2024 Vitality Index. For that study, the Evernorth Research Institute and Morning Consult ran a bilingual online survey from May 29 to June 14, 2024, involving more than 5,000 US adults aged 18 and over.

The survey used quotas based on US Census data, then weighted responses to resemble the national population across age, gender, race and ethnicity, region, employment and income. In the chart, Gen Z meant adults born from 1997 through 2006. The youngest were therefore 18, while the oldest were about 27 when the fieldwork took place. Baby boomers were defined as people born from 1946 through 1964.

That is a substantial, weighted sample. It is still a self-report survey. “Lonely” here is a classification produced by answers to a questionnaire, not a clinical condition confirmed in an examination. The report does not put generational sample sizes or confidence intervals beside the chart, so the one-point difference between Gen Z and millennials should not be treated as a decisive separation.

Loneliness is not the same as being alone

Loneliness is subjective. It describes a gap between the connection a person wants and the connection they feel they have. Social isolation is more objective and concerns the extent of someone’s contact with other people. Solitude simply means being physically alone. The three can overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

A person can move through group chats, classes, shifts and crowded rooms while feeling poorly understood. Another can spend long stretches alone without wanting more company. Internet access, constant messaging and a busy social environment do not automatically protect anyone from loneliness.

A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis in The BMJ, led by Claudia Surkalim, found that prevalence estimates varied greatly with the country, age group, measure and threshold being used. The review identified data from 113 countries and territories, yet also found major geographic gaps. There is no single worldwide loneliness percentage that can be moved cleanly from one survey to another.

The old-age stereotype was always incomplete

Older adults can face real risks of disconnection. Retirement, bereavement, reduced mobility and the loss of friends may narrow opportunities for contact. The mistake is turning those risks into an assumption that age itself makes older people the loneliest group.

Research on aging has often produced a more complicated curve. One study used two major US datasets, the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project and the Health and Retirement Study, to examine age, survey-period and birth-cohort differences from 2005 to 2016. It found no overall rise in loneliness among older adults during that period, although average loneliness increased after age 75.

There is a related distinction in a 10-year study of older adults’ social networks previously covered by Science Blog. Peripheral relationships tended to fade while close ties held steadier, and emotional tone mattered more than network size. A smaller circle is not, by itself, evidence of greater loneliness.

The Cigna result overturns a stereotype more clearly than it documents a historical reversal. Its survey compares generations living at different ages during the same period. It does not show Gen Z becoming lonelier across time while baby boomers become less lonely.

Age, generation and the present are tangled together

This is the central limitation in any one-time generational ranking. Gen Z respondents are young now. Baby boomers are old now. The groups also grew up in different economies, family structures, media systems and historical moments. A cross-sectional survey cannot cleanly separate three possible explanations.

There may be an age effect, in which transitions common in young adulthood are associated with more loneliness. There may be a cohort effect, meaning something about the shared experiences of people born in the same period persists as they grow older. There may also be a period effect, created by conditions affecting everyone when the survey was conducted. Usually, a result contains some mixture of all three.

The pandemic belongs in that background, along with housing costs, unstable work, delayed family formation, changes in community institutions and digitally mediated relationships. But the Cigna survey cannot assign the 23-point Gen Z and boomer gap to any one of them. The company notes that younger generations grew up with digital technology. That observation is not evidence that phones or social media caused the difference.

The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection uses a broader framework. It describes connection as shaped by individual circumstances, relationship quality, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, technology and public policy. The evidence supports a system of influences more readily than it supports one culprit.

A US ranking is not a law of human development

International evidence makes the case for restraint even clearer. A 2026 study in the European Journal of Epidemiology used 218,048 responses from the 2023 and 2024 Gallup World Poll across 148 countries. Its globally representative analysis found that more than one in five adults reported feeling lonely, with large differences between countries and income groups.

That study used a different question and cannot be compared directly with Cigna’s 67 percent. This is precisely the point. A prevalence estimate belongs to its wording, timeframe, sample and threshold. “Felt lonely a lot of the previous day” and “classified as lonely on a multi-item scale” measure related experiences in different ways.

Generational labels introduce another temptation. They make a statistical pattern sound like a shared personality. Gen Z covers millions of people whose cultures, incomes, families, friendships and living arrangements differ sharply. An average can reveal a population-level gap while describing no particular person very well.

What this comparison can honestly tell us

The 67 percent and 44 percent figures matter because they direct attention toward younger adults in a field and a culture that long centered older age. Public discussion and research on loneliness cannot assume the person most likely to report it is elderly or lives alone.

Large questions remain. To establish a generational change, researchers would need to follow comparable groups over time, use stable measures and test whether the gap remains as Gen Z enters later adulthood. Repeated cross-sectional surveys can track changes across historical periods; longitudinal studies can show how individuals change. One chart cannot do both jobs.

In a weighted 2024 survey of US adults, Gen Z had the highest classified loneliness rate and baby boomers the lowest. That finding weakens an old assumption about who loneliness belongs to. It does not yet tell us whether the gap will travel with these generations as they age.