Aug 27, 2026 · 23 min · 10 segments
Young men in Britain are spending more time alone than they did a decade ago, but the reason may not be what you expect. A new Resolution Foundation report finds that men aged 18–29 spent roughly six…
Yeah.
So before we really get into the findings, I think we should establish why time use diaries are so uniquely revealing for this kind of societal research.
Because when you ask people a standard survey question like, how much do you work or how social are you?
Right.
You get like the idealized version of their life.
Exactly.
People misremember, I guess.
They kind of lie to themselves a bit.
Sure.
But with time use diaries, respondents are recording exactly what they're doing in these short 10 minute continuous intervals throughout the entire day.
Oh, wow.
So it's granular.
Extremely granular.
It functions almost like a stopwatch for your life.
Yeah.
It completely bypasses those narratives we tell ourselves.
And it just shows researchers the raw, unvarnished reality of how we actually navigate our environment in hour by hour.
And so the mission of this deep dive today is to basically figure out this radical, completely unequal shift in how much time different generations are spending alone based on that exact stopwatch data.
Yes.
Because spoiler alert for everyone listening, the standard narratives we constantly hear in the media, you know, about smartphones ruining everything and young people just choosing to live.
They do not tell the whole story at all.
No, not even close.
The simple narratives usually just serve to hide the most complex systemic realities.
Yeah.
So let's start by looking at what we I guess what we thought we knew.
Yeah.
So before we really get into the findings, I think we should establish why time use diaries are so uniquely revealing for this kind of societal research.
Because when you ask people a standard survey question like, how much do you work or how social are you?
Right.
You get like the idealized version of their life.
Exactly.
People misremember, I guess.
They kind of lie to themselves a bit.
Sure.
But with time use diaries, respondents are recording exactly what they're doing in these short 10 minute continuous intervals throughout the entire day.
Oh, wow.
So it's granular.
Extremely granular.
It functions almost like a stopwatch for your life.
Yeah.
It completely bypasses those narratives we tell ourselves.
And it just shows researchers the raw, unvarnished reality of how we actually navigate our environment in hour by hour.
And so the mission of this deep dive today is to basically figure out this radical, completely unequal shift in how much time different generations are spending alone based on that exact stopwatch data.
Yes.
Because spoiler alert for everyone listening, the standard narratives we constantly hear in the media, you know, about smartphones ruining everything and young people just choosing to live.
They do not tell the whole story at all.
No, not even close.
The simple narratives usually just serve to hide the most complex systemic realities.
Yeah.
So let's start by looking at what we I guess what we thought we knew.
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