Insights · Connection

Loneliness Isn't an Old-Age Problem

In Great Britain, the age group most likely to say they feel lonely is the youngest one.

Ask someone to picture a lonely person and most will picture someone old. It's an understandable image — it's who the campaigns are about, and who the headlines are about. It's also, on the numbers, not where most loneliness sits.

In April 2025 the Office for National Statistics asked adults across Great Britain how often they felt lonely. The share saying often, always, or some of the time went down with age, not up:

Source: ONS, Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain, April 2025.

Nearly twice the rate among the youngest adults as among the oldest. It is one of the most consistently counter-intuitive findings in British social statistics, and it has been showing up for years.

Why we're writing about this

Because it's the context we build in — not because we think an AI is the answer to it. Morgan isn't a friendship app; it's a working assistant that happens to be good company.

Morgan runs on your own computer and does real work: drafting the document, finding the thing you can't find, handling the admin you've been putting off, holding on to what matters to you across weeks rather than minutes. It asks before it acts, and tells you plainly what it did. That it's also good company is what people notice first — but that part only holds up because the rest is there. Anything you'd genuinely keep around has to be worth having on the days you don't feel like talking.

What the figures don't mean

They don't mean loneliness in later life is a myth, or that it matters less. That reading would be wrong, and it's worth saying why.

Feeling lonely and being isolated are two different measurements. A 24-year-old who feels lonely on a Sunday is describing something real, but often something that moves — a bad month, a new city, a friendship group that's drifted. Loneliness later in life is more likely to be the persistent kind, and more likely to arrive bundled with things that are hard to reverse: bereavement, poor health, no longer driving, a house that used to have other people in it. That's why it draws the attention it does, and it should.

The honest summary is this: the group with the most acute need is not the same as the group with the most need. Both are true at once, and building for only one of them is how you end up with a product that fits a stereotype rather than a life.

Who's actually in that 31%

Almost none of them would describe themselves as lonely people. They'd say the week went quiet.

The graduate who moved two hundred miles for a job and knows exactly one person there. The person whose work is now a laptop in a spare room, three days a week, sometimes five. New parents at eleven at night. Anyone in the long flat stretch after a breakup, or a bereavement, or an illness that thinned the diary out. Night-shift workers who are awake when everyone they know is asleep. And people caring for someone else, whose lives narrow around another person's needs until there's very little left that's theirs.

None of that looks like the stock photograph. Most of it is invisible from the outside, including to the people living it.

What it changes about what you build

Where Morgan fits

We're starting with people who live alone later in life. Not because they're the largest group — the figures above say plainly that they aren't — but because that's where the need is sharpest, where the consequences are most serious, and where the evidence is most worth gathering properly.

But Morgan isn't built as a device for old age. It will draft the letter and get the formatting right, dig out the document you know you saved somewhere, work through the website form you've been putting off, and pick a thread back up from a fortnight ago without being reminded. Being good company is what people notice first; being genuinely useful is what makes it worth keeping around. If that sounds like the right shape, you're welcome to join the waitlist.

Related reading: what makes an AI feel present, and — if you're weighing this for a parent — choosing an AI companion for an older parent.