There is so much talk of all the lonely people in the world right now that the pervasive state of loneliness is being called an epidemic.

I don’t think that is an overstatement. I see loneliness around me all of the time. Everywhere. Not just in the faces of rough sleepers who look up at passers-by in the hope of finding eye contact and a little empathy – but also in the faces of those who rush past avoiding them, their heads wired or aired to their phones.

I see it on the faces in the bus glued to screens or zoned out in the bubbles of their cars on the freeway.

Academic research all over the world, including here in Australia, indicates young people are especially prone to loneliness and its perilous repercussions for mental and physical health. Many will find this counterintuitive. Surely those of older cohorts – facing the deaths of partners, friends and siblings, the prospect of living alone or shifting into care or already there – would be experiencing more isolation?

But much about the young and loneliness makes perfect sense to me. “The young” – people up to say 25 (who I could also call super-young given the demographic precipice where I hover) are the generation of hyper-connectivity. Most of us are unhealthily yet necessarily reliant on our phones (as recent network outages illustrate too well). But it’s no stretch to say that those up to........

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