The loneliest generation in history isn't Gen Z, it's the boomers who raised everyone, hosted everything, and are now sitting in quiet houses wondering where everybody went - Silicon Canals

"My mother called the other day. She's seventy-eight. She lives forty minutes away, and I hadn't actually talked to her in maybe three weeks. Three weeks. I grew up fifteen minutes from my grandmother, and my mother had coffee with her mother at least twice a week. Now my mother calls, and I'm thinking about whether I have time, and that sentence alone tells you everything you need to know about how something fundamental has broken."

"She didn't ask me to come over or complain that I hadn't visited. That would be too direct, too much pressure, too likely to create awkwardness. Instead, she talked about the weather and mentioned that my sister hadn't called her back in two weeks either. She said this like it was nothing, like it was just information, but I could hear the thing she wasn't saying: I am alone in this house, and my children are busy, and this is normal now."

"I've been reading about generational loneliness, and what I'm finding is that the boomers-this cohort that spent their entire lives showing up for everyone else-are experiencing a particular kind of isolation that nobody predicted. They were the generation that hosted Thanksgiving. They drove the carpool. They made the phone calls that held the whole social structure together. They had six to eight close friendships. They went to church or the club and saw the same faces every week. They knew their neighbors."

A seventy-eight-year-old woman lives alone and receives infrequent calls from her adult children, revealing fractured family rhythms. She avoids asking for visits and couches loneliness in neutral topics like weather and missed calls. Baby boomers who once organized holidays, carpools, weekly gatherings, and neighborhood life now face an unexpected kind of isolation. Over roughly thirty years, family dispersion, busy work schedules, youth sports, divorce, neighborhood turnover, and declining institutional attendance dismantled the social infrastructure. The people who used to connect and sustain community life increasingly find themselves without the networks they once held together.

Read at Silicon Canals