Finding friendships in adulthood can be challenging because making friends can take more effort and intention as it’s not as easy to keep in touch with your peers as it is at school or university.
For Gen Zers, the ability to socialize at work may have been impacted as companies have shifted to hybrid or fully remote work models.
Generation Z and Covid19
The pandemic lockdowns have forced people to go through a period of isolation and disruption to school activities and even work. Likewise, newcomers to the workforce found themselves isolated from the new colleagues they would normally have encountered.
In this way, experts say, the social circle has generally narrowed after two years of pandemicrelated isolation. That means there are young people who are looking for new ways to make friends.
“There was a lack of consistency during the pandemic,” says Joyce Chuinkam, research manager at Los Angelesbased market research agency Talk Shoppe.
she interviewed millennia (born between 1981 and 1995) and adolescents Generation Z (born between 1995 and 2010) on their friendships during the pandemic.
Multiple polls show how much the pandemic has impacted the sense of togetherness among Gen Z youth. So this lack of connections can affect everyone’s wellbeing, but the timing couldn’t be worse.
They are currently facing times of immense life changes: graduating from school, moving to new cities, starting new jobs, entering the labor market.
According to the Talk Shoppe survey, Chuinkam concluded that Gen Z are more open than Millennials to making new friends online via friend apps.
Gen Z feels like they’re “more likely to make friends” when they meet up in Facebook groups, says Chuinkam.
These social networking groups often attract people with common hobbies and also offer a “more convenient way to meet people” than the facetoface experience of an app.