As families shrink, our primary relationship is increasingly with ourselves

More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle mused in Politics that to live alone, a man must be a god or a beast, or words to that effect. I wonder what he would have thought of the popularity of China’s “Are You Dead?” app. For Aristotle, we are social animals, thriving in the “polis” in the company of family, friends and fellow citizens. The average mother had at least five children. Many homes housed three, even four, generations. Family life was noisy and crowded, full of companionship, contest and compromise. To live alone was peculiar. Inhuman even. What would Aristotle make of the entirely novel demographic trend towards loneliness: growing up as only children; marrying late, if at all; having children late, if at all; living alone in old age? These trends are unique in human history, have emerged at astonishing speed and are being aggravated by the social disconnection of social media. It seems our lives as social animals are being transformed within a generation. And not for the better. The Are You Dead? app, launched in May by three youngsters from Zhengzhou in Henan, went viral in China a week or so ago, and has focused attention not just on loneliness, but on the remarkable nationwide growth of one-person households. One of the app’s creators, identified only as Lyu, reportedly said the app was aimed at young users in big cities who were likely to experience both “a strong sense of loneliness due to the lack of people to communicate with” and “worries about unforeseen events occurring without anyone knowing”. “As fertility drops, life expectancy gets longer, marriages decline and divorce rates keep going up … all of these are creating the trend of one-person households,” National University of Singapore social demographer Wei-Jun Jean Yeung told the Financial Times. China’s one-child policy, in place from 1980 to 2015, has clearly aggravated the loneliness problem. By 2024, 19.5 per cent of Chinese households consisted of just one person, up from 7.8 per cent two decades ago, according to official statistics. Forecasters say up to 200 million Chinese may be living alone by 2030. “In big cities, everyone is an isolated, atomised individual. People live in soundproof apartments, not knowing the surname of their neighbours,” one commentator reportedly wrote of the Are You Dead? app. “This creates an extremely intense fear, which is commonly known as ‘lonely death’”. But dying alone and undiscovered is not a China-only phenomenon. Japan has long been concerned over its “lonely deaths”, which it calls kodokushi. While the concern there is more focused on the country’s large aged population – as it is in South Korea with godoksa – China’s equivalent embraces the dangerous implications of youth loneliness as well. In Hong Kong, single-person households are the fastest-growing type, accounting for over 21 per cent of all households last year after growing to almost 600,000 in 2024, according to official data. Nor is this a problem arousing concern only in Asia’s ageing societies. Worldwide, single-person households are estimated to make up more than 28 per cent of all households. Britain appointed a minister for loneliness in 2018 and drafted a national strategy to tackle loneliness in the same year. Germany also released a national strategy to counter loneliness in 2024. The US Surgeon General’s 2023 report “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” noted Americans living alone had risen from 13 per cent of all households in 1960 to 29 per cent in 2022. Beyond loneliness, there are other radical implications of the global demographic transformation. I grew up in the 1950s, the eldest of five, and it was clear the rough-and-tumble of childhood conflict and contest had a profound impact on shaping our personalities. I had the firstborn privilege of an (albeit temporary) exclusive relationship with my parents. But along with that came the challenge of parental angst and inexperience. The childhood battle for steadily increasing independence was hard-fought. As sisters and a brother followed over the next 12 years, they benefited from more experienced – and relaxed – parenting. But the contest for attention, and our position in the family pecking order, had a very real impact. The dynamic in a single-child household must be totally different and in the six decades since the 1960s, this big-family scrummaging has disappeared – almost certainly permanently. The average fertility rate across the world has plunged from 5.3 to 2.3, close to the replacement level of 2.1. In the UK, that transition took 95 years. In China, it took just 11. In economies like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the fertility rate has fallen firmly below one. In China, clearly influenced by the one-child policy, the fertility rate has slumped to 1, resulting in a shrinking population for the past three years. Even India’s, at 1.98, has fallen to within a sliver of 2.1. The swarming sociability of family life is disappearing for good. Even the “ideal” two-child family is becoming less common with the childless or one-child households becoming the norm. Our primary relationships in the future are likely to be with ourselves. Coping with loneliness is set to be a defining life skill. Social media are severing person-to-person communication. Working from home is altering teamwork. Even job interviews are becoming online discussions shaped by algorithms. No, Aristotle would not be comfortable at all. Perhaps we are destined for loneliness as gods or beasts.

As families shrink, our primary relationship is increasingly with ourselves

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The swarming sociability of family life is fading as one-person households and lonely deaths rise. Coping with loneliness is now a life skill

The swarming sociability of family life is fading as one-person households and lonely deaths rise. Coping with loneliness is now a life skill