A Gallup survey of more than 19,000 US workers found Gen Z employees who work fully remote report feeling lonely on a given day nearly three times as often as baby boomers, despite being the generation assumed to be most comfortable working through a screen

Gallup’s most recent quarterly workforce study, published in July 2025, found that 27 per cent of Gen Z employees who work fully remote report feeling lonely “a lot of the day yesterday”, nearly three times the rate reported by baby boomers in the same remote arrangement, at 10 per cent. The gap sits inside a generation that grew up online, video-called through school closures, and is routinely described as the most digitally fluent workforce in history.

I’m a writer, not a psychologist, and what follows is a reading of the survey data, not professional advice about loneliness or mental health. Gallup surveyed 19,043 full and part-time US workers for this study, using self-administered web surveys with random sampling and a margin of error of roughly 1.1 percentage points. It is one survey, not a settled finding about an entire generation, and the specific 27 per cent figure applies to the subset of Gen Z workers whose jobs are fully remote, not to Gen Z as a whole.

What makes the finding harder to explain away as an obvious result is what the same survey found about preference. Only 23 per cent of remote-capable Gen Z employees said they would choose to work exclusively from home, against 35 per cent for every older generation surveyed. Seventy-one per cent of Gen Z said they preferred a hybrid arrangement instead. And when Gallup asked how likely people would be to look for another job if remote options disappeared entirely, 41 per cent of millennials said extremely likely, against 32 per cent of Gen Z. On paper, Gen Z is the generation least attached to full remote work and least willing to fight to keep it.

It is also, on this data, the loneliest inside it.

A pattern that shows up in the bigger dataset too

Gallup’s broader workplace research points the same direction, even outside the specific Gen Z comparison. A separate Gallup report, drawing on a 2024 sample of nearly 20,000 US employees, found that one in five workers overall report feeling lonely a lot the previous day. Broken down by work location, fully remote employees reported loneliness at 25 per cent, hybrid employees at 21 per cent, and on-site employees at 16 per cent, a steady gradient rather than a single outlier group.

That report also found something easy to miss in a headline about remote work: being employed at all appears to lower loneliness relative to being unemployed, 20 per cent versus 32 per cent. Work, even in isolation, still functions as a source of structure and contact for most people. The bigger driver inside the employed population was not location alone but engagement. Actively disengaged employees reported loneliness at 31 per cent, compared with 17 per cent among employees who described themselves as engaged, a gap wider than the one between remote and on-site workers.

None of this proves that a location or a generation causes loneliness on its own. Both Gallup reports are workforce surveys built on self-reported feeling, not controlled experiments, and self-reported loneliness on a given day can be shaped by dozens of things a quarterly panel survey cannot isolate: a bad week, a recent move, a team reorganisation. What the two datasets agree on is the direction and the size of the gap, not a mechanism.

Why the most online generation might be the loneliest one logging in alone

Gallup’s own analysis offers a clue rather than a full answer. Even inside hybrid arrangements, most Gen Z workers are required to be on-site on set days but get some choice over which ones, and Gallup suggests this can mean showing up to a mostly empty office, arriving on a day colleagues did not choose, and getting the isolation of remote work without the flexibility that is meant to offset it.

My own reading adds a layer to that. Older workers who now work remotely mostly built their professional networks and workplace habits in person first, over years, before some or all of that moved online. Many Gen Z workers started their first full-time jobs during or just after a period when remote and hybrid arrangements were already the default, without ever building the same base of in-person familiarity with colleagues to draw on when the office thins out. Being fluent with a screen is not the same skill as having spent years reading a room, and the survey data does not show that fluency with technology converts automatically into the kind of casual, repeated contact that seems to protect people from feeling isolated at work.

That is an interpretation, not something Gallup’s numbers confirm directly. The survey was not designed to test why the gap exists, only to measure that it does.

The stakes are bigger than a bad day at the desk

Workplace loneliness is not a self-contained problem confined to how someone feels at their desk. The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation, drawing on a meta-analysis by the researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, put the mortality impact of chronic loneliness on roughly the same level as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, ahead of the risk associated with obesity or physical inactivity. The same advisory reported that around 40 per cent of US wage earners describe feeling isolated at work specifically, separate from the newer Gallup figures on remote and hybrid arrangements.

That statistic describes a population-level association observed across large studies over time, not a specific prediction about any one person’s health. It is a reason to take a persistent pattern of feeling isolated seriously rather than dismiss it as a minor mood, not a reason to read a lonely afternoon as a medical event.

If loneliness at work has settled into something more constant, something that is affecting sleep, concentration, or a sense of dread about logging on, that is worth raising with a GP or a counsellor rather than something an article like this one can resolve.

What the Gallup numbers describe, taken together, is a workforce where the people most comfortable with the technology of remote work are not necessarily the people best served by it. The assumption that growing up online prepares someone for working alone in a room does not hold up against the survey Gallup actually ran. Whatever is filling that gap for older, more isolated colleagues, whether it is a decade of prior office friendships or something else entirely, has not yet had the chance to build for the workers who logged in first.