Being seen online is not the same as being known at home.
I remember sitting in a parent workshop in Karachi last year when a father raised his hand and said something I have not been able to forget.
“Sir, mera beta ghar mein rehte hue bhi ghar mein nahin hota.” (“Sir, my son lives in our home, but he is never really there.”)
He wasn’t talking about physical absence. His son was in the next room, phone in hand, surrounded by voices from a screen. The father hadn’t lost him to rebellion or bad company. He had lost him to something quieter. A distance with no name. A kind of presence that isn’t really there.
His son has hundreds of followers. He posts. He scrolls. He replies. But when was the last time anyone, including the people who love him most, asked him something real?
He has 847 followers. He came home from school today and didn’t speak to a single person he trusts. That’s not a connection. That’s performance.
The Loneliness That Looks Like Connection
We tend to imagine loneliness as something visible, like an empty room, a child eating alone at lunch. But the loneliness growing inside this generation doesn’t look like that. It scrolls. It posts a story by nine at night. It reacts with a laughing emoji to something it doesn’t find funny.
A 2025 cohort study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that total time spent online is associated with greater loneliness among young adults, even when those hours are filled with what looks like social interaction. A separate 2025 review in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health confirmed a dose-response relationship: teenagers who spend more than three hours daily on social media face roughly twice the risk of poor mental health outcomes. The global Gen Z average currently sits at over three hours daily, with teenage girls averaging closer to five.
But the type of use matters as much as the hours. Research consistently shows that passive consumption, endlessly scrolling through other people’s curated highlights, is most strongly linked to depression, anxiety, and loneliness. It is the difference between watching a party from outside a window and actually being in the room.
A 2025 Pew Research survey of teenagers found that the share who say social media makes them feel they have people who can support them through difficult times has dropped significantly from 67% in 2022 to just 52% in 2024. Teenagers themselves are quietly registering what the adults in their lives haven’t yet said aloud: these platforms aren’t filling the gap.
What Pakistani Teenagers Are Actually Carrying
In Pakistan, this loneliness has a particular texture.
Our teenagers arrive at adolescence already carrying weight that much of the world does not see. Academic pressure that begins before O-Levels and rarely lets up. Family expectations communicated more through anxiety than conversation. Economic uncertainty that filters into the home in ways young people absorb without the words to describe it. And in many households, particularly for boys, emotional expression is still seen as a sign of weakness rather than a sign of health.
Then we hand them a phone. Not out of neglect. Out of love, often. Out of exhaustion. Out of the genuine belief that connection is happening because the screen is always lit up.
DataReportal’s Digital 2025 Pakistan report shows there are now 66.9 million social media user identities in Pakistan, a figure growing rapidly among those aged 15 to 24. But social media access is not the same as emotional access. A teenager can spend four hours on TikTok and still go to sleep feeling that no one in their life actually knows them.
And when they reach the point of needing help? The options are heartbreakingly thin. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Health Services found that Pakistan has just 0.19 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, one of the lowest ratios in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region, and that only 0.4% of the national health budget is allocated to mental health. In most schools, a trained counsellor remains a luxury rather than a standard. The conversation about adolescent mental health in Pakistan is still largely happening in whispers or not happening at all.
So what do young people do with feelings they cannot name, in spaces where help is scarce, and stigma is heavy? They scroll. Not because it helps. Because it fills the silence. Because it is warm, even when it is hollow.
A Different Kind of C.A.L.M
Parents often ask me: “Toh phir kya karein?” (“So what should we do?”)
The honest answer is: less monitoring, more meaning.
In my previous articles, I talked about C.A.L.M approach, but in the context of adolescent loneliness, here is how I’d frame it:
C — Create presence, not just proximity. Being in the same room is not the same as being there. Put your phone down first. Your teenager is watching whether you model what real, unhurried attention looks like.
A — Acknowledge the loneliness, name it. Many teenagers don’t have the language for what they feel. When you say, “Kabhi kabhi lagta hai ke sab ke saath hote hue bhi kuch khaali sa lagta hai kya kabhi aisa hota hai tere saath?” (“Sometimes you can be surrounded by people and still feel something is missing, does that happen to you?”), You give them permission to be honest.
L — Lower the threshold for conversation. Not every talk has to be serious. The lightest conversations about a show, a joke, something strange in the news are often the door to the real ones. Start small.
M — Make home a place they don’t need to escape. If the phone is the only space a teenager feels unmonitored, unjudged, and free to simply be, that is a question about home, not only about the screen.
Pakistani teenagers are not broken. They are navigating one of the most complex periods in human development, during one of the most overstimulating moments in history, in a culture that still too often tells them: chup raho, sab theek ho jayega. (“Stay quiet. It will all be fine.”)
But it will not be fine on its own. Invisible loneliness doesn’t disappear. It accumulates. So here is the question worth sitting with tonight before anyone reaches for their phone:
When did someone in your home last ask your teenager something they didn’t already know the answer to?