Feeling Out of Touch With the Times Is Linked to Loneliness in Older Adults

Older adults who feel they have lost touch with the pace of social change tend to be lonelier, both at the moment they are asked and again two years later, according to a new longitudinal study of people aged 75 and older published in the European Journal of Ageing. The finding comes from a two-wave panel survey conducted in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2021 and 2023, and it suggests that a psychological experience researchers call obsolescence may be a meaningful correlate of loneliness in very late life.

Psychological obsolescence, a concept introduced in aging psychology in the 1990s, describes a perceived discrepancy between a person’s own characteristics—abilities, knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes—and the demands of contemporary society. As social norms shift, communication practices evolve, and everyday life becomes increasingly digitalized, some individuals come to feel that the world is moving faster than they can adapt. The study’s authors, Nora M. Degen and Frieder R. Lang of Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, hypothesized that this sense of being out of sync with the times could undermine social participation and connectedness, and thereby contribute to loneliness in later life.

To test this, the researchers drew on data from an ongoing Health and Social Participation Survey (Gesundheit und soziale Teilhabe, GesTe). The baseline sample was drawn in 2021 from the population register of Nuremberg, with 10,000 individuals randomly invited to participate. Of the 9,548 eligible individuals in the verified sample, 2,370 returned a valid questionnaire, a response rate of 24.8 percent. The second wave, conducted in 2023 exclusively by mailed paper questionnaires, yielded 818 longitudinal respondents whose data formed the basis of the analyses, with full-information maximum likelihood used to handle missing data.

The longitudinal sample consisted of adults aged 75 to 95, with a mean age of 80.99 years. Loneliness was measured with the 6-item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale, scored from 0 to 12, with higher scores indicating greater loneliness; the instrument showed good reliability at both timepoints, with a McDonald’s omega of 0.84. Psychological obsolescence was assessed at baseline with three items originally developed by Brandtstädter and Wentura, including statements such as “I increasingly feel that I have lost touch with today’s time,” rated on a five-point scale. Covariates included age, gender, relationship status, education, financial situation, subjective health, the number of medical diagnoses, and a social isolation index.

The results showed a clear cross-sectional pattern. At baseline, psychological obsolescence was significantly and positively associated with loneliness, with a standardized coefficient of 0.238. People who reported greater difficulty keeping up with contemporary social change reported higher loneliness at that same moment. The baseline model explained 22.3 percent of the variance in loneliness, with psychological obsolescence accounting for an additional 5.2 percent of the variance beyond the covariates. Other significant baseline correlates included being single or divorced, being widowed, and being socially isolated, all associated with higher loneliness, while higher age and a better financial situation were associated with lower loneliness.

The longitudinal findings were more modest but still notable. Loneliness showed substantial temporal stability over the two-year period, with baseline loneliness strongly predicting follow-up loneliness at a standardized coefficient of 0.601. Beyond that stability, psychological obsolescence at baseline was still significantly associated with loneliness at follow-up, at a standardized coefficient of 0.074, after accounting for baseline loneliness and the covariates. This small prospective association added an additional 0.5 percent of explained variance in follow-up loneliness. Among the covariates, being single or divorced and being socially isolated were significant longitudinal predictors of subsequent loneliness, whereas financial situation and widowhood were not significant at follow-up.

On average, loneliness scores rose slightly over the two years, from 2.23 to 2.41, a statistically significant mean increase. When the loneliness score was dichotomized using a mean split—a cutoff the authors note identifies only very severe loneliness—the prevalence was 8.64 percent in 2021 and 8.29 percent in 2023, consistent with figures reported in other German panel studies. Psychological obsolescence itself was relatively low in the sample, averaging 2.25 on the one-to-five scale. Loneliness and psychological obsolescence showed small-to-moderate positive correlations at both timepoints.

The study also included exploratory cross-lagged analyses, which suggested an association between psychological obsolescence at baseline and loneliness at follow-up, but no significant reverse association from loneliness to later obsolescence. The authors are careful to interpret these as exploratory rather than evidence of directional effects, noting that with only two measurement occasions the possibility of bidirectional processes cannot be ruled out. Lonely individuals, they point out, tend to exhibit more negative self-evaluations and interpretations of social interactions, which could in turn foster a sense of being out of touch with contemporary society. Future research with additional measurement occasions is needed to investigate these potentially bidirectional processes more comprehensively.

Several limitations qualify the findings. All participants lived in an urban area in southern Germany, limiting generalizability to other regions or rural populations. The study began in mid-2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, so no pre-pandemic loneliness data were available, and initial loneliness levels may have been affected by the acute phase of the pandemic. The analysis did not account for possible changes in sociodemographic or health factors between the two waves, and personality traits, which previous research has linked to loneliness, were not measured. Attrition was also selective: older participants and those with higher social isolation were less likely to remain in the study, while participants with higher education, better financial resources, and better subjective health were more likely to continue, though the authors describe the effects as generally small.

Despite these caveats, the authors argue that psychological obsolescence may represent an additional factor in understanding loneliness in later life, beyond the mechanisms proposed in established theoretical models of social relationships and aging. They suggest that perceiving oneself in sync with social change and today’s way of living may act as a protective factor, while the demands of modern life may leave some older adults feeling lonelier. Because meta-analyses indicate that interventions targeting cognition or attention are among the most effective approaches to reducing loneliness, the authors propose that psychological obsolescence, as a cognitive representation of the present time, should be examined for its sensitivity to change in future studies. They also note that the construct explained only a modest proportion of additional variance in follow-up loneliness, an estimate they consider conservative given that obsolescence was measured as a broad, global construct rather than in specific domains such as technology or social norms.

Subject of Research: The association between psychological obsolescence and loneliness in adults aged 75 and older over two years

Article Title: How perceiving pace of social change affects loneliness: psychological obsolescence as predictor for loneliness in late-life sample

Article References: Degen, N. M., & Lang, F. R. (2026). How perceiving pace of social change affects loneliness: psychological obsolescence as predictor for loneliness in late-life sample. European Journal of Ageing, 23(1), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-026-00951-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10433-026-00951-8

Keywords: loneliness, psychological obsolescence, aging, older adults, longitudinal study, social change, social isolation, Germany, De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale, late life, mental health, social participation