Belonging has become an increasingly important concept as loneliness and social isolation statistics continue to climb in Australia and around the world.

Loneliness, as defined by the World Health Organisation, is the painful feeling created by a gap between the social connections we want and those we actually experience. Social isolation, by contrast, describes an objective lack of sufficient social connections.

Which is to say that loneliness isn’t the feeling experienced when someone is alone, but rather the disconnect between the connectedness we seek and actually experience.

Despite technological advancements that present us with endless ways to connect, social isolation in Australia has nearly doubled over the last two decades.

Ending Loneliness Together’s State of the Nation 2026 research found that 51% of Australians experience some form of social disconnection — loneliness, social isolation or both. Nearly one in five experience both, while almost one in six are reported as severely lonely.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s (AIHW) data paints a similar picture. In April 2025, 40% of Australians reported experiencing loneliness at least some of the time during the previous week.

It’s not just Australians who are growing more lonely. The WHO estimates that around one in six people worldwide experience loneliness, with rates highest among adolescents and young adults.

Belonging sits between identity and community, and is the feeling of “there is a place for someone like me here”. Belonging is not simply having a community available to us. It is experiencing ourselves as part of it.

Here is where there is a tension between Australian data on loneliness and belonging.

AIHW reports that 81% of Australian adults felt a sense of belonging in their neighbourhood in 2024, and 82% believed people in their local area would be willing to help their neighbours. Yet almost half said they sometimes or often felt isolated from others, while 41% sometimes or often felt left out.

Those figures measure different things and come from different questions, but together they highlight an important point: Belonging is not simply about having a community available to us. It is experiencing ourselves as part of it.

Despite feeling a sense of belonging within their neighbourhoods, Australians’ overall sense of belonging and social cohesion scores have been on the decline since the pandemic in 2020.

Indicators of Australians’ sense of belonging dropped only 1% from 78 in 2023 to 77 in 2024, following several years of decline, from a peak of 88 in 2020.

This fall over time is largely attributed to smaller numbers of people reporting that they “take great pride in the Australian way of life and culture, and have a great sense of belonging in Australia” (O’Donnell et al. 2024). While the sense of belonging scores have declined over time, more than four-fifths (85%) of Australians ‘have a sense of belonging in Australia’ to a great (47%) or moderate (38%) extent (O’Donnell et al. 2024).

A similar study revealed that participating in arts and creative and cultural experiences and activities helps to ‘build feelings of belonging, reduces social exclusion and isolation and acts as a catalyst for understanding’ (ANA 2024).

Volunteering is also seen as a way to help build community connection and social cohesion, but AIWH reports that volunteering rates declined during the 2020 onset of the pandemic, dropping from 36% in 2019 to 27% in 2022. The most recent data from 2024 has that number sitting at 28%.

So what has prompted our declining sense of belonging?

Cost of living crisis

Rising costs and living pressures have a direct effect on social connection and cohesion. As per AIWH, “financial wellbeing is strongly related to trust, belonging and happiness, while financial hardship is related to having a weaker sense of belonging and less trust in government, institutions and others in society.” (O’Donnell et al. 2024).

This current crisis has impacted many Australian households, who have had to cut back on discretionary spending to meet rising costs of essentials like housing, food, healthcare and transport.  In 2023 more than half (53%) of Australians surveyed as part of the Melbourne Institute’s Taking the Pulse of the Nation study were ‘just making ends meet or worse’, and 90% of those financially stressed indicated ‘they have had one or more challenges in paying bills or putting food on the table in the past three months’ (Payne et al. 2023).

Discrimination over diversity

As regular Australians struggle to make ends meet, some of them become more susceptible to bad-faith actors like the One Nation party, which lay the blame for their woes at the feet of our immigrant population.

This is evident in the statistics, with data from the ABS General Social Survey (GSS) in 2020 reporting that around 1 in 6 (16%) overseas-born Australians aged 15 and over experienced some form of discrimination in the previous 12 months (ABS 2021).

In the Mapping Social Cohesion survey (2025), 49% of Australians believe that immigration numbers are too high. In 2025, 58 per cent of the total population and 79 per cent of the population who think immigration is too high agree or strongly agree that ‘immigrants increase house prices’. Approximately one-half (48 per cent) of people who think immigration is too high also agree that ‘immigrants take jobs away’ (31 per cent of all people).

Despite this, support for multiculturalism remains high, with 83% of adults agreeing that multiculturalism has been good for Australia in 2025.

Creating the right conditions for a sense of belonging isn’t just about combating loneliness. It matters for workplaces trying to retain people. For councils designing neighbourhoods. For sporting organisations recruiting volunteers. For universities supporting students. For cultural institutions seeking audiences.

And for brands trying to create communities rather than simply customer databases.

It’s not just about how we bring people together, but rather how we create spaces where people can see themselves and have a meaningful role to play.