The ApprenticeRoute

Loneliness inside a busy social life

There was a Saturday in my second year that I still think about. I'd been out on the Friday with about fifteen people, I had plans on the Sunday, my calendar was as full as it had ever been, and I spent most of that Saturday in my room feeling profoundly on my own.

Nothing had happened. Nobody had fallen out with me. I just noticed, sitting there, that I could not think of a single person in that city I would have rung to say I was having a bad day.

I've thought about whether to write this one, because it's the kind of thing that's easy to do badly. So I want to be clear about what this article is: it's my own experience of a specific, structural thing that this route produces, written in the hope that recognising it is useful. It is not advice about mental health, which I'm not remotely qualified to give. There's a section at the end with the people who are.

Being surrounded and being lonely aren't opposites

The thing that confused me most was that it made no sense. I lived with five people. I worked with forty. I went out more in my first two years than at any point before or since. On paper this was the opposite of an isolated life, which is exactly why it took me so long to name what was going on.

Loneliness isn't about how many people are nearby. It's about whether anyone there knows you properly. And a degree apprenticeship is unusually good at producing the first thing and unusually bad at producing the second.

Here's why, structurally.

Proximity isn't intimacy. You see the same forty people constantly, but almost always in groups, almost always in contexts set by the programme. Group social life at scale is genuinely enjoyable and it does not, on its own, produce closeness. Forty acquaintances and no confidants is a very easy state to arrive at without noticing.

You can't be fully honest with any of them. This is the crux, and it's specific to this route. The things you most want to talk about at 19 — that you feel behind, that an assignment went badly, that you're not sure you're any good at your job, that you find it harder than everyone else seems to — are all things about work, said to colleagues. People who'll be in a meeting with you on Monday, who may one day be your manager, and who are also, quietly, the people you're being compared against. So you edit. Everyone edits. And a social life where everyone is editing is a strange sort of company.

Everything is conditional on the programme. Your friends are your colleagues are your housemates, as I've written about in when your colleagues, classmates and housemates are the same people. There's a background awareness that this whole social world is downstream of an employer, and that if you left, most of it would go. That's not a reason to distrust it — those friendships turned out to be real and durable in my case — but it sits there.

Your old friendships are on a different calendar. Your school friends at university are having a shared, legible experience: term dates, freshers, reading weeks, a long summer. Yours doesn't map onto theirs at all. "How's uni?" is a question that takes ten minutes to answer properly, so you say "yeah, good" instead, and something decays a little each time.

There's no institution noticing. A homesick fresher has a warden, a personal tutor, a support service down the corridor and a thousand people in the same building in the same state. You have a tenancy and a job. Nobody's role includes noticing that you've been quiet. I made this point in moving out at 18 as a practical matter; it's an emotional one too.

When it turns up

Not in week one. Week one is adrenaline and admin and a new front door.

For most people the first dip is somewhere around week three to six, when the novelty wears off and it lands that this isn't a trip. That one is well documented and it passes reasonably quickly once routines form.

The one nobody talks about is the second one, and for me it was somewhere in year two. The cohort has dispersed into different teams, the enforced closeness of the first year has loosened, people have paired off or moved house, and the intense shared newness that carried everyone through year one has gone. Meanwhile the workload is heavier than it was and you've stopped getting credit for merely coping.

If you're in that stretch and wondering why it feels worse than the beginning when the beginning was objectively harder: I think that's why. The scaffolding of the first year is temporary, and nothing automatically replaces it.

What actually helped me

I'm going to keep this modest, because I'm one person describing what worked for me rather than someone with expertise.

One thing that had nothing to do with the programme. I've said this elsewhere on this site and it's the single thing I'd most press on someone in first year. A club, a team, a class, a volunteering thing — anything with a fixed weekly slot and people who don't know your employer. Not because the hobby matters, but because it gives you a room where you're not being compared to anyone and not editing yourself. I did it late and it changed the whole experience.

Depth rather than breadth. Forty-person nights out are fun and they are not where friendship happens. What worked was doing things in twos and threes — a coffee, a walk, driving somewhere. Deliberately, on purpose, rather than waiting for it to occur naturally, because in a big cohort the default is always the big group.

One person outside it all. An old friend, a sibling, a cousin — someone you can say the unedited version to. It doesn't have to be many people. One is transformative.

A fixed call home. Same time each week, so it doesn't depend on anyone feeling like it. Mine was Sunday evening. It sounds trivial and it was load-bearing.

Saying the true thing once. The most useful single conversation I had in four years was one where I answered "how's it going?" honestly instead of automatically. The other person immediately said they'd been finding it hard too. That's not a coincidence — everyone in my cohort admitted, about a year later, to some version of this. We were all in the same house being fine at each other.

If you take one thing from this article, make it that: the odds are very high that the person you're being fine at is also being fine at you.

The boring physical stuff. Sleep, exercise, daylight, not making the pub the only social mode. I notice this reads like a listicle, and I include it only because it was true for me: the weeks I was most miserable were reliably the weeks I'd slept badly and not moved. Drinking culture and opting out covers the pub-shaped part of cohort life, which is worth thinking about if socialising and drinking have become the same activity.

Where this article stops

Everything above is about ordinary loneliness — the kind that responds to going for a coffee with one person instead of fifteen.

That's different from feeling persistently low, hopeless, unable to enjoy things, unable to sleep or eat properly, or having thoughts of harming yourself. That isn't a scheduling problem and there is nothing I can usefully tell you about it. If any of that sounds like you, please talk to someone who's actually trained.

If you need urgent help or you're in crisis:

Two routes you almost certainly have and probably haven't used:

Your employer's assistance programme. Most large employers run an employee assistance programme — a confidential service, free to you, usually including a number of counselling sessions, available 24/7 and often to your family too. It's on the intranet, or HR will tell you. Two things people get wrong about it: it is genuinely confidential (your manager isn't told you called), and it is not only for catastrophes. Ordinary struggling is exactly what it's for.

Your university's wellbeing and counselling service. You are a student. You are entitled to student support, and that's true even if you're rarely on campus and don't feel like a proper one. Apprentices systematically under-use this because the identity doesn't quite fit. Look up what your institution offers and how to access it remotely — most run appointments online now.

There's also your GP, which is the reason I bang on about registering in week one rather than in a crisis, and your skills coach at your training provider, who is a real person outside your employer whose job includes how you're getting on.

The short version

A full calendar is not the same as being known, and this route is very good at giving you the first while making the second harder. That's a structural feature of the arrangement rather than something wrong with you, and it is almost universal among people who do it — everyone just admits it a year late.

It got better for me. It got better when I stopped waiting for it to and started doing two specific things: joining something unrelated to work, and having a smaller number of realer conversations.

And if it's more than that, the people listed above are much better at this than I am. Talking to them isn't an escalation. It's just the sensible thing, and it's what they're there for.