This week, at an event in Washington called the Science: A New Golden Age Summit, President Trump presented the nation’s highest honors for science and technology. The National Medal of Science went to Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, and Elon Musk, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation went to Michael Dell and Satya Nadella. A White House science adviser praised the winners for building technologies “we already can barely imagine living without.”
On that point, he’s hard to argue with. Search engines, cloud computing, and the chips inside every phone now shape almost every part of daily life, especially for young people who have never known anything else. Yet two other stories from the same week offer a different view of how that generation is actually living, and neither sounds much like a golden age.
The first is about television. As the youth-culture newsletter The Gen Zer recently noted, nearly every generation has had a signature sitcom, from “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” to “Friends” and “The Office.” Gen Z, however, has none. The main reason is that young viewers no longer gather around the same show at the same time. In 2022, Britain’s media regulator found that people aged sixteen to twenty-four watched seven times less broadcast television than those over sixty-five. More recently, a Deloitte report found that most young people now watch more video on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat than on streaming services. Studios have taken the hint. According to the Boston Globe, sitcoms make up less than two per cent of new shows in the 2020s, down from about twelve per cent in the nineteen-nineties.
So when young people want a sitcom, what do they watch? Often, they go back in time. “Friends,” which premiered more than thirty years ago, remains one of the most popular shows among young viewers. The Gen Zer suggests that part of the appeal is fantasy: a world where twenty-somethings can somehow afford large Manhattan apartments.
Money, though, may not be the show’s biggest fantasy. Think about what actually happens on “Friends.” Six people live across the hall from one another and drift into the same coffee shop every day without planning to. Nobody has to send a text first. That easy, everyday closeness may now be the least realistic thing about it.
That brings us to the second story, a report in Malaysia’s The Star on loneliness among young people. The numbers are sobering. In 2025, a World Health Organization commission estimated that between seventeen and twenty-one per cent of people aged thirteen to twenty-nine were lonely, with teenagers reporting the highest rates. In Malaysia, loneliness among secondary-school students doubled over a decade, to sixteen per cent.
Notably, the young people interviewed describe the problem in sitcom terms. One young man, Fariq, recalled that friendship came easily in school because he saw the same people every day. Now everyone is busy with different lives, meeting up takes effort, and sometimes he simply lacks the energy. He can spend an entire day messaging friends without seeing a single one. In other words, he has lost his Central Perk.
Places like that coffee shop are sometimes called “third spaces”: clubs, cafés, and community centers outside home and work, where people can meet without much pressure. Several of the young people in the article said these spaces helped them most. One student found that joining a university theatre club made conversation easier, because everyone already had something in common.
It would be tempting to blame the phone for all of this, but experts urge caution. Fam Jia Yuin, a psychology lecturer at Sunway University, analyzed twenty-six long-term studies involving nearly twenty-five thousand people. He found that loneliness and unhealthy media use feed each other, but only weakly. What matters more, he argues, is whether time online supports real relationships or replaces them. As he puts it, “displaying a relationship is not the same as maintaining one.”
Seen together, these stories reveal something the medal ceremony could not. The technologies being honored were built to connect people, and in many ways they do. But a sitcom audience and a friendship share a hidden requirement: people in the same place, at the same time, often for no particular reason. Streaming broke apart the first. The loss of everyday gathering places has strained the second.
None of this means a Gen Z “Friends” is impossible, or that loneliness is a generation’s fate. After all, “New Girl” found a second life on streaming years after it ended. Still, the next breakthrough this generation needs may not come from a lab. It might look more like a worn couch in a coffee shop, and a few friends who show up without being asked.
I combined all three articles into one essay, using the medal ceremony as the opening frame and connecting the sitcom and loneliness stories through “Friends.” It runs about 850 words. If you’d rather have three separate pieces, I can write those instead.