Vanishing Part-Time Jobs Cost Youth a Sense of Belonging
Jobs are about more than money—and our young people are missing out.
Posted June 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
My first real job was as a checkout clerk and stock boy at Longs Drug Store (now CVS). It wasn't glamorous. The pay was not going to make me rich. But something happened in that job that I didn't expect and couldn't have planned for. I made friends.
Not acquaintances. Not coworkers I nodded at in the break room. Real friends. We were all just kids trying to make a few dollars, standing side by side, and somewhere in the middle of all that mundane work, connection happened.
Those jobs were friendship infrastructure. They gave me structure, purpose, a reason to show up, and a built-in community of people my own age all figuring it out together. The money was almost beside the point.
So when I came across a new interim report published by the UK government, documenting nearly 1 million young people Not in Education , Employment, or Training (NEET), I was shocked. But only for a moment. Because the more I read, the more I recognized what was actually being described. A generation that wants to participate, wants to connect, wants to find their footing but has had the scaffolding quietly removed from underneath them.
What the Data Actually Shows
The interim report, "Young People and Work ," documents a crisis that has been building for decades. The number both shocked me and gave me hope: Eighty-four percent of NEET young people said they want to find a job, education, or training. This is not a generation that has given up. The desire is there. What's missing is the on-ramp.
The trend lines are sobering. Six in 10 NEET young people have never held a job. In 2005, that number was four in 10. We are not talking about a temporary dip. We are talking about a structural shift compressing opportunity for an entire generation over two decades.
The friendship data is just as stark. One in five young people aged 18 to 24 now report having one or no close friends, a proportion that has tripled in a decade. Seventy percent of that same age group report experiencing loneliness . Young people are now lonelier than the elderly.
The easy explanation is that something went wrong with this generation. Too soft, too distracted, too attached to their phones. The report doesn't support that. And neither does my experience writing about male friendship in my new book.
What actually happened is simpler and harder to fix. We removed the structures that made connection easy.
Work was never just about earning a paycheck. Entry-level jobs were friendship infrastructure. You showed up at the same place, at the same time, with the same people, week after week. Friendship didn't require effort or intention. It was a byproduct of proximity and shared experience.
Those entry points have been shrinking for years. Apprenticeship starts for young people have declined by over 40 percent. Recruitment has gone remote and automated. The young person who once walked into a store, talked to a manager, and got a chance now faces algorithms and screening portals before anyone has looked them in the eye. The report notes that 15 percent of NEET young people now hold a degree. The problem isn't preparation. It's access.
The same thing happened to third places. Places like the pub, the community center, the youth club, the corner drugstore. The report documents their systematic closure. These weren't luxuries. They were the places where young people showed up without an agenda and left with a friend.
The result is a self-reinforcing loop. No work means no structure. No structure means no proximity. No proximity means no friends. No friends means worsening mental health. Worsening mental health means less likelihood of seeking work. Around and around it goes.
This is not a character problem. It is a design problem.
We've Been Asking the Wrong Question
For years, the public conversation about young men has been organized around a single question: What's wrong with them? Why aren't they showing up? Why aren't they trying harder?
The report answers that question by dismantling it. When the vast majority of disconnected young people say they want to work and participate, the problem is not motivation . The problem is access. The question was never what's wrong with this generation. The question should have been what did we take away from them.
This matters especially for young men. The male NEET rate is now higher than the female rate, a reversal from a decade ago. Young men are falling behind faster because those structures were doing particularly heavy lifting for them. The desire is intact. The infrastructure is gone. One requires fixing the young person. The other requires fixing the system. The evidence points clearly to the second.
What Structural Change Actually Looks Like
If this is a design problem, the fix has to be structural. Not another app. Not a therapy program. Not a social media campaign telling young men to open up more.
The interim report makes something clear that often gets lost in the debate. Employers are not the enemy here. Many are desperate to hire young people. What they described was a growing gap between what the workplace demands from day one and what young applicants are equipped to provide. Running through every conversation, with employers, mayors, and charities, in every part of the country, was the same diagnosis: There is neither a system nor a plan to increase youth participation.
Here's what actually needs to change:
Back to Longs Drug Store
Stocking shelves and running a register at Longs Drug Store was not going to change the world. But it changed something for me. It gave me structure, purpose, and people. It gave me friends I didn't have to go looking for because the job put us in the same place at the same time and let the rest happen naturally.
That's what we need to rebuild. Not the drugstore. The conditions.
Young people want back in. They want to work, to contribute, to connect. They are not the problem. We just stopped building the places where connection happens by accident.
It's time to start building them again.
UK Department for Work and Pensions. (2026, May 28). Young people and work: Interim report . https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report/young-people-and-work-interim-report
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Jarie Bolander is the author of seven books on leadership, entrepreneurship, and communication, including Ride or Die: Loving Through Tragedy, A Husband’s Memoir , the story of his late wife Jane and her 15-month battle with leukemia.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.