I'm actually writin an article about youth mental health for my substack. I'll post it on HN when it's done, but the tl;dr is that the evidence for the youth mental health crisis is very thin at best. Despite what this article says, the youth suicide rate in Canada is near its all-time low. Self-reported youth distress is up, but our only 2 datapoints are 2012 and 2022 (middle of the pandemic). Every group has also reported worsening mental health, and the adult suicide rate is (and always has been) much worse than the youth suicide rate. I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern, but I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine.
Spot the non-programmer in the room :) The two negatives apply to different things. One is how they feel about the mental health situation and the other is the mental health situation so it reads just fine. Of course it could be reworded but was it really that hard to parse?
Sure, it parses, the same way !isNotEnabled compiles. Doesn't mean I'd want to read it in a PR. You should read the book 'Clean Code' by Uncle Bob if you haven't already.
The sentence may be valid but it has poor readability. That was my point.
Both are true. It's a less than desirable structure, but it's not going to lose somebody used to writing code. You simplify the expression when you find something like this, but to simplify it you had to understand it first.
I guess code quality/readability doesn't matter to some developers. To each their own. Since OP is promoting their substack Id assume they would avoid turning off readers with their poor sentence structure.
I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)
I'm reading your new article, and just wanted to say it is really good! This kind of analysis is what I _dream_ of getting from coworkers when they're diagnosing a problem.
It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.
It's not just that we don't have a lot of data, it's that the only area about youth mental health that we actually do have a lot o data about is the suicide rate, which is decreasing. It's increasing in America, but it's increasing for everybody, not just young people. There's no clear youth-specific decline in mental health except a vague increase in teens that report feeling that their mental health is poor, but this is plagued by bias. I don't think the problem is that we don't have enough data to say if the youth mental health crisis is real, it's that I think we have enough to say that it isn't.
The article was mainly about young men. I'm no a sociologist, and I don't have data myself, but I find it hard to believe that they this category won't struggle.
Job market being automated, poor economy, expensive houses, and a culture that encourages casual dating, onlyFans, porn etc, I just don't know how young men can't be more depressed than the generations before it.
So I'm not sure why you can't buy it when so many factors would more likely point to the result in the two data points shared and the sentiment of the young men expressed.
I also quickly thought of bias when I read this, and that concern was reinforced by the bit about substance abuse rates in male-predominant fields of work. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that has been the case for a very long time.
Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."
I find this hard to believe without seeing the data. I finished high school when the first iPhone was released. It was absolutely awful for me and many folks I grew up with.
I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would have been with social media and cameras everywhere like it is today.
> I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine
You can't imagine the stress and anxiety that is fabricated by immature minds from being on the internet all of the time?
Reading your comment has just brought to mind the sheer amount of betting and stock trading ads I get on YouTube currently. I’m in my late 30s so a little out of the “young males” category.
Do the honors. Click. Sign up. Use free bonus. Do some arbitrage bets (use bonus to bet on A and bet on ^A elsewhere). Cash out. Close account. They now lose money.
I'm in my mid 40's and get them, too. I suppose they know I'm male, but not necessarily my age; I do not think I'm the target for these as I do not watch sports at all nor game much.
My point here is that I get these ads and I can sense that they are targeting young men.
All promising the "get rich quick" ride. One time it was casting shows promising a stratospheric music career. Then it was YouTube/streaming, then it was crypto and (hah) NFTs. And then it's collectible everything (cards, shoes, whatever other dumbass idea).
And for young women it's predatory OnlyFans "agents" encouraging them to be virtual sex workers.
There's probably research about where the money went when lockdown meant no going out and no consuming, while the government gave taxpayers some thousands of dollars of emergency funding...
Consequence of financial nihilism is a propensity towards YOLO plays - They believe that they will never succeed playing the game normally, so they are tempted to take the low % option
It's because they're rational. The American dream is dead, and the Canadian one is too. You can work your entire life with nothing to show for it. Never escaping a landlord. No time or money or third places to have a life. Women don't want children in this environment. The worst people are leading and in control of society. The insatiable greed of billionaires ruined whatever was good about the social compact. Families torn apart by the lies shown to them by Zuckerberg and co. No time for friends. Can't even build a PC because Sam Altman bought all of the compute.
Your post resonates, and yet nostalgia is a powerful force. Was life ever really good? After all, there were issues even during peak post-war Americana from civil rights unrest to Cold War "you could be nuked any day now" anxiety.
OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.
Yeah money in politics is most of it. It will be difficult to persuade the oligarchy that one dollar shouldn't equal one vote, but if we continue on this current trajectory they'll inevitably destroy society and the environment to such an extent that groceries won't be able to make it to their New Zealand luxury bunkers.
The American Dream is very much alive. US is still trying to fend off massive number of immigrants from pretty much all over the world. People want to be here because it is a place where there is still hope for the future.
I think even if you downgrade the "American Dream" from its popular image ("If you work hard, you can have a family and a little house and property in a nice area. If you're also educated and have a little luck, you can even be wealthy.") to a more realistic modern version ("If you work hard, are educated, and have a little luck, you can have a family and a little house and property in a nice area."), it's still obviously dead. I think it requires a certain amount of willful ignorance to not recognize this.
This is exacerbated by the trend of businesses not sharing the burden of inflation with their employees, facilitated in part by imported/outsourced cultures lowering the bar described above, since they come from places with much lower expectations.
I am not disagreeing with any of this, but the dream itself is alive. It is what attracts many of the imported cultures here. Does the importing make it easier for businesses to not share burdens, yes, but it also enables fresh ideas and modes of working.
> Oliffe said that in the last decade, there has been "low government investment in men's mental health."
When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high?
I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.
"Data from the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows a huge rise in young men calling helplines with gambling addictions. (Health Canada reports men are three times more likely than women to have a gambling problem.)
Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."
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We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.
Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.
Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.
Is it just the young men whose mental health is declining? I'd go a generation earlier and see how things start to get pretty bad. A lot of kids these days don't hang out in person, they are hanging out virtually while laying down in their beds or in comfortable chairs in front of their consoles or computers playing video games online. This is quite unealthy way to grow up. A lot of teenagers, male or female are also undetachable from their cellphones and social media too. This is also a very unhealthy way to grow up.
Even when assuming that a decline in hanging out in person is a huge factor, it is particularly bad for the youngest. Because all the suburbia+birthrate trends get much worse at the point where the number of same-age peers within comfortable reach of available transportation drops from 1 to 0. The same basic principle was less awful for the earlier generation that more likely lived through a comparatively mild 3 to 2 drop, and remains less bad for those that grew up just in time to make up for the distance with reasonable affordable petrol.
The job market has collapsed, graduates are moving back in with their parents, dating is a non-starter for most, nobody born after the 2000s can afford homes, the future looks bleak
Sure, except the difference is that it (ie affordability) is substantially worse for the young today, and the data backs it up.
Home price to income ratios are near the highest they've ever been (>5 right now, in 1980s it was ~3.X, in 1960s it was ~2.X). Mortgage rates have increased +2.74x since just Jan 2021. Heck, the cost of a mortgage nearly doubled in just 2022 alone. There isn't precedent in modern US history where this has happened. No prior generation alive today has faced such a rapid and large change in housing affordability. The median age of a homebuyer is now sitting ~59, and first time buyer is now ~40! Hardly what you call people of the young generation...
Next consider college tuition costs. It use to be possible to pay for a year's worth of college tuition by simply working a minimum wage job. That ceased being possible as of 2000, and college tuition costs have only risen since (+~160% in fact, whereas federal minimum wage has only increased +40%).
Contrast that with the late 1970s, where a student could easily cover 100% of their annual public college tuition and fees by working a standard 40-hour-a-week summer job for a mere 13 weeks at the federal minimum wage ($2.65/hour), and had money to spare for living expenses.
And then there's cars, healthcare, talk of raising social security taxes. It's no question the young are struggling economically today...
In a supposedly very conservative red state, Arkansas, the recent TV ad message run by the GOP candidate was “young men who are gaming at home and eating Cheetos all day are why we had to implement work requirements for welfare”; it was a very negative ad that made young men look like slackers, layabouts etc.
Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.
But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.
BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.
For who? Who are they supposed to vote for? You have politicians actively and openly seeking "the black vote" or "the hispanic vote", and all of them pander to women voters nowadays.
Where is the politician chasing the young White men voters? Such a politician would be roundly condemned if they dared to do so. It would be political suicide.
They tried it with Trump in 2016 and now they hate him because it turned out to be more of the same Israel-first, pro-war, screw the common White guy, line-must-go-up multicultural boomer Republicanism.
So easy to do. No bars to entry at all. We all either have sufficient extra time after work, or sufficient money to not need to work, to put forth a campaign if we felt like we needed to. Or we have sufficient fame or connections to draw resources from others who have them.
You might as well tell me that if I don't like driving to work that I should just build my own subway system to get there.
I'm actually Australian, and we had a new party (White Australia) starting here just for that reason.
You know what happened? The entire system started kvetching. They had it prohibited as a terrorist organisation with very real threats of 10+ years in prison for anyone associated. It had to be immediately disbanded to protect members, and the tyranny is being challenged in court right now.
Meanwhile our treasonous politicians are only too happy to pose for photo ops with the Indians, Jews, Muslims, etc they happily funnel millions of dollars towards at every opportunity.
They're not going without a fight [1] However opting to rebrand, rename or insidiously insert a group think by registering a political party as White Australia - it was not, never could be a move by anyone who intended to appeal to the semi-intelligent Australian voter - it doesn't pass the pub test for a start. What works in the US, won't necessarily work in Australia.
Well, TPTB seem to disagree with you, else they wouldn't have been in such a hurry to shut it down. In doing so, and by doing so in such an egregiously undemocratic manner, they proved White Australia's need to exist (ie. political representation for White Australians in a xenophilic political climate that is openly hostile towards the interests of White Australians), made more White Australians conscious of this fact, and rallied support for them.
It's separate from the welfare angle, but there absolutely is a trend of deteriorating workforce/education participation for men. Male labor force participation has fallen sharply over the long run, and the long-run decline is concentrated among men without four-year degrees.
Big drop over long time. The other options include falling sharply over the short run = big drop over little time, and falling gradually over short or long time frames.
You conveniently forgot to mention that a lot of the controversy is coming from the GOP side because it was a young white man being used to depict someone that's lazy. You should ask yourself if these people would be as upset if the ad depicted a young black man instead.
I mean, yeah, young white men would be upset when someone who's supposed to represent them slanders their group instead, and they won't be as upset if some other, unrelated group is being slandered instead. Is that supposed to be a hot take? What's your point?
The comment I'm responding to left out the race aspect entirely and tried to frame it like the controversy is about the age of the guy depicted, which is a complete misrepresentation of events.
> You need to ask yourself if they would ever run such an ad starring a black man instead, and what the public reaction would be like then.
Ronald Reagan and the GOP are the ones responsible for popularizing the "welfare queen" stereotype and specifically associating it with black women. It has been a part of the playbook for quite some time.
I wonder if some of it is a sort of parallel to the self-image issues called out for young women on social media. In the same way that it used to be easier to be happy about your appearance when you didn't see the genetically gifted on your feed every day, it was easier to feel proud about being good at $job/$hobby/etc when you only had to be better than anyone within 100 miles rather than competing with that one guy who lives 3,713 miles away who hasn't done anything but eat, sleep and blacksmith (or whatever) since he was 3.
Even as an adult, I feel it a bit. You see somebody on YouTube and think the hobby looks intriguing, but feel discouraged because you'll never be as good as someone who made a "make it or break it" bet on the hobby at 12 years old with a parent who was famous in the field.
It seems hard to feel proud of yourself these days in a world where everything you do is judged on a national or global scale instead of your city or county.
Shouldn't you have some ability to be internally/intrinsically motivated or proud of a hobby without comparing on a national/global scale?
Plenty of people played guitar, poorly, even though they could hear CDs of good guitarists. You can blacksmith, poorly, even though someone's making some stunning damascus on YouTube - in fact, it should now be easier to get into the hobby, learn, and connect with others than it ever was.
> Plenty of people played guitar, poorly, even though they could hear CDs of good guitarists.
I think it is different because that guitarist on the band that released a CD is a famous musician, at least famous enough to get a contract and release a CD. So I, as a hobbyist, don't expect to be as good.
But now there are thousands of regular people non-professional musicians on youtube (or wherever) who are a hundred times better than me, so it can become discouraging.
Ok, so shouldn't those same feelings mean that nobody would go bowling, ice skating, or participate in a team sport? Statistically there'll be someone better than you at the venue.
When younger I liked to play amateur (very, very amateur) basketball, but Michael Jordan never showed up at our court.
OTOH I did have that experience once, in kart racing, where a top-level professional, a then-current Indy car driver showed up at our local track! It was a humbling experience, but very educational. I'm a good car (and kart) racer at an amateur level, but this pro guy was so many orders of magnitude better than any of us at the club. It was also eye-opening to consider that this pro was only a mid-pack racer in Indycars, the top guys were much faster than him.
My Dad and I built a kart to spec but didn't race it, only drove for fun and skill. Luckily I had no idea there were so many levels of expertise as you speak of. Helluva way to learn to drive though! By the time I got full control of an automobile all my wild urges had been satisfied.
If I'd met someone like you describe I'd have challenged him to a race: what else is there but to learn!
And so much of life is necessarily chance - so go for it!
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we purchaed music on physical media. I had a Tower Records near me, took up an entire side of the shopping center - its since been cut up into five stores. Anyhows, it was filled with CDs, every genre. Somehow, when faced with all of that music, it didn't stop people form creating more music.
Guitar and art in general is weird because technical skill and commercial success are orthogonal. I grew up on pop punk; anyone with a desire and like 4 hours of free time can basically play Blink-182’s entire discography of power chords.
I wouldn’t even say I can play guitar and I can do an okay rendition of Stairway to Heaven.
It’s easier to get into hobbies, but you’ll also be far more keenly aware of just how shit you are at it. I do hydroponics and YouTube won’t even really show that; apparently if you haven’t upgraded to aquaponics (hydro with fish to poop out nutrients) it’s not even worth having a channel. The algo hasn’t even suggested someone with a normal sized setup. The smallest I ever see verges on a commercial setup. Genuinely I think the smallest setup I’ve seen had a 500 gallon tilapia tank for a reservoir. The larger ones were installing hydroponic power on rivers to run all their pumps and fans for a detached hydroponic grow system.
Guitar's an easy example because you had a benchmark for "success" before and after social media. But the logic extends to any hobby or skill: before social media, surely people still recognized they weren't in the top 1% of hydroponics, or painting, or bowling. Did that stop them then? Why were they motivated to keep doing it without 50,000 subscribers?
It's possibly a good outlook to strive for but I'm inclined to think that most people fundamentally and inherently need to feel like respected members of society or else their mental health suffers.
I feel like this is a better phrasing of what I’m trying to get at. Feeling like you aren’t good at anything feels like you’re bound to be “undifferentiated worker #7354 at Amazon warehouse 13.12b”, and the abundance of talent on social media can make it hard to feel like something other than a corporate cog that has hobby #142
That's a very modern idea: that everyone is special and valuable and the main character of the story.
The reality is that for most people (and all of human history, excluding a handful of kings, popes, and explorers) you are just undifferentiated worker #7354, undifferentiated office employee #436, or undifferentiated serf #324.
As I said in my original comment, you've got to have some internal motivation. It's unhealthy to derive all your motivation from likes or views, and people need to recognize that, as Schopenhauer says, "the safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy".
The problem is that this is antithetical to western (particularly) American cultural propaganda.
Now a lot of people are angry that you've been lying to them for years and the best you have to say now is "sucks to suck". I predict increasing political instability and violence and the social and economic classes get reshuffled.
> it should now be easier to get into the hobby, learn, and connect with others than it ever was.
Nope. I'm doing less hobby stuff that I was 5 years ago even. Anything that's not free software has gotten much more expensive or the opportunity cost has been raised too high and my wages are down.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft- hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
The increase in the visibility of mental health issues could either be an increase in the instance of mental health issues or a decrease in the concealment of mental health issues, or indeed both.
If there is any correlation between the wider perception of the state of the world and the instance of mental health issues then the only meaningful claim you could be making about any subgroup is the deviation from that correlation.
Talking about single instances and absolute numbers disregards those nuances.
TFA keeps talking about the manosphere as it the relation was causal to the mental health of young men declining but... I think it's backwards: it's because many don't find their place and find no woman that they look into, sadly, frauds like Tate and things like the manosphere. When you've got nothing and think you've got no future, you can invest some time and energy in your body and look in shape, which shall at least spike the interest of some women.
As to why young men feel like they cannot find a mate well... There's an entire generation that's been hammered the notion that all men are oppressors and that masculinity is the root of all evil.
It is other way round. Entering manosphere lowers your chances to find partner. But, they did not entered it due to lack of partner. Tate is logical outcome of right wing masculinity right - the exact thing ring wing and conservative thinkers pushed for.
You complain that it was talked about openly. But Epstein, Hegseth, Trump, Cavanaugh and all the 45+ republicans known as domestic abusers or likely rapist show he is not a new thing.
I already knew what angle the article would take before I started reading. It’s the same political bullshit that they’ve been saying for decades:
‘The emphasis on women's parity in the labour force and society, as well as a greater acceptance of non-traditional gender identities, has upended expectations.’
"At one point we knew we were supposed to be the provider and protector, and the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ wasn’t a thing," he said. "I think men are really trying to figure out what it means to be a man in today’s world."
It just shows how much of a crap they give about men’s mental health that this viewpoint is constantly regurgitated instead of addressing the real problems.
The jobs market is horrendous, especially for the young. Everything is super expensive too. Young men generally desire independence, so finding a job to excel at, buying a house, starting a life… these are what is desired and also what is now out of reach.
Dating and marriage have been completed destroyed by modern society. Blaming goons like Andrew Tate avoids addressing the real issues.
I have family members who work in mental health, and they say that young women are having a worse time than young men.
Women, on average, have higher recorded rates of nonfatal suicidal behavior and attempts. Men, on average, use methods that are more immediately lethal, so there is less opportunity for rescue or medical treatment.
What pisses me off is the subtext of these articles that basically says ‘men can’t handle women succeeding in the workplace’. Mocking pain and suffering and suicide for cheap feminist ‘wins’ is par the course for these people. Yet, where are the articles addressing the decline in mental health of young women and how the loss of their traditional roles are wives and mothers has led them there?
Approach these teachings in a humble and open manner, understanding that we are all weak and lost, and hopefully it changes your life like it did mine.
The article is right. You're missing the key point, which is that democracies generally tend to do better than autocratic states.
What does democracy have to do with the economy? Well concentration of power in a subgroup is generally not good for overall performance. That's true whether it's concentrated by gender, age (gerontocracy), race, monopolies etc. Even one sector of the economy getting too strong is generally bad (resource curse). There are exceptions of course, but that's the trend.
Young men swung hard for "grab them by the pussy" Trump. I recommend not doing that. If you care about jobs, you need to start caring a lot about DEI and abortion and inequality and trans people. It's not "identity politics" vs "real issues". The two are inextricably linked, and that job chart will keep happening until American society finally understands it. There's a reason Blue states are (generally) richer than Red (ex-slave) states.
> Yet, where are the articles addressing the decline in mental health of young women and how the loss of their traditional roles as wives and mothers has led them there?
Women can be mothers and wives. Generally, they do not want the related loss of status back to previous periods. It is men who fret about returning there. The "provider protector" thing is euphemism for "the ruler". And "the protector" thing is fairly absurd since the actual danger the woman need the protection from are men feeling entitled to harm her is she is alone about.
An individual guy protecting a woman from other guys is a protector. But his protector role works only because men as a group are the threat to her and he is being the exception.
I agree in general and would like to understand why the well-being studies like this seemingly walk in circles picking up crumbles of "what might be the problem" while missing the larger point - bad economy (good on paper, bad for regular people), no stability, therefore inability to make long-term plans.
Most studies don't get into those details, i.e. its the economy, because they would lose funding if they starting laying any blame in the direction of wealth inequality and its corresponding effects of opportunities to thrive.
>> Mocking pain and suffering and suicide for cheap feminist ‘wins’ is par the course for these people.
> What pisses me off is people criticizing anything discussing men's issues by bringing up that it's still worse for women.
Two examples of the same problem: blaming the other gender (or generation) for political problems fomented and misconstrued by academia, media and lobby-driven politicians.
The defense against that kind of destructive social currents should come from social sciences, they should also point to the real origins of the problems instead of releasing red herrings like they're herring fisheries.
But you aren't holding your breath, are you? Neither am I.
What pisses me off, in turn, is segregating mental health problems between men and women. This invites sexism, while we need integration.
"The mental health of young people is declining" should have been their line, it's not like young women are immune to it. The reasoning even proves that mental health shouldn't be segregated by sex, it's not the Olympics.
I volunteer at a pregnancy center, counseling young men with pregnant girlfriends.
Probably the most common trait among confused young men is the lack of a solid example growing up. Most of the boys were either abandoned by their father as a young boy or never saw him while he was in prison. The results are devastating.
The issue is systemic. These young men were raised in a system where the messaging was “the future is female”, “women in STEM”, “teach men not to rape”, or “would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a man.” All of this, all of it, impressed upon them that there is a future out there they aren’t invited to. That they are monsters through the sheer happenstance of having been born male. They are to be feared, they aren’t to be trusted, and there is no need to provide them with any help or hope because they are hopeless.
They spend the first 17-18 years of their lives in a public education that is largely gynocentric. It caters to better outcomes for women and has become a zero sum game engineered by women and for girls.
If there was an issue of black folks having poorer and poorer outcomes, and those largely overseeing their education openly joked, “would you rather be in the woods with a bear, or a black person”, the issue would be instantly recognizable and suddenly problematic. It would be immediately understood that bigotry was disenfranchising that segment of the student body and those in charge carried a significant share of the blame. But that conversation isn’t happening.
Instead we get more messaging on how it’s these toxic boys with their toxic masculinity that is driving the issue. That patriarchy has tainted these defective boys and that is the root of their problems. That without addressing their toxicity and broken social conditioning they can’t be fixed. What about those with the toxic messaging? The hate directed towards minors by bitter adults with an axe to grind?
So, seeing the writing on the walls, they retreat to spaces that are unapologetically pro boy, pro male. These spaces don’t exist in public spheres because pro male spaces that exclude women are discouraged. They don’t even have Boy Scouts anymore as a space for just them. It’s not inclusive enough.
To the Internet they go. Chat rooms, message boards, YouTube, TikTok, where there are no real adults in the room but there are opportunists. People like Andrew Tate who are only too happy to welcome them with open arms and tell them they’re awesome. They have power. They can have the future they want. If only they had places to go with reasonable adults in charge, proper male role models who could help them better understand themselves and the world they live in, but that space doesn’t exist. It’s not given space to exist.
The lack of introspection is troubling and this problem isn’t likely to get better without it. So, those in charge will just double down and then double down again instead of looking in the mirror. Adults blaming children for the outcomes they helped engineer in the first place.
Saw some jackass in another thread complaining that young people keep floating towards extreme political ideologies both on the left and right.
Yeah... duh... and you'll get what you deserve. A large majority of boomers support raising taxes on the young so they can keep their SSI.
I have no sympathy for idiotic champions of a rotting status quo who would rather continue enriching themselves and screwing their children and grand children down the line while mocking them for recognizing. Fuck em.
If we can’t get even anywhere close to a consensus on what men are, how they are different from women, and why they matter, then there is no hope for a general solution to the problem.
Any solution that does appear will be immediately branded toxic by someone who is not a man.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadDouble negative makes this hard to read
The sentence may be valid but it has poor readability. That was my point.
It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.
Job market being automated, poor economy, expensive houses, and a culture that encourages casual dating, onlyFans, porn etc, I just don't know how young men can't be more depressed than the generations before it.
So I'm not sure why you can't buy it when so many factors would more likely point to the result in the two data points shared and the sentiment of the young men expressed.
Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."
I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would have been with social media and cameras everywhere like it is today.
> I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine
You can't imagine the stress and anxiety that is fabricated by immature minds from being on the internet all of the time?
My point here is that I get these ads and I can sense that they are targeting young men.
And for young women it's predatory OnlyFans "agents" encouraging them to be virtual sex workers.
There's probably research about where the money went when lockdown meant no going out and no consuming, while the government gave taxpayers some thousands of dollars of emergency funding...
OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.
This is exacerbated by the trend of businesses not sharing the burden of inflation with their employees, facilitated in part by imported/outsourced cultures lowering the bar described above, since they come from places with much lower expectations.
When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high?
I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.
Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."
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We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.
Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.
Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.
Home price to income ratios are near the highest they've ever been (>5 right now, in 1980s it was ~3.X, in 1960s it was ~2.X). Mortgage rates have increased +2.74x since just Jan 2021. Heck, the cost of a mortgage nearly doubled in just 2022 alone. There isn't precedent in modern US history where this has happened. No prior generation alive today has faced such a rapid and large change in housing affordability. The median age of a homebuyer is now sitting ~59, and first time buyer is now ~40! Hardly what you call people of the young generation...
Next consider college tuition costs. It use to be possible to pay for a year's worth of college tuition by simply working a minimum wage job. That ceased being possible as of 2000, and college tuition costs have only risen since (+~160% in fact, whereas federal minimum wage has only increased +40%).
Contrast that with the late 1970s, where a student could easily cover 100% of their annual public college tuition and fees by working a standard 40-hour-a-week summer job for a mere 13 weeks at the federal minimum wage ($2.65/hour), and had money to spare for living expenses.
And then there's cars, healthcare, talk of raising social security taxes. It's no question the young are struggling economically today...
Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.
But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.
BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.
This is the paradox of it all, disenfranchised people voting against their own best interests, all the time. This is populism, this is 2026. yay.
For who? Who are they supposed to vote for? You have politicians actively and openly seeking "the black vote" or "the hispanic vote", and all of them pander to women voters nowadays.
Where is the politician chasing the young White men voters? Such a politician would be roundly condemned if they dared to do so. It would be political suicide.
They tried it with Trump in 2016 and now they hate him because it turned out to be more of the same Israel-first, pro-war, screw the common White guy, line-must-go-up multicultural boomer Republicanism.
Vote for who?
You might as well tell me that if I don't like driving to work that I should just build my own subway system to get there.
You know what happened? The entire system started kvetching. They had it prohibited as a terrorist organisation with very real threats of 10+ years in prison for anyone associated. It had to be immediately disbanded to protect members, and the tyranny is being challenged in court right now.
Meanwhile our treasonous politicians are only too happy to pose for photo ops with the Indians, Jews, Muslims, etc they happily funnel millions of dollars towards at every opportunity.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/08/neo-n...
I think their success is inevitable.
Perhaps young White men are right to be sick of being everyone's punching bag.
Ronald Reagan and the GOP are the ones responsible for popularizing the "welfare queen" stereotype and specifically associating it with black women. It has been a part of the playbook for quite some time.
Even as an adult, I feel it a bit. You see somebody on YouTube and think the hobby looks intriguing, but feel discouraged because you'll never be as good as someone who made a "make it or break it" bet on the hobby at 12 years old with a parent who was famous in the field.
It seems hard to feel proud of yourself these days in a world where everything you do is judged on a national or global scale instead of your city or county.
Plenty of people played guitar, poorly, even though they could hear CDs of good guitarists. You can blacksmith, poorly, even though someone's making some stunning damascus on YouTube - in fact, it should now be easier to get into the hobby, learn, and connect with others than it ever was.
From a random HN comment not so long ago, I highly recommend this gentle intro to applied Adlerian psychology:
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
Not challenging as far as reading goes, but it might hit some people deep enough to only chew on a few pages at a time.
I think it is different because that guitarist on the band that released a CD is a famous musician, at least famous enough to get a contract and release a CD. So I, as a hobbyist, don't expect to be as good.
But now there are thousands of regular people non-professional musicians on youtube (or wherever) who are a hundred times better than me, so it can become discouraging.
When younger I liked to play amateur (very, very amateur) basketball, but Michael Jordan never showed up at our court.
OTOH I did have that experience once, in kart racing, where a top-level professional, a then-current Indy car driver showed up at our local track! It was a humbling experience, but very educational. I'm a good car (and kart) racer at an amateur level, but this pro guy was so many orders of magnitude better than any of us at the club. It was also eye-opening to consider that this pro was only a mid-pack racer in Indycars, the top guys were much faster than him.
If I'd met someone like you describe I'd have challenged him to a race: what else is there but to learn!
And so much of life is necessarily chance - so go for it!
I wouldn’t even say I can play guitar and I can do an okay rendition of Stairway to Heaven.
It’s easier to get into hobbies, but you’ll also be far more keenly aware of just how shit you are at it. I do hydroponics and YouTube won’t even really show that; apparently if you haven’t upgraded to aquaponics (hydro with fish to poop out nutrients) it’s not even worth having a channel. The algo hasn’t even suggested someone with a normal sized setup. The smallest I ever see verges on a commercial setup. Genuinely I think the smallest setup I’ve seen had a 500 gallon tilapia tank for a reservoir. The larger ones were installing hydroponic power on rivers to run all their pumps and fans for a detached hydroponic grow system.
The reality is that for most people (and all of human history, excluding a handful of kings, popes, and explorers) you are just undifferentiated worker #7354, undifferentiated office employee #436, or undifferentiated serf #324.
Now a lot of people are angry that you've been lying to them for years and the best you have to say now is "sucks to suck". I predict increasing political instability and violence and the social and economic classes get reshuffled.
Nope. I'm doing less hobby stuff that I was 5 years ago even. Anything that's not free software has gotten much more expensive or the opportunity cost has been raised too high and my wages are down.
If there is any correlation between the wider perception of the state of the world and the instance of mental health issues then the only meaningful claim you could be making about any subgroup is the deviation from that correlation.
Talking about single instances and absolute numbers disregards those nuances.
As to why young men feel like they cannot find a mate well... There's an entire generation that's been hammered the notion that all men are oppressors and that masculinity is the root of all evil.
You complain that it was talked about openly. But Epstein, Hegseth, Trump, Cavanaugh and all the 45+ republicans known as domestic abusers or likely rapist show he is not a new thing.
‘The emphasis on women's parity in the labour force and society, as well as a greater acceptance of non-traditional gender identities, has upended expectations.’
"At one point we knew we were supposed to be the provider and protector, and the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ wasn’t a thing," he said. "I think men are really trying to figure out what it means to be a man in today’s world."
It just shows how much of a crap they give about men’s mental health that this viewpoint is constantly regurgitated instead of addressing the real problems.
The jobs market is horrendous, especially for the young. Everything is super expensive too. Young men generally desire independence, so finding a job to excel at, buying a house, starting a life… these are what is desired and also what is now out of reach.
Dating and marriage have been completed destroyed by modern society. Blaming goons like Andrew Tate avoids addressing the real issues.
I have family members who work in mental health, and they say that young women are having a worse time than young men.
Women, on average, have higher recorded rates of nonfatal suicidal behavior and attempts. Men, on average, use methods that are more immediately lethal, so there is less opportunity for rescue or medical treatment.
What pisses me off is the subtext of these articles that basically says ‘men can’t handle women succeeding in the workplace’. Mocking pain and suffering and suicide for cheap feminist ‘wins’ is par the course for these people. Yet, where are the articles addressing the decline in mental health of young women and how the loss of their traditional roles are wives and mothers has led them there?
Approach these teachings in a humble and open manner, understanding that we are all weak and lost, and hopefully it changes your life like it did mine.
Printed books and meditation aids can be found here: https://krishnastore.com/
What does democracy have to do with the economy? Well concentration of power in a subgroup is generally not good for overall performance. That's true whether it's concentrated by gender, age (gerontocracy), race, monopolies etc. Even one sector of the economy getting too strong is generally bad (resource curse). There are exceptions of course, but that's the trend.
Since the end of WW2, and especially since the end of the Cold War, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
Young men swung hard for "grab them by the pussy" Trump. I recommend not doing that. If you care about jobs, you need to start caring a lot about DEI and abortion and inequality and trans people. It's not "identity politics" vs "real issues". The two are inextricably linked, and that job chart will keep happening until American society finally understands it. There's a reason Blue states are (generally) richer than Red (ex-slave) states.
Women can be mothers and wives. Generally, they do not want the related loss of status back to previous periods. It is men who fret about returning there. The "provider protector" thing is euphemism for "the ruler". And "the protector" thing is fairly absurd since the actual danger the woman need the protection from are men feeling entitled to harm her is she is alone about.
An individual guy protecting a woman from other guys is a protector. But his protector role works only because men as a group are the threat to her and he is being the exception.
[citation needed]
> What pisses me off is people criticizing anything discussing men's issues by bringing up that it's still worse for women.
Two examples of the same problem: blaming the other gender (or generation) for political problems fomented and misconstrued by academia, media and lobby-driven politicians.
The defense against that kind of destructive social currents should come from social sciences, they should also point to the real origins of the problems instead of releasing red herrings like they're herring fisheries.
But you aren't holding your breath, are you? Neither am I.
"The mental health of young people is declining" should have been their line, it's not like young women are immune to it. The reasoning even proves that mental health shouldn't be segregated by sex, it's not the Olympics.
Probably the most common trait among confused young men is the lack of a solid example growing up. Most of the boys were either abandoned by their father as a young boy or never saw him while he was in prison. The results are devastating.
Even subtexually,
Seems an inevitable
Underbussing on this
Site.
They spend the first 17-18 years of their lives in a public education that is largely gynocentric. It caters to better outcomes for women and has become a zero sum game engineered by women and for girls.
If there was an issue of black folks having poorer and poorer outcomes, and those largely overseeing their education openly joked, “would you rather be in the woods with a bear, or a black person”, the issue would be instantly recognizable and suddenly problematic. It would be immediately understood that bigotry was disenfranchising that segment of the student body and those in charge carried a significant share of the blame. But that conversation isn’t happening.
Instead we get more messaging on how it’s these toxic boys with their toxic masculinity that is driving the issue. That patriarchy has tainted these defective boys and that is the root of their problems. That without addressing their toxicity and broken social conditioning they can’t be fixed. What about those with the toxic messaging? The hate directed towards minors by bitter adults with an axe to grind?
So, seeing the writing on the walls, they retreat to spaces that are unapologetically pro boy, pro male. These spaces don’t exist in public spheres because pro male spaces that exclude women are discouraged. They don’t even have Boy Scouts anymore as a space for just them. It’s not inclusive enough.
To the Internet they go. Chat rooms, message boards, YouTube, TikTok, where there are no real adults in the room but there are opportunists. People like Andrew Tate who are only too happy to welcome them with open arms and tell them they’re awesome. They have power. They can have the future they want. If only they had places to go with reasonable adults in charge, proper male role models who could help them better understand themselves and the world they live in, but that space doesn’t exist. It’s not given space to exist.
The lack of introspection is troubling and this problem isn’t likely to get better without it. So, those in charge will just double down and then double down again instead of looking in the mirror. Adults blaming children for the outcomes they helped engineer in the first place.
Yeah... duh... and you'll get what you deserve. A large majority of boomers support raising taxes on the young so they can keep their SSI.
I have no sympathy for idiotic champions of a rotting status quo who would rather continue enriching themselves and screwing their children and grand children down the line while mocking them for recognizing. Fuck em.
Any solution that does appear will be immediately branded toxic by someone who is not a man.