Is the Cure to Male Loneliness a Substack Publication?

It is no mystery how market forces and demographic changes have been fostering loneliness and mental distress. When will we take it seriously and stop building a world in which we’re worse off?

Aug 01, 2023

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“A kindly word from a brave man’s heart, a smile that conceals the consuming glory of the spirit, is little and much, like a magical password hiding life and death in its innocent syllable, like living water welling up from deep inside the mountains and conveying to us in each crystal drop the secret energy of the earth.”
– Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion

I’ve seldom seen an article get turned into an internet meme as quickly as the July 19th NYT article “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness out on the Pickleball Court?” It is much in tune with the kind of stuff that makes it to the reddit front page regularly. When I was at my lowest personally, visiting subreddits like r/2meirl4meirl was a surefire way to make things worse. If you’re unfamiliar, you’ve not been missing out. As all subs sooner or later turn into meta-ironic shells of their former self, the most egregious posts of r/meirl (“me in real life”, an innocuous place where users share occasionally funny memes about modern life) have been exiled to “too-me-irl-for-me-irl”.
The net is saturated with articles, podcast, video essays and memes attesting to the loneliness and decline in mental well-being in the younger generation (to put it mildly).

The answer for many: Self-Improvement, a huge online subculture. Thousands and thousands of young men wondering how to deal with the demands of today’s life. They talk about “dopamine detoxing” and going “monk mode” — very intriguing language for what they’re actually doing. Dopamine is not a toxin, naturally, but this could tell us that young people feel poisoned in the digital landscape we’ve built for ourselves. Social media are designed to be addictive, to feel good while not actually fulfilling any of our needs. They’re minimally demanding and maximally rewarding, numbing us to any real challenge. Legions of young men who should be enjoying a life of unprecedented opportunity – seeking to discipline themselves? Is this not highly unusual? They feel they need to become like monks just to function in today’s world?

Then there are those who feel that’s going too far. That optimizing and/or monetizing every single aspect of your life just to have a chance maybe shouldn’t be normalized. This sentiment finds no better expression than in that of the “Sigma Male” meme, a satirical1 parody on the concept of the “Alpha Male”, embodied most fittingly by Christian Bale in the role of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Alphas are pathetic. Being an Alpha is no longer enough, you need to become the Sigma, the Super-Man, the Übermensch.

Or so these young men feel, and they do have a point. When 30% of all Millennials are feeling lonely all or most of the time, one in four young adults have no friends at all, when 60% of men under 30 are single and not even having sex, do all the self-improvement you want, that’s systemic. In the 1940s, the US median age for the first marriage was 23 for men, 20 for women. Today, it’s 30 and 29, respectively.

Two overarching themes emerge from all this memery, apart from very obvious depressive symptoms:

A sense of purposelessness
Withdrawal into the digital world

We are being told that the loneliness and mental health crisis affects men particularly. Indeed, the so called “Incel” (“involuntary celibate“) subculture has garnered much medial attention. But really, there is a mental health crisis among the young. According to a 2023 CDC report, 30% of all female US high school students had seriously considered suicide, 24% had made a suicide plan, and 13% had actually attempted it. For males, it’s 14%, 12% and 7%, respectively.
Two novel facettes of modern life are contributing to this, among others: Play deprivation and overprotection of children, as well as social media and smartphone use in general.

Unsupervised play is vital to children’s development. It fosters decision-making skills, social competence, and provides a sense of autonomy. It is wildly underestimated how fundamentally technology has transformed childhood. Let me tell you about mine.

I grew up in a village of roughly 1600 inhabitants basically in the middle of nowhere. What my father tells me of growing up there just 60 years ago seems completely foreign to me: Sure, the roads weren’t yet paved, there was one telephone for communal use at the local post office, only two or three families owned a car which they barely used, no one had a TV, some had radio, but there were several bakeries, shops, and three pubs. Every day after school (which never went on past 12 pm), you’d play football with your mates, just out in the street. After all, there were almost no cars passing through.

My grandparents were simple farmers, essentially living like medieval peasants only with tractors, modern fertilizer, and pesticides. When I tell my dad he grew up in conditions that we would today describe as absolute poverty, he only laughs and tells me “Everyone lived like that.” Yet, the place was flourishing. Even if they didn’t have much, they had a sense of community and a bright future.

The last pub closed some years ago, there is now one market with a bakery and a butcher. For many essentials, it’s a 20 minute drive to the next biggest town, where I went to school. Local highlights these days amount to a sheet metal processing plant and a gravel pit. To be fair, we also do have a very nice church – where it’s been a long time since a local priest held mass. My dad today owns 2 cars, three TVs, and we all have a smartphone – a tiny pocket computer that probably has more processing power than all computers in existence in the 60s, combined.
Are we rich? No, everyone lives like that. But something far more important was lost.

When you go for a walk, you see nobody. If you do meet someone, they’re 50+. The place is dangerously old. It's no exaggeration to say there just are no young people there. Classes consisted of about 60 kids when my father attended school, all village locals. When I went in the early 00s, they could barely scrape together 30 kids my age from the entire community of around 3000 people. My sister – two years younger – was in the last cohort to get a secondary education there. Now, there’s only the primary school up to fourth grade. Not enough kids to justify paying more teachers.

With the real world so unengaging, young me like many retreated into the digital. I logged hundreds of hours in my most played games. Factoring in console games (that don’t track your time), or the time spent reading fantasy novels, I’m sure we’d end up with many thousands of hours. My teen years were mostly spent alone; me entertaining myself. I remember my father being upset at that, but equally having no advice on what I should do instead. The older I get the more I appreciate his position.

Naturally, my parents would like me to live there one day.
They wonder why I am so hesitant.

Let’s realize what a novel situation this is. Being by yourself and being bored out of your mind used to be virtually synonymous. Granted, there was no shortage of teen angst either, but to reiterate: It’s not that I was lazy, it’s that there was nothing to do and more importantly no one to do it with. My response to Dad’s “Back in my day we used to play outside […]” would be “Play with whom? And where?” When the next kid your age is a 5-10 minute drive away, that’s a huge barrier. The public spaces where my dad played and flourished were abandoned to cars. Increasingly, (like I am doing) young adults are fleeing these sad environments for the city. It's like that in a lot of places.

Are we doing much better in the cities? It’s arguably even worse: Just living in an urban environment increases the likelihood of feeling lonely by 38%. In the cities, ironically where there are the most people, it’s become laughably easy to exist without having to interact with any human being at all: Going shopping? Electronic self-checkout, not a cashier in sight. Want to order food? Need a ride? It's all screens and apps.

We are getting to the last item on this list:

Urbanization and population decline are wrecking communities.
This has remained unaddressed politically for decades.
Our current market system2 has proven insufficient to rectify these problems by itself and may have made us rich, but also miserable.
We are attempting (and failing) to fill the resulting gap with technology.
Indeed, we are finding out that loneliness is quite profitable.

It’s never been so hard to meet people, so now there are dating apps. Again, technology transformed life in a fundamental way that's somehow widely unacknowledged: Whereas your dating pool used to be limited to your acquaintances, now you are in competition with everyone.
These apps are borderline unusable for men, and women aren’t faring much better. The only group having a good time on these apps are men exhibiting “Dark Triad” personality traits – unscrupulous, manipulative men. Dating apps may indeed be cultivating these traits in people, leading to an ever more cynical dating landscape:
These men exploit normal women for quick hookups, who become jaded and less likely to want to invest into any relationship, even when they are matched with a decent, normal guy. These men, finally, grow frustrated at “all the women”, who they perceive to be shallow, and either quit or switch their dating strategy to hookups, perpetuating the cycle.

This environment leads to choice paralysis and lower satisfaction even when you do find a partner. Exactly the worst people are taking advantage of it and ruining it for everybody. There’s a more fundamental principle at play, additionally: If dating apps were actually fulfilling their purpose, they’d make themselves obsolete. You’d install them, find a partner, then uninstall them. App developers, however, want to make money. Their userbase are singles, usually 80% male. Thus, paradoxically, dating apps are incentivized to keep young men lonely.

And that is The Loneliness Economy:
Increasingly, the economic incentives for providers of goods and services are completely antithetical to the needs of the consumer. It's like that with a lot of things. Certainly it is the case for social media. We are becoming more lonely while – and because – our loneliness is being monetized.

And again, it’s not just men. Women are absolutely catching up to us in misery. (Yay, equality?) Anyone doubting they’re as badly or even worse off should read the illuminating pieces by Stella Tsantekidou and Freya India that I’ll link at the end.
The prevailing sentiment among male Incels seems to be that women have it easy and can basically access sex “on tap” through dating apps. It’s easy to reach that conclusion for anyone familiar with male dating app statistics. It’s also not entirely false that with swipe-to-match ratios of upwards of 70%,3 casual sex is readily accessible. As previously mentioned, they fail to factor in quality, though. I don’t think they’d be thrilled to hear that they, too, can have as much sex as they want – with unattractive or manipulative women.

Here’s an idea: What if the male and female experience sucked about equally, just for different reasons? But soon, none of that will matter anyway! Why bother with real partners, when you can have your very own AI girlfriend?

Is it any surprise to us now that young people – disgusted with this landscape – are opting out of the dating market, increasingly checking out of life, and hitting major milestones later and later? I haven’t even touched on the Metaverse4, VR in general, or other economic factors that are making life for younger people harder, technological revolution and atomization of individual life aside.

I think it’s high time we asked: What are wo doing? To whose benefit are we building all of this anymore? The majority of the young population is clearly faring worse and worse. Humans must be the only animal that’s actively engineering its living environment to be more detrimental to its well-being.

It's become somewhat stereotypical by now to be the Millennial arguing “phones bad”. Firstly, the phones are definitely bad. Secondly, the phones are symbolic of a systemic approach we’re taking on many issues: Urbanization, population decline, digitalization etc. have created new and unprecedented challenges. We are attempting to solve these problems through technology. Time and again, technological solutions then prove poor substitutes for the real thing. This may well be profitable, but it is making us more miserable.

What is the cure to (male) loneliness? More technology is not it. What is? Systematically, I don’t have a simple answer. It probably includes having more kids. Prerequisite to that would be creating the socio-economic conditions to enable young people to even contemplate having kids.
Individually, I think the Self-Improvement-Bros are onto something.

“[The internet is] a parasitic digital organism that feeds on human time and emotion, extracting money or attention through the most useless and shameless means possible.”
– Freddie deBoer, “The Internet is Broken and Will Never Be Fixed“

This is the most apt description of the modern digital landscape I know. Whatever the internet started out as, whatever benefits it brings, now it’s that. Two kinds of people use social media these days: People who want to sell you stuff and fools. Remaining sane today absolutely does require a kind of technological ascesis. Refuse easy but false pleasures. Limit your screen time to what is absolutely necessary for you to function. Don't opt out of dating, opt out of the loneliness economy. It can be done.
Find something you want to do, in the real world. You will form connections inevitably. You are not alone.