The vices may (or may not) be different for young women, but this trenchant overview describes the confusing path that all young people have to walk at this point. We need honest-broker clearinghouses - administered by human beings - for housing, dating, and employment. High schools, community centers, and colleges could be places where seekers and finders come together - we need investment funds to train workers in vital skills (anyone see that video about court reporters and escalator repairmen being in short supply?) and yes, laws to prevent corporate buyers in the private housing market. Thank you for the great post!
I value Commonplace, but this article started out with so many overstatements that it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I have never heard a liberal say "men are trash."
There are about 2500 four-year colleges & universities in the US. About 100 are highly selective, accepting less than 1/3 of applicants. The vast majority of students go to colleges that admit 50% or more of applicants. The experience of applying to these schools is not one of "randomness." The elite's perception that Harvard and Yale are the only place to go is utterly distorted, as Commonplace writers should certainly know.
From my perspective, I have definitely heard the “men is trash” sentiment - sometimes in exactly those words, sometimes just expressed. There was (is?) a recent trend online where it was fashionable for young women to question whether it’s embarrassing to even have a boyfriend. (Of course, a lot of women also pushed back on that!)
I think your point on colleges is valid. It’s not really difficult to get into college. The “elite” ones do make you stand out in the faceless online application process though, and can make tuition feel like less of a gamble in a way that second-tier colleges don’t, and acceptance into those kinds of colleges I think *can* feel random. Lots of people can develop “perfect” college applications on paper over their high school years, and many will still not be accepted into the elite schools they were aiming for (in other words, they won’t be rewarded for their efforts). I think that is the dysfunction John was getting at.
"a polity cannot write off 90% of the population as losers unable to compete"
We've been doing exactly that for over 100 years. Successfully navigating the 21st century world requires far more cognitive and social ability to its early 20th century counterpart. It's not an rural/urban thing -- 50%+ of all Americans were living in cities 100 years ago. But in that century, we made it harder and harder for the IQ<100 to succeed. (That's half the population.)
The 2-tier society is mostly cognitive, as the smarter and more social get university degrees which are mostly just markers to advertise their genetic endowments and catapult themselves into what we now call "the laptop class." If you're in the laptop class, this world is great. Oh, it's still lonely and atomized and difficult to find meaning or connection... but you've got lots of cheap stuff to distract you from the meaninglessness of your life and job. Everyone else lacks those distractions, so they create their own: porn, video games, drugs, etc... And that everyone else today is about 70% male.
Fundamentally, modern America doesn't need men, at least not American men. It needs consumers (women are good at that) but not producers (which is what men are). Our production comes from overseas. Women are legally equal and it turns out they don't like having babies when given the choice. So how, exactly, is your average 100 IQ, good with his hands, watch the game on Saturday kind of guy supposed to be a man in this world?
I don't have the answers, and those given here aren't bad. But remember Patrick Deneen's diagnosis in Why Liberalism Failed? Great book and many were all looking forward to his answers, but Regime Change flopped because his solutions were so obviously and woefully below the level of the problems he had identified. I feel the same way about the solutions presented here: not bad ideas, but far too little to matter.
This is a good article that properly articulates the loss of agency young people currently experience. The sadness is that their agency now resides exclusively with those who benefited from it over previous generations and who can now buy single family homes they do not need to get even more pennies they do not need. At which point the only hope is for local | state | federal governments with agency to declare the behavior predatory and end it. Which will not happen because the levers of authority are in the hands of those who enjoyed said now lost agency and mistake it for superiority, and thereby, an entitlement to charge it forward.
Very real problems, and with each issue I recognise how much considerably easier it was back when I was young a long long time ago.
Low cost housing was ubiquitous. A cheap room could be had for a week by working day labor half a day, and sucky jobs paid much more. A guy could be self supporting immediately, and a college degree, any degree, from any college would move you up the ladder quickly at any company.
I often read articles by young economists. They look at statistics and figures. They weren't around then. The whole story doesn't get told. They can't see beyond average or median. Pre aids there was more sex, a lot more sex.
Often young economists and thought leaders see only the view from a good college grad. They want affordable new 4 bedroom houses, and foreign vacations, a fancy car. They never look at the world normies lived in back then, or now.
I'm building a tiny house right now, it will probably end up costing me $30K. Tiny bedroom with loft, small kitchen, bathroom, AC, washer dryer, porch across the front. Around me in this town are many houses not much bigger that people used to raise eight or ten kids in while working the mines. Young folks these days need cheap places to live above all else.
We control how things go in our economy a lot more than free marketeers would like to admit. We need to structure things such that a 20 year old feels comfortable starting a family. While still in college if need be. As a society we need a much more attainable floor, a point below which no people can fall. A way to make it to the bottom rungs of the ladder.
Meh. Things will work themselves out, they always do despite all the gloomsaying in this piece. To whit, look back in history - to the mechanization of the textile industry, agricultural mechanization, the deskilling of manufacturing work with the assembly line, telephone switchboard automation, personal computers eliminating administrative roles, robotics in manufacturing. In all these cases , new roles and jobs were created, but yes, some groups got left out in the interim as things re-adjusted. For those left out, moving to where the work is, physically and mentally, will be required, but often few do, waiting for a new job to come to the community where the old job no longer is.
Good essay and excellent diagnosis. Many of the proposed solutions are communal; where communal institutions work to provide employment, marriage and social interaction support. Local churches are an established institution offering communal support especially with regard to marriage. The fact that more young men are attending a church is an encouraging development. How a local church or network of believers helps a young man gain employment may take some thought and consideration.
As an economic progressive, I'm very happy to read this kind of thinking from "conservative" writers. I've become more wary of defaulting to left-right labels as this new source of economic thinking emerges and dovetails with existing (ok, progressive) thinking. That's because it doesn't matter what one calls the policy on that spectrum. What matters is the policy gets implemented. Exacerbating entrenched left-right knee-jerks is the opposite of helpful. Welcoming our brothers and sisters to join in uniting against corporate control, oligopoly, legal political corruption, and for worker and voter agency is the attitude that can form a genuine movement. If those issues somehow become the legitimate platform of the republican party, I'll become a (progressive) republican. Same if the democratic party legitimately adopts that platform. But, since both are so thoroughly owned by the financial elite, I see a third party as the best option. To form that, social issue neutrality has to be enforced to keep the economic agenda front and center.
I enjoyed this thoughtful article but believe a glaring omission is encouragement of trade skill training as a legitimate career path for High School seniors. This would seem to be particularly important as some degree of manufacturing will be returning to the U.S. in the coming years.
There are a lot of very good ideas in this article but I can’t piece together why these issues appear to only affect men? Young women go through college admissions and job application processes too, and presumably experience a lot of the same randomness. Why would men be so much more susceptible to vices aplenty than they are?
You describe societal problems that assail women just as much as they do men. I mostly agree with you and especially so when you touch on the subject of equity firms buying up all properties they desire and zoning laws being absurd in that they keep the rich happy and isolated. In my humble opinion, salvage capitalism bears much of the blame for the battlefield young men and woman have to navigate nowadays but they are not alone. The middle class is collapsing and it seems unable to first understand what is happening and second to identify the real culprits and fight them. Instead of logical thinking, men and women of the losing classes are doing everything they can to evade the fight and escape the real world using games, drugs, online realities, fake friends, conspiracy theories..Anything and everything in order to escape the inevitable horror of how reality presents itself. You have described in your article an inter-generational decline based on a system that has been allowed to run without contraints for decades now. We need to stop thinking in terms of gender and start thinking in terms of system failure. We need to start thinking clearly!
“Metacrisis” is right. I won’t dispute your assessment of the economics behind my generation’s predicament—expensive housing, AI-driven job loss, the gig economy, etc.—but I’m absolutely convinced that culture is fundamentally to blame. I’ll use some anecdotes to elaborate.
I graduated in the top 1% of my high school GPA-wise, earned a National Merit Finalist scholarship (top 1% of PSAT test takers), and graduated from a public university with zero debt. I worked a series of fun and colorful seasonal jobs in various outdoor gigs: volunteered with the Fish & Wildlife Service on remote islands, killed invasive plants in California, collected seeds for a federal seed bank, surveyed seabirds in Hawaii, etc. Every job paid a little more money than the last, I lived frugally and saved as much as I could (55 cents on the dollar collecting seeds!), and maxed out my Roth IRA contributions. It was a great work-life balance, in that I could make ends meet, save for the future, see a new corner of the country, have fun, and take time off between seasons to travel. The economy seemed to be working, at least when you have no debt!
I worked my most recent assignment, the seabird survey job, for three seasons. It paid reasonably well, had decent benefits (employer-matched SIMPLE IRA, affordable healthcare, 7 hours of vacation per two-week pay period), and let me take two months off a year to travel. Awesome! But after three years of living in Kauai, I went on exactly one date. Turns out you have to go where the women are, and many of them (in Hawaii, anyway) are online these days, or spend their time drinking and getting high on the beach, or else don’t want to be in committed relationships. No thanks.
One of my coworkers dated a woman for close to ten years. She wanted to work in Hawaii and he didn’t, but he dragged himself out there for the sake of their relationship, moved in with her, and eventually got a good job as a natural resources manager making easily $80,000 per year. They’re both in their 30’s. But guess what? He wanted kids and she didn’t. This guy made a tremendous sacrifice by moving out to be with her, he got a good job, and he shared hobbies, interests, and temperaments with his girlfriend. To this day, they get along great. But because she doesn’t want a family, there’s yet another able and willing man—a guy who wants to become a father—who’s back to the drawing board.
I ended up getting baptized a year ago and joining the LDS/Mormon Church. (Long story.) I know multiple men in my current ward who are by all accounts productive citizens: they’re educated, they’re gainfully employed (some of them with great careers), a handful of them own their own homes or small businesses, and many of them have gone on missions, meaning they’ve set aside their egos for two years in the service of something other than themselves. I assume all of them are temple-worthy, meaning none of them drink, smoke, or use porn, they tithe 10% of their income to the church, and they volunteer their time and energy serving the congregation. In a previous generation—back when women supposedly wanted good husbands/family men—they would’ve been the cream of the crop, so far as character and values are concerned. A productive, selfless man! But to the best of my knowledge, very few of them can get dates, even within the church. I’ll be the first to admit that some of them seem to lack social skills, which is obviously important… but I stand by my assessment that the fundamental issue here, so far as this cohort is concerned, is that too many women judge the men in their lives only skin-deep. All the good behavior and family-based values won’t make a difference if he can’t get her attention, and he can’t get her attention unless he passes through an elaborate and ever-changing set of internet-derived filters that have little bearing on what makes for a good husband.
I’m 34 years old, yet I’m writing this from my childhood bedroom. I want desperately to become a husband and a good father. I was a high achiever academically, and I ended up pursuing a career that paid the bills and let me do what I enjoy: being outside and seeing the world. I did the whole “self fulfillment” thing, yet I’m as lonely as I’ve ever been because I can’t find anyone to share my life with. As a man, I’d like to focus on skills I can cultivate within myself (one could always work out more, or get fancier clothes, or delve deeply into a new hobby) rather than bitch about my lack of romantic life to strangers on the internet. But I’m utterly terrified I’ll throw myself into a thankless, soul-crushing job to signal that I’m a provider… and that it won’t make any difference. That no matter my sacrifice or efforts, the average woman will just scroll past me because the internet has convinced her that if a man can’t provide a dopamine rush on command, he’s not worth having. It’s deeply frustrating and it’s driven some of us to despair.
Sorry for the ridiculously long and personal post. I’m just not convinced the “metacrisis” is primarily economic. Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of men who’ve proven themselves to be deadbeats—on welfare/food stamps, doing drugs, playing video games ad nauseum, etc.—but I’ve met far too many who are productive, selfless, and on their best behavior, yet have no dating luck whatsoever.
Men and women are supposed to need each other—men can reign in the emotional impulses of women, women can help tame and harness men’s productive energy, etc.—but we live in a culture that prizes autonomy above all else. Should it surprise anyone that most young adults would rather finance a vacation to Santorini—replete with drinks and one-night stands—than raise children together? Our values are what’s been messed up, and until we return to something approximating the recent past—incentivizing marriage, manhood, and productivity, disincentivizing mindless consumption and random hookups, and finding ways to make us need each other instead of constantly promoting independence and autonomy—we’ll always have the “metacrisis” in our midst.
Being in a long-term relationship is hard and messy and most people prefer to avoid that nowadays. Everyday life is messy enough. Buying anything together could mean a costly divorce down the line, having children could mean causing harm to the ones you love the most if climate continues to worsen and nothing gets done to address it. Capitalism encourages individualism. Most media has taught us that a simple life is a thrown-away life as there are plenty of pleasures to seek and if we want to remain relevant, we should keep up with Instagram and have fun. My advice: learn to really enjoy being alone and relax. One day, out of nowhere, you will find someone to spend some or all your life with. Until then, enjoy friends and acquaintances, quaint chats with strangers and look outside identity groups for companionship. Most importantly, happiness should not be defined by a formula and you seemed to have lived quite a nice life until now so be thankful. If all that fails, volunteer in some very poor country for a while. That did the trick for me. I suddenly realised how wonderful my life has been and how LUCKY I am.
Interesting and timely article, but the author’s solutions are problematic in some ways.
—
Wage Subsidy
A wage subsidy in dying fields that are rapidly being chipped away or having big bites taken out of them will only exacerbate the problem, or make new problems, by creating market distortions.
If you subsidize a type of labor, those in the subsidized position will form a constituency and voting bloc. They will ally themselves with other wage-subsidized groups. Those groups will, through voting power, dictate job security to political candidates under counter-voting threat.
Advances will thus by stymied, increasingly useless labor will be propped up like Weekend at Bernie’s, and the economy will increasingly become adjacent to socialism via this redistributive policy, which in turn will flavor further socialist sentiment and harm economic growth. That said, will help provide meaning to many by giving them work they otherwise wouldn’t have.
—
Marriage Encouraging via Educational Institutions
Only private schools could get away with this. It won’t materialize in public institutions of a liberal society that increasingly advocates for female empowerment, singlehood, skepticism in traditional values, etc.
Even within a private religious educational context, we know the data on religion: the youth are starkly irreligious compared to older cohorts. Rebounds in belief have been greatly exaggerated.
—
Black Box Application Process
While I agree with the author’s anti-trust stance, company consolidation is not what is going to make the job-application-process-as-a-black-box go into overdrive mode: AI is.
As younger and tech-savvier people take over companies’ reins, AI will be used at every level of the application process to filter people out, game the system, etc. It will become exquisitely sophisticated.
More: this application AI tech will be within price-reach by even the smallest companies in town.
"...just walk into an office with a firm handshake and a copy of your resume, and ask to see the manager—is infuriating not because it’s nonsense, but because at one time it was true."
This is bullsh$t. It's a myth. Another 'boomers suck because XXX' myth.
The vices may (or may not) be different for young women, but this trenchant overview describes the confusing path that all young people have to walk at this point. We need honest-broker clearinghouses - administered by human beings - for housing, dating, and employment. High schools, community centers, and colleges could be places where seekers and finders come together - we need investment funds to train workers in vital skills (anyone see that video about court reporters and escalator repairmen being in short supply?) and yes, laws to prevent corporate buyers in the private housing market. Thank you for the great post!
I value Commonplace, but this article started out with so many overstatements that it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I have never heard a liberal say "men are trash."
There are about 2500 four-year colleges & universities in the US. About 100 are highly selective, accepting less than 1/3 of applicants. The vast majority of students go to colleges that admit 50% or more of applicants. The experience of applying to these schools is not one of "randomness." The elite's perception that Harvard and Yale are the only place to go is utterly distorted, as Commonplace writers should certainly know.
From my perspective, I have definitely heard the “men is trash” sentiment - sometimes in exactly those words, sometimes just expressed. There was (is?) a recent trend online where it was fashionable for young women to question whether it’s embarrassing to even have a boyfriend. (Of course, a lot of women also pushed back on that!)
I think your point on colleges is valid. It’s not really difficult to get into college. The “elite” ones do make you stand out in the faceless online application process though, and can make tuition feel like less of a gamble in a way that second-tier colleges don’t, and acceptance into those kinds of colleges I think *can* feel random. Lots of people can develop “perfect” college applications on paper over their high school years, and many will still not be accepted into the elite schools they were aiming for (in other words, they won’t be rewarded for their efforts). I think that is the dysfunction John was getting at.
"a polity cannot write off 90% of the population as losers unable to compete"
We've been doing exactly that for over 100 years. Successfully navigating the 21st century world requires far more cognitive and social ability to its early 20th century counterpart. It's not an rural/urban thing -- 50%+ of all Americans were living in cities 100 years ago. But in that century, we made it harder and harder for the IQ<100 to succeed. (That's half the population.)
The 2-tier society is mostly cognitive, as the smarter and more social get university degrees which are mostly just markers to advertise their genetic endowments and catapult themselves into what we now call "the laptop class." If you're in the laptop class, this world is great. Oh, it's still lonely and atomized and difficult to find meaning or connection... but you've got lots of cheap stuff to distract you from the meaninglessness of your life and job. Everyone else lacks those distractions, so they create their own: porn, video games, drugs, etc... And that everyone else today is about 70% male.
Fundamentally, modern America doesn't need men, at least not American men. It needs consumers (women are good at that) but not producers (which is what men are). Our production comes from overseas. Women are legally equal and it turns out they don't like having babies when given the choice. So how, exactly, is your average 100 IQ, good with his hands, watch the game on Saturday kind of guy supposed to be a man in this world?
I don't have the answers, and those given here aren't bad. But remember Patrick Deneen's diagnosis in Why Liberalism Failed? Great book and many were all looking forward to his answers, but Regime Change flopped because his solutions were so obviously and woefully below the level of the problems he had identified. I feel the same way about the solutions presented here: not bad ideas, but far too little to matter.
This is a good article that properly articulates the loss of agency young people currently experience. The sadness is that their agency now resides exclusively with those who benefited from it over previous generations and who can now buy single family homes they do not need to get even more pennies they do not need. At which point the only hope is for local | state | federal governments with agency to declare the behavior predatory and end it. Which will not happen because the levers of authority are in the hands of those who enjoyed said now lost agency and mistake it for superiority, and thereby, an entitlement to charge it forward.
Very real problems, and with each issue I recognise how much considerably easier it was back when I was young a long long time ago.
Low cost housing was ubiquitous. A cheap room could be had for a week by working day labor half a day, and sucky jobs paid much more. A guy could be self supporting immediately, and a college degree, any degree, from any college would move you up the ladder quickly at any company.
I often read articles by young economists. They look at statistics and figures. They weren't around then. The whole story doesn't get told. They can't see beyond average or median. Pre aids there was more sex, a lot more sex.
Often young economists and thought leaders see only the view from a good college grad. They want affordable new 4 bedroom houses, and foreign vacations, a fancy car. They never look at the world normies lived in back then, or now.
I'm building a tiny house right now, it will probably end up costing me $30K. Tiny bedroom with loft, small kitchen, bathroom, AC, washer dryer, porch across the front. Around me in this town are many houses not much bigger that people used to raise eight or ten kids in while working the mines. Young folks these days need cheap places to live above all else.
We control how things go in our economy a lot more than free marketeers would like to admit. We need to structure things such that a 20 year old feels comfortable starting a family. While still in college if need be. As a society we need a much more attainable floor, a point below which no people can fall. A way to make it to the bottom rungs of the ladder.
Meh. Things will work themselves out, they always do despite all the gloomsaying in this piece. To whit, look back in history - to the mechanization of the textile industry, agricultural mechanization, the deskilling of manufacturing work with the assembly line, telephone switchboard automation, personal computers eliminating administrative roles, robotics in manufacturing. In all these cases , new roles and jobs were created, but yes, some groups got left out in the interim as things re-adjusted. For those left out, moving to where the work is, physically and mentally, will be required, but often few do, waiting for a new job to come to the community where the old job no longer is.
Good essay and excellent diagnosis. Many of the proposed solutions are communal; where communal institutions work to provide employment, marriage and social interaction support. Local churches are an established institution offering communal support especially with regard to marriage. The fact that more young men are attending a church is an encouraging development. How a local church or network of believers helps a young man gain employment may take some thought and consideration.
As an economic progressive, I'm very happy to read this kind of thinking from "conservative" writers. I've become more wary of defaulting to left-right labels as this new source of economic thinking emerges and dovetails with existing (ok, progressive) thinking. That's because it doesn't matter what one calls the policy on that spectrum. What matters is the policy gets implemented. Exacerbating entrenched left-right knee-jerks is the opposite of helpful. Welcoming our brothers and sisters to join in uniting against corporate control, oligopoly, legal political corruption, and for worker and voter agency is the attitude that can form a genuine movement. If those issues somehow become the legitimate platform of the republican party, I'll become a (progressive) republican. Same if the democratic party legitimately adopts that platform. But, since both are so thoroughly owned by the financial elite, I see a third party as the best option. To form that, social issue neutrality has to be enforced to keep the economic agenda front and center.
Anyway, this is exciting to read.
I enjoyed this thoughtful article but believe a glaring omission is encouragement of trade skill training as a legitimate career path for High School seniors. This would seem to be particularly important as some degree of manufacturing will be returning to the U.S. in the coming years.
There are a lot of very good ideas in this article but I can’t piece together why these issues appear to only affect men? Young women go through college admissions and job application processes too, and presumably experience a lot of the same randomness. Why would men be so much more susceptible to vices aplenty than they are?
I think "randomness" is overstated here. People gamble money, hoping to make even more. Most other things seem to be fated: inexorable.
You describe societal problems that assail women just as much as they do men. I mostly agree with you and especially so when you touch on the subject of equity firms buying up all properties they desire and zoning laws being absurd in that they keep the rich happy and isolated. In my humble opinion, salvage capitalism bears much of the blame for the battlefield young men and woman have to navigate nowadays but they are not alone. The middle class is collapsing and it seems unable to first understand what is happening and second to identify the real culprits and fight them. Instead of logical thinking, men and women of the losing classes are doing everything they can to evade the fight and escape the real world using games, drugs, online realities, fake friends, conspiracy theories..Anything and everything in order to escape the inevitable horror of how reality presents itself. You have described in your article an inter-generational decline based on a system that has been allowed to run without contraints for decades now. We need to stop thinking in terms of gender and start thinking in terms of system failure. We need to start thinking clearly!
“Metacrisis” is right. I won’t dispute your assessment of the economics behind my generation’s predicament—expensive housing, AI-driven job loss, the gig economy, etc.—but I’m absolutely convinced that culture is fundamentally to blame. I’ll use some anecdotes to elaborate.
I graduated in the top 1% of my high school GPA-wise, earned a National Merit Finalist scholarship (top 1% of PSAT test takers), and graduated from a public university with zero debt. I worked a series of fun and colorful seasonal jobs in various outdoor gigs: volunteered with the Fish & Wildlife Service on remote islands, killed invasive plants in California, collected seeds for a federal seed bank, surveyed seabirds in Hawaii, etc. Every job paid a little more money than the last, I lived frugally and saved as much as I could (55 cents on the dollar collecting seeds!), and maxed out my Roth IRA contributions. It was a great work-life balance, in that I could make ends meet, save for the future, see a new corner of the country, have fun, and take time off between seasons to travel. The economy seemed to be working, at least when you have no debt!
I worked my most recent assignment, the seabird survey job, for three seasons. It paid reasonably well, had decent benefits (employer-matched SIMPLE IRA, affordable healthcare, 7 hours of vacation per two-week pay period), and let me take two months off a year to travel. Awesome! But after three years of living in Kauai, I went on exactly one date. Turns out you have to go where the women are, and many of them (in Hawaii, anyway) are online these days, or spend their time drinking and getting high on the beach, or else don’t want to be in committed relationships. No thanks.
One of my coworkers dated a woman for close to ten years. She wanted to work in Hawaii and he didn’t, but he dragged himself out there for the sake of their relationship, moved in with her, and eventually got a good job as a natural resources manager making easily $80,000 per year. They’re both in their 30’s. But guess what? He wanted kids and she didn’t. This guy made a tremendous sacrifice by moving out to be with her, he got a good job, and he shared hobbies, interests, and temperaments with his girlfriend. To this day, they get along great. But because she doesn’t want a family, there’s yet another able and willing man—a guy who wants to become a father—who’s back to the drawing board.
I ended up getting baptized a year ago and joining the LDS/Mormon Church. (Long story.) I know multiple men in my current ward who are by all accounts productive citizens: they’re educated, they’re gainfully employed (some of them with great careers), a handful of them own their own homes or small businesses, and many of them have gone on missions, meaning they’ve set aside their egos for two years in the service of something other than themselves. I assume all of them are temple-worthy, meaning none of them drink, smoke, or use porn, they tithe 10% of their income to the church, and they volunteer their time and energy serving the congregation. In a previous generation—back when women supposedly wanted good husbands/family men—they would’ve been the cream of the crop, so far as character and values are concerned. A productive, selfless man! But to the best of my knowledge, very few of them can get dates, even within the church. I’ll be the first to admit that some of them seem to lack social skills, which is obviously important… but I stand by my assessment that the fundamental issue here, so far as this cohort is concerned, is that too many women judge the men in their lives only skin-deep. All the good behavior and family-based values won’t make a difference if he can’t get her attention, and he can’t get her attention unless he passes through an elaborate and ever-changing set of internet-derived filters that have little bearing on what makes for a good husband.
I’m 34 years old, yet I’m writing this from my childhood bedroom. I want desperately to become a husband and a good father. I was a high achiever academically, and I ended up pursuing a career that paid the bills and let me do what I enjoy: being outside and seeing the world. I did the whole “self fulfillment” thing, yet I’m as lonely as I’ve ever been because I can’t find anyone to share my life with. As a man, I’d like to focus on skills I can cultivate within myself (one could always work out more, or get fancier clothes, or delve deeply into a new hobby) rather than bitch about my lack of romantic life to strangers on the internet. But I’m utterly terrified I’ll throw myself into a thankless, soul-crushing job to signal that I’m a provider… and that it won’t make any difference. That no matter my sacrifice or efforts, the average woman will just scroll past me because the internet has convinced her that if a man can’t provide a dopamine rush on command, he’s not worth having. It’s deeply frustrating and it’s driven some of us to despair.
Sorry for the ridiculously long and personal post. I’m just not convinced the “metacrisis” is primarily economic. Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of men who’ve proven themselves to be deadbeats—on welfare/food stamps, doing drugs, playing video games ad nauseum, etc.—but I’ve met far too many who are productive, selfless, and on their best behavior, yet have no dating luck whatsoever.
Men and women are supposed to need each other—men can reign in the emotional impulses of women, women can help tame and harness men’s productive energy, etc.—but we live in a culture that prizes autonomy above all else. Should it surprise anyone that most young adults would rather finance a vacation to Santorini—replete with drinks and one-night stands—than raise children together? Our values are what’s been messed up, and until we return to something approximating the recent past—incentivizing marriage, manhood, and productivity, disincentivizing mindless consumption and random hookups, and finding ways to make us need each other instead of constantly promoting independence and autonomy—we’ll always have the “metacrisis” in our midst.
Being in a long-term relationship is hard and messy and most people prefer to avoid that nowadays. Everyday life is messy enough. Buying anything together could mean a costly divorce down the line, having children could mean causing harm to the ones you love the most if climate continues to worsen and nothing gets done to address it. Capitalism encourages individualism. Most media has taught us that a simple life is a thrown-away life as there are plenty of pleasures to seek and if we want to remain relevant, we should keep up with Instagram and have fun. My advice: learn to really enjoy being alone and relax. One day, out of nowhere, you will find someone to spend some or all your life with. Until then, enjoy friends and acquaintances, quaint chats with strangers and look outside identity groups for companionship. Most importantly, happiness should not be defined by a formula and you seemed to have lived quite a nice life until now so be thankful. If all that fails, volunteer in some very poor country for a while. That did the trick for me. I suddenly realised how wonderful my life has been and how LUCKY I am.
Interesting and timely article, but the author’s solutions are problematic in some ways.
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Wage Subsidy
A wage subsidy in dying fields that are rapidly being chipped away or having big bites taken out of them will only exacerbate the problem, or make new problems, by creating market distortions.
If you subsidize a type of labor, those in the subsidized position will form a constituency and voting bloc. They will ally themselves with other wage-subsidized groups. Those groups will, through voting power, dictate job security to political candidates under counter-voting threat.
Advances will thus by stymied, increasingly useless labor will be propped up like Weekend at Bernie’s, and the economy will increasingly become adjacent to socialism via this redistributive policy, which in turn will flavor further socialist sentiment and harm economic growth. That said, will help provide meaning to many by giving them work they otherwise wouldn’t have.
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Marriage Encouraging via Educational Institutions
Only private schools could get away with this. It won’t materialize in public institutions of a liberal society that increasingly advocates for female empowerment, singlehood, skepticism in traditional values, etc.
Even within a private religious educational context, we know the data on religion: the youth are starkly irreligious compared to older cohorts. Rebounds in belief have been greatly exaggerated.
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Black Box Application Process
While I agree with the author’s anti-trust stance, company consolidation is not what is going to make the job-application-process-as-a-black-box go into overdrive mode: AI is.
As younger and tech-savvier people take over companies’ reins, AI will be used at every level of the application process to filter people out, game the system, etc. It will become exquisitely sophisticated.
More: this application AI tech will be within price-reach by even the smallest companies in town.
A worthy analysis, but you left out worker power and unions, which will have to be part of any serious fix.
"...just walk into an office with a firm handshake and a copy of your resume, and ask to see the manager—is infuriating not because it’s nonsense, but because at one time it was true."
This is bullsh$t. It's a myth. Another 'boomers suck because XXX' myth.