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 as wives and mothers has led them there?
The article is right. You're missing the key point, which is that democracies generally tend to do better economically than autocratic states.
What does democracy have to do with the economy? Well concentration of power in a subgroup is generally pretty bad 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 welfare and trans people. It's not "political bullshit" vs "real issues". The two are inextricably linked, and that jobs chart will keep happening until American society finally understands it. There's a reason Blue states are (generally) richer than Red (ex-slave) states: they have better teamwork.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
They think all the other young men are moochers and that they themselves are working their butts off trying to find jobs, a girlfriend, and what not but just happen to be down on their luck or the system is pushing them down.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Curious why dating is a non-starter. Looks - or rather appeal - is always a distribution and probably similar between men and women so historically there's always been a match for anyone. Mostly. What's different now? Have expectations changed in either gender (or both).
- Loss of social skills with growing online interactions versus in-person, face-to-face once they are out of a school setting.
- Loss of independence with many young folks not being able to afford to move out. Yes, many cultures have dealt with this, but US culture needs to adjust dating with living at home with parents.
- Loss of capital if they cannot find well-paying jobs to support that independence
- Loss of third spaces (e.g. malls used to be a big one when I was growing up)
- High price of meeting f2f -- fuel, cars, etc. are all very expensive compared to when I was growing up
I dunno, these are things that I can think of. I think social media and dating apps have also really changed the male-female dynamics, allowing both sides to be more selective too early in the dating loop, effectively decreasing odds of actually landing a date by over-filtering.
Life tends towards 80/20 so that isn't actually as bad as it sounds. What is important is what I've seen elsewhere--what the low end of the curve looks like. Basically zero. A very fertile market for the hucksters that claim to offer answers. And when faced with an impossible problem the usual reaction is to deny it exists at all. Anyone who recognizes the problem is "depressed". Same as we saw "try harder" after the housing collapse threw a bunch of unemployment into the system. It's not like trying harder will magically make jobs appear, at best it can shuffle around who is unemployed.
Expectations on both sides have changed, but the idea that women don't have to "settle" anymore has encouraged them to chase the top 10% of men, often fruitlessly. Online dating data from OKCupid infamously showed that playing out in numbers, where as pre-OLD their dating (and attention) pool was constrained to their hometown bar, college campus, etc. There's a parallel to the online job market: you used to be able to walk in with a resume and at least be considered, but now you're competing with 1,000+ resumes from across the country.
I have no sources for this but just the understanding I get from talking with some folks born after 2000. Most people are online or doing more individualistic activities so meeting single people organically is difficult. Dating apps are wildly skewed based on gender and have changed peoples dating behavior. I think there are other factors too but I think the combo of those two have left a lot of people discouraged and exhausted trying to date
> 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.
The point about gambling is hard to argue against. Abolishing (or simply stopping enforcement of) various gambling bans around the world, especially those specifically scoped for the youth, is a fairly recent development. Upholding those bans took constant investment - the incentives to tear down the protections were always there.
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.
"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."
------------
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.
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.
I agree and support term limits, but also not certain it can fix anything.
Legislators are (with rare few exceptions) not independent from the power of their party (meaning, they either align with party line or don't stand a chance of being elected). And each party has a nearly endless supply of new corrupt people to substitute in. Even if we had single term term-limits for every role, each party will keep cycling in new corrupt party-aligned people into those roles.
What we really need is a system where legislator are in a position that it is not feasible to corrupt them. It's fun to think of ways of designing such a government, but of course it will never be allowed by the powers that be.
The problem with a term limit like that is if you kill politics as a career that mostly precludes electing anyone competent because few will want to have to start over in a new career at some point in their life.
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.
This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta.
I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.
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.
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."
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.
It's !believes(!isSerious(mentalHealth)) which is both poor code and writing.
'I think mental health is a serious concern' would be preferred.
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 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?)
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 as wives and mothers has led them there?
The article is right. You're missing the key point, which is that democracies generally tend to do better economically than autocratic states.
What does democracy have to do with the economy? Well concentration of power in a subgroup is generally pretty bad 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 welfare and trans people. It's not "political bullshit" vs "real issues". The two are inextricably linked, and that jobs chart will keep happening until American society finally understands it. There's a reason Blue states are (generally) richer than Red (ex-slave) states: they have better teamwork.
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.
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.
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.
A common struggle seems to be that for whatever reason, people have tunnel vision on achieving the end result instead of enjoying the path to it.
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.
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.
Should we give up all hope and ambition? Or perhaps there is a middle ground to strike?
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".
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?
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.
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.
How does something fall sharply over the long run?
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.
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.
Perhaps young White men are right to be sick of being everyone's punching bag.
> 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 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.
Did they ever stop blaming video games?
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Like you said, it's a very red state, so I guess these young men voted for these people in the first place?
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.
They think all the other young men are moochers and that they themselves are working their butts off trying to find jobs, a girlfriend, and what not but just happen to be down on their luck or the system is pushing them down.
> only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men
As I said, "they think".
"I'm gonna voooote" lol
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?
If there are no good candidates, you know what to do big dog.
Lying and blaming whoever seems good targer is very on brand for conservatives. There is nothing "supposedly" to he had here.
After all, that is what people (including men) want when they vote for republicans. They just dont expect themselves to be receiving it.
One thing I've noticed: the amount of gambling ads targeted towards young males; kinda wild. I'm glad that I'm not growing up in this era.
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...
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.
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.
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 get tons of them too. I don't gamble or play games like that.
Seems like ads for sporting events and sports podcasts annd jersey sponsors are asymptotically approaching 100%.
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 like the VCs are trying to make the AfD win.
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
Spot on. Young men have almost completely given up on dating. Young women mainly use dating apps for attention. Society is not functioning correctly.
Curious why dating is a non-starter. Looks - or rather appeal - is always a distribution and probably similar between men and women so historically there's always been a match for anyone. Mostly. What's different now? Have expectations changed in either gender (or both).
- Loss of independence with many young folks not being able to afford to move out. Yes, many cultures have dealt with this, but US culture needs to adjust dating with living at home with parents.
- Loss of capital if they cannot find well-paying jobs to support that independence
- Loss of third spaces (e.g. malls used to be a big one when I was growing up)
- High price of meeting f2f -- fuel, cars, etc. are all very expensive compared to when I was growing up
I dunno, these are things that I can think of. I think social media and dating apps have also really changed the male-female dynamics, allowing both sides to be more selective too early in the dating loop, effectively decreasing odds of actually landing a date by over-filtering.
There's a famous OkCupid study that showed 20% of men got 80% of the matches. Other dating apps have a similar skew.
Life tends towards 80/20 so that isn't actually as bad as it sounds. What is important is what I've seen elsewhere--what the low end of the curve looks like. Basically zero. A very fertile market for the hucksters that claim to offer answers. And when faced with an impossible problem the usual reaction is to deny it exists at all. Anyone who recognizes the problem is "depressed". Same as we saw "try harder" after the housing collapse threw a bunch of unemployment into the system. It's not like trying harder will magically make jobs appear, at best it can shuffle around who is unemployed.
Expectations on both sides have changed, but the idea that women don't have to "settle" anymore has encouraged them to chase the top 10% of men, often fruitlessly. Online dating data from OKCupid infamously showed that playing out in numbers, where as pre-OLD their dating (and attention) pool was constrained to their hometown bar, college campus, etc. There's a parallel to the online job market: you used to be able to walk in with a resume and at least be considered, but now you're competing with 1,000+ resumes from across the country.
I have no sources for this but just the understanding I get from talking with some folks born after 2000. Most people are online or doing more individualistic activities so meeting single people organically is difficult. Dating apps are wildly skewed based on gender and have changed peoples dating behavior. I think there are other factors too but I think the combo of those two have left a lot of people discouraged and exhausted trying to date
Young men are becoming right wing manosphere sux. Women dont and have other options - like being single.
> 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.
The point about gambling is hard to argue against. Abolishing (or simply stopping enforcement of) various gambling bans around the world, especially those specifically scoped for the youth, is a fairly recent development. Upholding those bans took constant investment - the incentives to tear down the protections were always there.
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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.
"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."
------------
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.
Canada does not start that many wars.
if you only knew how bad things really are https://files.catbox.moe/youqwb.gif
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.
> Citizens United
I agree.
Include ranked choice or quadratic voting + repeal CU and a lot of things could improve quickly.
Terms limited to 25 years and age 65 at time of election.
I agree and support term limits, but also not certain it can fix anything.
Legislators are (with rare few exceptions) not independent from the power of their party (meaning, they either align with party line or don't stand a chance of being elected). And each party has a nearly endless supply of new corrupt people to substitute in. Even if we had single term term-limits for every role, each party will keep cycling in new corrupt party-aligned people into those roles.
What we really need is a system where legislator are in a position that it is not feasible to corrupt them. It's fun to think of ways of designing such a government, but of course it will never be allowed by the powers that be.
The problem with a term limit like that is if you kill politics as a career that mostly precludes electing anyone competent because few will want to have to start over in a new career at some point in their life.
I do agree with ranked choice.
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.
Personally, I'd make ownership of such bunkers illegal. Make them have some skin in the game.
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.
This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta.
I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.
Kind of hilarious to see the downvotes without comment. Guess you got your nvidia stock early. Everything is fine!
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.
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 don't think mental health isn't a serious concern
Double negative makes this hard to read
It may be easier to read that line as "I'm not saying mental health is totally fine"
"I think mental health is a serious concern."
That's the clearest version. Just drop the negatives.
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.
It's !believes(!isSerious(mentalHealth)) which is both poor code and writing.
'I think mental health is a serious concern' would be preferred.
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.
Programmer in the room, meet bikeshedding senior UI/UX designer in the room
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?)
My substack is called The Canadian Observer. I would greatly appreciate it if you subscribed.
subscribed! I found it a bit hard to find the site, if anyone else is interested it's here: https://matteoraso.substack.com/
What's this argument?
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 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?
Just telling the truth,
Even subtexually,
Seems an inevitable
Underbussing on this
Site.
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.
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.
Nobody would even know Andrew Tate if not for certain people summoning him everywhere like he's the devil.
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.
Not comfortable chairs! Back in my day, we had to walk up hill to school both ways, in the snow!
"experts warn"
“many people are saying this”
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