America’s age of unaccountability was supposed to free its inhabitants of the shackles of stress, sorrow, and self-loathing. Instead, it has tightened them.
A survey of 2,000 young men between the ages of 18 and 29 conducted by the Institute for Family Studies (ISF) found that 42% of young men say, “All in all, I am inclined to think that I am a failure.” Just 32% outright reject this unflattering characterization of themselves.
Attitudes differ based on age (46% of those between the age of 18 and 23 feel like a failure, while just 38% of those between 24 and 29 do), employment status (33% for full time workers, 43% for part time ones, and 56% for the unemployed), and living situation (26% for those married with kids, 46% for those who are married without kids, 49% for those who are unmarried with kids, and 43% for those who unmarried without kids).
The obvious conclusion here is the right one. Productive men with intact families who are better established in their adult lives have a healthier self-conception than unproductive ones without families at an earlier, uncertain point. This observation, when accounted for alongside declining marriage and fertility rates, as well as women’s ever-increasing share of the job market and outstripping of their male peers in education, bodes dismally for America’s men and their sense of self-worth.
As the Institute for Family Studies’ Joseph E. Davis, Michael Toscano, and Ken Burchfiel note, men now account for only 41% of earned college degrees, and they have proven more susceptible to all manner of pitfalls.
Young men have higher rates of conditions such as ADHD and autism and have more problems with drugs, gambling, pornography, and the law. Many young men today have lower earnings and career prospects compared to earlier cohorts … They have fewer friends, socialize less, and are less civically engaged. Fewer are making a timely transition to adulthood by meeting such milestones as having a full-time job, being financially independent, living away from their parents’ home, and getting married and having children.
The question is: why?
To be sure, there are structural culprits for these trends. Davis, Toscano, and Burchfiel point the finger at society’s “deemphasis on role transitions.”
After all, from a young age, they have heard a cultural message of emancipation from the old constraints of social roles and forms of life. Now, their future is open, and they can be whatever they want to be and live however they choose. There is seemingly no stigma attached to delaying family formation or choosing to remain unmarried and not have children.
And by all accounts, men crave — and know that they desperately need — the structure of family life and the old benchmarks of adulthood to achieve self-satisfaction. Fifty-nine percent of young men are single, but 74% of that cohort are open to dating. Sixty-eight percent of unmarried men hope to be married, and 62% of those without a child want to be a parent. Eighty-nine percent recognize strength, responsibility, and leadership as qualities associated with manhood, and 85% say it “requires a willingness to sacrifice for others.” They say they want good jobs with which they can live independently and eventually provide for a family.
Young men are not apathetic about their future. Considering all that has been stacked against them – The New York Times and its peer publications’ monthly odes to polygamy, the emergence of the toxic, far-right manosphere, and a whole-of-society effort to convince young people that spouses and children are burdens rather than blessings — that is no small thing. They want that which is meaningful and can make them happy. That is a necessary condition for an improvement of their lot. It is not sufficient.
Keyser Söze observed that “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” His second greatest trick was convincing those who are aware of him that he works only through others. There is no shortage of boogeymen Americans can choose to blame for their own shortcomings. The Right offers up feminism, the sexual revolution, DEI, affirmative action, and the media. The Left suggests toxic masculinity, religion, big business, white privilege, and a panoply of isms. Both profit off the idea — which of course comes with a grain of truth — that individuals lack agency; that in order for their lives to improve, it’s society, not themselves that must change.
It’s true that men face a current pushing them downriver of the good, true, and beautiful. But many, despite their recognition of the desirability of swimming against it, have let themselves be swept up.
Pornography, gambling, drugs, slothfulness, dependence: these aren’t ills that force themselves upon men, they’re temptations that they give in to. The world may offer them the tools with which to ruin themselves, but still, it’s they that must use them. And use them, they are.
It’s they who waste money on parlays, their own time on idle pursuits, their parents’ on continuing to provide for them, and their brains on narcotics. Nobody else makes the bet, smokes the joint, sleeps in, skips class, or mails-it-in for them.
Men understand this as intuitively as they long for the families they’re not forming. They might publicly join in the popular political blame game, or even convince themselves that they believe in it. Deep down, though, they know they are the authors of their own destiny, and they resent themselves for not making more of it.
As well as the society that’s made an industry out of the lie responsible for their misery.
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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.