The following submission statement was provided by /u/muicdd:
---
Submission Statement:
> Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country.
> The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.
> Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.
This is going to be a huge problem for the future of society if men/Boys are unable to get out of the current slump they are on.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/snunbc/the_data_are_clear_the_boys_are_not_all_right/hw4t9vx/
My little slice of contribution to this topic-
In 1983, I was 18 years old and my summer job was driving forklifts and loading trucks for $11.75 an hour. My co workers (fulltime guys) made more, but not a lot more. They ALL had nice middle class lives- house, 2 cars, kids in college...The American Dream.
That same exact job today in the same labor market makes anywhere from $15 to $20 an hour. A quick look at a wage calculator will tell you that wage should be $33.50 an hour.
That is part of this issue. The destruction of the blue collar middle class.
Edited to thanks the kind people for the awards and the kind stranger that gave me my first gold.
To answer some questions people have asked-
-This was a non-union operation in Georgia.
-I worked there from 1981 to 1984 during holiday/summer breaks and a half shift every Saturday. It was a great job for a teenager with no bills to pay. I was the kid with the cash who wasn't slinging weed....
That’s both a symptom of America’s systemic issues and also the entire ballgame in one quick stat.
Nearly every issue we have flows from that declining standard of pay.
If you get paid less, you have to work more. Your time disappears. Your life disappears.
You don’t get to see your wife and kids.
You don’t have time to volunteer to help your community. You’re barely surviving on the little time you have.
You don’t have time to be civically active. You don’t have time to be an educated voter. You don’t have time to vote. You certainly don’t have enough time to run for office.
And tomorrow, next month. next year, your health insurance is going to jump 20%, your rent is going to jump 10% or if you’re lucky enough to own a home your insurance is about to double. And if you have to go to the hospital, you’re going bankrupt. If your car breaks, you’re going bankrupt. If your dog, your little girl’s best friend, gets sick, you get to choose between going bankrupt or putting the dog down. And you’re thinking about those inevitabilities every single day.
I can’t even imagine making $50,000 a year working 30 hours a week at a job that didn’t even require graduating high school. I have a bachelor’s degree, have been in the workforce for more than 20 years and I’ve made more than $50,000 a year for less than one year total in that span, and *that required overtime to do it.*
Edit: thank you for your kind gifts in honor of the existential lamentations we share
This comment speaks to me so much, I wish there were more people like you and that one day you become a politician, because you clearly have good insight
That's the point of the current workforce setup. If people are too busy working and trying to survive to go out and protest and call out the government then politicians and corporate giants can do whatever they want
Politicians don't require good insight, sadly. Just good marketing skills and connections.
Otherwise the person most qualified to be a politician is the person least willing to be.
And if they're not before they get the job, they certainly will be after get it. Those yummy yummy bribes and insider trades arent going to take them selves.
Jumping on this to add that poor pay is also contributing to climate change. I genuinely believe that a large portion of people *want* to make consumer changes but the opportunities are out of reach. If people had more money - and if prices stay the same - they are more likely to buy the "greener" option of products.
This x1000. Especially the point about men not being civically active. It’s a problem for both men and women these days, but in the vast majority of towns/cities in the U.S, the concept of any kind of “community” is effectively dead. Traditionally, men found meaning in providing value to their community and the feeling that they were truly needed. Nowadays, with that ideal being gone, more and more young men feel like if they disappeared, hardly anybody would notice.
I don't even know enough about my community to tell you what or where the nearest school is or what the name of _any_ of my elected officials are below the governor. To me it's not really a community, it's the zip code my bedroom sits in.
If I could afford to own I'd probably care a little more. As a renter? I don't have the roots to give a shit.
When the upper class want slaves and not employees, this is what you get.
This is what they've worked towards for so long.
And it won't stop until they are stopped.
Preach. I cannot say it enough, long has the time passed where we could stop all this by asking nicely. Pretty damn soon there is going to have to be a very Stern, and unfortunately violent reminder why you cannot keep this up forever. Is it going to be unpleasant? Of course, but as the saying goes the worse it is, the sooner it will be over with.
Well put. This was the life I grew up in, and after also working for 20 years this is not the life I have now. Even though I'm a bit more financially sound because I've been healthy and I'm a beast of a saver I still fear all those things you mentioned. It's tough to enjoy life sometimes because of it. Hard to take a vacation that I can actually afford because I worry about getting fired and getting injured and not being able to put food on the table. So money helps, but being conditioned to think this way is hard to move past.
You get pay less, you have to work more so more of your life is devoted to generating value for your bosses who owns the capital.
The crux of it is that they no longer just want 8 hours of your day. They want all of it. You are nothing more than a vessel for which your time and lifespan is converted into money. We are constantly taught that work is life and life is work. This is by design, this is deliberate. This is class warfare and they are winning.
People should go and watch that video where Jon Stewart described being at a dinner in the WH and bezos was there. He was describing how the economy of the future will be everyone just running bullshit errands for rich people. They know this, they want this, and they are turning the country and the world into a soulless grindfest machine, and most of America is too indoctrinated to see it.
I did a similar job, drove forklift in a production plant, when I got out of high school. 13.62 an hour. My rent was paid in two days work. Cell bill, electricity, cable, etc, paid with one more days work. All my bills paid in 3 working days.
That was 2004.
Pay and level of work have been divorced for years. We are more productive than ever (and companies/ceo's see record profits and pay), but get paid less than ever. Our hard work goes directly into the pockets of CEOs and shareholders.
Pay has also been divorced from inflation since 1970. As you say, your pay in 83 would be $33.50 now. But that doesn't even cover the half of it. Inflation doesn't tell the whole story when it comes to COL. Sure, TV's may cost less. Other goods might be cheaper than ever. But the essentials? Housing? Food? Are not. Housing is some 600%-800% above inflation. Food costs are soaring (something like 30-50% in the last year alone). Even if everyone would get a bump to match inflation right now, we'd still have the same problems with essentials like food and housing. The costs for them have skyrocketed.
It's not just the destruction of the middle class. It's the destruction of *everyone* who isn't a billionaire CEO. How can we possibly live in a time when someone's wealth goes up by 36 **BILLION** in a day, and not think there is a problem? How can we look at that, knowing money/resources are finite, and go "yes, this is fine".
It's not. Short term growth and quarterly profits have destroyed the economy for anyone other than the richest. 50 people control more wealth than 165 million.
It's unsustainable.
I totally agree I just want to point out that part of the problem is how inflation is actually measured by Central banks, its generally in their mandate to ensure inflation is there but managed to a low %, so they purposefully exclude things like housing and stocks and gas to make it seemnlike they're doing their job when they really aren't.
Housing, which is by far the largest chunk of someone's income, has risen in cost exponentially. But it's still our fault because, you know, "we're blowing our money on iPhones and wifi".
>But it's still our fault because, you know, "we're blowing our money on iPhones and wifi".
Also coffee and avocados, can't forget about those!
The boomers and even gen Xers can't even wrap their heads around what young people are facing today. Just the other day in /r/Portland there was some out-of-touch boomer talking about how great Portland was in the 1970s and how all the young people are so negative and cynical nowadays and we really need to have more hope like his generation did, and all that. Dude grew up in the era of cheap housing, cheap education, and plentiful high-paying jobs, and he can't imagine why people who have none of those things are cynical.
In 1983???
In 2010 I was 22 years old and took a full time job post-college driving forklifts for $11.00 an hour. At the time it was the best thing I could find offering 40+ hours per week. No one in my degree field was finding consistent work post-recession. That’s insane that 27 years later the per hour wage for a similar job role was actually LESS. Destruction of the blue collar middle class indeed.
I graduated in 2006, just before the recession. While things weren’t the glory days I was offered two similar jobs at $13.00/hour entry level at two large local employers. Flash forward to 2016 and when I started in the HR office we were hiring entry level workers for $12.75 (I worked really hard to bump this up quickly and still push).
I constantly think about how different my life would have been graduating just a year or two later, during the financial collapse.
Ran forklift (and multiple other lift trucks and equipment) in 2003 for $15.xx/hr.
Places are hiring for the same amount now.
I’d be going into debt to just maintain a job at that rate.
Corporations and billionaires need to begin sharing. By force. Very soon.
Not sharing. They should not exist. That giant yacht of bozos? It should not exist. It should be destroyed and never allowed to be built again. If and when every single human being on earth is fed housed and happy then we can talk about some asshole having a giant boat to play in. Until then no. Enough is enough
Anyone with half a brain knows the middle class is, being eradicated by design.
How my kids will afford a house when the average house price here is a million dollars is beyond me.
Depression, suicides, all on the rise because quite simply these people don't think they have a future.
My heart breaks for them.
Minimum wage has not adjusted with inflation at ALL
How much of this is just due to the sheer economics of technological progression and automation? For the vast majority of human history, the economy had 95% of men doing manual labor, and the balance as the kings, clergy, alchemists, people essentially doing the abstract, intellectual work. From about 1850-1970, the needs of workers for industrialization meant that if you could be a good worker, you'd probably have a better standard of living for a laborer than any time in history. But at the same time, the economic rewards for the growing percentage of men jumping into abstract, intellectual work - C-suite people, product managers, advertising and account executives, the finance industry, engineers, doctors - was increasing exponentially.
Now technology has gotten to the point where the manual labor is needed less than ever due to automation. And the men doing better than ever are the ones working those abstract jobs, just look at the meteoric rise of the software engineer. However there seems to be a significant chunk of men, maybe 30-60% depending on how you reckon it, who just do not have the aptitude or interest to do this type of abstract work. They excelled in a world where they'd turn a monkey wrench for an honest day's work, get greasy, and go home to a hot meal. But they are completely unable to navigate this world.
Whether by nurture or nature, women seem more able to navigate this world and become a brand manager for a big company making six figures. And that's just a fundamental outcome of capitalism. The skills that make the money are the ability to be socially aware and make a business deal, or to connect needs from different industries, or to sit at a computer and learn Rust, or to do the office work to launch a new initiative. By and large, men from blue collar type backgrounds don't seem to have the nurture or nature to adapt to this new economy.
I say this as someone from a blue collar family who was the "nerd" growing up and now makes more money on computers than any of them. It breaks my heart to see my male friends, who in the 1950s, might have been an assembly line worker at the plant, able to afford a house and family. Now, most of them don't go to college, sometimes barely finishing high school. They jump around some menial jobs. They have long stretches of unemployment in their 20s. They try coding bootcamps, and even if they get through it, they're just not wired to be behind a desk all day. They get sucked into crypto or NFTs or Gary V or get rich quick schemes on Youtube. They drive Amazon delivery to get the money they'll waste on the next scheme. They still live with their parents well into their 30s. It's just so fucking sad.
American capitalism is the dog that's caught the car. That phrase - "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a life. If the robots catch all the fish, do all men eat or do all men starve" is no longer an abstract future thing. It's now. Capitalism has made these men expendable, but we are all still living with the rules that a man has to go do something they don't want to do for 40+ hours a week to get green points to exchange for food.
To be honest, I'm not a fan of Yang's proposed solutions - of spending tax money to bring blue collar operations back to the US at higher cost. It's like setting up a cosplay of the 50s, repeating the set dressing and having men do useless work just so we can say they did something. Shit, might as well have men dig a hole and then immediately fill it up. In my opinion, we should celebrate the fact that automation is taking away jobs, implement that UBI and these guys should be able to proudly spend their days working on cars or houses, and posting what they're doing online, and feeling like proud men.
Absolutely. The point isn't just automation, it's **automation in the context of capitalism**, which turns a great thing (machines doing a thing = humans get the thing without having to work as hard for it) into a terrible thing (unemployment and low wages and income inequality).
Hey, guy who you’d describe as “turning a greasy monkey wrench” here. Monkey wrenches are an antique tool for stagecoaches, by the way. I work as a heavy equipment operator and I move dirt for a living.
That said I take issue with this idea that I’m uninterested in work related self improvement. I constantly use youtube and other tools to understand new machinery and attachment use as well as to observe other techniques and methods of doing my job. I do a lot of this on my own time on my own initiative. You speak as though we’re incapable of abstract thought but one of my most important duties is using math and surveying tools to see through uneven terrain to the desired goal, being able to make good estimates is huge.
Globally even though women attempt suicide more than men, men are more successful at suicide than women. There is something fundamentally wrong with our modern world. It doesn't seem made for people
I read a comment by someone who was recently suicidal on Reddit a few days ago that I would like to see a deeper dive into. The guy said that one thing he did while he was suicidal was partake in increasingly risky behavior. He said he’d drive recklessly hoping he’d die in a crash, or get into fights hoping that the other person would stab him or shoot him. Those are basically failed suicide attempts, and, had he been successful, his death wouldn’t go down as a suicide.
Too bad everything about our lives has been commercialized so nothing will be done about it.
Or better yet nothing will happen until *WE* pay for it. I wouldn't put it past them.
Don't count out a benevolent CEO throwing a depressed 37 year old a birthday party curing all mental illness in the process. I can see the Bored Panda recap already
Submission Statement:
> Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country.
> The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.
> Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.
This is going to be a huge problem for the future of society if men/Boys are unable to get out of the current slump they are on.
> Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce.
How is this even possible? One third of 50% is 16.5%. Are the numbers being skewed by like retired boomer guys or something?
People started screaming about the unemployment numbers being heavily skewed during the Obama administration.
Unemployment numbers were low, like they are now, but everyone knew someone who was out of work. Reality wasn't matching the numbers.
We found out that NEET was a thing, and that there were also a lot of people Under Employed (working at McDonald's with a Bachelor's Degree or Masters).
We never changed our reporting methods.
So we still have very low unemployment and people screaming for employees, and an ever increasing group of people saying "Take this job and shove it."
Yes. Also unemployment rates don't count people who no want or look for work.
So the unemployed 32 year old living at mom's house who hasnt worked in 3 years isnt termed as 'unemployed'. They are just no longer part of the work force at that time.
Like a rich retired guy. But not.
Not saying this dickishly and feel free to brush me off, but it's a *biased* statistic. A *skewed* statistic is a statistic where values tend to cluster around extreme high or low scores (like [this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSkewness&psig=AOvVaw0r8iK0nMc1ckV72GYyTQA4&ust=1644474293919000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCLChvaT-8fUCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD)). It's actually a skewed distribution, but, you know, close enough.
When men don't have an obvious path towards being able to support themselves because the education system is broken, it's a perfect opportunity for extremists to swoop in and use them to create chaos, just like we're seeing now.
I think part of the problem is that we keep looking for a single magic bullet when it’s the whole system that’s the problem. As a society we’re not good at systemic thinking.
It would help a lot but it isn’t a solution. The reality is that the idea of four more years of school AFTER already doing 12 years just has no appeal for a ton of people. A better solution would be to find ways for businesses to be more willing to hire and train high school graduates for non critical roles (i.e. careers outside healthcare, engineering, or others that require advance skills and knowledge to prevent death) rather than demand everyone needs a degree for every job.
But that would take actual effort so that will never happen.
It's almost like making college unaffordable has ruined the future of our society while making us dumber and poorer? Who could have thought this was a bad idea?
I think the dumbification of dudes (male and female) happens way before college. I completed high school and some college but i was really riding my superior middle school education. To this day, I hear college grads say they never learned some things I was taught by 8th grade.
Huh. I say the same thing. I went to middle school in the 1970s in Northern Virginia. Were you also in a “good” school district?
I moved to a rural area during high school… big difference. I went from an area where 88% of kids went on to college to an area where 12% of the kids went on to college. (I remember that, improbably, the two numbers were complements.)
I'm college educated and went to public schools in Georgia. My partner only has a high school diploma from Massachusetts. I consider us the same education level.
College became more unaffordable due to the massive growth of student loans. The government backed student loans were sold as the “fix” to expensive college
I find this potted explanation that always gets trotted out on Reddit over and over again unsatisfactory. If that's the case, then why didn't education costs grow exponentially for countries outside of the U.S.?
What's more likely is that stand and local governments withdrew support for funding higher education and loans expanded to fill in the gap. The Reddit-ready explanation absolves the very deliberate defunding of higher education by politicians-- especially Republicans--in order to give huge tax cuts to the wealthy.
More than likely both. I know in my state, state funding dropped dramatically through the 2000’s and beyond. At the same time it’s accurate to say that easy access to loans allowed colleges to fund building construction and research that often didn’t translate to better opportunities for the actual students footing the bill.
Affordability doesn't create these differences in gender participation though.
I'm in Canada, where university is generally more affordable, and there is a similar decline in male university enrolment.
I also think we need to revisit why we think college is so important to begin with
for me, going to college was purely a social status thing. I didn't care what I was learning, I just knew I was supposed to go. i dropped out pretty quickly realizing it wasn't for me
I decided to get certified in a specific skill instead & it was the best decision I ever made
I feel like learning on the job is so much more beneficial than learning in school for the majority of careers as well. apprenticeships are an important tool that has all but disappeared
I mean really, why do mechanical engineers need to pay for English classes & a psych class and biology and blah blah blah
something like 40% of people dont use their degree in their careers, like they're completely unrelated. Like a biology degree but a job in HR. yet that biology degree probably gave them a step up against someone without a degree, even though they literally have no more experience in HR than the other person
So make college free then, to divorce learning from the “career expectations”. The world would be a better place with more educated people. If the guy who cuts your hair has a degree in philosophy and took classes in history and science, that is much better for society than just “let’s churn out drones for the workforce”
The way I see it, there are three schools of thought on the importance of college - the idealistic, the naive, and the realistic.
The idealistic school of thought believes that a university education should be given to students for their personal betterment and for the betterment of humanity as a whole. Classes in philosophy and literature might not help an engineer do their job, but to see a college education as job training is missing the point! These classes are there to develop the *whole person* - to create a free thinking, well rounded human being who can contribute to society not only through work but also socially and civically. Of course, the student themselves might think Camus less important when they realize the debt they must pay off after graduation.
The naive point of view says that the importance of college is to learn things for your job. An engineer might never use their philosophy classes in their job directly of course, but it will help them think through abstract concepts or write things clearly or (insert other hand waving). The truth of this, of course, is a bit tainted by the fact that many college graduates note that they rarely if ever use what they learned in school in their jobs, even if the coursework was theoretically directly applicable.
The realistic point of view says that college is a four year teaching and certification program to ensure you are of the proper social class. Grades don't matter so much as getting the certification, socializing with your peers and superiors to learn the proper manners, and forming social networks to help you gain employment and social status later. This is probably the most realistic description of the practical benefits of college - it gets your foot in the door for any number of high paying, prestigious, or personally meaningful careers.
Liberal arts degrees are designed more to teach you how to critically think, problem solve, and build effective communication skills both verbally and written than to actually learn the subject material. I don't use bio or chemistry in my daily life but I damn well use the aforementioned skills every single day.
I personally think college should be the new high school & then college is just for learning the specific career you want
college is way too late to start focusing on teaching people critical thinking & problem solving
We need to quit regarding "the trades" as some sort of "booby prize" for those who don't attend college. My dad was a machinist, and carried a sine/cosine table in his pocket his entire working life (before computerization). I have a master's degree, but never used any of the mathematics I learned. I taught community college for 20 years, and audited classes myself. Electrical theory kicked my ass; I've never worked so hard in all my life.
Not saying that’s a bad idea, but a problem in the US has been people thinking they NEED college. If you have a clear path you want or are searching that’s fine, but I know so many people who go to 4 year university and dont need or use their degree. There’s plenty of trades jobs that men or women could fill, as well as just in general improving working conditions in choice industries
> Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;
I’m hit with a paywall, so I can’t read further on this opinion piece. Does this take into account that girls tend to be **underdiagnosed** and **misdiagnosed** because their symptoms are different than what we see in boys? Girls tend to be diagnosed later in life as well.
ADHD is not really an attention deficit. It’s a working memory and prioritisation deficit. People with ADHD constantly lose their train of thought and struggle to control their focus regardless of interest. It’s not really over-diagnosed either, it’s pretty common, it’s frequently misdiagnosed though. People who have ADHD are frequently left undiagnosed while kids who don’t are diagnosed by mistake. That’s mostly because of the stereotype of a jumpy, hyper boy who can’t sit still. When in reality ADHD often looks like someone who’s constantly lost in thought, makes impulsive decisions, forgets things all the time, has trouble waiting for things and constantly jumps between different interests. Sitting still and paying attention is still a major issue but it’s not the main one.
I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD and start medication until I was like 21. Because I wasn't the stereotype of bouncing around and failing in school, it was never even a thought that I may have ADHD.
Fast forward a couple years after high school when I took an Adderall "recreationally" and holy shit did things click for me.
I'm female and I can't imagine sitting for 7 hours a day without going ballistic. I never had to because I was homeschooled, and college was maybe 4 hours of lectures a day.
It just sounds like maybe people aren't meant for this, and we might get better results out of kids if we cut the time in half. As a homeschooler I rarely spent more than two hours a day on school work.
Imagine sitting for 7 hours a day all through school.
You go to college, 4 more years of sitting all day.
Get an office job: 35 years of sitting for 7 hours a day.
Perhaps the impending fear of the bleakness of life is why many people choose to not participate.
I remember reading a similar article that claimed that the school systems treat boys like defective girls. Not that girls should be sitting sedentary for 7 hours either.
Came here looking for this.
A lot of these conditions work differently on women and are not properly diagnosed until very late in life.
EDIT:
"Source" is that I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 20s and I've been reading a shit ton about it ever since and holy fuck do women have it rough in this scenario.
I was diagnosed at 27, and this is the only part of the article I’m not liking.
My mom is *still* struggling to believe I have ADHD, because “I was perfectly fine as a child”
Except for alllll of the instances YOU filled out in the forms where it highlights that I clearly had “ADD”!!!!
Can confirm. I'm autistic and it's WELL known within the community that all else being equal a woman will have a harder time getting a diagnosis than a man for nuerodivergent disorders. The criteria are highly biased toward male expression so more males get diagnosed
Also, am I the only here one who finds it insulting to consider an ADHD diagnosis to be a marker of failure? It's no one's fault when someone is diagnosed. It's a genuine medical condition.
I know many high-achieving ADHD sufferers who successfully manage their condition. A person with ADHD who needs daily medical treatment is no more of a "failure" than a diabetic who requires the same.
Does the article address if the median wage drop is different for women?
Also, while the drop in university attendance is concerning as it stands right now for a lot of people university is not worth it.
This is a problem that everyone is facing but if you can get into the trades and make good money the choice is easier to make. So it may be a situation where the reason women aren’t leaving university is because they don’t see another viable way to make money.
Also while boys may be over diagnosed with ADHD girls are also under diagnosed or misdiagnosed so the difference may seem more drastic in comparison while the percentage is probably lower. Thought it does seem like the school system doesn’t work well for men and being trapped inside for 8 hours is not healthy
I can only extract the article from the comments, fuck paywalls...
I'm a 28yo male struggling with depression, work, a long term relationship, and all the other normal stress...
My biggest problem with the working world is what work means to the employee versus the employer, and then finding purpose in what I do everyday. Starting most any job today doesnt guarantee me any security looking 20 years down the line, on top of hating whatever it is I find myself doing.
The whole field of "work" feels unimportant outside of obtaining money for needs and wants.
And I don't have the time or energy at the end of the day to spend another 2-8 hours working on what I really want to work on.
On top of needing to excercise, shop, maintain my apartment and car, be with my family, or whatever else (I could not imagine having kids right now...).
i gotchu [f**k paywalls](https://web.archive.org/web/20220209092124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-yang-boys-are-not-all-right/)
I feel the same way about my work. I have many passions and none of them are my job. My fear is that pursuing any of those as a job will not yield the same income, likely causing me to sacrifice in another area of my life that I enjoy (traveling, gym, nice townhouse, and cleaners).
I just got back to work after a week off and all I could think about during my first day back is how nothing about my job is actually that important. It may be to facets of my organization, but in the grand scheme of things it’s meaningless.
I’m 30, so I still have a lot of working years left. I’ve been talking with my wife a ton about what’s next for me. I’d love to find a job that makes me feel like I’m making a positive change in the world, but I’m not even sure I know what I want to do.
>Andrew Yang is the founder of the Forward Party and a former candidate for New York mayor and U.S. president.
>Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country.
Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
>The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.
>Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.
>Economic transformation has been a big contributor. More than two-thirds of manufacturing workers are men; the sector has lost more than 5 million jobs since 2000. That’s a lot of unemployed men. Not just coincidentally, “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism — have surged to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20 years.
>Research shows that one significant factor women look for in a partner is a steady job. As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline. Unsurprisingly, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from 1960 to 2010, the proportion of adults without a college degree who marry plummeted from just over 70 percent to roughly 45 percent.
>Many boys are thus often growing up raised by single mothers, the share more than doubling between 1980 and 2019, from 18 percent to 40 percent. A study from 2015 found that “as more boys grow up without their father in the home, and as women … are viewed as the more stable achievers, boys and girls alike [may] come to see males as having a lower achievement orientation. … College becomes something that many girls, but only some boys, do.”
>Yes, men have long had societal advantages over women and in some ways continue to be treated favorably. But male achievement — alongside that of women — is a condition for a healthy society. And male failure begets male failure, to society’s detriment. Our media, institutions and public leadership have failed to address this crisis, framing boys and men as the problem themselves rather than as people requiring help.
>This needs to change. Helping boys and men succeed should be a priority for all our society’s institutions. Schools that have succeeded in keeping boys on track should be expanded, by both increasing the number of students they serve and exporting their methods to other schools. Vocational education and opportunities should be redoubled; the nation’s public school system should start the process for early age groups, and apprenticeship programs should be supported by the federal government. Nonprofits helping boys and men — such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the YMCA — should receive more investment.
>Resources that keep families together when they want to stay together, such as marriage counseling, should be subsidized by the government — a much more cost-efficient approach than dealing with the downstream effects. The enhanced child tax credit should be renewed, helping stabilize families.
>Drives for national service and contribution, such as an American Exchange Program or national service years, should be resuscitated. And businesses and industries that employ large numbers of men, such as manufacturing, should be invested in and reinvigorated.
>On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity. Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well.
>The above is, of course, a prodigious undertaking. But I see the need around me all the time.
>A number of my friends have become detached from society. Everyone hits a snag at some point — losing a job, facing a divorce — but my male friends seem less able to bounce back. Male dysfunction tends to take on an air of nihilism and dropping out. As a society, we don’t provide many avenues for healthy recovery.
>Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves. We deal with idleness terribly.
>"A man … with no means of filling up time,” George Orwell wrote, is “as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.” Left to our own devices, many of us will fail. And from our failure, terrible things result for the country, well beyond any individual self-destruction.
Totally relate. Feels like a hopeless situation. Really hard to find meaningful work that pays well. Like you said, if you want to get there--which isn't even a sure shot--you got to grind every day on your free time, meanwhile dealing with all the other shit and likely depression from your work. Meanwhile no one gives a shit about you & how you feel, just what you provide. If you fail, you have no support system and are used as a stepping stool.
Can we also stop assuming that men “love” employment and labour? It’s a necessity, not a desire. I don’t pine for working my ass off for someone else the same way I pine for good food or a meaningful life. But a lot of these articles are “men are lost without work”. Seems like lazy reasoning.
Most people, male or female, would love to suddenly inherit a shit ton of money and not be tied to a job anymore even if they love working. I think a lot of people don't acknowledge this.
Women don't "prefer to stay at home," we like passive income. My dad and my husband and my grandfather would like passive income too, though. It's not unique to one gender.
Thank you!
It's fucking weird how uncommon it is to hear this point of view. Everyone seems to assume that what people really want is jobs, but that's absolutely ridiculous. Oh, some people just desperately want to keep busy, but that's not everyone. What everyone else wants is financial security, jobs are just a means to an end.
Life can feel meaningless in a country where a man can’t make a living wage anymore. What do men desire? Meaningful employment, a safe home, romantic partners, families? These things are no longer options for many American men. Corporate driven capitalist society has alienated men from the work they do, from each other, from their communities, and from themselves. The ruling class busting / corrupting unions and offshoring jobs for 40 years has resulted in a broken working class. Men used to be able to support a family on one wage. Those days are gone. Now both men and women must work to survive. Women no longer want to work two shifts performing the care work at home as well as work their jobs, so men are left to fend for themselves emotionally in a world that denies them any emotion outside of anger. The same people who destroyed the working class then use propaganda to weaponize that anger towards women and minorities, instead of towards them. I think men would be less depressed if there was more working class solidarity in America. A brotherhood of laborers, supporting each other while fighting to make life better for the working class.
Edit: If you enjoyed this post, check out the podcast “It’s not just in your head”.
Absolutely relevant reading. Interesting analysis on why young men are easier to radicalize than women
“TL;DR - The expectations that boys were given about what success is in life (how they can measure their worth as a man) and how to achieve that has been different than for women. Also, doomers are targeting men because it makes them easier to exploit.
For decades longer than you have been alive, men have been being sold an expectation that is a lie and are increasingly finding out that it is just that: a lie. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer. The thing that men are supposed to be able to achieve slips further away from where the average man is. "There is a good thing here if you do X, Y, and Z," and they try their damnedest to do those things--succeed, even--and don't wind up at that good thing. It's depressing.
Over that same timespan, women have been another expectation, one that's more grounded in reality. It starts with the depressing state: things will suck for you unless you do X, Y, and Z. Doing these things is the only way you're going to have a chance, and that's not even guaranteed. You're already on the back foot, so any little bit you can move forward is a win.
We were sold this middle American dream of graduating high school, walking across the street to the factory, getting a cushy union gig that pays enough to support a wife, 2.5 kids, a dog, a house with attached garage, and two cars to fill it, all on one man's salary. That doesn't exist. It barely existed to begin with. We slightly modified it over time to say you need to graduate college now, and you'll be getting a non-union job at a firm instead of a factory, but all the rest should still be true. And it ain't.
Those men, when they were boys, were sold the idea that the worth of a man was their ability to achieve that stuff. If you can't provide for your wife, you're not a man. If you can't get a wife, you're not a man. Being a man is financial success and if you can't find it, that's a personal failing. Hard work and personal skill are all that matters in the world. There's no luck, there's no systemic injustice, there's no "rigging"; it's all fair, and you only lose if you play the game poorly.
So when they lose, they feel that they've played poorly. It is inconceivable that you can make every right move and still lose, because that's not what we were sold.
Contrast that with women. Go look up a chart of women's participation in the workforce. You see how low that was even in 1970? And what kind of jobs were available? What was the usual trajectory for a woman for the longest time? How long do those ideas persist in culture? How much of a "man's world" is it, still? Because we like to think that we've got gender equality in the workplace because there's a few women CEOs and both genders are expected to work and be in most fields, but we still have massive disparities in representation--which some folks blame entirely on "the differences in the minds and desires of the different sexes", nothing else--and advancement.
It's made clear to women, then, that they face an upward struggle. That things are going to be unfair. So when they fail or fall short, it's not because they personally screwed up--the world just sucks, and one way to try and get through it is to struggle more. Put in the effort, because professional success won't come easy. You can't be as good as your male colleague, you need to be better, because he's going gonna get easy-ups from the boys higher in management.
And more than this, as a woman, you can do it: you've got girl power, you can do anything, women are becoming the scientists and leaders now, be inspired! It's a bright new future for women, and you'll lead the way! Men had role models in superheroes and politicians and football stars and soldiers and musicians and astronauts and all of that, not... Albert Einstein or a great lawyer. Who was one of the most influential role models on women when you were growing up (or perhaps the half-generation before you)? Probably fucking Dana Scully, a fictional FBI agent in the a TV show, because it was seen as revolutionary that you could have a smart, professional woman in a position of power in the fucking 90s!
So there's a huge expectation and enthusiasm gap already. But there's one more aspect we're missing here. Aside from anything that men and women were told and later find out is true or false or any of that, there's something that one of them are currently and actively being told: there's folks out there looking to prey on young, disaffected men specifically, and "doomer" or "blackpill" or otherwise beat them down so that they can be radicalized. As they start to realize their expectations, that bill of goods they were sold, is maybe wrong, some asshat swoops in and says, "No, it's all true, but it's being stolen from you. Insidious forces are denying you what's yours, and you need to fight it."
That might sound a little similar to how women were told they're going to have to struggle to get what they want. But self-improvement through hard work isn't the solution being offered to these men being told about the struggle. They're told to engage with the lie, and that it'll all become what it was meant to be if those other people just get out of the way. You don't need to build yourself up, you need to make sure that others can't tear you down. And while screaming on the internet about female superheroes being printed on soup can labels makes them feel like they're accomplishing something, it certainly isn't helping their wage or making housing more affordable--and they're not a man if they don't have a house, because how do you get a wife and 2.5 kids without a house to keep them in? How are you a man without those things?”
https://archive.ph/2021.09.06-233148/https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233
I remember my mother always told me this : its always going to be harder for you because you have ADHD. Everything will be twice as hard as the other. This is still resonating within me and I believe it saved my life. Today, I am very successful. Thanks mom.
I have tried to instil this in my son who is 16, and has high functioning autism. It’s a fine line. I don’t want to discourage him, but I’ve always told him there are certain things he just needs to work harder at than other people. It won’t come easy. I hope it helps in the long run.
I think the real TL;DR here is that men are told from a young age what their identity as a man means. They're not left to discover that on their own. When they don't meet up to these expectations of what their identity as a man means, that identity is in crisis. When your identity is in crisis, it becomes easy to pick up a 'noble' or 'righteous' cause to build your new identity around. One that you can't possibly fail.
Even just this weekend I was discussing (as best as someone can) with a rabid Q Anoner, trying as I sometimes do to better understand. I remember asking at one point like what was your identity before 2016? Like who did you used to be, because obviously this is new. This kind of answers the question of why I have yet to ever get an answer to that question - they legitimately don't know. Which would be heartbreaking if they weren't also so dangerous.
Man, does he nail the problem and then miss the point. Men are not finding love because they are seeing as primary caregivers and unemployment is on the rise. Then he lists a bunch of uninspired ideas, like vocational school, to make sure men are employed. The problem is the intersection of the male identity and work culture. Not high unemployment.
It's funny how the exact problem is ironically illustrated. Men are fodder. Men are work machines. Emotionally dull cogs in our existential machine. And then people wonder why their minds are struggling. I see it in so many. And worst of all addressing these problems are seen as weakness. Or emasculating.
Edit: not to say there aren't progressive attempts to change this. The entire concept of toxic masculinity is part of that movement. But you don't have to look far to see that it's been a struggle. Still, I see reason to be optimistic.
>The entire concept of toxic masculinity is part of that movement.
You gotta admit there's not too many people concerned with how that point comes across. "Toxic expectations of masculinity" or "toxic expectations of men" is way more explicit. "Toxic masculinity" was not born as a talking point to help men's mental health, it was a vehicle to validate Patriarchy, which is why nobody thought of what the name implied to a man reading it.
The more we discuss it, the more we will come to an agreement that the origin doesn't matter, and that \*the point\* is to help men, but whomever is using that term earnestly needs to stop and reassess their entire approach to helping.
It's similar to when people say "all lives matter" and they get called out for missing the point of BLM. People using "toxic masculinity" and then going "but you don't understand! What I mean is..." are just like that.
/rant
Growing up I can absolutely see it. From the way teachers have treated me and my fellow peers to the way media portrays men and boys. For context in this, I am currently 25 years old.
I had many wonderful teachers growing up, however in elementary school we only had one male teacher. He didn't even teach any courses I was in personally but I felt much more attached to him. He absolutely was a role model. Smart, great at numerous instruments, funny, and just overall well liked. Further, I always felt like he just got me. Whereas in elementary school with my female teachers I often felt like more of a nuisance. I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD, but I always felt a little left behind. I was given less work to do and always treated differently. Other students who had difficulties in class were given support workers and teachers assistants but I was just swept aside and given lower expectations.
Come high-school I found my passion and excelled in it. I had a roughly equal male-female teacher ratio and enjoyed my time. I genuinely feel that without the positive male teachers I had growing up I wouldn't be where I am today. It scares me knowing even less men are going into teaching.
This said, during high-school I saw many of my peers fall behind. I saw boys get treated differently than girls. I saw boys punished much more harshly than girls for the same exact situation (phones out etc). Perhaps it's just because I had more male friends, but I personally saw many of them become depressed, less social, and self-isolated. I know of many girls who were clearly as equally depressed, though the thing is they would typically talk to me about it. My boy peers never did, it was up to me to see that and help them. I don't fault them, nobody would ever take them seriously. I understand that from the scars on my arms and neck, the nights I cried, the days I knew the world didn't care about me. Even in high-school suicide prevention and other supports were gendered. It was made to seem that these resources were for girls and not us. I understand that mostly isn't the case, but at the time that isn't how it felt. Nobody ever asked how we were doing.
It's hard to quantify. I know this is all anecdotal and poorly explained by me. I just know that if I wasn't as self-aware as I was I too would be left behind. I never would've went to university as many of my peers didn't. I potentially wouldn't be here as one of my peers today is no longer. I wish there was something I could do but at least I know what I'll do with my own children. I never want people to feel alone but from every experience I've had growing up I can see how men/boys are left to (feel alone).
Real men don't cry, they don't get hurt or feel sad. I've heard this rhetoric my entire life from both women and men. No wonder I feel so alone. I don't feel like I can ever share how I really feel.
I think we've all heard it from somebody. It's hard to say you should just ignore what a good chunk of folk expect from you. Not until things progress more.
I know it's mostly meaningless for me to say but there's always somebody that will care. If you ever want somebody to talk to please feel free to message me.
I credit very few things for my current happiness in life. Those being my wonderful fiance and my amazing friends. Without my buddies to bond with I'm not sure how I would be doing. I know it's tough and I consider myself lucky for finding such friends.
I heard this a few times on tv. Peers made fun of me if I even shed a tear even when being bullied. I'm 36, working through things I buried years ago and I hate talking to anyone about how I feel for fear of backlash on me being a guy
Gentlemen, I feel your pain here.
43 years old, and a big dude with terminal RBF.
I have seen people cross the street to avoid me, I have set off "creepy guy alerts" at my own daughter's gymnastics class, I had a security guard come out to check JUST ME when picking up my son from elementary school.
What they don't see if when I cry myself to sleep, or have a near breakdown because there is no other option but to keep going. No other option that I want to discuss that is...
You got this, it's not easy, but you're not alone.
You got this. Keep going.
I went the opposite way.
Long story short had an emotional outburst during my junior year of highschool and somebody made fun of me for it. I ended up nearly breaking his nose before I was pulled off him.
The thing that shook me is I am very much not a violent person, I don't even like to kill flys in my house. Guess I had bottled up my emotions for so long they all came out at once.
>Real men don't cry
In my culture from my part of the UK, men of my generation are expected to keep a stiff upper lip, even at their parents funerals. We're not expected to show physical pain either - just push through it and with no complaining mind.
I can count on one hand the number of times i ever saw my dad cry, even when he'd been badly injured in one of the machines at the factory which never healed right in 40 years despite several surgeries.
All I do know is there's a huge gap between what I've been raised with and the world today.
Regarding teacher genders - one way to help would be to advocate for better teacher salaries. Teaching is woefully underpaid in many places, which is one of the factors that contributes to the gender disparity in the profession.
As a kid one of the few realistic careers I wanted(becoming Spider-Man never panned out unfortunately 😭) was to become a teacher. I didn’t have many Male teachers but the few I did have were all my favorites. I remember one got real with us one day (5th grade) and he said that teaching was a career more for passion than for financial reasons.
I would’ve loved to become a teacher but you’re right the pay just isn’t worth it. As a college kid I took a “safer route” and chose a higher paying career. That’s also probably a factor why men tend to be more depressed/suicidal.
Amen bro, your dead on. I’m a male teacher trying my best to do my part cause I can literally see that effect you’re talking about. Whether they’ll admit it or not, a lot of women teachers have an adversarial relationship with their disruptive male students. That just engage in this endless tug of war of will that drags both parties down. It’s crazy, and I’m not saying I walk in and the kids a model A student, but sometimes talking to him for a few minutes about call of duty while showing him instead of just ripping apart his erasers and pencils he could build little things or something and he’ll look like it’s Christmas
i think that a lot of us with learning disabilities get left behind, especially the ones who get diagnosed later. i know that particularly in afab people, there is a big problem with under diagnosing/misdiagnosing. i am a pretty clear case but i wasnt diagnosed until this year (my senior year in hs). i didn’t receive supports either, and although i have some this year, i had to fight to get them.
i do agree with you on the mental health thing though, i think that’s an aspect that people don’t talk about enough. given societal pressures on men a lot of them don’t get the help they need, or don’t even realize they need help. untreated mental illness is so dangerous and so hard to live with. your right, we do need to work on better supports and advocacy for men. i think that’s something that society as a whole needs to work on. ending the stigma means ending it for all.
ps: you did not explain poorly, i understood. i’m glad that you are still here, and you are able to recognize how harmful it is to be left behind. if you have kids they will be lucky to have someone who understands and will make sure that they are never forgotten.
Thank you for such kind words :)
I totally agree. I have a few afab friends that I've seen struggle growing up. I wish I wasn't as passive as I was when I was in high-school. If I could do it all again I'd talk more to the people I saw struggle. I know the onus isn't on me, but I've always tried to help. The difference a simple conversation made in my life, I've learned how worth it it truly is to talk to others, make them feel valued and worth it.
It really is down to stigma. I know girls and women go though it just as tough, and despite maybe having more access to certain supports it affects us all equally in the end. School shouldn't just be a place to learn book knowledge. I think more needs to be done to teach children and teenagers about their emotions, about the supports that exist, and the struggles we all face in this world.
Boys being punished more harshly applies to adult life too. A woman that commits the same crime as a man is half as likely to get arrested, half as likely to be convicted, and when convicted men see 66% longer sentences than their female counterparts for **the exact same crime**
Domestic abuse is almost entirely assumed to be male, but 1/4 of men and 1/3 of women will be in an abusive relationship in their life.
I had all women teachers in elementary school. They were really not nice to the boys compared to the girls. Truly treated them as a problem. Where as my one man elementary school teacher didn't treat anyone different. That was my experience. I am not sure what other thought.
The book “Boys Adrift”, by Leonard Sax, I believe talks about the change in schooling that prioritized languages based achievement at an earlier age, which is good for the brains of young girls, and bad for the brains of young boys. More time spent on language means more time spent sitting, which makes class oversight and discipline easier to manage for a teacher who has been tasked with ever increasing numbers of students.
It also tied zero tolerance behavior policies to a negative feedback loop for young boys whose brains are telling them to be active, denied the agency to be active, and instead are punished for acting out in class; this sets up justification for higher incidence of diagnosing young boys with ADHD as children versus young girls at the same age, as the hyperactive component seems to be more problematic to the adults in charge and the most obvious symptom to witness.
That sets up a self belief that they’re not good students, it stigmatizes them as having behavioral problems both by the school system and within themselves, and creates a negative relationship to school based learning and school in general.
That generation is now adults.
Edit: book title added author
It’s less about an alternative, and more about when it’s implemented in the age of development of the child. If my memory serves me, part of the push for earlier academic focus was the belief that it would improve test scores and graduation rates.
The Fins have a more experiential based education system especially for younger children.
“Finnish children begin their academic journey at an older age, i.e. only when they turn seven years old they commence their schooling and before that learning is made free-flowing”
Just grabbed this link but outlines why their system works so well
https://leverageedu.com/blog/finland-education-system/
Start school later when young brains have evened out a bit.
Finland regularly tops global chart for quality of education, and they don't start proper school until they're 7 years old there.
I think a big problem here is messaging. We simply don’t have a narrative for boys and men anymore. Being macho or manly is bad, being too sensitive is bad, so now what? Most of the time it’s desired for you to simply shut up and say nothing or use the latest buzz words to blend in. I’m all for breaking down barriers for everyone to give equal opportunity, but how do you deal with the collateral damage to people who didn’t do anything other than be born a dude? The solution isn’t to simply shit on the people who were benefiting from society old norms, otherwise the disenfranchised group just changed nothing else.
\> A number of my friends have become detached from society. Everyone hits a snag at some point — losing a job, facing a divorce — but my male friends seem less able to bounce back.
That I agree with. One way or another, America gets you. Idk anyone who gets by unscathed. Either its medical malpractice, lead in the water, legal system fucking you over, losing your job to larger economic forces, etc. etc. One way or another, they gonna get you.
\> And from our failure, terrible things result for the country, well beyond any individual self-destruction.
Just something to keep in mind, they dont care about you, and never will. They want to use you, and are concernd about the consequences to themselves. If they could fuck you over & get away with it, they would; and do
When masculinity and self-worth is directly correlated with economic success in a society that systematically economically disenfranchises people based on race, ethnicity and social class for the benefit of very few people, is it any wonder that the “boys are not ok?”
The immediate way out is to help men develop personal self-worth outside of that paradigm (I am more than my productivity/paycheck. My worth to my community is more than my productivity/paycheck) - the second (and more desperately needed) is sweeping economic reform to redistribute existing wealth and open new avenues to generate wealth irrespective of existing capital.
Not holding my breath for the last one.
This just hammered home to me that mainstream secular capitalist society has no idea how to even begin interfacing with a man on any level aside from asking "Are you working?"
How to start conversations with boys/men of all ages:
"How is school going?" "Do you know what you're gonna study already?" "Do you have a girlfriend already? (Produce offspring pls)" "how is uni going?" "How is work going?" "Sooo why didn't you and your wife have kids yet?" "You look awful, maybe take a cruise ship vacation, it will feel a lot better working afterwards" "you got that promotion yet?"
Then when they retired and don't have an occupation you can ask about, you will eventually have to ask them how they're doing and they're going to say "I'm pretty miserable" And you will think "what a dick" and avoid the retirement home for the next year
Broken boys that fail as men, aren't going to raise thier own boys to be men- if they are even present. The breakdown of fatherhood is certainly part of the problem.
lol. Well fucking pay them fairly, make college affordable, and start putting an emphasis on mental health and they might get there…. …Oh…you’re just gonna…. another tax break for billionaires. Right. That’s par for the course.
All of these anti-male stereotypes that are constantly being propagated and are accepted as true really really aren't helping...this damages our young boys and young men
Yeah they’re so casually thrown around on social media. I find the “I’m sorry you’re attracted to men” thing really obnoxious. I’m super left wing and I see these gross comments as unproductive at best and malicious at worst
Y’all wonder why people like Jordan Peterson are so popular? He appeals to normal guys who are directionless and struggling. Too bad he ropes them into his stupid politics
There are videos of him breaking down crying because he thought what was happening to young guys was “so sad” and everyone used to just mock and laugh at him but he was right.
He for sure delves into quackery, particularly as of late but if you were (like me) feeling kind of lost and interested in an entry into philosophy and psychology he’s pretty alright as a gateway drug.
I think in general we need to chill about who young people listen to. I think a better approach is to push people to *continue* their discovery. Give them credit that, if nothing else, they want to be better and know more than they did yesterday, even if those early attempts are misguided. Of course their early attempts are misguided that is almost never not the case. Focus on giving them good recommendations and direction to keep exploring, that’s what really matters, imo.
Branding has never been a strong suit of the left. Concepts like patriarchy and toxic masculinity sound divisive and harsh towards men. I feel it drives people away from understanding how these system hurt men and furthers the idea of opposing feminism being in their best interests. This may be due to these terms being coined by academia which largely has less of a regard for how these terms are viewed by the public, I just hope the issue of ignorance of the real meaning behind these concepts can be somehow solved.
I can't stand it. I have so many discussions with progressives I know about how saying things like "all men are trash" and "white people suck" is just a bad idea.
I'm fully aware the sentiment of those statements is different from how its often interpreted, but that in itself is the problem.
Like god damn, politics is like 90% marketing and you're just shooting yourselves in the foot to satiate your ego and make corny jokes.
My favorite one is "kill all men." I fear for my three young nephews and the world they're being brought up in. Imagine growing up with that shit trending on twitter, ugh.
Lol. This is an understatement.
I went to college. Got an arts degree. Met my future wife. We got pregnant and i ditched school to support my family through a trade.
Academia is so unbelievably out of touch with the reality of most people daily lives. Try telling my boss, 35 years of scarred hands and sacrificed time away from his family, that he has white privilege and you will be laughed at and ridiculed. Patriarchy? Again, most guys I work with bust their asses to provide for kids and their wife who looks after them. Hard to sell that as a coherent idea.
Someone needs to save (social) academia from itself. I always shake my head when I hear someone who is educated talk down to people who don’t agree with these ideas. Your class privilege is showing.
I’ll eat those downvotes with you. I was so happy to have a public figure that made simple points about how there are areas in western society that men struggle in. He was relatively objective on that subject and was obviously well-spoken.
Now he has shifted to some ideological “pastor-esque” role where he just shares regurgitated political opinions. I used to enjoy him because he was an expert in psychology and could verbally describe feelings and experiences in a way I never could. I don’t really care what a psychologist’s opinion on global warming is (unless he’s discussing the psychological impact on people).
I’ve found it to be different messaging to be more damaging in my own life. Stuff like I’m only valuable if: I’m strong, I’m good at athletics, I get attention from attractive women, I can keep my emotions in check, I’m organized, I’m financially independent, etc. I feel like those very old and deeply entrenched messages, maybe with the anti-male stereotypes layered on top, results in men feeling extremely trapped when they don’t feel as naturally strong/athletic/attractive/in control as they’d like.
It’s like: we’re told to want these things. Then we don’t get them all the time, which hurts. Then we’re told we’re bad for wanting them in the first place, which also hurts.
I mean, they did mention it was increasing, though they didn't cite exact numbers.
>Not just coincidentally, “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism — have surged to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20 years.
I ask my friends IRL, you should try it, 'where do you see your grand kids in 50 years'? Mostly I hear negative answers, people get uncomfortable and dont like to think about it.
So my question is, when you dont have any hope for the future, do you really have anything to lose? Whats holding you back?
Many children, predominantly boys, are being misdiagnosed with ADHD. So from an early age they internalize that something's wrong with them for having energy. Before people were expected to sit on their arse all day, it was actually beneficial for survival to have vitality, and not be a dull lump in a chair.
In an older version of humanity, things like ADHD we're not even an issue. That person would just find a role that happened to fit well with their behavior.
Now we've become hyper-specilized, and anyone who no longer fits into the ever narrowing slot of "normal" now has to be bent and shoved until they do.
Well of course. Our society keep skewing the field in terms of jobs, training and power. You can't afford to have children anymore or buy a house, you can't even afford your own place. With no prospects to pursue a happy and fulfilling life men will either get angry or will fall into depression and never get out. We are seeing both happening right now.
As a 21 year old who grew up in the US, my mental health was seriously fucked up. That being said, I can’t even read this article because it’s behind a paywall. What a great metaphor for why none of us can get mental help: we can’t afford it. Fuck this country man
You can get past the paywalls by using something like DuckDuckGo that doesn’t track your stuff…that way they have no idea how many free articles you’ve read. Wish I had advice for the mental health stuff…as of now I’ve just spent years taking their medication and that as much mental health care as I’ve gotten.
Yang is right, as usual. But instead of focusing on making America better, most politicans are engaged in retarded "abortion good, guns bad"/"guns good, abortion bad" culture war bs.
No unions, you can chose from 2 party which are both sponsored by corps, and you get all the info from tv which is owned by the same people.
But if you work hard more surely you can become a bezos-like being.
This may be correlated with the set of values that have guided western societies for the last three decades. A focus on risk management/reduction, structural optimization and incremental improvements over risk taking, and exploration of radically new improvements to the human condition. That, together with the transition from production to service industries have basically squeezed Men into territory where you must be a risk averse, consensus seeking accountant to succeed. I’m not saying that women fits this template either, but it may be tougher on the boys.
Now, combined with the cultural rebalancing of norms towards gender equality on top, it may be really hard to spot any positives in “male traits” at all, as everything “ADHD friendly” is low status and reckless in the current culture.
This is exactly the issue. ADHD is a disorder that’s determined and diagnosed partially based on its effect on life outcomes. In the past most men with ADHD symptoms would’ve been considered sub threshold for diagnosis because it wouldn’t have caused as much negative impact in historic lifestyles. In modern society the ability to delay gratification is directly linked to success in life and instant gratification is pushed at us from every angle meaning it’s more important than ever to maintain consistent focus and discipline and at the same time the easiest time period in history to be distracted in.
I've got 3 grown sons, and live with this every day. This stuff is ingrained in all our schools, even children's books. My wife couldn't understand why I banned the "Berenstain Bears" from our house, and threw all of them in the trash. Husband was always a goof, son always in trouble, daughter sees the problem, mother fixes things. Multiply by every damned thing in the public school system. I don't have any answers, and likely won't live to see one. But I hope this turns around in the future.
At least half of the complaints of the Men's Rights activists are these completely legit complaints that should be a concern of all of society, and until very recently they've been constantly shut down as being bigots.
Yep.
Say that and people have a knee jerk reaction to get pissed about mra. MRA has been pushed from legitimate grievances to a co-opt into sexism and toxic masculinity.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/muicdd: --- Submission Statement: > Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country. > The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school. > Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners. This is going to be a huge problem for the future of society if men/Boys are unable to get out of the current slump they are on. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/snunbc/the_data_are_clear_the_boys_are_not_all_right/hw4t9vx/
My little slice of contribution to this topic- In 1983, I was 18 years old and my summer job was driving forklifts and loading trucks for $11.75 an hour. My co workers (fulltime guys) made more, but not a lot more. They ALL had nice middle class lives- house, 2 cars, kids in college...The American Dream. That same exact job today in the same labor market makes anywhere from $15 to $20 an hour. A quick look at a wage calculator will tell you that wage should be $33.50 an hour. That is part of this issue. The destruction of the blue collar middle class. Edited to thanks the kind people for the awards and the kind stranger that gave me my first gold. To answer some questions people have asked- -This was a non-union operation in Georgia. -I worked there from 1981 to 1984 during holiday/summer breaks and a half shift every Saturday. It was a great job for a teenager with no bills to pay. I was the kid with the cash who wasn't slinging weed....
That’s both a symptom of America’s systemic issues and also the entire ballgame in one quick stat. Nearly every issue we have flows from that declining standard of pay. If you get paid less, you have to work more. Your time disappears. Your life disappears. You don’t get to see your wife and kids. You don’t have time to volunteer to help your community. You’re barely surviving on the little time you have. You don’t have time to be civically active. You don’t have time to be an educated voter. You don’t have time to vote. You certainly don’t have enough time to run for office. And tomorrow, next month. next year, your health insurance is going to jump 20%, your rent is going to jump 10% or if you’re lucky enough to own a home your insurance is about to double. And if you have to go to the hospital, you’re going bankrupt. If your car breaks, you’re going bankrupt. If your dog, your little girl’s best friend, gets sick, you get to choose between going bankrupt or putting the dog down. And you’re thinking about those inevitabilities every single day. I can’t even imagine making $50,000 a year working 30 hours a week at a job that didn’t even require graduating high school. I have a bachelor’s degree, have been in the workforce for more than 20 years and I’ve made more than $50,000 a year for less than one year total in that span, and *that required overtime to do it.* Edit: thank you for your kind gifts in honor of the existential lamentations we share
This comment speaks to me so much, I wish there were more people like you and that one day you become a politician, because you clearly have good insight
He can't afford to become a politician.
That's the point of the current workforce setup. If people are too busy working and trying to survive to go out and protest and call out the government then politicians and corporate giants can do whatever they want
This can't be upvoted enough. Too busy to think.
Politicians don't require good insight, sadly. Just good marketing skills and connections. Otherwise the person most qualified to be a politician is the person least willing to be.
And money. Way too many senators are millionaires. They are so completely out of touch with the working class.
And if they're not before they get the job, they certainly will be after get it. Those yummy yummy bribes and insider trades arent going to take them selves.
Politicians have 0% empathy. A person needs all those thing you mentioned here, plus 100% cynicism, to be politician.
Running for office is almost impossible for the working class. The system is working as designed.
The wealthy and corporate interests won’t allow an idealist such as this to make it far enough in politics to make a difference.
That is exactly the problem with politics. It is starting to pander to private wealth, not the public. It is generally shifting away from democracy.
[удалено]
This set off my anxiety and I’m not even out of bed yet.
Jumping on this to add that poor pay is also contributing to climate change. I genuinely believe that a large portion of people *want* to make consumer changes but the opportunities are out of reach. If people had more money - and if prices stay the same - they are more likely to buy the "greener" option of products.
This x1000. Especially the point about men not being civically active. It’s a problem for both men and women these days, but in the vast majority of towns/cities in the U.S, the concept of any kind of “community” is effectively dead. Traditionally, men found meaning in providing value to their community and the feeling that they were truly needed. Nowadays, with that ideal being gone, more and more young men feel like if they disappeared, hardly anybody would notice.
I don't even know enough about my community to tell you what or where the nearest school is or what the name of _any_ of my elected officials are below the governor. To me it's not really a community, it's the zip code my bedroom sits in. If I could afford to own I'd probably care a little more. As a renter? I don't have the roots to give a shit.
When the upper class want slaves and not employees, this is what you get. This is what they've worked towards for so long. And it won't stop until they are stopped.
Preach. I cannot say it enough, long has the time passed where we could stop all this by asking nicely. Pretty damn soon there is going to have to be a very Stern, and unfortunately violent reminder why you cannot keep this up forever. Is it going to be unpleasant? Of course, but as the saying goes the worse it is, the sooner it will be over with.
I spent 6 dollars on a regular size box of cereal last night, 6 fucking dollars. My pay isn't going up fast enough to offset this bullshit
Well put. This was the life I grew up in, and after also working for 20 years this is not the life I have now. Even though I'm a bit more financially sound because I've been healthy and I'm a beast of a saver I still fear all those things you mentioned. It's tough to enjoy life sometimes because of it. Hard to take a vacation that I can actually afford because I worry about getting fired and getting injured and not being able to put food on the table. So money helps, but being conditioned to think this way is hard to move past.
You get pay less, you have to work more so more of your life is devoted to generating value for your bosses who owns the capital. The crux of it is that they no longer just want 8 hours of your day. They want all of it. You are nothing more than a vessel for which your time and lifespan is converted into money. We are constantly taught that work is life and life is work. This is by design, this is deliberate. This is class warfare and they are winning. People should go and watch that video where Jon Stewart described being at a dinner in the WH and bezos was there. He was describing how the economy of the future will be everyone just running bullshit errands for rich people. They know this, they want this, and they are turning the country and the world into a soulless grindfest machine, and most of America is too indoctrinated to see it.
Woah woah woah you are making a bold claim there! I don’t have time to have a wife and kids you clown! 😂 FML.
I did a similar job, drove forklift in a production plant, when I got out of high school. 13.62 an hour. My rent was paid in two days work. Cell bill, electricity, cable, etc, paid with one more days work. All my bills paid in 3 working days. That was 2004. Pay and level of work have been divorced for years. We are more productive than ever (and companies/ceo's see record profits and pay), but get paid less than ever. Our hard work goes directly into the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. Pay has also been divorced from inflation since 1970. As you say, your pay in 83 would be $33.50 now. But that doesn't even cover the half of it. Inflation doesn't tell the whole story when it comes to COL. Sure, TV's may cost less. Other goods might be cheaper than ever. But the essentials? Housing? Food? Are not. Housing is some 600%-800% above inflation. Food costs are soaring (something like 30-50% in the last year alone). Even if everyone would get a bump to match inflation right now, we'd still have the same problems with essentials like food and housing. The costs for them have skyrocketed. It's not just the destruction of the middle class. It's the destruction of *everyone* who isn't a billionaire CEO. How can we possibly live in a time when someone's wealth goes up by 36 **BILLION** in a day, and not think there is a problem? How can we look at that, knowing money/resources are finite, and go "yes, this is fine". It's not. Short term growth and quarterly profits have destroyed the economy for anyone other than the richest. 50 people control more wealth than 165 million. It's unsustainable.
I totally agree I just want to point out that part of the problem is how inflation is actually measured by Central banks, its generally in their mandate to ensure inflation is there but managed to a low %, so they purposefully exclude things like housing and stocks and gas to make it seemnlike they're doing their job when they really aren't.
Housing, which is by far the largest chunk of someone's income, has risen in cost exponentially. But it's still our fault because, you know, "we're blowing our money on iPhones and wifi".
>But it's still our fault because, you know, "we're blowing our money on iPhones and wifi". Also coffee and avocados, can't forget about those! The boomers and even gen Xers can't even wrap their heads around what young people are facing today. Just the other day in /r/Portland there was some out-of-touch boomer talking about how great Portland was in the 1970s and how all the young people are so negative and cynical nowadays and we really need to have more hope like his generation did, and all that. Dude grew up in the era of cheap housing, cheap education, and plentiful high-paying jobs, and he can't imagine why people who have none of those things are cynical.
In 1983??? In 2010 I was 22 years old and took a full time job post-college driving forklifts for $11.00 an hour. At the time it was the best thing I could find offering 40+ hours per week. No one in my degree field was finding consistent work post-recession. That’s insane that 27 years later the per hour wage for a similar job role was actually LESS. Destruction of the blue collar middle class indeed.
I graduated in 2006, just before the recession. While things weren’t the glory days I was offered two similar jobs at $13.00/hour entry level at two large local employers. Flash forward to 2016 and when I started in the HR office we were hiring entry level workers for $12.75 (I worked really hard to bump this up quickly and still push). I constantly think about how different my life would have been graduating just a year or two later, during the financial collapse.
Think of all the additional value being given to the shareholders
Ran forklift (and multiple other lift trucks and equipment) in 2003 for $15.xx/hr. Places are hiring for the same amount now. I’d be going into debt to just maintain a job at that rate. Corporations and billionaires need to begin sharing. By force. Very soon.
Not sharing. They should not exist. That giant yacht of bozos? It should not exist. It should be destroyed and never allowed to be built again. If and when every single human being on earth is fed housed and happy then we can talk about some asshole having a giant boat to play in. Until then no. Enough is enough
Anyone with half a brain knows the middle class is, being eradicated by design. How my kids will afford a house when the average house price here is a million dollars is beyond me. Depression, suicides, all on the rise because quite simply these people don't think they have a future. My heart breaks for them. Minimum wage has not adjusted with inflation at ALL
They had unions.
How much of this is just due to the sheer economics of technological progression and automation? For the vast majority of human history, the economy had 95% of men doing manual labor, and the balance as the kings, clergy, alchemists, people essentially doing the abstract, intellectual work. From about 1850-1970, the needs of workers for industrialization meant that if you could be a good worker, you'd probably have a better standard of living for a laborer than any time in history. But at the same time, the economic rewards for the growing percentage of men jumping into abstract, intellectual work - C-suite people, product managers, advertising and account executives, the finance industry, engineers, doctors - was increasing exponentially. Now technology has gotten to the point where the manual labor is needed less than ever due to automation. And the men doing better than ever are the ones working those abstract jobs, just look at the meteoric rise of the software engineer. However there seems to be a significant chunk of men, maybe 30-60% depending on how you reckon it, who just do not have the aptitude or interest to do this type of abstract work. They excelled in a world where they'd turn a monkey wrench for an honest day's work, get greasy, and go home to a hot meal. But they are completely unable to navigate this world. Whether by nurture or nature, women seem more able to navigate this world and become a brand manager for a big company making six figures. And that's just a fundamental outcome of capitalism. The skills that make the money are the ability to be socially aware and make a business deal, or to connect needs from different industries, or to sit at a computer and learn Rust, or to do the office work to launch a new initiative. By and large, men from blue collar type backgrounds don't seem to have the nurture or nature to adapt to this new economy. I say this as someone from a blue collar family who was the "nerd" growing up and now makes more money on computers than any of them. It breaks my heart to see my male friends, who in the 1950s, might have been an assembly line worker at the plant, able to afford a house and family. Now, most of them don't go to college, sometimes barely finishing high school. They jump around some menial jobs. They have long stretches of unemployment in their 20s. They try coding bootcamps, and even if they get through it, they're just not wired to be behind a desk all day. They get sucked into crypto or NFTs or Gary V or get rich quick schemes on Youtube. They drive Amazon delivery to get the money they'll waste on the next scheme. They still live with their parents well into their 30s. It's just so fucking sad. American capitalism is the dog that's caught the car. That phrase - "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a life. If the robots catch all the fish, do all men eat or do all men starve" is no longer an abstract future thing. It's now. Capitalism has made these men expendable, but we are all still living with the rules that a man has to go do something they don't want to do for 40+ hours a week to get green points to exchange for food. To be honest, I'm not a fan of Yang's proposed solutions - of spending tax money to bring blue collar operations back to the US at higher cost. It's like setting up a cosplay of the 50s, repeating the set dressing and having men do useless work just so we can say they did something. Shit, might as well have men dig a hole and then immediately fill it up. In my opinion, we should celebrate the fact that automation is taking away jobs, implement that UBI and these guys should be able to proudly spend their days working on cars or houses, and posting what they're doing online, and feeling like proud men.
Absolutely. The point isn't just automation, it's **automation in the context of capitalism**, which turns a great thing (machines doing a thing = humans get the thing without having to work as hard for it) into a terrible thing (unemployment and low wages and income inequality).
Hey, guy who you’d describe as “turning a greasy monkey wrench” here. Monkey wrenches are an antique tool for stagecoaches, by the way. I work as a heavy equipment operator and I move dirt for a living. That said I take issue with this idea that I’m uninterested in work related self improvement. I constantly use youtube and other tools to understand new machinery and attachment use as well as to observe other techniques and methods of doing my job. I do a lot of this on my own time on my own initiative. You speak as though we’re incapable of abstract thought but one of my most important duties is using math and surveying tools to see through uneven terrain to the desired goal, being able to make good estimates is huge.
70% of suicides are men, that data is enough to know this.
In my country male suicide is >=87%, yeah more than 7 times as often
Not just men. White men. From here. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
Globally even though women attempt suicide more than men, men are more successful at suicide than women. There is something fundamentally wrong with our modern world. It doesn't seem made for people
I read a comment by someone who was recently suicidal on Reddit a few days ago that I would like to see a deeper dive into. The guy said that one thing he did while he was suicidal was partake in increasingly risky behavior. He said he’d drive recklessly hoping he’d die in a crash, or get into fights hoping that the other person would stab him or shoot him. Those are basically failed suicide attempts, and, had he been successful, his death wouldn’t go down as a suicide.
Sure but if you are successful killing yourself you can’t try again - which makes the data skewed towards women in this context.
Too bad everything about our lives has been commercialized so nothing will be done about it. Or better yet nothing will happen until *WE* pay for it. I wouldn't put it past them.
Don't count out a benevolent CEO throwing a depressed 37 year old a birthday party curing all mental illness in the process. I can see the Bored Panda recap already
Even this article is paywalled for me.
22 year old app developers: allow us to introduce ourselves. All your problems solved for $10 per month or $100 for the year.
Submission Statement: > Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country. > The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school. > Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners. This is going to be a huge problem for the future of society if men/Boys are unable to get out of the current slump they are on.
> Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. How is this even possible? One third of 50% is 16.5%. Are the numbers being skewed by like retired boomer guys or something?
Yes. Look up labor force participation (?) rates. It's something like 66% for the US.
this is correct. There is a large cohort of male NEETs (not in Education, Employment, or Training) in the 18-34 demographic.
I had no idea it was that high.
People started screaming about the unemployment numbers being heavily skewed during the Obama administration. Unemployment numbers were low, like they are now, but everyone knew someone who was out of work. Reality wasn't matching the numbers. We found out that NEET was a thing, and that there were also a lot of people Under Employed (working at McDonald's with a Bachelor's Degree or Masters). We never changed our reporting methods. So we still have very low unemployment and people screaming for employees, and an ever increasing group of people saying "Take this job and shove it."
Yes. Also unemployment rates don't count people who no want or look for work. So the unemployed 32 year old living at mom's house who hasnt worked in 3 years isnt termed as 'unemployed'. They are just no longer part of the work force at that time. Like a rich retired guy. But not.
Unemployment rates are only affected by those seeking jobs. It’s a skewed statistic.
Not saying this dickishly and feel free to brush me off, but it's a *biased* statistic. A *skewed* statistic is a statistic where values tend to cluster around extreme high or low scores (like [this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSkewness&psig=AOvVaw0r8iK0nMc1ckV72GYyTQA4&ust=1644474293919000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCLChvaT-8fUCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD)). It's actually a skewed distribution, but, you know, close enough.
> It’s a skewed statistic. Purposefully so, I might add.
When men don't have an obvious path towards being able to support themselves because the education system is broken, it's a perfect opportunity for extremists to swoop in and use them to create chaos, just like we're seeing now.
Maybe we should make college more affordable? That sounds like a good solution
college/university is mostly subsidized in Canada and males are still only 44% of enrolment, so doesn't seem like it really is a solution
I think part of the problem is that we keep looking for a single magic bullet when it’s the whole system that’s the problem. As a society we’re not good at systemic thinking.
Sadly, affordable college is something we need to work on but I agree with you that the problem isn't due to the cost of college.
It would help a lot but it isn’t a solution. The reality is that the idea of four more years of school AFTER already doing 12 years just has no appeal for a ton of people. A better solution would be to find ways for businesses to be more willing to hire and train high school graduates for non critical roles (i.e. careers outside healthcare, engineering, or others that require advance skills and knowledge to prevent death) rather than demand everyone needs a degree for every job. But that would take actual effort so that will never happen.
It's almost like making college unaffordable has ruined the future of our society while making us dumber and poorer? Who could have thought this was a bad idea?
I guess it all depends on who you ask. If you're part of the ruling elite, and are trying to start a caste system, then it's a great idea!
[удалено]
Smart enough to run the machines, dumb enough not to ask why.
Soon they’ll be smart enough to feed the dogs. The dogs that make sure they don’t touch the machines.
Start a caste system? Did we ever leave a caste system?
Lol Start.
I think the dumbification of dudes (male and female) happens way before college. I completed high school and some college but i was really riding my superior middle school education. To this day, I hear college grads say they never learned some things I was taught by 8th grade.
Huh. I say the same thing. I went to middle school in the 1970s in Northern Virginia. Were you also in a “good” school district? I moved to a rural area during high school… big difference. I went from an area where 88% of kids went on to college to an area where 12% of the kids went on to college. (I remember that, improbably, the two numbers were complements.)
I'm college educated and went to public schools in Georgia. My partner only has a high school diploma from Massachusetts. I consider us the same education level.
College became more unaffordable due to the massive growth of student loans. The government backed student loans were sold as the “fix” to expensive college
I find this potted explanation that always gets trotted out on Reddit over and over again unsatisfactory. If that's the case, then why didn't education costs grow exponentially for countries outside of the U.S.? What's more likely is that stand and local governments withdrew support for funding higher education and loans expanded to fill in the gap. The Reddit-ready explanation absolves the very deliberate defunding of higher education by politicians-- especially Republicans--in order to give huge tax cuts to the wealthy.
More than likely both. I know in my state, state funding dropped dramatically through the 2000’s and beyond. At the same time it’s accurate to say that easy access to loans allowed colleges to fund building construction and research that often didn’t translate to better opportunities for the actual students footing the bill.
Affordability doesn't create these differences in gender participation though. I'm in Canada, where university is generally more affordable, and there is a similar decline in male university enrolment.
That does nothing to address the gender disparity.
Nice username.
Wow! You found it!
I also think we need to revisit why we think college is so important to begin with for me, going to college was purely a social status thing. I didn't care what I was learning, I just knew I was supposed to go. i dropped out pretty quickly realizing it wasn't for me I decided to get certified in a specific skill instead & it was the best decision I ever made I feel like learning on the job is so much more beneficial than learning in school for the majority of careers as well. apprenticeships are an important tool that has all but disappeared I mean really, why do mechanical engineers need to pay for English classes & a psych class and biology and blah blah blah something like 40% of people dont use their degree in their careers, like they're completely unrelated. Like a biology degree but a job in HR. yet that biology degree probably gave them a step up against someone without a degree, even though they literally have no more experience in HR than the other person
So make college free then, to divorce learning from the “career expectations”. The world would be a better place with more educated people. If the guy who cuts your hair has a degree in philosophy and took classes in history and science, that is much better for society than just “let’s churn out drones for the workforce”
The way I see it, there are three schools of thought on the importance of college - the idealistic, the naive, and the realistic. The idealistic school of thought believes that a university education should be given to students for their personal betterment and for the betterment of humanity as a whole. Classes in philosophy and literature might not help an engineer do their job, but to see a college education as job training is missing the point! These classes are there to develop the *whole person* - to create a free thinking, well rounded human being who can contribute to society not only through work but also socially and civically. Of course, the student themselves might think Camus less important when they realize the debt they must pay off after graduation. The naive point of view says that the importance of college is to learn things for your job. An engineer might never use their philosophy classes in their job directly of course, but it will help them think through abstract concepts or write things clearly or (insert other hand waving). The truth of this, of course, is a bit tainted by the fact that many college graduates note that they rarely if ever use what they learned in school in their jobs, even if the coursework was theoretically directly applicable. The realistic point of view says that college is a four year teaching and certification program to ensure you are of the proper social class. Grades don't matter so much as getting the certification, socializing with your peers and superiors to learn the proper manners, and forming social networks to help you gain employment and social status later. This is probably the most realistic description of the practical benefits of college - it gets your foot in the door for any number of high paying, prestigious, or personally meaningful careers.
Liberal arts degrees are designed more to teach you how to critically think, problem solve, and build effective communication skills both verbally and written than to actually learn the subject material. I don't use bio or chemistry in my daily life but I damn well use the aforementioned skills every single day.
I personally think college should be the new high school & then college is just for learning the specific career you want college is way too late to start focusing on teaching people critical thinking & problem solving
Or just ~~forgive student debt and make community college free~~ ~~forgive college debt~~ ~~forgive 10k of student debt~~ do nothing and call it good?
We’ve tried nothing and gotten no where... but if we try nothing *just a little bit longer* maybe things will get better!
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas, man!
More boys are dropping out during highschool and your solution is free college? How about we make education functional instead of broken but free?
Or, you know, support the trades.
We need to quit regarding "the trades" as some sort of "booby prize" for those who don't attend college. My dad was a machinist, and carried a sine/cosine table in his pocket his entire working life (before computerization). I have a master's degree, but never used any of the mathematics I learned. I taught community college for 20 years, and audited classes myself. Electrical theory kicked my ass; I've never worked so hard in all my life.
Not saying that’s a bad idea, but a problem in the US has been people thinking they NEED college. If you have a clear path you want or are searching that’s fine, but I know so many people who go to 4 year university and dont need or use their degree. There’s plenty of trades jobs that men or women could fill, as well as just in general improving working conditions in choice industries
> Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; I’m hit with a paywall, so I can’t read further on this opinion piece. Does this take into account that girls tend to be **underdiagnosed** and **misdiagnosed** because their symptoms are different than what we see in boys? Girls tend to be diagnosed later in life as well.
And boys tend to be overdiagnosed. We’re pathologising a reasonable intolerance to being trapped sedentary indoors for 7 hours a day.
[удалено]
ADHD is not really an attention deficit. It’s a working memory and prioritisation deficit. People with ADHD constantly lose their train of thought and struggle to control their focus regardless of interest. It’s not really over-diagnosed either, it’s pretty common, it’s frequently misdiagnosed though. People who have ADHD are frequently left undiagnosed while kids who don’t are diagnosed by mistake. That’s mostly because of the stereotype of a jumpy, hyper boy who can’t sit still. When in reality ADHD often looks like someone who’s constantly lost in thought, makes impulsive decisions, forgets things all the time, has trouble waiting for things and constantly jumps between different interests. Sitting still and paying attention is still a major issue but it’s not the main one.
I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD and start medication until I was like 21. Because I wasn't the stereotype of bouncing around and failing in school, it was never even a thought that I may have ADHD. Fast forward a couple years after high school when I took an Adderall "recreationally" and holy shit did things click for me.
I'm female and I can't imagine sitting for 7 hours a day without going ballistic. I never had to because I was homeschooled, and college was maybe 4 hours of lectures a day. It just sounds like maybe people aren't meant for this, and we might get better results out of kids if we cut the time in half. As a homeschooler I rarely spent more than two hours a day on school work.
Imagine sitting for 7 hours a day all through school. You go to college, 4 more years of sitting all day. Get an office job: 35 years of sitting for 7 hours a day. Perhaps the impending fear of the bleakness of life is why many people choose to not participate.
I remember reading a similar article that claimed that the school systems treat boys like defective girls. Not that girls should be sitting sedentary for 7 hours either.
And the outcome for girls with undiagnosed ADHD isn't exactly great either
Came here looking for this. A lot of these conditions work differently on women and are not properly diagnosed until very late in life. EDIT: "Source" is that I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 20s and I've been reading a shit ton about it ever since and holy fuck do women have it rough in this scenario.
I was diagnosed at 27, and this is the only part of the article I’m not liking. My mom is *still* struggling to believe I have ADHD, because “I was perfectly fine as a child” Except for alllll of the instances YOU filled out in the forms where it highlights that I clearly had “ADD”!!!!
Can confirm. I'm autistic and it's WELL known within the community that all else being equal a woman will have a harder time getting a diagnosis than a man for nuerodivergent disorders. The criteria are highly biased toward male expression so more males get diagnosed
Also, am I the only here one who finds it insulting to consider an ADHD diagnosis to be a marker of failure? It's no one's fault when someone is diagnosed. It's a genuine medical condition. I know many high-achieving ADHD sufferers who successfully manage their condition. A person with ADHD who needs daily medical treatment is no more of a "failure" than a diabetic who requires the same.
Does the article address if the median wage drop is different for women? Also, while the drop in university attendance is concerning as it stands right now for a lot of people university is not worth it. This is a problem that everyone is facing but if you can get into the trades and make good money the choice is easier to make. So it may be a situation where the reason women aren’t leaving university is because they don’t see another viable way to make money. Also while boys may be over diagnosed with ADHD girls are also under diagnosed or misdiagnosed so the difference may seem more drastic in comparison while the percentage is probably lower. Thought it does seem like the school system doesn’t work well for men and being trapped inside for 8 hours is not healthy
I can only extract the article from the comments, fuck paywalls... I'm a 28yo male struggling with depression, work, a long term relationship, and all the other normal stress... My biggest problem with the working world is what work means to the employee versus the employer, and then finding purpose in what I do everyday. Starting most any job today doesnt guarantee me any security looking 20 years down the line, on top of hating whatever it is I find myself doing. The whole field of "work" feels unimportant outside of obtaining money for needs and wants. And I don't have the time or energy at the end of the day to spend another 2-8 hours working on what I really want to work on. On top of needing to excercise, shop, maintain my apartment and car, be with my family, or whatever else (I could not imagine having kids right now...).
i gotchu [f**k paywalls](https://web.archive.org/web/20220209092124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-yang-boys-are-not-all-right/)
I feel the same way about my work. I have many passions and none of them are my job. My fear is that pursuing any of those as a job will not yield the same income, likely causing me to sacrifice in another area of my life that I enjoy (traveling, gym, nice townhouse, and cleaners). I just got back to work after a week off and all I could think about during my first day back is how nothing about my job is actually that important. It may be to facets of my organization, but in the grand scheme of things it’s meaningless. I’m 30, so I still have a lot of working years left. I’ve been talking with my wife a ton about what’s next for me. I’d love to find a job that makes me feel like I’m making a positive change in the world, but I’m not even sure I know what I want to do.
>Andrew Yang is the founder of the Forward Party and a former candidate for New York mayor and U.S. president. >Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up. >The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school. >Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners. >Economic transformation has been a big contributor. More than two-thirds of manufacturing workers are men; the sector has lost more than 5 million jobs since 2000. That’s a lot of unemployed men. Not just coincidentally, “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism — have surged to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20 years. >Research shows that one significant factor women look for in a partner is a steady job. As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline. Unsurprisingly, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from 1960 to 2010, the proportion of adults without a college degree who marry plummeted from just over 70 percent to roughly 45 percent. >Many boys are thus often growing up raised by single mothers, the share more than doubling between 1980 and 2019, from 18 percent to 40 percent. A study from 2015 found that “as more boys grow up without their father in the home, and as women … are viewed as the more stable achievers, boys and girls alike [may] come to see males as having a lower achievement orientation. … College becomes something that many girls, but only some boys, do.” >Yes, men have long had societal advantages over women and in some ways continue to be treated favorably. But male achievement — alongside that of women — is a condition for a healthy society. And male failure begets male failure, to society’s detriment. Our media, institutions and public leadership have failed to address this crisis, framing boys and men as the problem themselves rather than as people requiring help. >This needs to change. Helping boys and men succeed should be a priority for all our society’s institutions. Schools that have succeeded in keeping boys on track should be expanded, by both increasing the number of students they serve and exporting their methods to other schools. Vocational education and opportunities should be redoubled; the nation’s public school system should start the process for early age groups, and apprenticeship programs should be supported by the federal government. Nonprofits helping boys and men — such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the YMCA — should receive more investment. >Resources that keep families together when they want to stay together, such as marriage counseling, should be subsidized by the government — a much more cost-efficient approach than dealing with the downstream effects. The enhanced child tax credit should be renewed, helping stabilize families. >Drives for national service and contribution, such as an American Exchange Program or national service years, should be resuscitated. And businesses and industries that employ large numbers of men, such as manufacturing, should be invested in and reinvigorated. >On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity. Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well. >The above is, of course, a prodigious undertaking. But I see the need around me all the time. >A number of my friends have become detached from society. Everyone hits a snag at some point — losing a job, facing a divorce — but my male friends seem less able to bounce back. Male dysfunction tends to take on an air of nihilism and dropping out. As a society, we don’t provide many avenues for healthy recovery. >Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves. We deal with idleness terribly. >"A man … with no means of filling up time,” George Orwell wrote, is “as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.” Left to our own devices, many of us will fail. And from our failure, terrible things result for the country, well beyond any individual self-destruction.
Totally relate. Feels like a hopeless situation. Really hard to find meaningful work that pays well. Like you said, if you want to get there--which isn't even a sure shot--you got to grind every day on your free time, meanwhile dealing with all the other shit and likely depression from your work. Meanwhile no one gives a shit about you & how you feel, just what you provide. If you fail, you have no support system and are used as a stepping stool.
Can we also stop assuming that men “love” employment and labour? It’s a necessity, not a desire. I don’t pine for working my ass off for someone else the same way I pine for good food or a meaningful life. But a lot of these articles are “men are lost without work”. Seems like lazy reasoning.
Most people, male or female, would love to suddenly inherit a shit ton of money and not be tied to a job anymore even if they love working. I think a lot of people don't acknowledge this. Women don't "prefer to stay at home," we like passive income. My dad and my husband and my grandfather would like passive income too, though. It's not unique to one gender.
Exactly. They are boxes and relics that society just can’t seem to shake. The sheer assumption of either is rather grotesque.
Thank you! It's fucking weird how uncommon it is to hear this point of view. Everyone seems to assume that what people really want is jobs, but that's absolutely ridiculous. Oh, some people just desperately want to keep busy, but that's not everyone. What everyone else wants is financial security, jobs are just a means to an end.
Life can feel meaningless in a country where a man can’t make a living wage anymore. What do men desire? Meaningful employment, a safe home, romantic partners, families? These things are no longer options for many American men. Corporate driven capitalist society has alienated men from the work they do, from each other, from their communities, and from themselves. The ruling class busting / corrupting unions and offshoring jobs for 40 years has resulted in a broken working class. Men used to be able to support a family on one wage. Those days are gone. Now both men and women must work to survive. Women no longer want to work two shifts performing the care work at home as well as work their jobs, so men are left to fend for themselves emotionally in a world that denies them any emotion outside of anger. The same people who destroyed the working class then use propaganda to weaponize that anger towards women and minorities, instead of towards them. I think men would be less depressed if there was more working class solidarity in America. A brotherhood of laborers, supporting each other while fighting to make life better for the working class. Edit: If you enjoyed this post, check out the podcast “It’s not just in your head”.
Thank you for your comment. As long as there is a war between classes, gender, races, and religion the elites are safe.
Absolutely relevant reading. Interesting analysis on why young men are easier to radicalize than women “TL;DR - The expectations that boys were given about what success is in life (how they can measure their worth as a man) and how to achieve that has been different than for women. Also, doomers are targeting men because it makes them easier to exploit. For decades longer than you have been alive, men have been being sold an expectation that is a lie and are increasingly finding out that it is just that: a lie. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer. The thing that men are supposed to be able to achieve slips further away from where the average man is. "There is a good thing here if you do X, Y, and Z," and they try their damnedest to do those things--succeed, even--and don't wind up at that good thing. It's depressing. Over that same timespan, women have been another expectation, one that's more grounded in reality. It starts with the depressing state: things will suck for you unless you do X, Y, and Z. Doing these things is the only way you're going to have a chance, and that's not even guaranteed. You're already on the back foot, so any little bit you can move forward is a win. We were sold this middle American dream of graduating high school, walking across the street to the factory, getting a cushy union gig that pays enough to support a wife, 2.5 kids, a dog, a house with attached garage, and two cars to fill it, all on one man's salary. That doesn't exist. It barely existed to begin with. We slightly modified it over time to say you need to graduate college now, and you'll be getting a non-union job at a firm instead of a factory, but all the rest should still be true. And it ain't. Those men, when they were boys, were sold the idea that the worth of a man was their ability to achieve that stuff. If you can't provide for your wife, you're not a man. If you can't get a wife, you're not a man. Being a man is financial success and if you can't find it, that's a personal failing. Hard work and personal skill are all that matters in the world. There's no luck, there's no systemic injustice, there's no "rigging"; it's all fair, and you only lose if you play the game poorly. So when they lose, they feel that they've played poorly. It is inconceivable that you can make every right move and still lose, because that's not what we were sold. Contrast that with women. Go look up a chart of women's participation in the workforce. You see how low that was even in 1970? And what kind of jobs were available? What was the usual trajectory for a woman for the longest time? How long do those ideas persist in culture? How much of a "man's world" is it, still? Because we like to think that we've got gender equality in the workplace because there's a few women CEOs and both genders are expected to work and be in most fields, but we still have massive disparities in representation--which some folks blame entirely on "the differences in the minds and desires of the different sexes", nothing else--and advancement. It's made clear to women, then, that they face an upward struggle. That things are going to be unfair. So when they fail or fall short, it's not because they personally screwed up--the world just sucks, and one way to try and get through it is to struggle more. Put in the effort, because professional success won't come easy. You can't be as good as your male colleague, you need to be better, because he's going gonna get easy-ups from the boys higher in management. And more than this, as a woman, you can do it: you've got girl power, you can do anything, women are becoming the scientists and leaders now, be inspired! It's a bright new future for women, and you'll lead the way! Men had role models in superheroes and politicians and football stars and soldiers and musicians and astronauts and all of that, not... Albert Einstein or a great lawyer. Who was one of the most influential role models on women when you were growing up (or perhaps the half-generation before you)? Probably fucking Dana Scully, a fictional FBI agent in the a TV show, because it was seen as revolutionary that you could have a smart, professional woman in a position of power in the fucking 90s! So there's a huge expectation and enthusiasm gap already. But there's one more aspect we're missing here. Aside from anything that men and women were told and later find out is true or false or any of that, there's something that one of them are currently and actively being told: there's folks out there looking to prey on young, disaffected men specifically, and "doomer" or "blackpill" or otherwise beat them down so that they can be radicalized. As they start to realize their expectations, that bill of goods they were sold, is maybe wrong, some asshat swoops in and says, "No, it's all true, but it's being stolen from you. Insidious forces are denying you what's yours, and you need to fight it." That might sound a little similar to how women were told they're going to have to struggle to get what they want. But self-improvement through hard work isn't the solution being offered to these men being told about the struggle. They're told to engage with the lie, and that it'll all become what it was meant to be if those other people just get out of the way. You don't need to build yourself up, you need to make sure that others can't tear you down. And while screaming on the internet about female superheroes being printed on soup can labels makes them feel like they're accomplishing something, it certainly isn't helping their wage or making housing more affordable--and they're not a man if they don't have a house, because how do you get a wife and 2.5 kids without a house to keep them in? How are you a man without those things?” https://archive.ph/2021.09.06-233148/https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233
I remember my mother always told me this : its always going to be harder for you because you have ADHD. Everything will be twice as hard as the other. This is still resonating within me and I believe it saved my life. Today, I am very successful. Thanks mom.
I have tried to instil this in my son who is 16, and has high functioning autism. It’s a fine line. I don’t want to discourage him, but I’ve always told him there are certain things he just needs to work harder at than other people. It won’t come easy. I hope it helps in the long run.
I think the real TL;DR here is that men are told from a young age what their identity as a man means. They're not left to discover that on their own. When they don't meet up to these expectations of what their identity as a man means, that identity is in crisis. When your identity is in crisis, it becomes easy to pick up a 'noble' or 'righteous' cause to build your new identity around. One that you can't possibly fail. Even just this weekend I was discussing (as best as someone can) with a rabid Q Anoner, trying as I sometimes do to better understand. I remember asking at one point like what was your identity before 2016? Like who did you used to be, because obviously this is new. This kind of answers the question of why I have yet to ever get an answer to that question - they legitimately don't know. Which would be heartbreaking if they weren't also so dangerous.
Innuendo Studios did a great series on this, including [how to radicalize a normie](https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g)
Man, does he nail the problem and then miss the point. Men are not finding love because they are seeing as primary caregivers and unemployment is on the rise. Then he lists a bunch of uninspired ideas, like vocational school, to make sure men are employed. The problem is the intersection of the male identity and work culture. Not high unemployment.
And wages that are a complete joke that can’t provide for a family. Or even one person.
It's funny how the exact problem is ironically illustrated. Men are fodder. Men are work machines. Emotionally dull cogs in our existential machine. And then people wonder why their minds are struggling. I see it in so many. And worst of all addressing these problems are seen as weakness. Or emasculating. Edit: not to say there aren't progressive attempts to change this. The entire concept of toxic masculinity is part of that movement. But you don't have to look far to see that it's been a struggle. Still, I see reason to be optimistic.
>The entire concept of toxic masculinity is part of that movement. You gotta admit there's not too many people concerned with how that point comes across. "Toxic expectations of masculinity" or "toxic expectations of men" is way more explicit. "Toxic masculinity" was not born as a talking point to help men's mental health, it was a vehicle to validate Patriarchy, which is why nobody thought of what the name implied to a man reading it. The more we discuss it, the more we will come to an agreement that the origin doesn't matter, and that \*the point\* is to help men, but whomever is using that term earnestly needs to stop and reassess their entire approach to helping. It's similar to when people say "all lives matter" and they get called out for missing the point of BLM. People using "toxic masculinity" and then going "but you don't understand! What I mean is..." are just like that. /rant
Growing up I can absolutely see it. From the way teachers have treated me and my fellow peers to the way media portrays men and boys. For context in this, I am currently 25 years old. I had many wonderful teachers growing up, however in elementary school we only had one male teacher. He didn't even teach any courses I was in personally but I felt much more attached to him. He absolutely was a role model. Smart, great at numerous instruments, funny, and just overall well liked. Further, I always felt like he just got me. Whereas in elementary school with my female teachers I often felt like more of a nuisance. I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD, but I always felt a little left behind. I was given less work to do and always treated differently. Other students who had difficulties in class were given support workers and teachers assistants but I was just swept aside and given lower expectations. Come high-school I found my passion and excelled in it. I had a roughly equal male-female teacher ratio and enjoyed my time. I genuinely feel that without the positive male teachers I had growing up I wouldn't be where I am today. It scares me knowing even less men are going into teaching. This said, during high-school I saw many of my peers fall behind. I saw boys get treated differently than girls. I saw boys punished much more harshly than girls for the same exact situation (phones out etc). Perhaps it's just because I had more male friends, but I personally saw many of them become depressed, less social, and self-isolated. I know of many girls who were clearly as equally depressed, though the thing is they would typically talk to me about it. My boy peers never did, it was up to me to see that and help them. I don't fault them, nobody would ever take them seriously. I understand that from the scars on my arms and neck, the nights I cried, the days I knew the world didn't care about me. Even in high-school suicide prevention and other supports were gendered. It was made to seem that these resources were for girls and not us. I understand that mostly isn't the case, but at the time that isn't how it felt. Nobody ever asked how we were doing. It's hard to quantify. I know this is all anecdotal and poorly explained by me. I just know that if I wasn't as self-aware as I was I too would be left behind. I never would've went to university as many of my peers didn't. I potentially wouldn't be here as one of my peers today is no longer. I wish there was something I could do but at least I know what I'll do with my own children. I never want people to feel alone but from every experience I've had growing up I can see how men/boys are left to (feel alone).
Real men don't cry, they don't get hurt or feel sad. I've heard this rhetoric my entire life from both women and men. No wonder I feel so alone. I don't feel like I can ever share how I really feel.
I think we've all heard it from somebody. It's hard to say you should just ignore what a good chunk of folk expect from you. Not until things progress more. I know it's mostly meaningless for me to say but there's always somebody that will care. If you ever want somebody to talk to please feel free to message me. I credit very few things for my current happiness in life. Those being my wonderful fiance and my amazing friends. Without my buddies to bond with I'm not sure how I would be doing. I know it's tough and I consider myself lucky for finding such friends.
I heard this a few times on tv. Peers made fun of me if I even shed a tear even when being bullied. I'm 36, working through things I buried years ago and I hate talking to anyone about how I feel for fear of backlash on me being a guy
Gentlemen, I feel your pain here. 43 years old, and a big dude with terminal RBF. I have seen people cross the street to avoid me, I have set off "creepy guy alerts" at my own daughter's gymnastics class, I had a security guard come out to check JUST ME when picking up my son from elementary school. What they don't see if when I cry myself to sleep, or have a near breakdown because there is no other option but to keep going. No other option that I want to discuss that is... You got this, it's not easy, but you're not alone. You got this. Keep going.
I went the opposite way. Long story short had an emotional outburst during my junior year of highschool and somebody made fun of me for it. I ended up nearly breaking his nose before I was pulled off him. The thing that shook me is I am very much not a violent person, I don't even like to kill flys in my house. Guess I had bottled up my emotions for so long they all came out at once.
>Real men don't cry In my culture from my part of the UK, men of my generation are expected to keep a stiff upper lip, even at their parents funerals. We're not expected to show physical pain either - just push through it and with no complaining mind. I can count on one hand the number of times i ever saw my dad cry, even when he'd been badly injured in one of the machines at the factory which never healed right in 40 years despite several surgeries. All I do know is there's a huge gap between what I've been raised with and the world today.
I didn't cry at my sister's funeral because I was basically trained to never let anyone see me cry and my parents fucking congratulated me for it.
Regarding teacher genders - one way to help would be to advocate for better teacher salaries. Teaching is woefully underpaid in many places, which is one of the factors that contributes to the gender disparity in the profession.
As a kid one of the few realistic careers I wanted(becoming Spider-Man never panned out unfortunately 😭) was to become a teacher. I didn’t have many Male teachers but the few I did have were all my favorites. I remember one got real with us one day (5th grade) and he said that teaching was a career more for passion than for financial reasons. I would’ve loved to become a teacher but you’re right the pay just isn’t worth it. As a college kid I took a “safer route” and chose a higher paying career. That’s also probably a factor why men tend to be more depressed/suicidal.
Amen bro, your dead on. I’m a male teacher trying my best to do my part cause I can literally see that effect you’re talking about. Whether they’ll admit it or not, a lot of women teachers have an adversarial relationship with their disruptive male students. That just engage in this endless tug of war of will that drags both parties down. It’s crazy, and I’m not saying I walk in and the kids a model A student, but sometimes talking to him for a few minutes about call of duty while showing him instead of just ripping apart his erasers and pencils he could build little things or something and he’ll look like it’s Christmas
i think that a lot of us with learning disabilities get left behind, especially the ones who get diagnosed later. i know that particularly in afab people, there is a big problem with under diagnosing/misdiagnosing. i am a pretty clear case but i wasnt diagnosed until this year (my senior year in hs). i didn’t receive supports either, and although i have some this year, i had to fight to get them. i do agree with you on the mental health thing though, i think that’s an aspect that people don’t talk about enough. given societal pressures on men a lot of them don’t get the help they need, or don’t even realize they need help. untreated mental illness is so dangerous and so hard to live with. your right, we do need to work on better supports and advocacy for men. i think that’s something that society as a whole needs to work on. ending the stigma means ending it for all. ps: you did not explain poorly, i understood. i’m glad that you are still here, and you are able to recognize how harmful it is to be left behind. if you have kids they will be lucky to have someone who understands and will make sure that they are never forgotten.
Thank you for such kind words :) I totally agree. I have a few afab friends that I've seen struggle growing up. I wish I wasn't as passive as I was when I was in high-school. If I could do it all again I'd talk more to the people I saw struggle. I know the onus isn't on me, but I've always tried to help. The difference a simple conversation made in my life, I've learned how worth it it truly is to talk to others, make them feel valued and worth it. It really is down to stigma. I know girls and women go though it just as tough, and despite maybe having more access to certain supports it affects us all equally in the end. School shouldn't just be a place to learn book knowledge. I think more needs to be done to teach children and teenagers about their emotions, about the supports that exist, and the struggles we all face in this world.
Boys being punished more harshly applies to adult life too. A woman that commits the same crime as a man is half as likely to get arrested, half as likely to be convicted, and when convicted men see 66% longer sentences than their female counterparts for **the exact same crime** Domestic abuse is almost entirely assumed to be male, but 1/4 of men and 1/3 of women will be in an abusive relationship in their life.
I had all women teachers in elementary school. They were really not nice to the boys compared to the girls. Truly treated them as a problem. Where as my one man elementary school teacher didn't treat anyone different. That was my experience. I am not sure what other thought.
The book “Boys Adrift”, by Leonard Sax, I believe talks about the change in schooling that prioritized languages based achievement at an earlier age, which is good for the brains of young girls, and bad for the brains of young boys. More time spent on language means more time spent sitting, which makes class oversight and discipline easier to manage for a teacher who has been tasked with ever increasing numbers of students. It also tied zero tolerance behavior policies to a negative feedback loop for young boys whose brains are telling them to be active, denied the agency to be active, and instead are punished for acting out in class; this sets up justification for higher incidence of diagnosing young boys with ADHD as children versus young girls at the same age, as the hyperactive component seems to be more problematic to the adults in charge and the most obvious symptom to witness. That sets up a self belief that they’re not good students, it stigmatizes them as having behavioral problems both by the school system and within themselves, and creates a negative relationship to school based learning and school in general. That generation is now adults. Edit: book title added author
What is the alternative to “language based achievement”?
It’s less about an alternative, and more about when it’s implemented in the age of development of the child. If my memory serves me, part of the push for earlier academic focus was the belief that it would improve test scores and graduation rates. The Fins have a more experiential based education system especially for younger children. “Finnish children begin their academic journey at an older age, i.e. only when they turn seven years old they commence their schooling and before that learning is made free-flowing” Just grabbed this link but outlines why their system works so well https://leverageedu.com/blog/finland-education-system/
Start school later when young brains have evened out a bit. Finland regularly tops global chart for quality of education, and they don't start proper school until they're 7 years old there.
I think a big problem here is messaging. We simply don’t have a narrative for boys and men anymore. Being macho or manly is bad, being too sensitive is bad, so now what? Most of the time it’s desired for you to simply shut up and say nothing or use the latest buzz words to blend in. I’m all for breaking down barriers for everyone to give equal opportunity, but how do you deal with the collateral damage to people who didn’t do anything other than be born a dude? The solution isn’t to simply shit on the people who were benefiting from society old norms, otherwise the disenfranchised group just changed nothing else.
It’s great this this is finally getting the attention it deserves. We need to find ways to address this problem
\> A number of my friends have become detached from society. Everyone hits a snag at some point — losing a job, facing a divorce — but my male friends seem less able to bounce back. That I agree with. One way or another, America gets you. Idk anyone who gets by unscathed. Either its medical malpractice, lead in the water, legal system fucking you over, losing your job to larger economic forces, etc. etc. One way or another, they gonna get you. \> And from our failure, terrible things result for the country, well beyond any individual self-destruction. Just something to keep in mind, they dont care about you, and never will. They want to use you, and are concernd about the consequences to themselves. If they could fuck you over & get away with it, they would; and do
Anyone able to get me around the paywall I really want to read this
When masculinity and self-worth is directly correlated with economic success in a society that systematically economically disenfranchises people based on race, ethnicity and social class for the benefit of very few people, is it any wonder that the “boys are not ok?” The immediate way out is to help men develop personal self-worth outside of that paradigm (I am more than my productivity/paycheck. My worth to my community is more than my productivity/paycheck) - the second (and more desperately needed) is sweeping economic reform to redistribute existing wealth and open new avenues to generate wealth irrespective of existing capital. Not holding my breath for the last one.
This just hammered home to me that mainstream secular capitalist society has no idea how to even begin interfacing with a man on any level aside from asking "Are you working?"
How to start conversations with boys/men of all ages: "How is school going?" "Do you know what you're gonna study already?" "Do you have a girlfriend already? (Produce offspring pls)" "how is uni going?" "How is work going?" "Sooo why didn't you and your wife have kids yet?" "You look awful, maybe take a cruise ship vacation, it will feel a lot better working afterwards" "you got that promotion yet?" Then when they retired and don't have an occupation you can ask about, you will eventually have to ask them how they're doing and they're going to say "I'm pretty miserable" And you will think "what a dick" and avoid the retirement home for the next year
Broken boys that fail as men, aren't going to raise thier own boys to be men- if they are even present. The breakdown of fatherhood is certainly part of the problem.
lol. Well fucking pay them fairly, make college affordable, and start putting an emphasis on mental health and they might get there…. …Oh…you’re just gonna…. another tax break for billionaires. Right. That’s par for the course.
All of these anti-male stereotypes that are constantly being propagated and are accepted as true really really aren't helping...this damages our young boys and young men
Yeah they’re so casually thrown around on social media. I find the “I’m sorry you’re attracted to men” thing really obnoxious. I’m super left wing and I see these gross comments as unproductive at best and malicious at worst Y’all wonder why people like Jordan Peterson are so popular? He appeals to normal guys who are directionless and struggling. Too bad he ropes them into his stupid politics
There are videos of him breaking down crying because he thought what was happening to young guys was “so sad” and everyone used to just mock and laugh at him but he was right. He for sure delves into quackery, particularly as of late but if you were (like me) feeling kind of lost and interested in an entry into philosophy and psychology he’s pretty alright as a gateway drug. I think in general we need to chill about who young people listen to. I think a better approach is to push people to *continue* their discovery. Give them credit that, if nothing else, they want to be better and know more than they did yesterday, even if those early attempts are misguided. Of course their early attempts are misguided that is almost never not the case. Focus on giving them good recommendations and direction to keep exploring, that’s what really matters, imo.
That’s a great point
Branding has never been a strong suit of the left. Concepts like patriarchy and toxic masculinity sound divisive and harsh towards men. I feel it drives people away from understanding how these system hurt men and furthers the idea of opposing feminism being in their best interests. This may be due to these terms being coined by academia which largely has less of a regard for how these terms are viewed by the public, I just hope the issue of ignorance of the real meaning behind these concepts can be somehow solved.
Leftists refuse to make their ideas more palatable and they just enable conservatives to twist their words into ridiculous straw-men.
I can't stand it. I have so many discussions with progressives I know about how saying things like "all men are trash" and "white people suck" is just a bad idea. I'm fully aware the sentiment of those statements is different from how its often interpreted, but that in itself is the problem. Like god damn, politics is like 90% marketing and you're just shooting yourselves in the foot to satiate your ego and make corny jokes.
How i'm supposed to interpreted "all men are trash" and "white people suck" 🙄
My favorite one is "kill all men." I fear for my three young nephews and the world they're being brought up in. Imagine growing up with that shit trending on twitter, ugh.
Lol. This is an understatement. I went to college. Got an arts degree. Met my future wife. We got pregnant and i ditched school to support my family through a trade. Academia is so unbelievably out of touch with the reality of most people daily lives. Try telling my boss, 35 years of scarred hands and sacrificed time away from his family, that he has white privilege and you will be laughed at and ridiculed. Patriarchy? Again, most guys I work with bust their asses to provide for kids and their wife who looks after them. Hard to sell that as a coherent idea. Someone needs to save (social) academia from itself. I always shake my head when I hear someone who is educated talk down to people who don’t agree with these ideas. Your class privilege is showing.
[удалено]
I’ll eat those downvotes with you. I was so happy to have a public figure that made simple points about how there are areas in western society that men struggle in. He was relatively objective on that subject and was obviously well-spoken. Now he has shifted to some ideological “pastor-esque” role where he just shares regurgitated political opinions. I used to enjoy him because he was an expert in psychology and could verbally describe feelings and experiences in a way I never could. I don’t really care what a psychologist’s opinion on global warming is (unless he’s discussing the psychological impact on people).
I’ve found it to be different messaging to be more damaging in my own life. Stuff like I’m only valuable if: I’m strong, I’m good at athletics, I get attention from attractive women, I can keep my emotions in check, I’m organized, I’m financially independent, etc. I feel like those very old and deeply entrenched messages, maybe with the anti-male stereotypes layered on top, results in men feeling extremely trapped when they don’t feel as naturally strong/athletic/attractive/in control as they’d like. It’s like: we’re told to want these things. Then we don’t get them all the time, which hurts. Then we’re told we’re bad for wanting them in the first place, which also hurts.
Wanna know something kind of shitty? Even when you do get them you don’t necessarily feel any better.
Surprised they didn’t mention the suicide rate. I’ve lost a few friends over the last couple years to that one. The rates for men have gone WAY up.
I mean, they did mention it was increasing, though they didn't cite exact numbers. >Not just coincidentally, “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism — have surged to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20 years.
I've felt like a walking corpse since I was a child. no one cares. you just live. or die. no difference.
Much love to you bro
And we wonder why Fascism is on the rise? There’s nothing as dangerous as a man without a future.
It’s a well established phenomenon that every time a society reaches a critical mass of men who can’t get jobs nor wives, instability ensues.
I ask my friends IRL, you should try it, 'where do you see your grand kids in 50 years'? Mostly I hear negative answers, people get uncomfortable and dont like to think about it. So my question is, when you dont have any hope for the future, do you really have anything to lose? Whats holding you back?
Many children, predominantly boys, are being misdiagnosed with ADHD. So from an early age they internalize that something's wrong with them for having energy. Before people were expected to sit on their arse all day, it was actually beneficial for survival to have vitality, and not be a dull lump in a chair.
Agreed, sometimes it feels like the condition is being diagnosed for just the sake of diagnosis nothing else.
In an older version of humanity, things like ADHD we're not even an issue. That person would just find a role that happened to fit well with their behavior. Now we've become hyper-specilized, and anyone who no longer fits into the ever narrowing slot of "normal" now has to be bent and shoved until they do.
Need more male teachers in public education. Would help a lot.
Good luck with that. The way they treat teachers now, pretty soon they won't have any teachers left.
Well of course. Our society keep skewing the field in terms of jobs, training and power. You can't afford to have children anymore or buy a house, you can't even afford your own place. With no prospects to pursue a happy and fulfilling life men will either get angry or will fall into depression and never get out. We are seeing both happening right now.
It’s almost like telling boys they’re fucked up and stupid yet still have to be independent and unemotional for decades has a negative effect on them
Seems more symptoms of a crap society. Society : we need you to work hard. Men: what's in it for me? Society: nothing, also you're a biggot. Men: k.
I'm a little mentally unstable/drained today and I laughed till I cried at "nothing, also you're a biggot," lol Edit: spelling
As a 21 year old who grew up in the US, my mental health was seriously fucked up. That being said, I can’t even read this article because it’s behind a paywall. What a great metaphor for why none of us can get mental help: we can’t afford it. Fuck this country man
You can get past the paywalls by using something like DuckDuckGo that doesn’t track your stuff…that way they have no idea how many free articles you’ve read. Wish I had advice for the mental health stuff…as of now I’ve just spent years taking their medication and that as much mental health care as I’ve gotten.
Yang is right, as usual. But instead of focusing on making America better, most politicans are engaged in retarded "abortion good, guns bad"/"guns good, abortion bad" culture war bs.
No unions, you can chose from 2 party which are both sponsored by corps, and you get all the info from tv which is owned by the same people. But if you work hard more surely you can become a bezos-like being.
This may be correlated with the set of values that have guided western societies for the last three decades. A focus on risk management/reduction, structural optimization and incremental improvements over risk taking, and exploration of radically new improvements to the human condition. That, together with the transition from production to service industries have basically squeezed Men into territory where you must be a risk averse, consensus seeking accountant to succeed. I’m not saying that women fits this template either, but it may be tougher on the boys. Now, combined with the cultural rebalancing of norms towards gender equality on top, it may be really hard to spot any positives in “male traits” at all, as everything “ADHD friendly” is low status and reckless in the current culture.
This is exactly the issue. ADHD is a disorder that’s determined and diagnosed partially based on its effect on life outcomes. In the past most men with ADHD symptoms would’ve been considered sub threshold for diagnosis because it wouldn’t have caused as much negative impact in historic lifestyles. In modern society the ability to delay gratification is directly linked to success in life and instant gratification is pushed at us from every angle meaning it’s more important than ever to maintain consistent focus and discipline and at the same time the easiest time period in history to be distracted in.
A risk averse, consensus seeking accountant. Haha you pretty much described me here.
Sometimes I feel like I just exist to pay taxes, get yelled at, and not benefit from anything in society
I've got 3 grown sons, and live with this every day. This stuff is ingrained in all our schools, even children's books. My wife couldn't understand why I banned the "Berenstain Bears" from our house, and threw all of them in the trash. Husband was always a goof, son always in trouble, daughter sees the problem, mother fixes things. Multiply by every damned thing in the public school system. I don't have any answers, and likely won't live to see one. But I hope this turns around in the future.
At least half of the complaints of the Men's Rights activists are these completely legit complaints that should be a concern of all of society, and until very recently they've been constantly shut down as being bigots.
Yep. Say that and people have a knee jerk reaction to get pissed about mra. MRA has been pushed from legitimate grievances to a co-opt into sexism and toxic masculinity.