> I’ve been thinking recently about these guys who are dating less, socializing less, and leaving their home less, while filling their media with more porn and betting parlays. They seem to prefer the financial discomfort of losing a bet to the social anxiety of being rejected on a date. They find intimacy scary and gambling exciting. They furnish their rooms like high-tech monasteries and gravitate toward media that works like a slot machine.

> These young men seem to me like modern ascetics who find themselves somehow trapped on the betting floor of the economy. They are like monks, yes. But more than that: They are monks in a casino. Risk-aversion in the social sphere has combined with their risk-chasing in the market, and it’s created a genuinely berserk modern life script.

This seems like a bad take. There's no preference there, these people have crippling addictions, it's a form of mental illness. It's like saying schizophrenics prefer talking to voices than having a home, or that people who are clinically depressed prefer napping over going to work.

You can listen to what men are saying, or continue to suppress and label their speech as "bad faith" or otherwise.

When men are not heard they simply seek other audiences and other avenues. It is the incentive structures that will tell them where to go.

An interesting take, but I think it goes a bit too far; you don't need to be a porn or gambling addict for increasingly available screen-based entertainment/interaction to "leech" time and motivation that you would otherwise spend with humans instead.

I'd be hesitant with value judgements, but this is most certainly going to affect our society massively (from decreased reproduction rates alone if nothing else).

I feel there must have been smaller similar trends in the past with easily obtainable written entertainment (books).

I feel like the internet/social media has taken over the communication paradigm, and there are conversations that simply cannot and do not take place on social media in any real depth. Deep communication between parties needs those parties to allow for the possibility of recontextualization - telling another story.

If I say that somesuch social movement is causing problems, then people in that social movement will feel attacked. Even bringing up somesuch social movement is a great way to increase vitriol on social media. It just makes people angry because people already feel justified in their anger at the demons on the 'other side'

It feels there there are too many things that are 'Agree with me 100% or we have to fight'.

I feel like the true luxury good of the future is human attention, and specifically careful emotional validation.

I don't think I would exactly call these men "monks". It has been pretty normal throughout history for a fairly large proportion of men, especially those lower down the economic ladder, to be permanently single or not marry until pretty late in life. These days, they don't have to work as much to avoid complete destitution or starvation, they're not as likely to die young, and they've largely replaced visiting cheap prostitutes with gooning, but otherwise this is not any unprecedented phenomenon.

It does mean that the economic growth that allowed most men to be a plausible marriage partner in the mid-20th century no longer obtains, which is a bad thing, despite the small comfort of consumer goods being cheap enough to alleviate some of this pain.

The experience of young men is that they have grown up in a world where they've consistently been told that everything is their fault because they have male privilege. Doubly so if the men have white or Asian ancestry.

Reactions to this vary. The ones described in the article have sought out addictions to escape this reality. Many others, including my son, have essentially said, "Well if this side rejects me, I'll go to the other side." The result is a rapid rise in conservatism, as documented in polls. See https://www.realclearpolling.com/stories/analysis/young-amer... for an example.

It is very easy, particularly for those who are very progressive, to blame the men themselves for these reactions. But it is a natural overreaction to the systematic rejection to a lifetime of being told that they are the problem. "You think I'm the problem? I'll show YOU what it looks like if I BECOME the problem!"

I firmly believe that these problematic behaviors and politics would be greatly softened if our society showed more empathy to these struggling men. But in our polarized society, their choices and beliefs label them as the enemy. Which causes some to double down into toxic extremism like siding with incels, or MGTOW.

Historically when a pendulum swings one way, eventually it swings back. But I'm having trouble how we're going to swing back, when both sides have swung to and then doubled down on polarization.

My criticism with this article is that the author seems to lump all time alone behavior into the 'bad' category. What about the guys spending time alone to work on their guitar sole, dive deeper into a branch of AI math, or how about spending hours reading plato?

That party graph is unholy. I live my life to reverse it and I really think one of the only meanings of life is just to party and have fun. I want the rest of my life to be filled with parties, both hosting them and attending them. If you can’t tell, I love parties. Discovering that later in life was really a lightbulb moment. Humans were meant for parties. That’s what we were doing around the fire every night with our friends and family and it is just gone now. The horrible mental health and depression you see is from that. We haven’t evolved to not need that and I hope we never do.