I have to believe it’s a strategy to take these society wide problems and assign them various identity groups. To make it seem like it’s just an issue for those people, their own fault even, and it’s not a collective problem for us to solve together. If I were powerful and interested in keeping a ruinous status quo, this would seem to be a very effective way to go about it.
Took the words out of my mouth. The amount of effort that is being put into divisive content does not feel organic. The bigotry being integrated into society feels state or privately sponsored.
It's racism 2.0 they invented the concept of race to divide the working classes now they are creating new ways to stratify us to further divide us for easier control.
It's literally everywhere on the internet now. Just watch yourself every time you read a post and start to feel annoyed or angry, and then step back and think if you're reading a legit story or just having your buttons pushed.
This is made far worse by headline driven 'journalism' and highly edited social media clips. I'm not sure how much this is Dead Internet or Dying Society but the only fix is to get offline and enjoy the real world as it really is, as best you can.
I feel like a lot of the male loneliness threads go from perfectly reasonable to straight up incel shit real quick. Your theory sorta makes that make sense.
Edit: and if anyone reading this feels like they’re part of this loneliness, just remember anyone trying to sell you something to fix your problem is probably a grifter.
One thing I also notice is that it's always externalized. It's never me, never I'm not affectionate and intimate with other men despite trying very hard to figure out how. That perspective is actionable, and also leads to detailed discussions of trauma and violence. The fear of men is such an omnipresent reality in all out lives a d in discussions of gender dynamics from a women's perspective, but the exact same thing is almost completely absent from the public dialogue about men's feelings of intimacy and acceptence.
It's organic for a society as narcissistic as ours, to externalize rather than internalize problems. It's easier for people to swallow and appeals to everyone's innate victim complex. But also... lack of community is not a result of individual failure.
The problem is that men are team creatures, pack hunters, social primates. The individual cannot build a community on his own. The cure for too much rugged individualism is not... yet more rugged individualism and self-will. All those things we rebelled against as kids - compelled team sports, cub scouts, camping, fishing, etc... are all ironically things that grow healthy young men with strong social bonds and healthy characters. What's needed isn't individual action or "discussions" but for the men in their own communities to come together and compel their sons into the traditional activities that humans relied on to grow boys to men for tens of thousands of years.
Lots of it is Russian propaganda. All of the male influencers in that business all got caught taking money from Putin. They are used to dissolution male youth and get them to separate themselves from support structures to get them to vote Republican or commit mass casualty events and the like.
It is worth remembering we’re also decades in to a concerted political and cultural attack orchestrated as part of Russian foreign policy specifically intended to create division along social lines
You should separate loneliness from the people complaining that loneliness happens.
"Male Loneliness Crisis" is a thing, because pick up artists and incels (which for some reason every outlet platforms) want to frame people telling them that they are bigots as the problem.
There’s a theory called the disimagination machine which dovetails with this quite well. It’s the idea that fixing yourself is your own job, and neglects the fact that most of the time, the fix should really come from society. But by keeping people busy enough and stressed out enough, they cannot imagine a way to fix the institutions, only their reaction to it.
There's a couple things here. One, working more than one job really robs you of time for any kind of socializing. And two, working as a gig worker or contractor removes a lot of the sense of belonging that your typical office workers get.
Or when you're unemployed, you can't afford the usual socializing that comes with a night out or hobbies. Unemployment often also comes with a side of crippling depression, robbing you of the energy necessary to socialize even if you have opportunities.
Wage slavery makes us sick. Humans aren't evolved to live in these circumstances.
I work in hospitality (restaurant, back of house) and I've found the major obstacle to hanging out or making plans with coworkers is that our schedules always change and the fact that our restaurant is open 7 days a week and is open for 12 hours at a stretch so it's almost impossible to have our schedules align where both people are off and not completely exhausted or recuperating from an ass kicking shift.
Definitely double edged depending on the office. Few office environments, yeah, many are quite toxic and could definitely make the sense of isolation worse.
Thing is, most "lucrative" jobs have fully internalized a kind of hypercapitalist ideology that requires most people (well, anyone but a psychopath) to shut off their empathy and spend a significant amount of their emotional energy presenting a facade of a productive, tireless, unthreatening, and diligent biorobot, no matter the situation. All while using the underlying human psychology of in-group bonding, teamwork, and socialization as the glue to make it tolerable, poisoning a lot of the person-to-person contact a given employee undertakes every day.
I'm not saying that all was well and harmonious and kumbaya when factory towns meant most people were in community with their coworkers and saw each other around town all the time, but I think it was qualitatively closer to the ancestral environment our brains and societies evolved around in the first place. Even brutal shift work in a mine or factory often carried elements of solidarity and shared sacrifice; those are now abstract narratives a pioneering CFO might slip into a slide deck explaining why this most recent round of layoffs will really fix things for reasons that aren't logically supported by all the other slides around it.
Submission statement: You've probably heard that men are bad at making friends; that they tend to be lone wolves; that they just aren't socialized to really understand how to make plans—and, as such, we're in the middle of a male loneliness crisis. Well, not quite: Slate contributor Nick Keppler looked at the data, and it turns out that men aren't more lonely than women. But there is one particularly lonely group: poor people. Lower-wage careers used to involve camaraderie—now gig work keeps drivers and shoppers and helpers separated from one another, so there goes making friends on the job. Church attendance is on the decline, and hanging out at bars and restaurants costs more than ever. We should not blame people for their loneliness, writes Keppler. After all, anyone's financial luck could turn, making us part of the lonely class, too.
Cleaned link from "https://slate.com/life/2026/08/men-lonely-social-skills-therapy-economy-crisis.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=loneliness&utm_campaign=&utm_term=&tpcc=reddit-social--loneliness-":
https://slate.com/life/2026/08/men-lonely-social-skills-therapy-economy-crisis.html?tpcc=reddit-social--loneliness-
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It's almost painful to read such a long article, without the slightest mention about why (of all things or people) this "epidemic" is eponymously known to be just about men.
Even when masculinity is hinted, the gendered dimension is completely neglected. And it's even more stupid after bringing up the data showing males and females standing about the same within their social circles, to not mention in any shape or form all the damn grifting going on in the manosphere.
Nothing about men going their own ways, nothing about empathy being ridiculed, nothing about women being alone probably guessing that it's better than in bad company while young boys getting told that rejection is because feminists are misandrists.
Hell, even if you just want to stick to the fucking "everything is class" narrative, guys dropping out of college is because they are told that brainy activities are for pussies, and that pumping iron and pounding puss is how a real manly man operates.
I’d also question a methodology that hinges on self-report data. Of course men don’t report feeling lonely—as the article itself states, they’re expected to be independent and stoic.
Yeah there's a lot feeding into this. Everyone is lonelier and everyone is poorer and there's a lot of shame around being poor.
The thing is, attitudes and perceptions have completely changed in the last 10 years or so. Men do not see women as valid non-sexual companions. They place 100% of their social/emotional wellbeing on their partners in a society where women are increasingly averse to dating for obvious reasons. Men also don't have the same kind of emotional closeness with each other that women do because, as you said, they demonize vulnerability and empathy.
Everyone is wary about everyone else. Everyone is frustrated about everything. More people are living at home. There are fewer (affordable) third places. People are looking to social media to fill that need and its become toxic af.
It is the phones. Instead of socializing people just reach for their phone and start doom scrolling. Then 3 or 4 hours have gone by and nothing productive was accomplished in their down time.
It's interesting they focused on the home health worker's loneliness and didn't mention his patients at all. The people I see in my life who are pathologically lonely are senior citizens.
People who have lost a spouse or never had one are often mindbogglingly depressed to the point of never leaving home, not taking care of their personal hygiene, etc.
A lot of young men are not going to poat-secondary/trade school or working, so they're becoming poorer. Society in general is also getting poorer, snd therefore more isolated and lonely.
I’m so glad you share this because not enough people are catching on to it. I couldn’t find any actual evidence/source of the “male loneliness epidemic” but what I did find was the US surgeon general in the Biden administration saying there was a “loneliness epidemic”.
As a substitute teacher, I had been doing gig work everyday and was extremely lonely at work then I also didn’t have enough money to spend time with my friends because they kept wanting to eat at expensive restaurants or do activities that cost money. This was all very lonely! I could barely afford rent. I’m in a much better place now and will be starting a full time position this school year, but I still stand by all this.
Shockingly almost absent from the article is the breakup of the American family. There is plenty of talk about social patterns, people groups, gender groups, etc. but almost nothing to say about family itself. The creation of the nuclear family pattern of life post WWII and its breakup as an unstable model should certainly be discussed. The importance of the extended human family throughout history should be considered front and center. Otherwise this may be no more than a discussion of "rich" people affording companionship and poor people not being able to afford it. It doesn't follow.
>The inability of men to form friendships, or even make conversation, with each other is a ready setup for a Saturday Night Live bit. In one viral sketch, exhausted women take their male partners to a “man park,” where they grunt about sports and Marvel movies.
The american faux-left liberal inability to fight its' deeply entrenched gender norms needs to be studied holy fuck.
Since it's branded as a male epidemic affecting mostly white men, a large percentage of people gleefully enjoy either saying they deserve it, or that it's not a problem.
If the Male loneliness epidemic was correctly rebranded a poor loneliness epidemic that includes disproportionate numbers of women and people of color maybe somebody would do something about it.
There seems to be a massive problem with people using the same term (male loneliness epidemic) to mean VERY different things. And as a result, groups are talking past one another.
Communities of mostly young mostly very online men who feel aggrieved and personally disenfranchised in some way by society using the term to describe a borderline conspiracy to seek some sort of retribution against young men by denying them social and sexual validation.
A reaction to group 1 use from largely online communities, used as an insult. I.e., This use is aligned with dismissing group 1 use concerns as being the baseless whining of "incels" who want women assigned to them by law. Group 2 use is largely pejorative.
With some tangential overlap with group 1 use, group 3 use tends to acknowledge a broad society wide issue of loneliness and lack of 3rd space connections with an emphasis on how this shows up for or affects men.
An attempted scholarly examination of the claims that men are in some way uniquely or especially effected by loneliness in recent decades, with an emphasis on attempting to determine what, if any, factors might distinguish loneliness in men from loneliness in women, in both causes and effects.
So, I think the article does a good job of pointing out that there are multiple uses and that the term itself isn't precise. Redirecting and internally defining the scope of inspection is miles above what I see in a lot of other articles and posts, including the recent one about emotional intelligence that's making the rounds.
The article says that it’s not men so much as poor people, but whose economic futures are crashing the most? Not to start a fight among the poors, but men’s indicators are going badly in so many areas.
There have also been a lot of social changes that really discourage friend making in general, and that fear/avoid men specifically. That’s something you have to learn as a male, that few social situations are particularly welcoming- men don’t want to talk with you, and women don’t either. It’s bad if you’re married - you can talk with exactly one woman in the world, who has a lot of opinions on your shortcomings - and worse if you’re single.
So in old age I’ve come to realize why so many old guys have these super intensive hobbies that their families find cute, and why they “don’t talk much” and don’t seem to care about going places and doing things.
They’ve learned that the world is a happier place when they - when we - just STFU. Self care happens between the ears. I suspect this trend is moving backwards from very old age to less old and maybe even younger people.
Succeed at not intruding on people and you’ll fail at making friends and I don’t know if one is really that much worse.
Not to be mean, but only humans would see natural selection and call it 'male loneliness epidemic'. There's always been individuals of any species not getting picked (especially the ones not playing well with others).
In times of difficulty, procreation isn't as essential.
This is a hard time to justify having children. Since women are not dependent on men anymore, and we don't rush naive young girls I to early pregnancy and marriage as much, they get to choose wisely.
How is that a bad thing? Women don't owe men who clearly see them as lesser anything. No one has the right to be picked when they misbehave. We've learned this rule in kindergarten. How are men suddenly throwing tantrums as if their promised toys have been taken way?
People have been writing about the decline of community and social institutions for decades. These aren't isolated problems for targeted identity groups, but pieces of a larger whole.
Ok. So disregard the content of the article due to a bad title. That is a really good idea. Forget the content. It takes too long to read.
The main point of the article is that economic disparity and the lack of a third place has isolated many people in American society, both men and women.
If we can't easily congregate and form friendships, of course there is going to be a feeling of loneliness.
For those paying attention at home the previous political strategy of gender and race identity politics propaganda has more or less ended. Now you'll see a wave of progressive politicians and thinkpieces suddenly reframing everything as class identity politics. You will watch as everyone does a combo of distancing themselves from the positions and claims from the last ~10 years that they can't just ignore, and pretending it was like this the whole time. Children just coming of age into political awareness will smuggly explain things to you from within the bubble of this new normal.
Eh, not how it works. This strain will never "end" exactly, they never do because the core true believers will keep a little subculture of it alive, most will move along with the mainstream, others will metastasize into some new type of bullshit and no one really planned for. It always happens in waves like this. Meanwhile the new hotness is the class stuff, and it'll get pushed hard as it catches on but then mutate into something stupid and eventually break apart. Whether it breaks apart immediately in the face of some other, hotter thing, or rises to become something mega stupid that no one anticipated, who knows? A lot of people thought "woke 1" was too stupid to survive long, but it sure made its mark. We'll see what happens next.
Yes, that's exactly how it works. There is a vested interest in keeping these topics in our headlines. They will keep pushing it until they lose effectiveness, and then once they notice that, they will find something new.
There has always been a vested interest in keeping class conversations out of the spotlight, since the red scare and probably before. It's not just "another fad" like identity politics. Identity politics was useful to yet again delay class consciousness.
Either you are really young and/or aren't aware of the history of social movements in the US and how they have been sidelined. Don't forget they didn't kill MLK Jr until they realized he was a socialist sympathizer.
I doubt that. The oligarch class want anything other than class consciousness. The majority identifying as a single exploited class would be their end. They will just continue to create new forms of non-economic identity politics. Nationalism and racism still sell very well.
It's already happening, watch for it. Maybe Mamdani was a turning point for the Democrat establishment types, who knows? Your doubt makes sense, so just watch what happens. If it turns out you're right then good for you. If it turns out you're wrong, remember to notice and be surprised and wonder what you missed or were wrong about before.
I doubt it-the billionaire oligarchs spend a LOT of time and money making sure that class consciousness never actually takes root in America so they can guarantee that poor people fight over gender and race rather than them stealing from us. If this gains any momentum, they will just pay for a wave of propaganda against trans people or immigrants or something to distract, distract, distract.
Why do seemingly extroverts think us introverts are lonely being alone? Perhaps extroverts should stop projecting their own feelings of what it would like to be alone and how to fix something that isn't broken.
No. No one reported as such to the author of this article. Those were not their studies. Again, a seemingly extrovert projecting. I did not see a breakdown of those self-reporting were extro or intro, maybe I missed it, but would a key factor right?
>Do such men exist? Perhaps. But the truth is, in aggregate, men are not much lonelier than women. Recent large polls from Pew Research and the Harvard Graduate School of Education found no significant gender gap in self-reported feelings of loneliness. In a KFF survey, more women (18 percent) than men (13 percent) said they always or often feel lonely. In the 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 15 percent of men said they have no close friends, versus 10 percent of women, but when Pew pollsters asked the same question more recently, they found no substantial gender disparity. In the latest American Time Use Survey, the average man spent about five and a half hours per day alone and the average woman about five hours and 20 minutes.
Whether people self identify as introverted or extroverted is irrelevant, unless you're making the claim that introverted people can't feel loneliness.
Making the distinction that it's not their studies is so bafflingly ridiculous, I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Does gravity not exist because you yourself did not personally run the test confirming it? Do you know what a citation is?
This article is utter garbage, and only references more utter garbage as source material. Don't waste your time; there is zero value, substance or even a point to this article.
kurosawa99 | an hour ago
I have to believe it’s a strategy to take these society wide problems and assign them various identity groups. To make it seem like it’s just an issue for those people, their own fault even, and it’s not a collective problem for us to solve together. If I were powerful and interested in keeping a ruinous status quo, this would seem to be a very effective way to go about it.
filagrey | an hour ago
Took the words out of my mouth. The amount of effort that is being put into divisive content does not feel organic. The bigotry being integrated into society feels state or privately sponsored.
dayburner | an hour ago
It's racism 2.0 they invented the concept of race to divide the working classes now they are creating new ways to stratify us to further divide us for easier control.
YoghurtFlan | 17 minutes ago
It's literally everywhere on the internet now. Just watch yourself every time you read a post and start to feel annoyed or angry, and then step back and think if you're reading a legit story or just having your buttons pushed.
This is made far worse by headline driven 'journalism' and highly edited social media clips. I'm not sure how much this is Dead Internet or Dying Society but the only fix is to get offline and enjoy the real world as it really is, as best you can.
Ok-Skilllevel-5056 | 25 minutes ago
Maybe there’s a conspiracy but the simpler explanation is that this is what the algorithms result in
geekwonk | 9 minutes ago
that’s like saying maybe wrenches just have right-handed grips. you develop algorithms to do a thing. you can develop them to do another thing.
VoidOmatic | 22 minutes ago
There absolutely is. All those influencers got caught getting paid by Putin.
BKlounge93 | an hour ago
I feel like a lot of the male loneliness threads go from perfectly reasonable to straight up incel shit real quick. Your theory sorta makes that make sense.
Edit: and if anyone reading this feels like they’re part of this loneliness, just remember anyone trying to sell you something to fix your problem is probably a grifter.
Constant-Skill-7133 | 47 minutes ago
One thing I also notice is that it's always externalized. It's never me, never I'm not affectionate and intimate with other men despite trying very hard to figure out how. That perspective is actionable, and also leads to detailed discussions of trauma and violence. The fear of men is such an omnipresent reality in all out lives a d in discussions of gender dynamics from a women's perspective, but the exact same thing is almost completely absent from the public dialogue about men's feelings of intimacy and acceptence.
jinkyjormpjomp | 22 minutes ago
It's organic for a society as narcissistic as ours, to externalize rather than internalize problems. It's easier for people to swallow and appeals to everyone's innate victim complex. But also... lack of community is not a result of individual failure.
The problem is that men are team creatures, pack hunters, social primates. The individual cannot build a community on his own. The cure for too much rugged individualism is not... yet more rugged individualism and self-will. All those things we rebelled against as kids - compelled team sports, cub scouts, camping, fishing, etc... are all ironically things that grow healthy young men with strong social bonds and healthy characters. What's needed isn't individual action or "discussions" but for the men in their own communities to come together and compel their sons into the traditional activities that humans relied on to grow boys to men for tens of thousands of years.
Holy-Crap-Uncle | an hour ago
If it's about wealth inequality, then yes that is the playbook. It isn't new, it's literally 1000s of years old.
VoidOmatic | 24 minutes ago
Lots of it is Russian propaganda. All of the male influencers in that business all got caught taking money from Putin. They are used to dissolution male youth and get them to separate themselves from support structures to get them to vote Republican or commit mass casualty events and the like.
VoidOmatic | 23 minutes ago
Just like Epstein was behind the whole anti-woke campaigns, to get people to buy Call Of Duty DLC and to eventually accept Pedos.
sillygoofygooose | an hour ago
It is worth remembering we’re also decades in to a concerted political and cultural attack orchestrated as part of Russian foreign policy specifically intended to create division along social lines
Anis930 | 43 minutes ago
Americans will never evolve if they keep blaming all these systemic issues on russia
sillygoofygooose | 38 minutes ago
Foundations of geopolitics and Dugin would very much like a word. I am also not American.
Anis930 | 19 minutes ago
This is not nearly enough proof thay the rise of right wing extremism and social division is the fault of Russia lol
sillygoofygooose | 13 minutes ago
Luckily there is an immense amount more spanning decades and very readily available to the curious
mirh | an hour ago
You should separate loneliness from the people complaining that loneliness happens.
"Male Loneliness Crisis" is a thing, because pick up artists and incels (which for some reason every outlet platforms) want to frame people telling them that they are bigots as the problem.
rubensinclair | 14 minutes ago
There’s a theory called the disimagination machine which dovetails with this quite well. It’s the idea that fixing yourself is your own job, and neglects the fact that most of the time, the fix should really come from society. But by keeping people busy enough and stressed out enough, they cannot imagine a way to fix the institutions, only their reaction to it.
vineyardmike | an hour ago
There's a couple things here. One, working more than one job really robs you of time for any kind of socializing. And two, working as a gig worker or contractor removes a lot of the sense of belonging that your typical office workers get.
VikingTeddy | an hour ago
Or when you're unemployed, you can't afford the usual socializing that comes with a night out or hobbies. Unemployment often also comes with a side of crippling depression, robbing you of the energy necessary to socialize even if you have opportunities.
Wage slavery makes us sick. Humans aren't evolved to live in these circumstances.
joe_shmoe11111 | an hour ago
It’s not just time, it’s energy.
If you’re working long depressing shifts, you’re not going to have the energy to initiate social events during your time “off” either.
Septopuss7 | 43 minutes ago
I work in hospitality (restaurant, back of house) and I've found the major obstacle to hanging out or making plans with coworkers is that our schedules always change and the fact that our restaurant is open 7 days a week and is open for 12 hours at a stretch so it's almost impossible to have our schedules align where both people are off and not completely exhausted or recuperating from an ass kicking shift.
Major_Mushroom_7300 | an hour ago
>sense of belonging that your typical office workers get.
I started dry heaving when I read this
Explosive_Diaeresis | 47 minutes ago
Definitely double edged depending on the office. Few office environments, yeah, many are quite toxic and could definitely make the sense of isolation worse.
kylco | 7 minutes ago
Thing is, most "lucrative" jobs have fully internalized a kind of hypercapitalist ideology that requires most people (well, anyone but a psychopath) to shut off their empathy and spend a significant amount of their emotional energy presenting a facade of a productive, tireless, unthreatening, and diligent biorobot, no matter the situation. All while using the underlying human psychology of in-group bonding, teamwork, and socialization as the glue to make it tolerable, poisoning a lot of the person-to-person contact a given employee undertakes every day.
I'm not saying that all was well and harmonious and kumbaya when factory towns meant most people were in community with their coworkers and saw each other around town all the time, but I think it was qualitatively closer to the ancestral environment our brains and societies evolved around in the first place. Even brutal shift work in a mine or factory often carried elements of solidarity and shared sacrifice; those are now abstract narratives a pioneering CFO might slip into a slide deck explaining why this most recent round of layoffs will really fix things for reasons that aren't logically supported by all the other slides around it.
[OP] Slate | 2 hours ago
Submission statement: You've probably heard that men are bad at making friends; that they tend to be lone wolves; that they just aren't socialized to really understand how to make plans—and, as such, we're in the middle of a male loneliness crisis. Well, not quite: Slate contributor Nick Keppler looked at the data, and it turns out that men aren't more lonely than women. But there is one particularly lonely group: poor people. Lower-wage careers used to involve camaraderie—now gig work keeps drivers and shoppers and helpers separated from one another, so there goes making friends on the job. Church attendance is on the decline, and hanging out at bars and restaurants costs more than ever. We should not blame people for their loneliness, writes Keppler. After all, anyone's financial luck could turn, making us part of the lonely class, too.
Read the full article here (no paywall!): https://slate.com/life/2026/08/men-lonely-social-skills-therapy-economy-crisis.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=loneliness&utm_campaign=&utm_term=&tpcc=reddit-social--loneliness-
clean-links | 2 hours ago
Cleaned link from "https://slate.com/life/2026/08/men-lonely-social-skills-therapy-economy-crisis.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=loneliness&utm_campaign=&utm_term=&tpcc=reddit-social--loneliness-": https://slate.com/life/2026/08/men-lonely-social-skills-therapy-economy-crisis.html?tpcc=reddit-social--loneliness-
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mirh | an hour ago
It's almost painful to read such a long article, without the slightest mention about why (of all things or people) this "epidemic" is eponymously known to be just about men.
Even when masculinity is hinted, the gendered dimension is completely neglected. And it's even more stupid after bringing up the data showing males and females standing about the same within their social circles, to not mention in any shape or form all the damn grifting going on in the manosphere.
Nothing about men going their own ways, nothing about empathy being ridiculed, nothing about women being alone probably guessing that it's better than in bad company while young boys getting told that rejection is because feminists are misandrists.
https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college
Hell, even if you just want to stick to the fucking "everything is class" narrative, guys dropping out of college is because they are told that brainy activities are for pussies, and that pumping iron and pounding puss is how a real manly man operates.
davej-au | 23 minutes ago
I’d also question a methodology that hinges on self-report data. Of course men don’t report feeling lonely—as the article itself states, they’re expected to be independent and stoic.
Tru3insanity | 26 minutes ago
Yeah there's a lot feeding into this. Everyone is lonelier and everyone is poorer and there's a lot of shame around being poor.
The thing is, attitudes and perceptions have completely changed in the last 10 years or so. Men do not see women as valid non-sexual companions. They place 100% of their social/emotional wellbeing on their partners in a society where women are increasingly averse to dating for obvious reasons. Men also don't have the same kind of emotional closeness with each other that women do because, as you said, they demonize vulnerability and empathy.
Everyone is wary about everyone else. Everyone is frustrated about everything. More people are living at home. There are fewer (affordable) third places. People are looking to social media to fill that need and its become toxic af.
shunny14 | 29 minutes ago
Did you/they change the title of this article? It is “America’s Loneliness Trap”.
Please see the rules of subreddit ffs.
Novusor | 22 minutes ago
It is the phones. Instead of socializing people just reach for their phone and start doom scrolling. Then 3 or 4 hours have gone by and nothing productive was accomplished in their down time.
iperblaster | 21 minutes ago
Imagine a teenager without money to hang out, or a cool job to make friends .
SuperSpikeVBall | an hour ago
It's interesting they focused on the home health worker's loneliness and didn't mention his patients at all. The people I see in my life who are pathologically lonely are senior citizens.
People who have lost a spouse or never had one are often mindbogglingly depressed to the point of never leaving home, not taking care of their personal hygiene, etc.
kevlarbaboon | 37 minutes ago
I have a spouse and am estranged from my family. This is something I think about too much.
clean-links | 2 hours ago
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StaticCloud | an hour ago
A lot of young men are not going to poat-secondary/trade school or working, so they're becoming poorer. Society in general is also getting poorer, snd therefore more isolated and lonely.
LegHeir | an hour ago
I’m so glad you share this because not enough people are catching on to it. I couldn’t find any actual evidence/source of the “male loneliness epidemic” but what I did find was the US surgeon general in the Biden administration saying there was a “loneliness epidemic”.
As a substitute teacher, I had been doing gig work everyday and was extremely lonely at work then I also didn’t have enough money to spend time with my friends because they kept wanting to eat at expensive restaurants or do activities that cost money. This was all very lonely! I could barely afford rent. I’m in a much better place now and will be starting a full time position this school year, but I still stand by all this.
PMmeIamlonley | an hour ago
Men can't really have adult relationships without good jobs so if they never get one they dont even get a chance to not be lonley.
AlternativeLazy4675 | an hour ago
Shockingly almost absent from the article is the breakup of the American family. There is plenty of talk about social patterns, people groups, gender groups, etc. but almost nothing to say about family itself. The creation of the nuclear family pattern of life post WWII and its breakup as an unstable model should certainly be discussed. The importance of the extended human family throughout history should be considered front and center. Otherwise this may be no more than a discussion of "rich" people affording companionship and poor people not being able to afford it. It doesn't follow.
Tomorrow-Man | an hour ago
>The inability of men to form friendships, or even make conversation, with each other is a ready setup for a Saturday Night Live bit. In one viral sketch, exhausted women take their male partners to a “man park,” where they grunt about sports and Marvel movies.
The american faux-left liberal inability to fight its' deeply entrenched gender norms needs to be studied holy fuck.
Pygmy_Nuthatch | an hour ago
Great article.
Since it's branded as a male epidemic affecting mostly white men, a large percentage of people gleefully enjoy either saying they deserve it, or that it's not a problem.
If the Male loneliness epidemic was correctly rebranded a poor loneliness epidemic that includes disproportionate numbers of women and people of color maybe somebody would do something about it.
DogsBeerYarn | 44 minutes ago
There seems to be a massive problem with people using the same term (male loneliness epidemic) to mean VERY different things. And as a result, groups are talking past one another.
Communities of mostly young mostly very online men who feel aggrieved and personally disenfranchised in some way by society using the term to describe a borderline conspiracy to seek some sort of retribution against young men by denying them social and sexual validation.
A reaction to group 1 use from largely online communities, used as an insult. I.e., This use is aligned with dismissing group 1 use concerns as being the baseless whining of "incels" who want women assigned to them by law. Group 2 use is largely pejorative.
With some tangential overlap with group 1 use, group 3 use tends to acknowledge a broad society wide issue of loneliness and lack of 3rd space connections with an emphasis on how this shows up for or affects men.
An attempted scholarly examination of the claims that men are in some way uniquely or especially effected by loneliness in recent decades, with an emphasis on attempting to determine what, if any, factors might distinguish loneliness in men from loneliness in women, in both causes and effects.
So, I think the article does a good job of pointing out that there are multiple uses and that the term itself isn't precise. Redirecting and internally defining the scope of inspection is miles above what I see in a lot of other articles and posts, including the recent one about emotional intelligence that's making the rounds.
tepidlymundane | an hour ago
The article says that it’s not men so much as poor people, but whose economic futures are crashing the most? Not to start a fight among the poors, but men’s indicators are going badly in so many areas.
https://fortune.com/article/why-are-men-leaving-the-workforce-more-women-outnumber/
There have also been a lot of social changes that really discourage friend making in general, and that fear/avoid men specifically. That’s something you have to learn as a male, that few social situations are particularly welcoming- men don’t want to talk with you, and women don’t either. It’s bad if you’re married - you can talk with exactly one woman in the world, who has a lot of opinions on your shortcomings - and worse if you’re single.
So in old age I’ve come to realize why so many old guys have these super intensive hobbies that their families find cute, and why they “don’t talk much” and don’t seem to care about going places and doing things.
They’ve learned that the world is a happier place when they - when we - just STFU. Self care happens between the ears. I suspect this trend is moving backwards from very old age to less old and maybe even younger people.
Succeed at not intruding on people and you’ll fail at making friends and I don’t know if one is really that much worse.
Due_Job781 | 14 minutes ago
Not to be mean, but only humans would see natural selection and call it 'male loneliness epidemic'. There's always been individuals of any species not getting picked (especially the ones not playing well with others).
In times of difficulty, procreation isn't as essential. This is a hard time to justify having children. Since women are not dependent on men anymore, and we don't rush naive young girls I to early pregnancy and marriage as much, they get to choose wisely.
How is that a bad thing? Women don't owe men who clearly see them as lesser anything. No one has the right to be picked when they misbehave. We've learned this rule in kindergarten. How are men suddenly throwing tantrums as if their promised toys have been taken way?
Konukaame | 12 minutes ago
People have been writing about the decline of community and social institutions for decades. These aren't isolated problems for targeted identity groups, but pieces of a larger whole.
rainywanderingclouds | an hour ago
saying there is no male loneliness crisis isn't a good headline
it's more of the same bull shit when you start that way.
BrizerorBrian | an hour ago
Ok. So disregard the content of the article due to a bad title. That is a really good idea. Forget the content. It takes too long to read.
The main point of the article is that economic disparity and the lack of a third place has isolated many people in American society, both men and women.
If we can't easily congregate and form friendships, of course there is going to be a feeling of loneliness.
Again, maybe read beyond the headline.
PeteMichaud | an hour ago
For those paying attention at home the previous political strategy of gender and race identity politics propaganda has more or less ended. Now you'll see a wave of progressive politicians and thinkpieces suddenly reframing everything as class identity politics. You will watch as everyone does a combo of distancing themselves from the positions and claims from the last ~10 years that they can't just ignore, and pretending it was like this the whole time. Children just coming of age into political awareness will smuggly explain things to you from within the bubble of this new normal.
Fuzzy_Ad9970 | an hour ago
> the previous political strategy of gender and race identity politics propaganda has more or less ended
It's running out of steam for sure, but it will not be ended until they find a new non-class issue to keep the lower class divided.
PeteMichaud | an hour ago
Eh, not how it works. This strain will never "end" exactly, they never do because the core true believers will keep a little subculture of it alive, most will move along with the mainstream, others will metastasize into some new type of bullshit and no one really planned for. It always happens in waves like this. Meanwhile the new hotness is the class stuff, and it'll get pushed hard as it catches on but then mutate into something stupid and eventually break apart. Whether it breaks apart immediately in the face of some other, hotter thing, or rises to become something mega stupid that no one anticipated, who knows? A lot of people thought "woke 1" was too stupid to survive long, but it sure made its mark. We'll see what happens next.
Fuzzy_Ad9970 | an hour ago
> Eh, not how it works.
Yes, that's exactly how it works. There is a vested interest in keeping these topics in our headlines. They will keep pushing it until they lose effectiveness, and then once they notice that, they will find something new.
There has always been a vested interest in keeping class conversations out of the spotlight, since the red scare and probably before. It's not just "another fad" like identity politics. Identity politics was useful to yet again delay class consciousness.
Either you are really young and/or aren't aware of the history of social movements in the US and how they have been sidelined. Don't forget they didn't kill MLK Jr until they realized he was a socialist sympathizer.
> Meanwhile the new hotness is the class stuff
This is both a silly and ignorant thing to say.
Superb-Draft | an hour ago
I doubt that. The oligarch class want anything other than class consciousness. The majority identifying as a single exploited class would be their end. They will just continue to create new forms of non-economic identity politics. Nationalism and racism still sell very well.
PeteMichaud | an hour ago
It's already happening, watch for it. Maybe Mamdani was a turning point for the Democrat establishment types, who knows? Your doubt makes sense, so just watch what happens. If it turns out you're right then good for you. If it turns out you're wrong, remember to notice and be surprised and wonder what you missed or were wrong about before.
MidnightIAmMid | an hour ago
I doubt it-the billionaire oligarchs spend a LOT of time and money making sure that class consciousness never actually takes root in America so they can guarantee that poor people fight over gender and race rather than them stealing from us. If this gains any momentum, they will just pay for a wave of propaganda against trans people or immigrants or something to distract, distract, distract.
mirh | an hour ago
> the previous political strategy of gender and race identity politics propaganda has more or less ended
ARE WE LIVING IN THE SAME 2026 WITH TRUMP PRESIDENT?
> Now you'll see a wave of progressive politicians and thinkpieces
Oh yeah, sure, let me guess.. You must be one of those believing communist elites dominate the world or something.
danknerd | an hour ago
Why do seemingly extroverts think us introverts are lonely being alone? Perhaps extroverts should stop projecting their own feelings of what it would like to be alone and how to fix something that isn't broken.
ncolaros | an hour ago
Well maybe you could read the article and understand what it's talking about.
This is in response to self reported feelings of loneliness.
danknerd | an hour ago
No. No one reported as such to the author of this article. Those were not their studies. Again, a seemingly extrovert projecting. I did not see a breakdown of those self-reporting were extro or intro, maybe I missed it, but would a key factor right?
ncolaros | 41 minutes ago
>Do such men exist? Perhaps. But the truth is, in aggregate, men are not much lonelier than women. Recent large polls from Pew Research and the Harvard Graduate School of Education found no significant gender gap in self-reported feelings of loneliness. In a KFF survey, more women (18 percent) than men (13 percent) said they always or often feel lonely. In the 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 15 percent of men said they have no close friends, versus 10 percent of women, but when Pew pollsters asked the same question more recently, they found no substantial gender disparity. In the latest American Time Use Survey, the average man spent about five and a half hours per day alone and the average woman about five hours and 20 minutes.
Whether people self identify as introverted or extroverted is irrelevant, unless you're making the claim that introverted people can't feel loneliness.
Making the distinction that it's not their studies is so bafflingly ridiculous, I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Does gravity not exist because you yourself did not personally run the test confirming it? Do you know what a citation is?
Reddit_reader_2206 | an hour ago
This article is utter garbage, and only references more utter garbage as source material. Don't waste your time; there is zero value, substance or even a point to this article.