Men Opting Out of Society
Introduction
This week was yet another busy week of work as I continued to focus on trying to understand the systems within my new job as well as build a healthy team and work environment for my personnel. This week I spent a great deal of time focusing on the ideas of what it looks like to build a healthy work environment and balancing the needs of the company and customers along with the needs of each technician and learning to be empathetic with their individual situations.
This week’s post will be on the shorter side of my usual posts. I hope you enjoy it!
What I Learned This Week
Men Without Work
This was an interesting book and one I was introduced to via one of the podcasts I listened to. As I have been continuing my quest of learning and understanding the social issues that are affecting women, how feminism, birth control, and the constant message of “there are too many people” have affected the thoughts of many of today’s young women.
This book introduced a different concern, a social issue that seems to be very much under the radar of many. This issue is the willful abandonment of gainful employment of young men today. For the first time in recorded history, we are seeing increasing numbers of young men who are choosing not to engage in the labor market. The reason for this, as ever, is multifaceted.
With this line of thinking in mind, some of the things I learned in both this book and the podcast above are.
According to some social studies:
“18% of men between the ages of 18 and 30 have not had sex in the last year”
Now I want to preface that the accuracy of this number is hard to know for sure, but it is an interesting statistic to consider.
“Currently, 50% of men say that they’re not looking for short-term or long-term relationships.”
Current data also shows that there are about 7 million men between the ages of 18 to 55 that are currently unemployed and not seeking employment.
This is an incredible number of men who are choosing to simply opt out of the labor force. Studies suggest that this number could be far higher as it is a number that is very hard to track accurately as many, if not most young men are reserved about admitting to not wanting to work or compete in the dating market.
Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom podcast has a very interesting thought on this subject that I think really speaks to many of these key social concerns of many young men, he calls it the “Male sedation hypothesis.”
The idea here is that, in general, many men are driven by a desire for status, which would, in turn, provide access to a prospective mate, which would then satisfy their sexual desires. The argument that Chris makes within this Male sedation idea is that today access to limitless free online pornography has satiated many men's drive to go to work and or strive to be the type of man who might gain the affection of a potential mate. The second component to this hypothesis is that historically men ventured out into the world seeking to achieve and conquer the world, by adventuring into the world and seeking to tame and subdue it. Whereas many young men today have had their ambition satisfied by video games which provide much more frequent and easier access to this sense of achievement.
I find this to be a compelling argument and one that has led me to read many books to seek to understand this idea better and to understand if this observation has been affirmed by those more educated than I am on this subject. Here are a few books I have found and read that dig into this diagnosis of concern for the young man of the twenty-first century
The End of Men by Hanna Rosin
The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell
Man Interrupted by Phillip Zimbardo and Nikita Coulombe
Is There Anything Good About Men by Roy F Baumeister
All in all, there simply seems to be a great deal of changes that have come with the turn of the century and our new technological and brain-based economy that simply seem to have many young men today feeling unable to compete.
And our current culture, there seems to be a sense for young men that they are simply not needed.
The final point, and one I will keep brief, is that many young men today simply don’t feel as though they are needed any longer. A message that is celebrated by a vocal minority who scream that men are no longer needed and that they are the bases for all the world’s problems. With slogans such as “All men are trash,” “All men are pigs,” “Men want nothing but sex,” and “The future is female.”
There are extreme positions on both sides, and there is a wedge that is being driven between men and women, driving a narrative that tells them to see one another as adversaries rather than allies. A position that is often all too easy to take when one party ends up hurting the other and so beginning a vicious cycle of seeing the worst parts of the other. A ploy as old as time, divide and conquer.
This was a fantastic podcast episode with some absolutely incredible information on brain studies and what has been discovered through years of research via brain scans and seeking to understand mental health, a problem that has taken not just America but the world by storm! Dr. Daniel Amen has spent much of his life studying the brain and learning how childhood trauma or even simply falling down some stairs can impair and damage brain development in some wild ways.
I was blown away by the conversation had in this podcast and can’t recommend it enough for anyone either wrestling with mental health or who has a friend or family member who struggles with mental health issues.
What did I do this week?
Studying and learning new software (for my new job)
Continuing to try to focus on questioning good questions
21 days without drinking any Alchohol
Deleted Youtube and Instagram from my phone to lower my phone usage
Thank you all once more for joining me. Today I found myself feeling kind of distracted as I was writing this post. I can’t really explain why but I hope you found something interesting and insightful all the same!
If you enjoyed it, please consider liking and subscribing, as it allows me to grow my audience and one day take over the world!
