So where does this all end up with youth in America? More obese, more anxious, more depressed, more angry than any generation in history? The highest suicide rates, the highest self-harm rates? I mean, what is the point of any of this… if our kids are depressed?
— from an interview with Scott Galloway hosted by the Wall Street Journal, 2024.
Really. What is the point of all this, if our kids are depressed?
I’ve been following NYU professor Scott Galloway, from a safe distance, for a couple of years now. On YouTube, and on his website ‘No Mercy/No Malice’.
I haven’t read any of his books, but I have a pretty good idea why he sounds frustrated with our current American culture.
He claims that the Boomer Generation as a whole — his generation; my generation — is “72% wealthier” than our parents’ generation were 40 years ago, while “the average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy.”
I believe that almost every major economic policy in the U.S. is nothing but a thinly veiled transfer of wealth from young to old…
Taking money from the wages of young workers and transferring $1.7 trillion annually into the pockets of Social Security recipients — the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the planet, according to Professor Galloway, to benefit the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet.
But these issues concern about young people in general — both men and women.
He, like so many other observers of American culture, has special concerns about young men in particular.
Donald Trump pulled off a stunning political comeback because of… young men. While the Democrats ignored this demographic, the far right rushed in to fill the void, flooding the manosphere with rockets, Hulk Hogan, coarseness, and crypto. The last presidential election was supposed to be a referendum on women’s rights. It wasn’t. It was a referendum on struggling young men.
Many of his concerns are the very same concerns discussed by author Richard Reeves, whom we quoted briefly in Parts Two and Three, about an education system stacked against boys and young men… the disappearance of traditionally male jobs… and the absence of fathers in many families.
From Scott Galloway:
The data around boys and young men is overwhelming. Seldom in recent memory has there been a cohort that’s fallen farther, faster. Why?
First, boys face an educational system biased against them. With brains that mature later than girls’, they almost immediately fall behind their female classmates. Many grow up without male role models, including teachers — fewer men teach K–12 than there are women working in STEM fields — with Black and Hispanic school instructors especially underrepresented…
A prohibitive real estate market is a contributing factor to why 60% of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at age thirty…
Meanwhile, algorithmically generated content on social media contributes to — and profits from — young men’s growing social isolation, boredom, and ignorance. With the deepest-pocketed firms on the planet trying to convince young men they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen, many grow up without acquiring the skills to build social capital or create wealth. The percentage of young men aged twenty to twenty-four who are neither in school nor working has tripled since 1980…
Reading the above quotes, you might get the impression that professor Galloway sees young men as innocent victims of a system that devalues them and has been leaving them behind. To some degree, that’s an accurate assessment. If we are even paying attention to the situation, my generation — the generation that is benefiting from the largest annual transfer of wealth in the history of the planet — often judges young men as ungrateful, lazy, selfish, lacking ambition, content to live in their parents’ basement playing video games.
Young women look at those same young men, and then look the other way. They’d rather face the world on their own.
And the young men themselves? As the professor claims, 51% of 18-to-24-year-old men have never asked a woman out, in person. Why is this statistic important? Because the moment a son or daughter is born, a man is transformed into a father. In this moment, a transition begins, changing “a boy” into “a man”. If he can fully embrace it, fatherhood changes a man for the better, in ways almost nothing else can.
If we are intent on raising a generation of boys who will never know the joy and struggle of fatherhood, I hardly think our civilization can survive.
But it’s on all of us — men of all ages, women of all ages — to make that possible. Social media cannot make it happen. AI cannot make it happen. Only we, together as a community, can make it happen.
If it’s still possible.
Why are we so averse to identifying and celebrating what’s good about men and masculinity, and why does it matter? Because we won’t prosper if we convince boys and young men that they’re victims, or that they don’t have to be persistent and resilient, or that their perspective isn’t valuable…
If we can’t convince young men of the honor involved and the unique contributions inherent in expressing what makes them male, we’ll lose them to niche, rabid online communities…
Women and children can’t flourish if men aren’t doing well. Neither will our country.