Why Young Men Are Falling Behind

Foreign.

Why are young men and just men in general falling behind within America? And what do we do? So recently, the Wall Street Journal posted a kind of story piece, narrative piece, that also had a bunch of research and data. It was very interesting to see because in many ways, they showed a lot of the problems that young men are going through without actually describing any possible solutions. Which is. I gotta say, this is one of the most frustrating things about the modern conversation with men. A lot of the times when you hear and you see these conversations happening, young, you know, less young men are going to college than ever before. Young men are living at home more than before. Young men are isolated more than before. Young men and men in general aren't going into the workforce as much. They're not dating as much, they're not having as much sex. These things are talked about. But when it comes to actually problem solving or solutioning, there's almost nothing that is offered. And so, like, with this, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, with the Wall Street Journal article, there were stories of these young men that are, you know, in their late 20s, living at home, can't really get a job, you know, sort of playing video games all the time. And it just described what their life was like, and it was giving insight into their life, but it didn't actually offer up any kind of, like, human, here's what we could be doing to support these men. You know, it was really irritating. And I feel like that's a good descriptor of bad therapy. You know, that's what bad therapy feels like is you go in, you talk about your problems, the therapist sits there and listens to you, and they offer almost nothing in terms of what you can actually do to shift and change. Which is why so many men avoid therapy. You know, they don't go to therapy or see a psychologist or hire a coach. They. Because they are looking for some type of solutions. And this is a very different approach than when a woman goes into therapy. Cause for a lot of women, they're looking for their problems in their life to be heard and understood. And sometimes they want advice or solutions. But for men, we are solutions heavy. We are solutions oriented. So we're gonna talk today about why men are actually falling behind. And I'm gonna offer up some solutions of here's what I would do. If I was back in my early 20s and struggling just like I did, you know, in my early 20s, I had no idea I was gonna be doing. I sold vacuums door to door, which was terrible, by the way. But it taught me a lot about people in life and sales. I worked at, you know, International Stereo, selling stereo equipment, stereo equipment for like cars and home theaters. I worked at Best Buy for a while. I worked in gravel pits, I helped to build sidewalks. Like, I did grunt work. I did crappy jobs that I absolutely freaking hated. And in some ways it was those jobs that I disliked that lit a fire under my ass to go and do something bigger and better with my life. Because I didn't want to end up as the 60 year old dude that hated himself, hated his marriage, hated his job, drank his face off all weekend and smoked because he just didn't want to face the fact that he didn't like his life. And that's where I was headed. And I think the challenge is when I look at a lot of the data and talk to a lot of the young men that are out there, they sound pretty hopeless. You know, I read your comments on YouTube, I get your DMs on Instagram. You know, I read your emails. And.

It'S a little frightening to me how many men feel hopeless about the future. So let's dive into some of the data that the Wall Street Journal presented. So the first one that I wanted to talk about is the amount of time that men are spending alone, which has gone up quite a bit since 2018. 2018 was about 5.4 hours and now it's about 6.6 hours per day. So men on average are spending a little bit more than an hour than women alone every single day. And this is, you know, this is an aggregate. But when you look at men as they get older, gender, generally speaking, they spend more time alone. And so the older that you are as a man, the more time you're going to spend alone. And I see this all the time with men that come into our membership, the Alliance. You know, we've got 750, 800 men in the alliance from all over the world. And a lot of these guys go through divorce. Their marriage is on the rocks. And those things are happening because they don't have other good men in their life. They have been isolated from other good men and friendships. Now the other thing that was interesting that they shared was that 25, the age of 25 to 34, the percentage of men living at home between 25 and 34 has spiked since the 1960s from about 10% to almost 20. So we have nearly doubled in the percentage of men that are living at home. Now, this isn't inherently a bad thing. I personally moved out when I was 18, um, I got the hell out of my house. For many reasons, it wasn't a great environment for me to be in. There was a lot of conflict between myself and my stepdad and I did everything in my power to move out of the house because I knew it wasn't a good environment for me to be in. Now that might not be the case for you, right? You might be a 25 year old man or a 28 year old man watching this and you're like, you know what? I've tried to make it out on my own and I, I'm having trouble right now. And I moved back into my house and, you know, it's, it's great that you might have that option and that opportunity to do that. Some men do not, but it's great if you have that opportunity to do that. But for some men, they're, they've never been really kicked out of the nest and they're being, they've been grown up and raised in a kind of helicopter parent lifestyle, what I call pillow parenting, where a parent is constantly throwing a pillow underneath that boy and underneath that man to make sure he doesn't fall square on his face. But we need that, right? We as men need to fall down sometimes, yes, we need help getting up sometimes, but we actually need to take risk. We need to be incentivized and sometimes encouraged to do things that cause us to meet our edge. And that is what a lot of young men have, have been lacking. And there's, we can look at the number of reasons why this is happening, right? One in four kids are going to grow up in a household without a man in the house, without their paternal father in the house, their paternal parent, their father in the house. And so if you're a young boy who's being raised predominantly by your mother, and she's not encouraging you to take risk, she's, you know, actively discouraging you from doing anything that might cause you to get physically hurt, that might cause you to get picked on, that might cause you to, you know, be shunned in your social circles. You might never do what it takes in order to develop a really deep sense of individuality and understand who you are. Because you've never taken the small, medium and large risks to figure that out. So that's a big one, right? A lot of young men are staying at home, and for women, it's much less 12.3% of women are, are living at home between the ages of 25 and 34. And not only that we've reached the threshold where more young women are purchasing houses than young men. So that has begun to shift as well. And when you look at the labor market, when you look at the labor force participation rates between 25 and 34, you have men on a significant decline over the years. And so in 2000, it was roughly 94 and a half, 94% of men that were in the workforce. And now it's almost under 89% of men that are engaged in the workforce. That means more men are living at home, they are. More men are unemployed, and more men are spending time by themselves. Now this isn't to demonize or shame young men, Right. I really hope that if you're listening to this, you're not getting like, oh, I'm such a piece of garbage, this is my fault. And it's just another video telling me that I'm a young man. No, I really feel for you because I was that young man that didn't like myself. I hated myself. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know the path I wanted to walk. I didn't know, you know, what was even possible for me. I was a guy that failed, you know, grade 12 biology and English and had to go back and do both. I didn't get to graduate with my class. You know, I academically was not good in school mostly because I was sneaking out and going to my girlfriend's house all the damn time in high school and was like sleeping during class and skipping out during class and I just didn't care. And there really wasn't, there really wasn't anyone that was paying close enough attention or giving enough of a shit in a, in a almost like forceful way to support me in really doing what it took to find a sense of not even excellence, but a sense of competency and, and capability within myself. I didn't believe that I was good at anything and nobody had really supported me in developing competency or skill in much of anything. I was sort of the ultimate free range kid. I was the problem child. And so I really feel for a lot of the young men that are out there today. And look, you probably have different challenges, right? I realize that I'm 40 now and the challenges that you face as an 18 or 20 or 25 year old man or even a 30 year old man, they're going to be fundamentally different than what I experienced when I was in my 20s. But the core competencies are still the same, right? Modern culture tells you tells us as men that complacency and mediocrity are okay, but that's the siren song for most men, right? This notion that you shouldn't have to work, this notion that there's something wrong with you as a man if you want to build and develop yourself into something that is robust, that has capacity. I mean, I just. Somebody just on Instagram yesterday sent me an article from the New York Times and it was an opinion piece from a woman. I think she wrote a book called like Boy mom or something like that. And the whole premise of the article was that men should not want to pursue or develop strength and that strength should somehow be systematically removed from the notion of masculinity. I mean, this type of rhetoric is not only ridiculous, but it is dangerous and harmful to young men. I can assure you that having a three and a half year old son, I'm going to raise a robust and strong child. That young boy, whatever he decides to do with his life, however he identifies sexually, all of those other things, all will be a strong and capable man that has the self esteem because he has developed the skills within himself to know that he's capable. He will have had to take risks. He will have been encouraged to push through the resistance towards developing competency because every young man goes through that. And he will be encouraged to press out into the world and inject himself in community, in the social fabric, to, you know, to build friends, to start to develop a skill set or a passion in something that he actually enjoys. Whether or not he does those things is, you know, that's his accord. But I think the challenge is that a lot of young men have grown up in this pillow parenting style where every single time they went to take a risk, they were discouraged, or every single time they started to express their own authenticity, they were either shamed for it or, you know, they went out on social media and they were discouraged because you might be labeled as a misogynist, you know, for going to the gym and, you know, wanting to get into shape. God forbid you want to be in shape or, you know, you were raised with a bad male role model, right? Maybe you had a man who was your father, your stepfather, who was tyrannical, you know, who is constantly controlling you and dominating and aggressive. And so you've taken this pathway of wanting to reject anything that might constitute being anything like that man. And so you've neglected developing your own sense of assertiveness, you've neglected being around other men that you respect and you hang out with dudes that you don't even like, that you think are losers. I see this all the time with guys is that they're hanging out with men that they know aren't good for them, that they know aren't going to change, that they do not respect, admire or appreciate, and then they wonder why they're miserable. Right. And so there's many things that feed into this. I haven't even talked about the state of the economy. I haven't even talked about the fact that the modern cultural narrative is not interested in lifting up men at all. That is seen as something that is counterintuitive to the feminist movement, to the modern cultural narrative that men have everything that the patriarchy needs to be abolished. I mean, what more evidence do you need to see that the patriarchy has been abolished or that men are struggling other than everything that I just listed? The fact that men are not going to post secondary education, that by 2030 you're going to have two women graduating for every one men. I mean, it is almost as bad as it was in inverse from the 1960s where we had two men graduating from post secondary and one woman. Right? It's just flipped. You have men exiting the workforce. You have men not dating, not having as much sex, not being employed, living at home. I mean, like, we could just, we could just go on and on and on. So if you're a guy watching this video, I don't pretend to have the answers from a social perspective. I don't know precisely what policy should be enacted. Maybe you do, maybe you have some idea of that. And I'd love to hear that maybe you know, or have an idea of what socially needs to happen. I'm going to speak to you more individually. This is what I think that we as men need to do in order to start to shift our lives. And these are the things that I would do and that I wish somebody told me when I was 20, hated myself, drank my face off, worked crappy jobs, and hung out with people that I knew were not a good influence on me or my life. So here are the things that I would start to do. Number one, I would stop blaming women and I would stop worrying against them. And I. I'm going to be as blunt as possible. No one wants to date, marry, or someone that resents them. Right? The. The plain and simple fact is that what is happening for a lot of men who are kind of disincentivized from modern culture and society is that the lens of resentment gets turned onto women and feminism. And this kind of hatred, of. For. Oh, well, women have done this, and I see this all the time in my YouTube comments. It'll probably be in this video as well, where guys are like, oh, you just don't get it, bro. Like, you know, women have blah, blah, blah, and feminism has ruined and da, da, da. And maybe there's a grain of salt in. And truth in feminism and its impact that society and culture is not ready to own and admit yet. But railing on about it is certainly not going to get you a healthy and enjoyable relationship, nor is it going to allow you to take action on your life, because you are just the victim of feminism or you're just the victim of a woman that broke up with you, that didn't like you. Now, that's not to say that there aren't genuinely men who are victims to women, who have betrayed them, who have abused them, who have taken advantage of them. So if you're one of them, I apologize. I understand that you've gone through a terrible situation, and it is your responsibility to respond to that as a man. It's your responsibility to do the things that are necessary in order to climb out of that situation. Whether that's getting support, getting help, reaching out to people that can help you and support you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. We don't need to go too far down that path. But. But warring against women, trying to get them to see the truth about the flaws in modern feminism. This is an absolute waste of time. And I see so many men wasting their lives away trying to convince women into something that they don't want to see or hear. And it contributes to this divide between men and women. And there are.

There are. I was going to say there are people that benefit from men and women being divided, which, you know, maybe that's true, but I think at the end of the day, we as, as a species, lose when both parties are worrying against each other. So stop blaming women. Stop worrying against them. Address your resentment towards either the collective group of women or the women or the one woman who maybe hurt you, who maybe betrayed you, who maybe, you know, really scarred you. Like, I remember in high school, I was dating this woman, and I was devastated. After we broke up, she cheated. You know, I was really beside myself. It was hard for me to deal with. I was resentful towards her and towards women. And I didn't open myself up for women for a lot to women for a long time because of that. And I had a lot of anger and hostility. And I think that If I. If I was growing up in today's world, I would be on the YouTube channels listening to the, like, all women bad. You know, feminism is the worst thing to have happened in the world, and it should be obliterated. I'd be listening to that. I get it. So that's number one. Number two, set your relationship to risk. Right? Set right your relationship to risk. So many young men and men in general, and have grown up either with pillow parents. I just love that term. I'm going to keep saying it. Either with pillow parents who have coddled the living crap out of them, who have made sure that you've never really had to take any real risks in your life, or you have gone through experiences that have constrained and constricted your ability to take smart risks. And so too many young men have been coddled and contained and smothered and into submission. We have really docile and highly, highly domesticated men in our culture who are terrified of taking risk, even small risks. Like, you know, talking to the cute barista and, you know, asking her how her day is and asking her for her phone number. Just shooting a shot. Right? Or even just saying, you know, I come here all the time. I think you're great. I love my interactions with you. How would you feel about, you know, grabbing dinner one night? Or how would you feel about, like, sharing your Instagram? I'd love for you to share your Instagram with me. Or, like, however you want to position it. Right. More. More on that another time. But setting your relationship to risk. Right. Actually, every single day, taking small risks consciously. Because what happens for a lot of men who haven't taken risks is that they develop what I call the lottery mindset, and they start doing, dreaming and fantasizing about some massive risk that they're going to take that's going to pay off, and they're going to. They're going to make the millions of dollars and they're going to get the Ferrari and the beautiful girl that they've been pining over, and that will all come to fruition. Meanwhile, they don't take any of the small to medium risks that would lead them down a path to success, to developing the fortitude and the actual grit and determination and assertiveness and all of the other skills that get developed when we take smart, small, consistent risks. So figure out what those risks are. It might be a decision that, you know you've needed to make. It might be a conversation you need to have. It might be starting something that, you know you want to do. Whether it's a side hustle or a job or whatever it is, but start to take those small, consistent risks on a daily basis. Number three, engage in healthy confrontation. Engage in healthy confrontation. Another way of saying this is do hard shit every single day. Have the hard conversation. Make the challenging decision. Fire the person. Apply for the job. Reach out to somebody. Ask the girl for her phone number, right? Do the hard things. Engage in healthy confrontation. This doesn't mean getting annihilated at the bar and picking a bar fight with the bouncer. That's dumb, right? That's just stupid confrontation. And this is what most young men do. It's what I did. I got to know a lot of bar fights because I was engaging in unhealthy confrontation because I was, you know, wild and I, that, that just lived within me. But start to engage in healthy confrontation. You know, what do you need to say to your buddies? What do you need to own and admit about yourself? What have you not been communicating to your friends that you know you need to say? So start to engage again in the healthy conference confrontation. Do hard shit every single day. Number four, make friends with people you respect.

Let go of the people that are draining you, that are dead weights in your life, that are encouraging a lifestyle that you do not even like. So many of you guys that are out there are hanging out with the same freaking dudes that have been dragging you down for years and you think that you're doing a good thing by being loyal to the guy who's dealing ecstasy out of his 1996 Toyota Corolla and going to the clubs on the weekend and, you know, is not going to amount to anything in his life because he loves, he just, that's who he is. That's what he wants to be doing, right? He just wants to do that until he can't anymore. And you won't cut those guys loose. Now, a lot of guys do this because they don't know where to find men that they respect. So go join a men's group, right? You can join the Man Talks Alliance. We have our own app. We've got 750 plus guys from around the world. There's tons of men's groups that are out there that you can join. I'm not trying to hawk my or promote my thing. Whether you join the Man Talks alliance or some other one out there, it doesn't matter. Join a men's group. Find a group of men where you can find men that you ultimately respect because those men will call you forward. This is My language. Call you forward into the type of man that you know you're capable of being. And if you're not willing to do that, then you are going to stay in this mediocre, complacent place for the rest of your damn life. Or at the very least, until you are ready to have somebody call your ass out on the behavior that you know already is garbage. Right. Sometimes we, as men know, need another man to step in and say, that's some, you know, that's some behavior that you're on right now. You said you're going to stop drinking for October. Now you're telling me that you've drank every day for the last four days. What's going on? When are you actually going to honor your word and to have another man give enough of a about you and your life to call you forward into the man that you say you want to be? I want to be a man that's a good father. I want to be a man that's a good husband. I want to be a man that doesn't drink, that doesn't get annihilated on the weekends because he doesn't like being in social situations and gets socially anxious. I want to develop some social fluency. Good. Be around men who you respect that have gone through hell to develop themselves into somebody that they respect and appreciate. Because generally, the men that we respect have developed self respect. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. Generally speaking, the men that you respect, they have developed self respect. They have done some hard shit in their life to build themselves into somebody that they can look in the mirror and maybe not admire, but at the very least, not freaking hate. So get around Ben that you can. That you. That you can respect, that you can admire. Pay to do that. Like, I mean, you can do it for free. There's men's groups that are free. But what I'm saying is prioritize this above everything else, because it will be your saving grace. The moment that I started to prioritize, this is the moment that my life changed. Number five, get your damn body in shape. Stop making excuses. Cut back on the junk food, lift heavy weights, feel good about how you look, and actually start to prioritize living in your body. Living in your body. A lot of men that I see that are out there and that I talk to, that are living at home, that don't have jobs, they're on Netflix all day, they're playing video games all day, they're jerking off and watching porn, they're high as a fucking kite all the time. And they are not doing simple basic things to feel good about living in their body. So start to live in your body more which working out is a great conduit for it. Maybe for you it's also breath work, it's also meditation. Maybe for you it's, you know, starting to do trail running or triathlons or Ironmans. I don't know what it is. But find a vehicle for you to begin to enjoy living in your body in a deeper way. Because for a lot of men that I've been talking about that are checking out from society, that are living at home, that you know, are unemployed, they're caged in their head, they are disconnected from the neck down. Unless, you know, they fire up pornhub to go and you know, jerk off and watch something they're not fully connected to the prime, the primal nature of living in their body as a man. And what I can tell you is that when you start to prioritize that people interact with you differently and you start to interact with people differently. So those are the five things that I would do. Add your thoughts below. Comment Share make sure you man it forward, but share your thoughts. What would you do? Maybe you're a 45 year old guy or 55 year old guy that's gone through this before. Share your thoughts in the comments on YouTube. Share this episode, maybe with men in your life that you think could benefit from this or men in your life that would enjoy this conversation. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.