A sobering Financial Times analysis from this past weekend by John Burn-Murdoch examines the rise in early deaths among middle-aged people across advanced countries, most notably in the United States, the UK, and Canada, even as older people are living longer.
In my experience government always winds up exacerbating every social ill it attempts to solve. The only worthwhile policy I see here is controlling crime and disorder which is a core government function. Beyond that I’d recommend:
Focusing like a laser on promoting economic growth and a hot economy.
Getting K-12 education back to basics. I.e. Stop trying to implement the latest Ed school fad and focus on reading, writing & arithmetic in primary schools. Bring back vocational education in junior high and high schools so kids who aren’t going to college graduate with marketable skill sets.
Beyond that this is about culture. Government should stay out of it, because government trying to affect culture is probably what got us here in the first place.
There is no government solution to “loneliness” per se. There is a solution to some of the main causes of loneliness: long term joblessness in particular can be solved by the government. However it will require raising taxes and regulating big business and unfortunately our Ivy League Industrial Complex has decided it has no use for that, so here we are.
Actually I’d argue that over regulation combined with overly complex regulation on businesses is a big part of the problem in that it disadvantages small/start up businesses and advantages large corporations who can both afford to comply and/or simply move overseas to a friendlier regulatory environment.
Instead of raising taxes to presumably pay for more social spending, government should focus on promoting economic growth. Workers have far more power when they are in demand, and a good paying job with benefits is a key solution to this. Government handouts destroy self esteem and are part of the problem not the solution.
The most important thing to realize about Northern Europe is that despite low rates of marriage, they are an extremely monogamous culture. Andrew Cherlin points out in The Marriage Go-Round that unmarried couples in Sweden are less likely to separate then married couples in the USA.
Male loneliness is all downstream of promiscuity. Even if you aren't particularly red-pilled (in the OG sexual reality sense), here is the dating market:
* 22 year old men (either blue collar or post-college): women who are 22 or perhaps a bit younger
* 22 year old women: men who are 32ish and younger
But it changes when you hit 30:
* 30 year old men: women in their 20s
* 30 year old women: men in their 30s who haven't yet married
When I was in my younger 20s I was largely invisible to women because I'm not a bubbly extrovert. But as my 30s approached women started making themselves available, and oftentimes chased me. I think for women, more than merely "hitting the wall" at age 30, is the reality that the good men are rapidly marrying out of the dating market. Most women don't want to be the last one standing when the music stops and the good men are all married.
The upshot is that young men spend their 20s drifting. Hookup culture, pot, video games, anime. They don't have a family to work for, so unless they're unusually driven, their career is not important. They have no purpose, no mission. High school friends have a way of scattering, but even if they stay close, hanging out with friends drinking beer and playing video games does not satisfy the longing for love and connection. I personally spent much of my 20s as a snowboard bum, and then at some point in my late 20s, a little alarm went off and I moved back to the East coast and got my first full-time job. I was married a couple years after that.
Edit: This was perhaps the largest part of Charlie Kirk's ministry to college students. You get out of life what you put into it, and young men who start living with purpose and break free of hookup culture, drugs, or porn can move their life in their 20s to a very different track.
I like this take. I suspect that the urge to build something lasting - to “make a life for yourself” starts with marriage and family - which used to be a 20 something routine step. My own path certainly illustrates this. Until I had a wife I was content to drift. My ambition kicked in as I married and we had our. first child. I think men are wired to build a life around a family. I’d argue that is certainly the best path for happiness for most (not all).
Can we create families and therefore communities, when so many people these days have horrible views of marriage and of having children? And when marriage, for many women, gets reduced to "mankeeping?" And when so very many people have such awful views of men?
We are retired, in our mid-70s. Six kids, 15 grandchildren. Close. Supportive. Loving. Fun. We all rise and fall together.
"Can we create families and therefore communities, when so many people these days have horrible views of marriage and of having children? "
That's been a long-term focus of leftism going back to Mary Wollstonecraft of the French Revolution, who wrote "A vindication of the rights of women." This was the original attack on marriage as a form of female subservience. It was further developed by Marxist and feminist intellectuals. There is a house debate on the left: is marriage primarily a capitalist institution designed to perpetuate class privilege and inequality across the generations? Or is marriage primarily a patriarchal institution designed to subjugate and oppress women?
Ironically, Mary Wollstonecraft found a radical man during the revolution and rather than her being enslaved, they both agreed that their love was the only bond between them they needed. Every conservative already knows how this story ends. She went on a diplomatic mission to Sweden (or some other Nordic nation) and came back home to find he'd gotten another woman pregnant. She tried to commit suicide twice but fortunately failed. Eventually she met another man and this time they married, but she died in childbirth. But her legacy continued because her daughter, Mary Shelley, also inherited her literary gift and wrote Frankenstein.
My wife was in a group of five women who were the first female police officers in Seattle, so probably in the entire state, in 1975. Those women had to meet the same physical requirements as did the men. 2200 applicants. 29 selected for the Academy, she graduated 3rd,.
For many years she protected rape victims (women and girls) through the court system, experiencing several, credible threats on her life. She always had a dog and a gun.
I'd like to see ANYBODY "subjugate and oppress" her! :)
p.s. I love my wife. And respect her beyond words.
“In our highly polarized politics today, these issues seem like a promising area for bipartisan legislation and cross-ideological cooperation” you would think but I doubt it because it would require a) agreeing on a root cause worth addressing and b) prioritize a solution both sides can agree will help. I see very little indication this will happen in a congress that has given up so much of its legislative power
That was my thought as well. Kind of like homelessness is an issue with broad bipartisan agreement that it needs to be solved. What those solutions should look like, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter
Family, voluntary associations, religious groups, economic activity, and government (local, state, national) all have a crucial roles to play.
TurningPoint USA has been mentioned as a voluntary association that has recognized a life challenge for many young people and is addressing it.
It is best not to interfere with efforts; of family, voluntary associations, religious groups, and the economy filling a need, that may be better addressed by them.
Much of what can be done is being done by the MAGA Republicans to fight back against the feminization of society. The key to getting it done is to reform the education system, increase job opportunities and reduce social welfare benefits that allow so many young people to sit on their asses all day playing screen games and consuming cannabis.
Also, fuck the work-from-home movement. Get their asses back to the job site where they will be forced to make friendly relations with coworkers.
One other thing... the Biden Inflation Increase Act that drove up labor costs has resulted in almost doubling of the cost of a drink and meal and young people cannot afford to go out with friends for entertainment. Reducing the cost of energy and creating more competition in the food and beverage markets will help to drive down this inflation. The no-tax-on-tips legislation that Democrats voted against will also help relieve some pressure on food and drink service wages.
Israel, which according to progressives is the worst country in the world, should have military and diplomatic aid withdrawn from, and hopefully destroyed by Jihadist terrorists, somehow stayed on the top ten of happiest nations in the world (dropping from 4th to 5th then 8th) despite two years of war. The others on that list are the Scandinavian nations so beloved by DSA types. Scandinavians haven’t had war instigated against them in 80 years and have their robust welfare states subsidized by petrodollars (Norway) and US taxpayers via the massive US defense subsidy of Europe.
Israel has no loneliness problem, has a longer average lifespan than most developed nations, a higher GDP per-capital than most EU countries (including the UK and France). It has a TFR rate of 3.0. It’s also more ethnically and racially diverse than any Scandinavian country.
But hey, you can’t look to a country like Israel for policy ideas. According to the progressive left nothing less than a genocide and ethnic cleansing of 7.7 million Israeli Jews will do.
Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one…it’s the Social Media, silly.
All the other causal factors listed are indeed true, but social media is the catalyst/accelerant. It takes the negative impacts of all of these causal factors, amplifies them, and serves it up to the loneliest amongst us 24x7x365. Social media fuels isolation, tribal viewpoints, the replacement of God/religion with our own selfish desires, and so on and so forth. Our minds/bodies have not evolved to be able to handle the level of information coming at us every day.
We’d be better off of they shut it all down. At the very least, we should get phones out of schools and keep kids off social media. But that would required parents to actually parent, something society has outsourced to the very technology that is destroying us.
It is unclear to me why English speaking men should feel more isolation than other northern and western people of European descent. Is it because our nouns lack gender?
In my experience government always winds up exacerbating every social ill it attempts to solve. The only worthwhile policy I see here is controlling crime and disorder which is a core government function. Beyond that I’d recommend:
Focusing like a laser on promoting economic growth and a hot economy.
Getting K-12 education back to basics. I.e. Stop trying to implement the latest Ed school fad and focus on reading, writing & arithmetic in primary schools. Bring back vocational education in junior high and high schools so kids who aren’t going to college graduate with marketable skill sets.
Beyond that this is about culture. Government should stay out of it, because government trying to affect culture is probably what got us here in the first place.
This!
There is no government solution to “loneliness” per se. There is a solution to some of the main causes of loneliness: long term joblessness in particular can be solved by the government. However it will require raising taxes and regulating big business and unfortunately our Ivy League Industrial Complex has decided it has no use for that, so here we are.
Actually I’d argue that over regulation combined with overly complex regulation on businesses is a big part of the problem in that it disadvantages small/start up businesses and advantages large corporations who can both afford to comply and/or simply move overseas to a friendlier regulatory environment.
Instead of raising taxes to presumably pay for more social spending, government should focus on promoting economic growth. Workers have far more power when they are in demand, and a good paying job with benefits is a key solution to this. Government handouts destroy self esteem and are part of the problem not the solution.
The most important thing to realize about Northern Europe is that despite low rates of marriage, they are an extremely monogamous culture. Andrew Cherlin points out in The Marriage Go-Round that unmarried couples in Sweden are less likely to separate then married couples in the USA.
Male loneliness is all downstream of promiscuity. Even if you aren't particularly red-pilled (in the OG sexual reality sense), here is the dating market:
* 22 year old men (either blue collar or post-college): women who are 22 or perhaps a bit younger
* 22 year old women: men who are 32ish and younger
But it changes when you hit 30:
* 30 year old men: women in their 20s
* 30 year old women: men in their 30s who haven't yet married
When I was in my younger 20s I was largely invisible to women because I'm not a bubbly extrovert. But as my 30s approached women started making themselves available, and oftentimes chased me. I think for women, more than merely "hitting the wall" at age 30, is the reality that the good men are rapidly marrying out of the dating market. Most women don't want to be the last one standing when the music stops and the good men are all married.
The upshot is that young men spend their 20s drifting. Hookup culture, pot, video games, anime. They don't have a family to work for, so unless they're unusually driven, their career is not important. They have no purpose, no mission. High school friends have a way of scattering, but even if they stay close, hanging out with friends drinking beer and playing video games does not satisfy the longing for love and connection. I personally spent much of my 20s as a snowboard bum, and then at some point in my late 20s, a little alarm went off and I moved back to the East coast and got my first full-time job. I was married a couple years after that.
Edit: This was perhaps the largest part of Charlie Kirk's ministry to college students. You get out of life what you put into it, and young men who start living with purpose and break free of hookup culture, drugs, or porn can move their life in their 20s to a very different track.
I like this take. I suspect that the urge to build something lasting - to “make a life for yourself” starts with marriage and family - which used to be a 20 something routine step. My own path certainly illustrates this. Until I had a wife I was content to drift. My ambition kicked in as I married and we had our. first child. I think men are wired to build a life around a family. I’d argue that is certainly the best path for happiness for most (not all).
Good article.
Can we create families and therefore communities, when so many people these days have horrible views of marriage and of having children? And when marriage, for many women, gets reduced to "mankeeping?" And when so very many people have such awful views of men?
We are retired, in our mid-70s. Six kids, 15 grandchildren. Close. Supportive. Loving. Fun. We all rise and fall together.
Where do people get that outside of families?
"Can we create families and therefore communities, when so many people these days have horrible views of marriage and of having children? "
That's been a long-term focus of leftism going back to Mary Wollstonecraft of the French Revolution, who wrote "A vindication of the rights of women." This was the original attack on marriage as a form of female subservience. It was further developed by Marxist and feminist intellectuals. There is a house debate on the left: is marriage primarily a capitalist institution designed to perpetuate class privilege and inequality across the generations? Or is marriage primarily a patriarchal institution designed to subjugate and oppress women?
Ironically, Mary Wollstonecraft found a radical man during the revolution and rather than her being enslaved, they both agreed that their love was the only bond between them they needed. Every conservative already knows how this story ends. She went on a diplomatic mission to Sweden (or some other Nordic nation) and came back home to find he'd gotten another woman pregnant. She tried to commit suicide twice but fortunately failed. Eventually she met another man and this time they married, but she died in childbirth. But her legacy continued because her daughter, Mary Shelley, also inherited her literary gift and wrote Frankenstein.
Fascinating. Thanks.
My wife was in a group of five women who were the first female police officers in Seattle, so probably in the entire state, in 1975. Those women had to meet the same physical requirements as did the men. 2200 applicants. 29 selected for the Academy, she graduated 3rd,.
For many years she protected rape victims (women and girls) through the court system, experiencing several, credible threats on her life. She always had a dog and a gun.
I'd like to see ANYBODY "subjugate and oppress" her! :)
p.s. I love my wife. And respect her beyond words.
“In our highly polarized politics today, these issues seem like a promising area for bipartisan legislation and cross-ideological cooperation” you would think but I doubt it because it would require a) agreeing on a root cause worth addressing and b) prioritize a solution both sides can agree will help. I see very little indication this will happen in a congress that has given up so much of its legislative power
That was my thought as well. Kind of like homelessness is an issue with broad bipartisan agreement that it needs to be solved. What those solutions should look like, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter
Government is not the answer to every concern.
Family, voluntary associations, religious groups, economic activity, and government (local, state, national) all have a crucial roles to play.
TurningPoint USA has been mentioned as a voluntary association that has recognized a life challenge for many young people and is addressing it.
It is best not to interfere with efforts; of family, voluntary associations, religious groups, and the economy filling a need, that may be better addressed by them.
Much of what can be done is being done by the MAGA Republicans to fight back against the feminization of society. The key to getting it done is to reform the education system, increase job opportunities and reduce social welfare benefits that allow so many young people to sit on their asses all day playing screen games and consuming cannabis.
Also, fuck the work-from-home movement. Get their asses back to the job site where they will be forced to make friendly relations with coworkers.
One other thing... the Biden Inflation Increase Act that drove up labor costs has resulted in almost doubling of the cost of a drink and meal and young people cannot afford to go out with friends for entertainment. Reducing the cost of energy and creating more competition in the food and beverage markets will help to drive down this inflation. The no-tax-on-tips legislation that Democrats voted against will also help relieve some pressure on food and drink service wages.
Israel, which according to progressives is the worst country in the world, should have military and diplomatic aid withdrawn from, and hopefully destroyed by Jihadist terrorists, somehow stayed on the top ten of happiest nations in the world (dropping from 4th to 5th then 8th) despite two years of war. The others on that list are the Scandinavian nations so beloved by DSA types. Scandinavians haven’t had war instigated against them in 80 years and have their robust welfare states subsidized by petrodollars (Norway) and US taxpayers via the massive US defense subsidy of Europe.
Israel has no loneliness problem, has a longer average lifespan than most developed nations, a higher GDP per-capital than most EU countries (including the UK and France). It has a TFR rate of 3.0. It’s also more ethnically and racially diverse than any Scandinavian country.
But hey, you can’t look to a country like Israel for policy ideas. According to the progressive left nothing less than a genocide and ethnic cleansing of 7.7 million Israeli Jews will do.
Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one…it’s the Social Media, silly.
All the other causal factors listed are indeed true, but social media is the catalyst/accelerant. It takes the negative impacts of all of these causal factors, amplifies them, and serves it up to the loneliest amongst us 24x7x365. Social media fuels isolation, tribal viewpoints, the replacement of God/religion with our own selfish desires, and so on and so forth. Our minds/bodies have not evolved to be able to handle the level of information coming at us every day.
We’d be better off of they shut it all down. At the very least, we should get phones out of schools and keep kids off social media. But that would required parents to actually parent, something society has outsourced to the very technology that is destroying us.
Other than that, things are great. Carry on.
It is unclear to me why English speaking men should feel more isolation than other northern and western people of European descent. Is it because our nouns lack gender?