The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health

Why, embarrassingly, the peddlers of alpha male snake oil actually get people to change their behavior better than we do

This piece discusses social isolation, mental health crises, and suicidal ideation.

“The only light in the cave.” Art by Sonu.

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The man on my screen tells me to clean my room. Discipline. Become who you're meant to be. Reclaim something lost. I don't know him. Not Peterson. Not Tate. Just some guy. Some C-list manosphere guy I’ve never heard of, probably named something like Trent or Chad, who claims his ‘system’ changed his life but whose video description says “Join the Brotherhood - FREE Telegram group (link in bio)” and something about crypto investments I can’t be bothered to read. I can vaguely see the appeal of the argument he’s trying to make. A world where everything makes Absolute Sense™, where problems can be solved by achieving inbox zero, squatting heavy, and negging your crush Sarah from econ. The pseudoscience is obvious. The 'ancient masculine wisdom' is light productivity advice in period drag. Misogyny sits under the surface like expired milk in the back of a fridge. As a psychologist, I know these patterns.

I’d spent the past week deep in conservatism. Psychology of conservatism. Social order. Hierarchy. The architecture of certainty. Videos on tradition, the value of clear roles and social expectations. And something clicked. I could see clear parallels to what this guy was really speaking to. The relief of knowing what’s expected. Wake at 6am. Cold shower. Gym. No excuses. A path forward. This is how you become better, do this today, tomorrow, next week. The relief of not reading another self-help article. Does making your bed reinforce capitalist myths or betray your authentic messy self? The question alone exhausts you.

And even knowing all of this, knowing it’s basically the psychological equivalent of a Nigerian prince email, I still felt it. A tiny bit of that pull. I came away thinking: fuck, I should get my shit together. Yesterday I did almost nothing except watch YouTube videos about the Fall of Rome. The room around me is closer to a depression museum exhibit than I am willing to admit. Maybe this guy who definitely bought his Rolex on credit has a point.

Take the NoFap movement for instance. On its face, it seems completely insane. Don’t masturbate and you’ll become an alpha male with magnetic attraction powers? If only. Imagine if personal transformation were actually that simple, just stop touching your dick for a month and suddenly you’ve got supernatural charisma, women magnetically drawn to you; the confidence of an emperor. What a world that would be indeed. We could solve so many problems. Depression? Just stop jerking off. Unemployment? Just don’t beat that meat. Thirty days of semen retention and you’re ready as CEO material. Wouldn’t it be nice if the human psyche worked like that? Like a video game where you could just do this one weird trick and get superpowers?

And to many it sounds like it could be true, at least somewhat. Surely all that sexual energy has to go somewhere? Wouldn't motivation work like water, where you dam it up in one place and it floods and redirects somewhere else? And to many others, it sounds like prime material for mockery. The internet loves making fun of these guys, dunking on their increasingly elaborate theories about what semen retention will unlock next. It’s low-hanging fruit for low-effort YouTube. “Good content”. The script can almost write itself: “Okay so these guys think their nut is literally magical. Like their balls are some kind of magic power source. They've got all these crazy theories about testosterone and life force and retention benefits. My guy, you jack off and your T levels are back to normal in like 20 minutes. This isn't Dragon Ball Z where you're charging up a spirit bomb in your nutsack. The only thing you’re training for is the Chastity Olympics.”

But at the same time thousands of guys report real change. They stick with it. Self-reports from true believers? Take those with salt. Still, there might be something interesting going on here that we miss when we're too busy laughing. People don’t do things and then stick with them for literally no reason. If thousands of guys are reporting that this changes their lives somehow, then dismissing it as pure delusion misses the point. The explanation they’ve been given might be pure fantasy, but some effect is psychologically real enough that they keep doing it. That’s worth examining seriously.

So things are happening at the alpha male circus. The real question is what is that ‘something’? What psychological mechanisms are they triggering in these men? Something keeps them coming back. I think we need to have a serious talk about that.

I. How bad ideas do good psychology

So, a lot of people use (chronic) masturbation as an avoidance behavior, basically a form of procrastination. It’s a loop they’re stuck in. If you break that loop, or any loop really, you create space for something different to happen. This is just what we call behavioral activation, habit/loop disruption, behavioral chain interruption, whatever name you want to put on it, Psychology 101. It’s not about ‘semen retention’ creating superpowers. It’s about identifying a specific pattern and replacing it with literally anything else. Seems straightforward enough.

At the same time, let’s be honest that it’s also more than just behavioral substitution going on with idea of ‘semen retention’. It’s not taking the actual felt experience seriously enough. There’s something real about emotional redirection of it all. Sometimes when I’m working out, especially if it’s been a few days, I feel physically… heightened. There’s something about how this energy presents in your body, a sense of amplified embodiment, whatever you want to call it, and can be actually channeled into something like physical performance. You’re not mystically “transmuting sexual energy into alpha male essence”, or whatever chicanery they claim. You’re basically taking an activation state, something that changes how your body and experience feels, and deliberately rerouting it toward a different behavior. That’s a real psychological process, very valid. People who are adept at regulating their emotions do this all the bloody time.

It’s what makes emotions and our experiences so powerful in the first place. You feel a certain energy and channel it into something else. Like how someone could turn anger about injustice into calling someone and getting legal assistance. Anxiety about your relationship into being more attentive towards your significant other by purposefully investing in what’s important to you. So with NoFap you take that, that physically activated feeling, and put it into the gym, instead of into your hand. That’s probably pretty healthy if you’re overdoing it. Emotions and the energy you feel in your body are ultimately information, and you can choose to that use for something else; the very thing that makes something difficult can be used as fuel for change. The pull becomes a push by redirecting it. Clever Observer but Bad Psychologist Freud called it ‘sublimation’, which makes it sound like you’re shamefully pushing down base urges into acceptable outlets. This is wrong. Channeling this erotic energy, but also just any other of the emotions and feelings a person can have, is the foundation of emotional intelligence. It’s the difference between being controlled and overwhelmed by every impulse and minor stomach ache your body produces, versus actively choosing what to do with that energy; giving it a direction. Which is different than merely enduring it in a stoic fashion. It’s turning it into something more actionable, it’s the transformative power of emotions as an instrument. Like how an artist can turn the feeling of sadness into a song. How someone takes restlessness and finally tackles that project they've been avoiding for months. It’s discovering that in emotion there is agency: I can’t magically make it go away, but I can choose to do something else to do with this feeling. Realizing that is a genuinely powerful thing to discover.

Before I continue I should probably clarify what I mean by “the manosphere.” There’s no ‘Manosphere International’ with membership cards and annual conferences in Dubai. It’s at best a loose, informal network. An umbrella term that describes interconnected communities, (mostly) online, usually including pickup artists, Men’s Rights Activists, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and adjacent influencers. In common definitions what unites them isn’t a shared vision for men’s well-being and health. It’s mainly what they’re against: feminism, women’s autonomy, progressive gender norms, the “feminization” of society. The specific reasons vary between groups. Pickup artists blame feminism for making dating harder, Men’s Rights Activists frame it as systemic discrimination against men, MGTOW see it as reason to ‘opt out’ entirely by avoiding marriage and committed romantic relationships. But these overlapping oppositions are what group them together. It’s negative advocacy, defined more by opposition than by any coherent roadmap or vision for men’s mental health, emotional development, and genuine flourishing. Actual support for men would mean advocating for mental health, well-being, resilience, and things like mentorship structures. The things that produce capable people rather than angry ones.

Now that we’ve established what the manosphere actually is, let’s examine why people get results from it, at least initially. They’ve stumbled onto some genuinely effective behavior change mechanics. When you step back and look at it objectively, they’ve accidentally reinvented basic coaching psychology. Let’s go over it step by step. Accountability: you report your streak to fellow your nonfappers. Clear protocols templates: do these 3 specific, but manageable, things every day. Authority figures: some guy who seems to have his shit together telling you what to do (he does seem to own a very expensive car after all). Community: other guys are doing the same thing. Identity markers and common tribespeak: “I am on day 47”. Shared struggle and purpose: we’re all in this together, fighting the same fight and having a sense of purpose because of that. These are powerful psychological buttons to press. And those are the mechanisms that also make coaching work, that make support groups work, that make any behavior change program reasonably effective. They stumbled into this, and repackaged it with alpha male branding and aggressive monetization: don’t forget to visit the online store full of stuff you desperately need to buy for unlocking your True Masculinity (and use the code BETATOBEAST10 for a 10% discount!). Buy the proprietary testosterone-boosting Alpha Wolf Warrior Dominance Stack™ for three easy payments of $29.99. (It’s zinc. It’s literally just zinc in a matte black container).

The surface simplicity of the challenge is very important too. When you’re stuck, (and I mean really deep stuck, caught-in-a-misery-depression-spiral-where-nearly-everything-feels-overwhelming stuck), then “stop jerking off for 30 days” is at least conceivable. It has a clear endpoint. You can wrap your head around it. You can perhaps imagine yourself achieving it. It’s hard for many, sure. Plenty of people fail. But it's one specific thing you can start right now, and if you fail, you start over. It requires zero interpretation from you. Compare that to the alternative: somehow addressing the entire crushing weight of your life all at once. The too-muchness of everything wrong in your life and everything you perceive as wrong with yourself. I know very few people who would be able to pull that one off. And sure, maybe they should be doing that herculean task anyway. Get your life together. Fix yourself. Become better. But what does that even mean? How do you even conceptualize that? Where do you even start? These guys that are stuck generally lack the tools for that kind of introspection. Besides, that has never been how overwhelming majority of people really learn or learn how to cope with things. That's not a moral failing. Do we really expect someone who's struggling to somehow have this enlightened and nuanced understanding of how humans actually work, his emotional needs, and the exact ten-step plan to self-improve and how to get there? Is that really a fair ask? So the simple challenge wins out. The simple worldview wins. When you’re in that downward spiral a bounded 30-day challenge (even a difficult one) is infinitely more achievable than the abstract and soul crushing project of fixing your entire existence.

II. Some people just want to be told what to do (and that’s not Sad)

So, this obvious need for some kind of structure isn’t an aberration we need to fix. It’s legitimate, it should be legitimate. To understand why the manosphere captures so many young men we need to understand this need for structure isn’t a character flaw. The question isn’t even whether people need structure, it’s what kind of structure we’re offering them, and whether it’s actually helping getting somewhere useful, or just exploiting that need for financial gain and social media grifting by manosphere. To understand why the manosphere’s terrible approach actually works better for some people than others, I need to explain something about how humans are wired. And why certain people become particularly vulnerable when that wiring meets isolation and crisis.

Let’s start with what ‘needing or preferring structure’ actually looks like in daily life. Life constantly throws decisions at us, and structure means having reliable ways to figure out what to do when you don’t automatically know. We all use different approaches depending on the situation. Car makes a weird noise? You take it to a mechanic and do what they say. That’s hierarchical authority; one expert tells you what’s wrong and what to fix. Picking a restaurant? You check Yelp ratings, ask friends, scan reviews. That’s distributed consensus; gathering multiple inputs and finding patterns. Same person, same day, completely different decision-making strategies.

Two people get the same complex medical diagnosis.

Person A spends three weeks reading medical papers, consulting multiple specialists, joining online communities, weighing quality-of-life tradeoffs between treatments. Finally synthesizes all this information and decides on a treatment plan. Feels good about the process - empowered, informed, like they took real ownership of their health.

Person B gets the diagnosis, calls their doctor the next day. “What do you recommend?” Doctor says Treatment X. They do it. Also feels good about it. Relieved to have a clear path forward, trusting they’re in capable hands.

We tend to think Person A did it “right.” They were informed, autonomous, really engaged with their own life. Person B seems... what? Passive? Like they’re not taking responsibility? Haven’t we all been told to “be your own advocate,” to “do your research,” to take an active role in medical decisions?

The clue isn’t that person B is less intelligent or less capable. The clue is that they’re experiencing the decision-making process completely differently. Those three weeks Person A spent researching? For Person B, that wouldn’t feel like productive exploration. It would feel like pointless prolonging of a decision that someone more qualified could make better and faster. The discomfort isn’t “I’m afraid of making the wrong choice.” It’s “why are we still discussing this when we could have an answer right now?”

This maps directly onto something personality psychologists have known for decades. Research consistently shows that roughly half the population scores lower on ‘openness to experience’ (McCrae & Costa, 1997). These people genuinely prefer structure, clear rules, hierarchy, predictability. They find comfort in tradition and explicit boundaries over novelty and change (Jost et al., 2018). Person A is high openness. In this example person B is low openness.

We’re talking about roughly half the population here, that’s a lot of young men trying to figure out their lives right now. Think about what this means beyond medical decisions. Someone low in openness might love working in a lab where there are clear protocols for everything, where you follow established procedures and build knowledge steadily over time. That same trait might lead someone else to find deep meaning in religious practice, in the comfort of rituals performed the same way for centuries. Or they might be a carpenter who takes pride in doing things the right way, the way they were taught, perfecting techniques that work. Same personality trait, completely different lives. What they share isn’t what they believe or do, it’s that they find satisfaction in mastery within established systems rather than constantly seeking novelty (Ng et al., 2021).

People do lean toward one type more than the other though, especially when either would work. Some prefer hierarchical systems across more situations: defer to the doctor, the religious leader, the senior colleague, the coach. A nice clear chain of command, established protocols, someone just tells you what’s right and that settles it. Others lean toward distributed consensus for bigger decisions: check multiple sources, cross-reference opinions, look for patterns, piece it together. The process of exploring feels reassuring. Both are structure, both are ways of dealing with “I don’t know what to do here, so how do I figure it out?”

Take someone looking for a new job. For someone high in openness, the internal experience might be: “Wow, look at all these possibilities! I could go into tech, or maybe non-profit work, or freelance consulting. Let me explore these options, talk to people, see what feels right.” For someone low in openness? “There are too many options. What if I choose wrong? What if I waste years going down the wrong path? I need advice from someone who’s done this before to tell me what makes sense.” The uncertainty isn’t possibility, it’s threat. Just to be clear, this is different from anxiety or neuroticism. Neuroticism is emotional reactivity, worrying bad things will happen. Low openness is finding the exploration itself uncomfortable. Someone low in openness but calm by temperament might be perfectly fine about the job search. They just find researching twelve career paths tedious when someone could tell them what makes sense for their situation. The discomfort isn’t “something bad might happen,” it’s “why are we still discussing this when we could have an answer right now?”

Then there’s another important layer to this. ‘Conscientiousness’, how organized and planful you naturally are. This completely changes what you need from external structure. People high in conscientiousness like structure because it matches how they already operate. They naturally organize the world around them because it matches how they feel inside. Structure feels good to them, like putting on a well-tailored suit. People low in conscientiousness need structure as external scaffolding because they struggle to generate it internally. They more often struggle maintain routines without external prompts. Good intentions could evaporate without someone checking in. Structure isn’t merely an aesthetic preference for them, it’s the difference between functioning and floundering.

Here both groups benefit from external frameworks, but confusing these two is where we go badly wrong. High conscientiousness people can bootstrap. They can read a self-help book, extract principles, build their own system. They have the internal machinery for self-directed improvement. Low conscientiousness people? They can really benefit from someone telling them: “We’re going to the gym at 5pm tomorrow. I’ll meet you there. Wear athletic clothes. We’re doing HIIT.” We’ve built a culture that treats the first type as The Way Humans Should Work, and the second type as a personal failing that therapy should fix. “Just be more organized.” “Make yourself a system.” This is asking someone to bootstrap their weak point to solve their weak point. And when someone low in conscientiousness is also dealing with isolation and depression, they’re not just lacking structure, they’re lacking the internal capacity to build it from scratch while everything is falling apart. That’s when they’ll start grabbing it from anyone offering, regardless of what else comes packaged with it.

I’ve seen something similar play out with my own dad. He’s deeply conservative, and scores mostly likely low on both openness and conscientiousness. Not because he’s broken or backwards, but because he genuinely needs more external structure than he’s getting. Outside of work, he’s always struggled to give his life direction or maintain clear routines. Modern liberal culture frames autonomy and self-direction as liberation. The freedom to find your own path, define your own values, freedom to become your authentic and true self. It sounds empowering. It is empowering. But the flip side is that needing external structure becomes a sign you haven’t done ‘the work’ yet. It might even be a sign of immaturity, or possibly even something even worse, a chronic lack of authenticity. Needing to be told what to do or wanting guidance? You’ll be sentenced to 10 years of soul searching where you have to journal about your inner child, and use phrases like ‘holding space’ and ‘leaning into discomfort’. And let’s be real here, that pitch sounds deeply unappealing to many, many people. ‘Clean your room and do 100 pushups’ at least sounds like something you might want to do. ‘Sit with your discomfort and honor your authentic self’ sounds like homework assigned by someone who’s very disappointed in you.

What’s interesting is how this shows up in his personal political ideas. He projects his need for structure outward. Because he feels directionless without clear external guidance, he assumes everyone else must feel that way too. You can’t trust people to figure things out themselves - not because people are bad, but because without structure, everyone would be as lost and all over the place as he feels. His political views are essentially his internal experience universalized. The very common ‘I am the default human’ fallacy. The train of though is pretty simple: ‘I need someone to tell me what to do -> therefore everyone needs someone to tell them what to do -> therefore society must provide strong top-down structure.’ It’s revealing. It’s people saying ‘this is what I need to function’ and building their own political philosophy around it. It’s not actually that deep once you see it.

This isn’t just my dad’s individual quirk. You see this same dynamic playing out en masse with young men right now. And that's where the manosphere gets insidious. They give you structure. Then it hands you a complete explanation for why you never had it in the first place. Feminism killed traditional roles. They dismantled the natural order, the rightful place of men and women, how things are supposed to be. Your directionless floundering isn’t your fault at all, it’s your masculinity crying out for what’s been stolen. The manosphere tells them: you’re not broken, you’ve been deprived of what’s rightfully yours. And the worst part is that they’re not even wrong about the deprivation part.

There’s a reason this particular political worldview is so effective at capturing people with these traits. When you need hierarchical structure to function comfortably, a politics based on clear hierarchies, natural order, and traditional roles feels intuitively right. It resonates with how your brain wants the world to work. And when someone who’s wired this way hits isolation, depression, and developmental chaos all at once, they’re not carefully evaluating political philosophy. It’s trying not to drown, and someone just offered them exactly what their psychology has been screaming for.

This vulnerability in principle can strike anyone at any life stage, but young men are getting hit particularly hard right now. Consider the conventional, stick-to-what-works guy that is uncomfortable with ambiguity. He’s navigating peak developmental ambiguity. Forming identities, choosing careers, figuring out relationships. Sometimes with little to no clear models or guidance. Add personality traits that make ambiguity particularly distressing rather than exciting. Then add the reality that some people struggle to generate structure internally. Layer on isolation, lack of skills, depression. You’re hitting vulnerability from at least six angles (!) simultaneously if you don’t have your support systems. And when enough people lack the structure they need to function you get social problems at scale. That’s the gap the manosphere exploits.

Another part of why this gap exists is that modern culture treats needing structure as a kind of failure, like wanting clear direction is one step away from fascism. But structure isn’t authoritarianism. Structure is just knowing what’s expected of you. Having predictable routines, habits. Understanding your role. Someone checking in on whether you did the thing; accountability. Basic behavioral handholds and clear expectations. This is what a significant percentage of humans have needed to flourish since, well, the dawn of mankind.

And yes, this also includes hierarchy. Hierarchy is everywhere, whether we see it or not. Coaches and athletes. Mentors and mentees. Teachers and students. Your senior colleague who knows more than you - yes, even that super nice guy from finance who remembers your coffee order and brings in his homemade banana bread also exists in a hierarchy with you. The question isn’t whether hierarchy exists (it obviously does), but whether it leads to good or bad outcomes for the people involved depending on how it’s organized. Power differentials can absolutely be abused, but we need to be careful not to conflate all hierarchy with abuse. There is a meaningful difference between different kinds of power. Power doesn’t automatically mean fascism or control or stripping away someone’s agency. An example. A track coach pushing you through intervals you didn’t think you could finish, then celebrating with you when you hit a new PR. Your piano teacher making you repeat that difficult passage fifteen times until you get it right. That’s power being used to enable someone, not power being used over someone to control them and their agency. The hierarchy exists, but it’s functional. It’s there to help and create accountability. But we’ve gotten uncomfortable authority in ways that we’ve made it harder to create legitimate mentorship relationships and the scaffolding that some people need more than others. We’ve thrown out good hierarchy and structure along with the abusive kind.

How did we get here? Part of the answer lies in how the West built a culture that celebrates autonomy and self-direction as the highest virtues. For some people, it genuinely was liberation. The Freedom to define yourself on your own terms. No predetermined roles constrain you. The ability to explore, experiment, become whoever you want to be without someone telling you to clean your room or follow a predetermined path. You can sit with your uncertainty and revel in the possibilities. It’s an incredible vision of human flourishing, especially if you’re high in openness and conscientiousness, can generate structure internally, and thrive in this ambiguity. But not everybody is thriving in this new world.

So we’ve established that needing external structure is real and legitimate. Some people don’t really want to ‘sit comfortably with ambiguity’. Some people struggle generating internal structure on their own. And when you combine those traits with developmental chaos, isolation, and depression, you create a specific kind of hyper-vulnerability. But the question remains: if this need for structure is so fundamental, if it’s existed throughout human history, why is it suddenly a crisis now? Why are so many young men finding themselves without anything to hold onto?

III. We traded church and knitting circles for TikTok and wonder why everyone’s miserable

My grandmother was part of the church council. She was in the women’s club. She was in the knitting circle. She was firmly embedded in social structures. Probably a solid 15+ hours a week of regular, structured social contact with clear roles and shared purpose. That was just normal life for a lot of people back then.

Now, when it comes to church, and churches aren’t magic exactly (also plenty of secular people have zero interest in a religious revival), but we have to give credit where credit is due. They were mechanically excellent at certain things: creating regular social contact, having clear roles, a shared purpose, some intergenerational mixing for good measure, and built-in accountability for people to show up. You didn’t have to be interesting or strategic about making friends and meeting new people. You just showed up and the social structure would do a lot of the heavy lifting. Sports leagues and hobby groups can provide this too, but they need more individual initiative to find and maintain. In church the dentist sat next to the factory worker. Teenagers mixed with retirees. You got exposed to people you’d never choose on your own. That’s probably what ‘social cohesion’ looks like in the real world before it turned into whatever political football it is now. Religious buildings were just the social infrastructure that came with your address, you inherited the community by default.

Plenty of people, more than we should be ever comfortable with, were genuinely harmed by these institutions. Dogmatic thinking, social control, enforced conformity, countless traumas that might never fully heal. But we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We removed structures and scaffolding that people leaned on, then ‘replaced’ them with technology, if you can call that a replacement. We dismantled the oppressive parts as well as the functional parts, then didn’t build anything back to replace what worked. We said ‘you’re free now’ and handed people a smartphone.

The current loneliness epidemic is real and well-documented. So what happens when someone who needs external structure to function, who can’t easily generate it themselves, encounters isolation at a societal scale? They get devastated. Crisis hits the most vulnerable first, but it’s so severe it’s damaging people well beyond just those most vulnerable to it. Plainly put, especially men have been hit catastrophically hard by this, and when I say ‘catastrophically’ this not an understatement (though women aren’t on average faring much better). I really need you to take a moment to actually sit with these numbers for a second. In 1990, 55% of American men reported having at least six close friends. By 2021, that dropped to 27%. We cut male friendship in half in thirty years. 15% percent of men now report having zero close friends - none - up from 3% in 1990. That’s a fivefold increase in complete social isolation in a single generation.

Figure 1. Percentage of Men by Number of Close Friends, 1990 and 2021

Note. Data from “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss,” by D. A. Cox, 2021, Survey Center on American Life (https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/).

And in case you were wondering, no, this isn’t just an America thing. In the UK, 7% of adults report having zero close friends (YouGov, 2021). Across the EU, 13% of adults say they feel lonely most or all of the time, and over 75 million European adults, roughly one in six (~17%), meet with family or friends at most once a month (Baarck et al., 2023). Pre-pandemic data shows 8.6% of European adults experience frequent loneliness and 20.8% suffer from social isolation, with Eastern Europe getting hit hardest (d’Hombres et al., 2021). The exact numbers vary by country and how you measure it, but the pattern of loneliness is unmistakable across the West.

So let’s dissect loneliness for a second. Social isolation is objective: how many social contacts you have, how often you see people. Loneliness is the feeling: the painful gap between the social connections you want and what you actually have (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). So not all being alone is lonely of course. What matters for mental health and well-being is whether connections feel ‘meaningful’, and meet your psychological needs. Which is in itself already a vague word. This is where everyday language just kind of falls apart and we tend to use words like; ‘real’ or ‘deep’ or ‘genuine’ or ‘the good shit’. If you feel unseen and clinically lack these, this is like filling a leaky bucket. Let me be clear, something is better than nothing. Even chatting with the cashier helps your happiness and well-being much more than you’d probably think (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014), but the quality of connection still matters.

Which brings us to young men under 30, a too large portion who are drowning both in social isolation and loneliness. Twenty-eight percent report no close social connections whatsoever (d’Hombres et al., 2021). Let that sink in: more than one in four young men said they literally have nobody they can turn to. Nobody. This is the highest rate of any demographic group. And this is the generation that supposedly had the internet, social media, its Infinite Ways to stay in touch, everyone at your fingertips. Clearly that didn’t work out. And what have we effectively replaced community with? Gacha games. TikTok. Parasocial relationships with streamers. This is obviously a recipe for disaster.

Chronic social isolation triggers the same biological stress responses as other major health threats, carrying mortality risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023). While acute social rejection activates neural pain pathways (Eisenberger et al., 2003), and long-term isolation causes white matter deterioration and myelin loss in brain regions that handle emotion and cognition. Let that sink in, neural tissue you use to think and feel degrades without enough human connection. The thing you use to think and feel literally slowly breaks down when you don’t have enough human connection. Needless to say this degradation compounds every other challenge you're facing.

Even I know from all the happiness research that social connection is so so very important. I know I should be out meeting people more. And yet... I experience this myself sometimes. Often I don’t particularly feel like going, even though I know it would be good for me. And no, that’s not a personal failure. It’s an environmental design problem. Technology has the insidious quality that it provides just enough social simulation next to preventing boredom in way that you don’t feel the acute pain that would normally drive you to actually connect with people. It’s social junk food. It fills you up with nothing.

And people think about this as if it’s all a self-made problem and solution. You just need to get disciplined. But the signals our bodies give us are the most primal and strongest things that steer our behavior. Hunger, pain, loneliness are ancient evolutionary systems that kept us alive. That’s your dashboard, the flashing warnings that tell you what needs attention to survive. Like those health bars in The Sims showing hunger, social, bladder. Smartphones are messing these signals up pretty badly. They’re dysregulating us at a fundamental level and screwing up the dashboard. There’s good science suggesting that constant digital stimulation is interfering with our basic regulatory systems (Twenge et al., 2018; Kushlev & Heintzelman, 2018). It’s a topic so fascinating I can’t fully do it justice without derailing this entire essay, so I'll stick to the bits that matters most here.

Your gut feeling can be pretty terrible at telling the difference between real human connection and pseudo-connection - the superficial parasocial warmth from that comes from watching streamers, scrolling through social feeds. Digital interactions that feel social but aren’t. So your body doesn’t send nearly as much pain signal that would motivate you to actually go find real people.

Though even if you don’t realize it, your brain actually does know the difference. Neuroimaging shows that digital interaction, be it video calls with friends, watching streams, or scrolling feeds, produces dramatically suppressed neural activity compared to face-to-face conversation (Zhao et al., 2023). Your neural circuitry registers: this isn’t the real thing. The real problem is that information doesn’t always make it to your conscious awareness; meaning: you don’t really automatically and accurately notice this. There’s no little voice in your head that naturally says, “This vague unpleasantness is loneliness.”

So the pattern goes something like this: You feel that ache of loneliness starting to build. Twenty years ago, that ache would intensify until you’d call someone, show up at a friend’s house, go somewhere people gathered, anything to make it stop. But now? You pick up your phone. Scroll TikTok for twenty minutes. Maybe watch a streamer who feels like a friend. The ache dulls just enough. You feel vaguely accomplished. Look at you, meeting your social needs so efficiently through Technology™. No awkward small talk required. Cringe avoided.

So you feel bad. Vaguely terrible, actually. But you can’t pinpoint why because the thing causing the pain (loneliness) is being masked by the thing pretending to solve it (parasocial digital connection). Your brain knows it’s not getting what it needs, even if you don’t recognize it. But you might protest, “I am really active on social media! I engage with many people, I post a lot!” Active or passive participation, it makes no difference (Roberts et al., 2024). Both increase loneliness over time. The cure is making you sicker.

This is what we mean when we say technology dysregulates you, it creates suffering while simultaneously obscuring the source of that suffering. That feeling, that Ambient Wrongness without a clear source, makes you incredibly vulnerable. Because someone eager to make money is ready to give that feeling a name, a cause, a clear villain.

And then someone on your screen tells you exactly what’s wrong: women. Feminism. The destruction of traditional masculinity. They took men’s spaces away. They made male friendship suspicious. They destroyed the natural order. They made the green M&M less fuckable, and if you squint in the exact right way, that’s also a part of the Theory of Everything of why your life sucks.

It sounds insane written out like this. But when you’re sitting in that confused pain, desperate for any explanation that makes sense of what you’re feeling, it lands. They’re offering you clarity. They’re saying: you’re not crazy for feeling this way. This is what’s Good, and this is what’s Bad. There is something wrong here and can fix it if you buy my course, “The High Value Male Blueprint: How To Turn Normal Conversation into a Power Struggle and Never Enjoy Talking to Anyone Again.”, for the small price of $499,99.

Moreover, we’ve replaced a lot of places where we naturally learn social knowledge with “find the information yourself.” But that’s not really how humans learn. Some people can figure things out completely independently, but that’s never been the primary mechanism for human skill development. In 200,000 years of history, we evolved to learn by watching, being shown, getting corrected, practicing with support, a highly and involved social process. Telling everyone to ‘just bootstrap it’ ignores how we’re actually built and what works best. You learn by watching someone model the behavior, having them give you direct instruction, trying it with them present, getting direct feedback and correction (tight feedback loops), and gradually practicing with decreasing support, and eventually internalizing it and doing it yourself. That’s how your parents taught you how to talk, to walk, to tie your shoes, it’s how our education systems are build.

You don’t need someone micromanaging you every step, and you also shouldn’t be thrown into the deep end with zero guidance. Good coaching and guidance helps you develop your own problem-solving capacity while providing scaffolding. But that’s not what’s happening. To do all of that completely completely independently requires executive function most people don’t have. That’s the self-regulation stuff that lets you make a plan and actually follow through on it, break big tasks into smaller steps, remember what you’re supposed to be doing without constant reminders, start things without someone telling you to. Plus emotional regulation. Plus material resources.

That entire complex set of capacities? We recklessly dump it into ‘bootstrapability’ - as if it’s one simple character trait you either have or don’t, rather than a cluster of skills (and some healthy coping) that need to be developed like muscles. A lot of people haven’t built that strength yet, or lose access to it under stress and overwhelm. And for the rest of us, completely self-directed self-improvement is genuinely difficult even under good circumstances. Think about the last time you tried changing anything about yourself—exercising more, eating better, whatever. How’d that go?Most people can’t even maintain a simple habit change for a month when they have a stable jobs and good friends. We’re not built for this kind of indefinite self-directed transformation. It is possible, of course, but it requires a certain level of know-how, tenacity and earnest diligence that we treat as baseline expectation rather than noteworthy accomplishment.

And if you’re already in the gutter, these problems compound viciously: you don’t have this know-how for self-direction. You’re overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what you’re supposed to figure out alone. And you’re probably already in that particularly exhausting state of spinning your wheels, trying to escape all the bad in your life while going absolutely nowhere. Your sleep schedule is fucked, your room is a mess, you have no career direction, your diet is garbage, you never exercise, you have no purpose, you feel worthless. You’re overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what you’re supposed to figure out alone. Compare that to someone who just needs to eat slightly healthier or go to the gym more consistently. The scope isn’t even comparable.

This is the exactly opposite of gaining traction, literally: dis (no) traction (grip). Having the enduring sense of having no grip over your life is its own form of chronic stress. Humans don’t thrive like this, they just don’t. We’re not built to do all of that while in isolated, directionless overwhelm and at the same time ‘manifesting our destiny’ and ‘being our best selves’. If it were that easy, we would be seeing people just magically manifesting themselves of out of soul-crushing jobs and mom’s basements everywhere. It’s a tremendously steep curve to climb. There's a clear skill gap here. We're asking people to function like machines when they're built like humans. 'Figure it out yourself' serves as thoughts-and-prayers dressed up as empowerment. The equivalent of pushing someone off a cliff and calling it character building.

IV. When your sweet grandma lost to a grifter with a rented Lambo

My grandmother used to tell me: “Just do your best.” It was well-meaning, emotionally supportive, and basically useless. I was already trying really hard. I would be the guy already going a hundred miles an hour absolutely nowhere. Full of determination I would throw myself at problems hard. Often I was stubbornly pushing in the completely wrong direction, like vigorously rowing a boat that’s still tied to the dock. The problem wasn’t effort. It was direction. I needed someone to tell me to check if there’s a rope to untie first, and then to point me toward the harbor. But she didn’t have a map to give me. So she gave what she had: platitudes and encouragement. Very heartfelt. Warmly delivered. Completely useless.

Trouble is, these are the actual platitudes real people dispense. They sound supportive but give you absolutely nothing practical to actually do. And honestly, what was my grandmother supposed to do? She was a sweet old lady, not a life coach. Poor grandma. Most people don’t have a framework or tactical know-how to give functional guidance, they just have what their generation passed down to them. Well-meaning aunts, moms, dads, friends, all dispensing the emotional equivalent of well-wishing: “I hope things get better!”, “You’ve got this!”, “Just be yourself”, “Everything happens for a reason”, “Maybe try some new hobbies”, “Stop being so hard on yourself.” Or if they’re more progressive: “Be more vulnerable with your emotions for once”, “Examine how patriarchy affects you too”, “Work on loving yourself first”. Because when you’re already overthinking yourself into paralysis, obviously the solution is more solo self-analysis and navel gazing.

What am I now going to do once I am sitting alone in my depression room? ‘Get out more’ - fantastic insight, truly groundbreaking. ‘Have you tried yoga? Maybe some meditation? Just get outside more and think positive thoughts.’ Hmm, I hadn’t considered simply not being depressed. “Maybe you should try volunteering” - also a great recommendation for someone who considers brushing their teeth regularly an achievement. None of this works for people who are actually stuck; it’s functionally useless. Again, the idea that someone can go from hikikomori (from Japanese; a severely withdrawn, isolated, stuck shut-in) to enlightened through solo introspection is frankly asinine.

I’m not expecting everyone to be therapists, that wouldn’t be very realistic, nor is it really needed. But the things we say to struggling people matter. Confidently dispensing useless advice isn’t neutral, it alienates people (’you clearly don’t get it’), so they stop reaching out. The advice itself often isn’t wrong (exercise helps, socializing helps), but it completely misses what they’re actually telling you. You’ve heard ‘I’m struggling’ and you responded with ‘have you tried not struggling?’ They needed you to understand the problem, they’re telling you, and you skipped straight to generic solutions.

Now, you might be Very Smart and say: Hold on - didn’t you just spend the entire previous chapter explaining that humans learn from watching each other and being around other people? I know a person like that. You’re saying my advice to them is worse than useless? Great. Say nothing, do nothing? Let people suffer in silence because I might say the wrong thing? What exactly am I supposed to do here?

I’m not saying you have to become a mime. But you’ll have to take some time listen to what they’re actually saying, not what you think the problem is. Come from a real place of curiosity. “What’s making this difficult for you right now?” goes infinitely further than “just get out more.” Summarize what you hear to check you understand: “So it sounds like you’re dealing with X and Y, and that makes Z really hard?” Then ask more. Not because you’re fishing for the magic answer, but because understanding the actual problem is infinitely valuable than dispensing generic fixes. You need genuine curiosity about what’s actually happening in their life, and the patience to sit with discomfort instead of rushing to fix it. You’re structuring their thoughts as much as your own.

And yes, some of what they say might genuinely bother you, the casual misogyny, conspiracy thinking, whatever it might be. The important part to realize is: if they’re telling you, they probably already believe it. Lecturing them or expressing shock won’t undo that belief, it’ll just teach them to stop talking to you (’you clearly don’t get it’). For that reason you don’t need to push back on things you disagree with right away. If you want to point something out, do it later, or even in a different conversation from a place of curiosity: “I have been thinking about what you said. Help me understand what’s leading you to that conclusion - I’m genuinely curious.” This way you don’t necessarily agree, but it shows you take them seriously. And lastly, but very critically: know when a conversation isn’t actually going anywhere. If it’s turned into a fight or when you’re genuinely too bothered to stay curious: disengage. “I want to understand what you’re saying, but I need some time to cool down and actually think about this, process it. Because this is important to me” preserves the relationship without pretending you’re fine when you’re not. It keeps the door open without forcing yourself through a conversation that’s going nowhere.

All of that matters when someone reaches out. But that’s not where most social learning actually happens. The real teaching happens in all those ordinary moments before. That’s especially true when you’re still learning how to be a person, whether you’re a kid absorbing everything your parents do, or a young adult who needs a role model/mentor but doesn’t have one. What they see matters infinitely more than what you say. A kid doesn’t learn emotional regulation from a parent yelling ‘CALM DOWN!’’ They learn it by watching what you actually do when you’re stressed, overwhelmed, facing a challenge, when shit hits the fan. How do you handle frustration? What do you do when you fail at something? How do you navigate conflict? That’s the curriculum. That’s what gets transmitted.

For that reason, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, has never worked in the entire history of parenting because that’s simply not how human learning works. You can lecture your teenager about healthy stress management while stress-eating an entire sleeve of Oreos during tax season, but guess which lesson they’re actually absorbing? Right. Kids don’t learn to manage emotions from your TED talk about mindfulness. They learn by watching you take a breath and count to ten instead of screaming at the driver who cut you off. Or by watching you call a friend when you’re upset instead of bottling it up. Or by watching you admit you fucked up instead of deflecting blame. But that only works if there’s someone around to watch. If you’ve got a parent or mentor who’s modeling functional behavior. And increasingly, that’s not the reality. The mentors aren’t there. The role models aren’t around. And if you’re already isolated, already stuck...

So, after all of that, armed with useless advice, you put yourself back in that room. You tried asking for help. You feel more alone than before, more convinced nobody understands. You’re doomscrolling because what else is there to do. And then suddenly there’s this guy on your screen who says: “Do these three things. Do 10 pushups. Take a cold shower. Message three people today. Report back tomorrow.”

From a coaching perspective? That’s excellent. It’s specific, concrete, actionable, measurable. Clear success metrics. It creates a behavioral trigger-action-reward loop. You can start immediately. You can’t do it wrong in the sense that you’re being judged in any way that would cause acute performance anxiety.

You’ve got to hand it to them. As much as they’re grifters, they’ve figured out how to deliver structure and clear behavioral protocols at scale in a way that actually reaches people. And scale really is the magic word here. Professional psychology knows how to help people get unstuck. CBT, ACT, DBT - these all work for people who make it through the door. But that knowledge is expensive, locked behind professional gates, inaccessible to most people who actually need it. The cultural templates, the advice moms and aunts and friends actually dispense, is mostly therapeutically useless platitudes. The manosphere has better cultural penetration than we do. I am a conscientious objector to social media, and even I know way more about the manosphere than I want to. That should bother us.

You don’t need to understand attachment theory or the neuroscience of habit formation to function as a human being. You need the right emotional software installed. You need to know what to do when you’re angry. Have strategies for when you’re overwhelmed. Manage discomfort. Delay gratification when needed. Maintain relationships. Recover from setbacks. These are learned skills, skills you can practice like anything else.

We’ve created a paradox we tell struggling people to acquire these skills through self-help books, journaling, deep self-reflection, “finding what works for you.” This all requires complex higher order skills: metacognitive capacity (being able to think about how you’re thinking and reflecting on that), emotional intelligence and self-regulation (recognizing what you’re feeling, understanding why, managing it appropriately instead of being hijacked by every emotion), and self-efficacy (genuine belief that you’re capable of change) If you lack those things, which struggling people generally do, you’re kinda fucked. Learning emotional regulation while your ship is going down in a hurricane is borderline impossible. You’re supposed to bootstrap the capacity required for bootstrapping. And good luck with that. It's the snake eating its own tail, except the snake gave up halfway and is now just lying there, listlessly.

The manosphere accidentally solved this by doing what actually works for skill transfer: direct modeling (watch how I do it), clear instructions (do exactly this), external accountability (check in daily), community enforcement (others doing the same). This is basic socialization. It’s structure. Your ancestors learned to track deer this way. You followed someone who knew how (modeling). They told you to step where the moss grows, avoid dry leaves (clear instructions). They picked you up before dawn and asked what you saw on yesterday's hunt (accountability). The other hunters expected you to know this by next season (community enforcement). Same with apprentice blacksmiths for thousands of years. Stand next to the master. Watch him heat metal to that exact orange glow. Strike it exactly now. Your work is checked daily. The other smiths in town know if you’re learning properly or wasting everyone’s time.

The manosphere borrowed from these same principles and spread them at scale online. They just wrapped it in pseudoscience about semen retention and a worldview where women are simultaneously the problem and the prize. And that somehow all makes good enough sense when you’re desperate.

V. A rational case for drinking poison

You wake up at 2pm. Days pass without meaningfully speaking to another human. Eight, ten, twelve hours dissolve in your room. Sleep, rinse, repeat. One day bleeding into the next until you can’t tell them apart anymore. You’re playing games not because they’re fun but because they fill time, they avoid thinking too much. The shame sits in your chest like a weight. Every time you finish jerking off you feel that crushing guilt. You promised yourself you’d do something different today. Get up earlier. Go outside. Do something productive. Anything. You’d settle for anything. But here you are. Again. You did it again. Your room smells bad. You’ve mostly stopped noticing. You see no path forward. This is just what your life is now.

You’re scrolling at 2am, the algorithm feeds you a video. Some guy talking about discipline, about stopping being a loser, about taking control of your life, about becoming powerful. You watch. Then another. Then another.

He says to you, do pushups. Take cold showers. No porn. Report your streak daily. The protocol says to do ten pushup right now. Just ten. You do them in your room. You report it in the Discord group that was linked. Someone congratulates you. Day one complete. The next day you manage fifteen. You post about it. More encouragement. Day three, you have to message someone. You message a friend you haven’t talked to in almost a year. “hey man, how’s it going.” He responds. You tell the Discord community. They celebrate it. You’re on day five. Then day twelve. The number goes up. Some people notice. Small wins get acknowledged. Every streak milestone gets celebrated.

Eventually you start going to the gym because the protocol says to, and someone on Discord will ask if you did, or why you didn’t. After 6 weeks you talk to some guy there about sets and protein shakes. He’s not really a friend. You don’t know his last name or where he lives, you’ve never hung out outside the gym. But he’s the realest human connection you have.

The worldview from these videos is like work clothes that put you in the right headspace - you know what’s expected, you know how to move through the world, you’re not constantly second-guessing every interaction anymore.

Your mom is relieved you’re leaving your room. She cried with relief when she thought you couldn’t hear her. She'd stopped believing you'd ever come back out.

Your older sister notices you’re showering again. Your dad sees you doing something instead of nothing. They’re glad.

They’re also worried now. You can tell. The things you say at dinner - they don’t like it. The way you talk about people now. You’re fighting more than you used to, arguments like that never happened before. You feel it too, if you’re honest. But you can’t go back. Won’t go back. Whatever it costs.

Your sister confronts you one night. She’s heard the stuff you’ve been saying, seen what you’re watching. “You know the shit you’ve been saying lately is fucked up, right? Like, you hear yourself?” she says.

You know she’s probably right on some level. It doesn’t matter. You also know you’re not going back to where you were. Back to that room. That emptiness. Days blurring endlessly together, nothing mattering, that weight in your chest that never lifted. That gaping black abyss of depression and nothingness staring at you.

You’ll keep doing what you’re doing. You have to. Because going back into that purgatory, you’d rather...

You don’t finish that thought. You’re not going back.

VI. The End: The Unbearable Lightness of Our Shitty Solutions

So here we are. We already know what works and what doesn’t. Accessible and easy to start behavioral interventions, structured coaching with scaffolding, community support, clear protocols/habits for the directionless, accountability systems. If you’re experiencing déjà vu, it’s because I’ve listed these approximately seventeen times already. We’ve known all of this for decades. We have the research. We have CBT workbooks gathering dust on shelves and evidence-based interventions gated behind $200/hour therapy sessions and expensive mental health systems.

We built a professional delivery system that works perfectly for a small subset of people who can access it, and is completely invisible to everyone else. One-to-one therapy for the worried well, $300 sessions for people with good insurance or enough money and the luxury of time. Meanwhile, the manosphere is the McDonald’s to professional psychology’s Michelin star restaurant. Sure, the long term health is questionable and might give you coronary artery disease, but at least it’s there just a swipe away when you’re desperate, and actually fills the emptiness in way that other things don’t.

The people who need help? They’re watching a 47-second TikTok where some guy with a rented Bugatti tells them their life sucks because of seed oils and that not beating their meat will give them superhuman rizz. That should be professionally humiliating.

The market solved this problem badly because that’s what markets often do. Algorithms optimize for engagement on social media, which means getting people riled up and exploiting those strong emotions, which means: “here’s why you’re miserable (feminism/society/Jews) + here’s the enemy (them) + here’s the simple fix (stop jerking off) + here’s your tribe (other lost guys).”

There’s no money in you just playing DnD with your friends every Thursday. Can’t sell Discord Nitro for real life face-to-face conversations. Actual community has terrible margins. Every time you do things offline with your friends, Mark Zuckerberg weeps.

But lonely people sitting at home, scrolling for hours because they have nowhere else to go, marinating in that Ambient Wrongness? That’s a dream demographic, champagne was uncorked in the C-suite, people were embracing and laughing like they’d just cured cancer. Meta and Alphabet shareholders are doing very well, thank you for asking. Social isolation isn’t a crisis to them, it’s quarterly growth. Some executive probably toasted to ‘sustainable loneliness’ at a shareholder meeting, then did a line off the conference table. And immediately deployed teams of engineers to systematically hyper-optimize their algorithms to keep these people scrolling as long as humanly possible.

This is the ecosystem where the manosphere thrives. It stumbled into behavioral interventions and is delivering them at scale through social media. It works and it makes money, that’s most important to the market. And us? What’s professional psychology doing while millions of vulnerable young men get radicalized through highly effective behavioral psychology wrapped in misogyny? More journal articles about toxic masculinity? Another haughty and hand-wringing The Guardian think piece about why the young males keep choosing Andrew Tate over reading Judith Butler? I am genuinely not trying to be flippant here, or even strawman the complexity of problem, but we’re bringing peer-reviewed studies to a TikTok street fight. All the while we’re in the middle of a real and urgent crisis.

Back in the Middle Ages, knights sought glory and honor. Military boot camps sell a promise of ‘forging you into something better’. The manosphere runs a similar playbook. This idea appeals to men wrestling with identity questions common to young adulthood, questions like ‘what is my place in the world?’. Questions that often crystallize as wanting to strive or fight for something meaningful. That feeling can become many things, it can drive someone to join Doctors Without Borders or a far-right militia. The feeling itself is ancient and probably adaptive. It’s related to bedrock positive psychology stuff: meaning-making, belonging, being part of something larger than yourself, having a sense of agency, growing and becoming something. That’s a completely, entirely normal feeling that gets hijacked by bad actors.

When your mom tells you to clean your room, it’s nagging. When Jordan Peterson tells you to clean your room, it’s reclaiming order from chaos, it’s the hero’s journey, it’s becoming the man you’re meant to be. It’s bullshit, but it’s meaningful bullshit. It makes you feel like the main character in an epic struggle instead of just another depressed guy trying to function. We need to feel like we’re building toward something, fighting for something, becoming something.

The emotional software we need isn’t just ‘do the thing.’ It’s ‘the thing matters.’ It’s ‘I matter.’ It’s ‘this is a part of something bigger.’ It’s ‘my tribe matters and they have my back.’ We need stories about why the struggle matters and who you’re struggling alongside. We need fraternity. What that looks like in practice, how we actually build it, that's another essay. But we can’t build anything until we’re honest about what we’re competing against. And right now we’ve got nothing except ‘do this because it’s good for your mental health’ and ‘maybe try Meetup.com’. Which is true but feels like being offered a wellness app when what you’re actually starving for is a reason to exist.

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