Understanding Young Male Syndrome
Why young men do stupid things and how best to help them.
I have a document of Essential Fire-Carrier books and articles that I’ve been adding to and pruning for years. Last Sunday, I came across one that I immediately added. It is a lecture transcript that was put out as an article and it comes from the fantastic Rob K. Henderson speaking at the University of Richmond for their Masculinity in a Changing World speaker series. Few modern thinkers have added as much to the masculinity conversation.
Henderson’s perspective is particularly interesting considering his background. He was abandoned by his father, put into foster care after his drug addict mother lost custody, adopted, and then abandoned by his adoptive father. He details this story and much more in this fantastic talk, which he offers in transcript and video form.
Here is a fantastic and thought-provoking excerpt:
…Moreover, a 2015 study, also led by Anderson, found that across 123 countries, people’s well-being consistently depended on the degree to which people felt respected by others. Attainment of status or its loss was the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings…
…Today, 1 in 6 American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether. This amounts to roughly 10 million men, a number that has more than doubled since the 1970s.
There used to be economic incentives to work, but in rich societies this is becoming less necessary for survival. There used to be social incentives to work, but people are generally less apt to praise young men for working or condemn them for being jobless. There used to be romantic incentives to work, but a man with a job is less appealing than he would have been in previous decades. Very few young men are inclined to expend the effort necessary to strive and improve and advance in education and employment without at least one of these external incentives.
Moreover, today, men have entertaining digital devices, video games, internet pornography, and a variety of other avenues to facilitate simulated status attainment and sexual gratification.
As an analogy, many young men will not travel to the grocery store and then cook a nutritious meal when they can satisfy their hunger by ordering fast food on Uber Eats. Ultimately, artificial junk food is less satisfying than real ingredients, but convenience combined with the absence of external incentives to prepare a real meal means that a growing number of individuals are opting for convenience and immediate gratification.
Young males are inevitably going to try to obtain status, whether in the real world or in a digital one. But anthropological and psychological evidence indicates that people whom young males wish to impress—such as peers, high-status individuals, respected authority figures, and young women—have a lot of influence as to which activities confer status. (bolding is mine)
If we don’t want to see young men fall prey to the worst expressions of the young male syndrome, we must be intentional in guiding the avenues through which they seek status.
If parents, caregivers, educators, peers, cultural trailblazers, potential romantic partners and other influential members of society overlook the important roles they play, then males will lack the guidance they need to opt into productive paths to prestige and will either take the path of dominance or drop out of society by playing virtual status games that have no real world benefit or contribution…
…if boys aren’t exposed to positive examples of masculinity in their personal lives, they will look for it elsewhere. (bolding is mine)
In contemporary western societies, parents, teachers, coaches, local community leaders, and other high-status figures used to raise boys to become men, imparting lessons about personal responsibility, hard work, relationships, and obligations. Today, in the absence of such guidance, many young boys are being raised by viral TikTok influencers peddling diluted and ungrounded conceptions of masculinity.
If you find this topic interesting, I’ve written a bit on this and related topics recently:
And here is another great, related piece from Richard Reeves, the author of Of Boys and Men. An excerpt:
The first headmaster of Stowe school, JF Roxburgh, declared his goal to be turning out young men who would be "acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck." A mixture of courtesy and courage used to be essential to the idea of a British citizen's character. Brits were the sort of people who knew both how to survive a Blitz and queue politely. Similarly, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement, aimed to induce in his young charges "some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make 'character.'" He described his movement as nothing less than a "character factory."
Thank you for reading and sharing with anyone you think will find this interesting!
Carry the fire!
Shane