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Young men are primarily motivated by sex and superiority over peers. In the new social media age (and I mean the new new one), attractiveness spells the difference between obtaining unlimited sex + positive female attention and being relentlessly bullied by anonymous strangers online. It is believed to be extremely important because it is extremely important. Social media is now about posting videos of your face online and yapping, so the stakes of facial attractiveness are enormous. If you ask a young man, “do you want lots of intercourse with the most attractive women in your vicinity, or do you want the more expensive PC / car / apartment / vacation”, they are going to choose the former option. That’s just the reality of young male biology. So they are making a rational choice based on the prevailing social conditions. This is exacerbated by: male fitness culture causing many males to judge other males with a homoerotic standard; rap music, which glorifies nothing other than sex and influence; changes in social media that reduce “peer checking” of behavior; shows like Euphoria or whatever else which glorify bad decisions.
That’s not really a thing at their age. They will suffer longterm consequences if they don’t focus on their career, but that will only impact them later down the road. You don’t actually need any skills to acquire the kind of social success than young men are chiefly interested in, which is sex and esteem from other men.
You would have to join up with an insular social ecosystem: a very serious Mormon church, a mosque where the girls wear hijabs and niqabs, or convert to Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Ask: does the ecosystem control sexual behavior through shame and guilt, and does it allocate esteem for prosociality?
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