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I'm flirting with a rather incendiary view.
Over the COVID era and the recent excessive developments in the LGBT movement, I've been looking into radical feminist worldview where my gripes with a lot of society overlaps with some of theirs. At least, a section of theirs. I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport. I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right. And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man. Now I don't buy into the rest of the grift attempting to promote what they regard as feminine features in men, and indeed such attempts at social engineering can be pretty disastrous. I watched this video last night about what it means to be a man in a sedentary, urbanite lifestyle that doesn't really key into our more primal instincts like before, say, the Second World War. A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality. The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is. Going forward, I think it'll only get worse as it festers with no easy solutions. Worse still, we're pursuing the wrong solutions by regurgitating the myth that all behaviour is socialised and not evolutionary, that we could get men to "unlearn" masculinity and "learn" femininity. In the end, such attempts will not only push the rejects over the edge, it might also risk creating more rejects. In many ways, I see Tyler Durdan as the "proto-red pill" media in how the persona gives the rejects what they desire and giving them an opportunity to pursue hightened competition in dominating in actual fights. The more woke the culture gets, and the more progressives freak out over the "red pill media" gaining traction and blame it as the source of "male entitlement" rather than a symptom of something a bit more complicated, the more these rejects' perception of society will overlap with the red pill crowd's. I realise the second part of my comment seems completely contradictory to what I'd said in the beginning, but what I'm trying to say is that radfems are correct in their analysis that the "degenerate phase" is the default phase of men and it requires significant external pressures to correct. Part of the problem could be that young boys being coddled might potentially give way to the mentality that life is a template where a series of events fall into place like they're a given like so: school -> girlfriend -> college -> job -> success. But if the habit of actively working towards your every goal isn't imbibed into you since a very young age, once reality confronts you, you become a doomer and just give up like you could do nothing about it. Like you were just born in the wrong household/class/society/whatever. I don't think the mainstream media is ever going to address this head on without being bogged down by what goes within the overton window of the culture war.
I know its a rather chaotic hodge podge stream of thoughts, but I hope I made sense in getting my point across.
I can feel the emotional appeal of this kind of "men in trouble" narrative, but I don't think it matches empirical reality all that well. Consider one of Fight Club's most famous quotes:
Sounds like a real crisis of masculinity. But where's the data? Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US. Reported mental health issues have increased, but this increase is driven more or less exclusively by worsening mental health in women; male mental health as measured by referrals has been relatively stable over the last twenty years - link to some UK data here.
I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.
I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn, whereas I've known people blow up their lives with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, gambling, and reckless driving, none of which are exactly new (though the opiates are getting worse). And when I look at subreddits like /r/loveafterporn, I'm much more inclined to see the person with the mental illness as being the controlling/BPD or psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship, rather than the poor guy who's jacking off to legal teens behind his wife's back.
More broadly, I think some of the male Zoomer doomerism (Zoomerism?) is just a matter of people looking for a romantic narrative around their gender generation. Which is fine, Palahniuk was doing it for GenX in Fight Club. But absent supporting data, I'm inclined to view it as a narrative rather than fact.
OBJECTION! Break it down by age group:
https://sprc.org/scope/age
Suicide among the ages of 15-34 demographic has increased, if there's an overall decrease it is because rates among 50+ demos (i.e. boomers) is decreasing.
But young people killing themselves is, ceteris paribus, MUCH more concerning than older people offing themselves. It should be extremely alarming if there is any significant increase in suicide rates among teens and young adults. And there is. This cannot be shrugged off.
The CDC confirms that the AGE ADJUSTED suicide rate has increased in the past 20 years!
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db309.htm
INCREASED 30 fucking percent.
THERE'S the data.
/images/16632506901989577.webp
Eyeballing it, it looks like it went from 14/100k to 18/100k. 30%, yes, but doesn't seem that big overall.
Note that those are per-year, not per-lifetime risk of suicide. The 2016 numbers per-lifetime sum to something like 1%.
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Add the slow-acting methods (excessive drugs/alcohol) and 'accidentally on purpose' ODs and it's getting pretty big.
Shit dude i didn't know i committed suicide back in my 20s. Also why don't we include people who dont wear seatbelts as suicides, and anyone who goes into a high risk job.
"Excessive" is of course somewhat open to interpretation -- I'm talking about the levels which will very likely kill you by fifty if you don't cut it out. I'm guessing you didn't OD in your 20s, and also that you don't have much experience with people who did. If you had, you'd know that it's very rarely quite an accident. (Less rare these days because there really is a non-negligible chance of getting a hot shot with more fentanyl in than you'd like, but still pretty unusual)
Don't mistake me for one of the reddit no-fun millenials -- I did tonnes of drugs in my 20s and beyond too; enough to know that it's all fun & games up to a certain point. More people than ever are crossing this line nowadays.
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This but unironically. I've theorized that suicide as a specific act is less important to consider than a spectrum of self-preservation----self-destruction. There are a lot of guys today who kill themselves by gun or OD who in my dad's generation drove dangerous cars and motorcycles too fast too often until a crash got them, who in my grandad's generation joined the Marines and didn't duck fast enough, who in my great-great-great-grandad's generation joined a merchant ship crew and went off to tropical parts unknown and were never heard from again. It's just that today, you have to really try to get yourself killed, where in the past you could do fairly normal things (drive cars, join the merchant marine or the Marines) and probably get yourself killed if you didn't try to keep yourself alive hard enough. Young men deciding they have nothing to live for is a universal phenomenon, how it is expressed is different.
I get what you are saying, that risk taking behavior is common in young men and the risks available these days might have less reward associated, but its still unreasonable to compare a risky yet possibly rewarding strategy (striking out on your own to make a new life out on the frontier) to literally just killing yourself. Likewise, some people use drugs to escape their reality, this is not the same as permanently giving up on reality by ending your interactions with it.
I think theres a few different "nothing"s being bundled here, the threshold for "i have nothing going for me in this town, i'm out of here even if it means joining the circuis" is pretty far away from "i have nothing to gain in this world that i can possibly reach and i would rather die than make any further attempt"
The two attitudes look identical from the outside if the way you deal with them is the same. "I'm going to join the Navy to get out of this nowhere town and see the world" and "I'm going to join the Navy and hopefully I'll die and end this stupid life" both look like "He joined the Navy and died in a storm or a fever somewhere East of Suez" to everyone but the man himself.
If the bottom 1% of men who just can't fit into normal life (and today become your school shooters, drug addicts, incels etc) existed before the 20th centure, their existence would have been hidden by just dying in ways that were written off as a normal cost of doing business back then. This article claims that during certain periods a fifth of British soldiers stationed to Jamaica died every year, while a third stationed in West Africa kicked the bucket. Merchant numbers weren't a whole lot better.
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This is a stat that should not be increasing in a healthy nation.
4 extra lives per 100k, just gone. With all the various second-order effects, especially on friends and family, that must imply.
And consider that this stat is just successful suicide attempts, so doesn't capture all the people who might be contemplating or having made unsuccessful attempts.
I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.
While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for mental resilience.
Interesting point if only because it brings us into a debate over whether it requires greater mental fortitude to actually commit a suicide or to continue living with whatever pain lead to the ideation in the first place. Is suicide, in most cases, actually a case of mental 'weakness?'
Pointing out, perhaps, that women have higher rates of (many) mental illnesses and yet a lower suicide rate than men, which is usually ascribed to men choosing much more effective means of killing themselves and, likewise, actually doing it with full intent of succeeding.
While an interesting debate, I'm instead going to rephrase:
While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for not being stressed to the point of suicide by the demands of modern society. Whether that's through us becoming stronger or us becoming weaker is, I think, immaterial to the widely-agreed on fact that it's better if your population isn't suiciding in droves.
Ah! That is an excellent clarification.
I can agree that the goal here should be to examine exactly what about our prosperous modern economy is still so intolerable or otherwise lacking that we have people choosing to end it.
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No. We're not selecting for that. Because modern society is changing too fast for selection pressures to react.
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Don't tempt the devil.
Given the preponderance of Utilitarians, Aeithiests, and Accelerationists on theMotte there is a very real possibility that someone will take you up on that.
Would love to hear it, and would listen in good faith.
Gonna rip any logic gaps apart though.
And if their argument is good then it would presumably be their position that we should increase the suicide rate, so interested to see if they bite that bullet or try to dodge.
Sure, let me try.
Assumption A: A life can be so bad as to be of negative value to the person themselves.
Assumption B: Because of self-preservation artifacts, not all whose lives are negative in value are determined to end them.
Assumption C: Your desire to kill yourself generally increases as your life value drops further into the negatives.
Conclusion: More suicides means more people were pushed from the margins of worse-than-worthless lives into making a correct decision. Of course it would be better if they were raised from those margins, but apparently we can't all have nice things.
This would be a stronger conclusion if we actually examined the problem to figure out what was pushing them into the decision. I don't think the majority of suicides are people who are actually suffering from material deprivation. The problem is fundamentally an emotional/mental one where people feel that life is not worth living. And in theory helping people find reasons to live and instilling purpose should be doable!
Suicide rate doesn't seem to correlate with GDP-per-capita, just ask Japan and South Korea.
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Thanks for going through the data, I thought something smelled fishy about doglatines post.
Boomers and gen x males suicide rates are dropping and that’s also interesting. I guess when your economic status has never been higher, and you’re thriving and flush with cash looking forward to retirement, life feels pretty good, even if you left society a burning wreck for the youngins
Man, I'm resisting the urge to spew data all over the place in response to that comment because in my research I've concluded that the masculinity crisis, focusing on young men, is WAY WORSE than you'd think if not paying close attention.
I'm giving Doglatine benefit of the doubt that he's arguing in good faith, he probably is!
But, I mean, look at this:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/
and
I have EXTREME concerns about what happens to a nation when the young male population isn't able to 'buy in' to the long-term success of the population, because said nation gives them nothing to live for and doesn't reward their efforts towards improvement. Why should such a man continue to participate and play 'by the rules' and produce wealth and value?
Suicide is just one indicator of this. There are others.
Another likely signal is the popularity of cryptocurrency speculation and reddit's /r/wallstreetbets which is largely dominated by young men literally gambling their life's savings trying to vault out of their shitty current standard of living.
Well, TIL. This is both startling and rather depressing, as 1) I'm somewhat certain that this is the first I've heard of this, and 2) I'm definately in the unpartnered category with little chance of that changing any time soon.
Atleast they try and give a reason as to why this all may be later in the article;
None of which speak well of possible solutions, though. Christ.
It is still possible to find success on the individual level, the stats shouldn't hamper you from putting efforts into improving your own life!
But its clear that there's something failing in the current system that is showing a strain in the young male population, and I don't like where this is going to take us.
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You could also look at the labour participation rate for young men, which is dropping at historically unprecedented rates.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/mens-declining-labor-force-participation.htm
This links data was from before the pandemic, which likely worsened things even further.
Ooh, how about college enrollment and completion?
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/10/08/the-male-college-crisis-is-not-just-in-enrollment-but-completion/
Although this might not be all that negative, on net.
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