The Monks in the Casino
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
mixed
Category
culture
Key topics
social isolation
masculinity
technology impact
The article 'The Monks in the Casino' discusses the trend of young men becoming increasingly isolated and substituting social interaction with online activities, sparking a debate on the causes and implications of this phenomenon.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
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- 01Story posted
11/13/2025, 4:20:47 PM
5d ago
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11/13/2025, 4:21:24 PM
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107 comments in Day 1
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11/17/2025, 7:36:34 PM
1d ago
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Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
When men are not heard they simply seek other audiences and other avenues. It is the incentive structures that will tell them where to go.
The fact that they don't get listened to causes them to double down into extremism.
Our current levels of extremism have put us in danger of sliding into becoming a totalitarian state. That risk will not lessen unless both sides recognize that extremism itself is the danger. Underneath the anger, angry people are often hurt people. Labeling them enemies and hurting them further certainly feels good in the moment. But in the long run it is counterproductive.
It turned out not to be.
That didn't happen. I just made that up. Was that also your first instinct upon reading it - that I made it up?
But I see men saying things like this happened to them, and that is my first instinct: it didn't happen and they made it up.
Am I supposed to stop doing that? Am I supposed to believe them?
Listening to real problems is good - are you saying I should listen to obvious trolls as well? That is what "bad faith" means - it's a euphemism for "obviously trolling".
Perhaps you even think I'm lying when I say I see people saying things like this online - but if that's the case, that means you're part of the same problem you cite, since you're not listening what I'm saying. Can you propose a solution to all this?
> What exactly are people not hearing? Say the quiet part out loud already.
There are no hidden messages here. If you think there are I suggest you seek a licensed psychiatrist.
> It is the fact they can no longer openly shit on women and minorities and homosexuals and trans people that they have issues with.
> The fact that being white and having a white name are not enough to be granted a favorable job.
If I say that somesuch social movement is causing problems, then people in that social movement will feel attacked. Even bringing up somesuch social movement is a great way to increase vitriol on social media. It just makes people angry because people already feel justified in their anger at the demons on the 'other side'
It feels there there are too many things that are 'Agree with me 100% or we have to fight'.
I feel like the true luxury good of the future is human attention, and specifically careful emotional validation.
Human beings need additional context when interacting with one another that isn't just some text on a screen. You can't learn everything about a person that way and while you can somewhat connect with them, there's levels there you're missing out on not being face to face.
There's also the matter that some people don't come across well online either, can't get their full personhood through the screen...
I think we all owe each other some grace for our humanity and how we deal with our problems. When we can at least see them even when we don't know how resolve them.
For this to be a threat, you have to assume that the other side is not willing to fight. :-)
Reactions to this vary. The ones described in the article have sought out addictions to escape this reality. Many others, including my son, have essentially said, "Well if this side rejects me, I'll go to the other side." The result is a rapid rise in conservatism, as documented in polls. See https://www.realclearpolling.com/stories/analysis/young-amer... for an example.
It is very easy, particularly for those who are very progressive, to blame the men themselves for these reactions. But it is a natural overreaction to the systematic rejection to a lifetime of being told that they are the problem. "You think I'm the problem? I'll show YOU what it looks like if I BECOME the problem!"
I firmly believe that these problematic behaviors and politics would be greatly softened if our society showed more empathy to these struggling men. But in our polarized society, their choices and beliefs label them as the enemy. Which causes some to double down into toxic extremism like siding with incels, or MGTOW.
Historically when a pendulum swings one way, eventually it swings back. But I'm having trouble how we're going to swing back, when both sides have swung to and then doubled down on polarization.
This is not me. This is not anyone I know. This is not anyone I've ever known. However, this is what I see people say online about other people who they've never met.
Did you grow up consistently being told that every single thing is your fault because you have male privilege, or are you repeating something you read online or in the media?
As a visible and ethnic minority I did not encounter such rhetoric growing up in predominantly immigrant socially conservative suburban environments.
My son's lived experience doesn't invalidate yours. Just as it also doesn't invalidate my half-brother Tom's, who lives on a native reservation, nor my nieces, who are members of that tribe.
You are wrong if you believe that I would not be willing to hear your experience. Remember, I'm the one saying, "Polarization is bad, we have to be willing to hear each other!" Sure, I'm sharing my son's experience. Which may be a hard experience for you to accept. But that really doesn't mean that I'm unwilling to hear your experience. Just as I have heard the experience of other family members with vastly different life stories.
There is a certain group of women who cannot accept that women can be at fault, for example that a woman can be an abuser, regardless of the facts.
> As a visible and ethnic minority I did not encounter such rhetoric growing up in predominantly immigrant socially conservative suburban environments.
Not even social liberal ethnic members of minorities seem to be as inclined to do it was affluent white women.
I think some people who are actually privileged play up being women (or being gay, or ethnic minority, or whatever) in order to play at belonging to an oppressed group. Its a bit like people claiming to be working class because they were as children, even if they are now living in a mansion.
I am visible ethnic minority but did not grow up in a predominately immigrant or socially conservative area in the UK. I have lived elsewhere though.
I'd love to see actual concrete examples of "they have grown up in a world where they've consistently been told that everything is their fault." Not imaginary slights conjured up by people with a persecution complex. Actual social institutions actually telling men that everything is their fault. If they are growing up "in this world" then there must be plenty of examples of this somewhere.
Any concrete example can be dismissed as imaginary slights conjured up by people with a persecution complex. You just indicated your willingness to do so. Doing so creates a version of a No True Scotsman fallacy. You demand examples, but any example you are provided with, you will dismiss.
In this discussion you've had the opportunity to hear several concrete examples. For example my description of my son's experience, and JulianChastain's in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918197. If you're opening to listening, there are plenty of young men out there who are willing to share their stories. Granted, the men doing so are generally hurt. And hurt people overgeneralize. So you need to listen, with empathy, for the hurt. And not dismiss because of the overgeneralization.
What's more likely? The entire world is actually persecuting young men, or: people are having a handful of bad personal experiences, extrapolating them to the whole world, going online to find validation of this world view, and then finally finding the exact SubReddit dedicated to that world view endlessly pumping out examples of it?
There is plenty of evidence that young men have a hard time. In many countries (such as the UK) men are lonelier, and young men have a very high suicide rate. There is nothing like the same pressure to do something about this.
In some professions, especially at entry grades (there are more women than men in medical school in the UK), and in some geographic areas young women earn more than young men. When men earn more than women or are the majority in a profession this is regarded as a problem. When women do it its fine.
There are lots of signs its hard being a man, from incels to trans maxing. They are not typical, but they are not just outliers either, but an indication of problems men in general face.
Its pretty obvious that men are regarded as morally worse than women, and that men are expected to solve problems for themselves as individuals, whereas women are seen as deserving of support from society for there problems.
There are plenty of other examples. Criminal justice is full of it. The US is the only country that is known (I am sure there are a few others, but not the sort of places you can get accurate stats from) where there is a higher rate of rapes of men than women. Which do you here more about? Women in the UK average shorter sentences for the same offence, but there are nonetheless people campaigning for women to get still lighter sentences. Abuse is classified as violence against women and girls by the Crown Prosecution Service, with a little footnote in their handbook noting it can happen to men too (40% of known victims of violent abuse are men, and I would bet a higher proportion for emotional abuse)..
Its not difficult to treat people as individuals in many cases. My older daughter is an electronic engineer. This is still unusual for women. It was because of how I educated her and brought her up, without even making a conscious effort, just treating her as an individual human being.
Tangential question: do you advocate death for all bad people, a group which according to you includes the president?
In any case - "Kill All Men" was always just a shibboleth. Treating it as an actual policy recommendation is prima facie risible. Throwing it out there to see who is oblivious enough to object is the point.
Even if "Kill All Men" was just a shibboleth of a specific online culture, it seems like objecting to it would be a kind of moral duty (for the same reasons), as long we are in agreement that normalized misandry is bad. But again, in my generation I don't think there was any kind of consensus that misandry is wrong. That's why objecting to a shibboleth like this would be evidence of how "oblivious" and behind the times you are
This is why I asked how you managed to extract something other than "Kill All Men" from the phrase "Kill All Men".
A: "Kill All Men! They are disgusting"
B: "Well, surely not all men, some men are noble or allies to your cause"
A: "When I look at who the evil people are, they are almost all men, and they are supported by many men. Men are responsible for the evil and for failing to stop the evil. For every man that commits date rape, there's 5 men that hear about it and don't do anything. They are all responsible, and just as guilty."
I'm certainly not claiming that there is widespread oppression towards men, but at least in my generation (particularly in higher education) the overton window includes denigrating masculinity but doesn't include admiring it.
Another comment mentioned "ShitRedditSays" - is it possible you were saturated with a narrative that you went out and sought to saturate yourself with?
Just to help you decode the lifetime of these interactions that awaits you.
Sadly, ad hominem attacks to reinforce group identity have become common across ideological groups.
The core contention is that he's a virginal loser with no friends. Men have insinuated this about each other, independently of political division, across the ages.
I do think it's helpful to understand when interactions are really just boiling down to this. Helps with the angst.
That is simply so far out of the realm of believability. It is no different than if you said people started conversations with you by levitating and turning into flocks of bats.
But he said that this was common.
My impression is not based on something I read online or in the media. Nor is it based on my experiences back when I was growing up in the 1980s.
My impression is based on the lived experience of my children, as consistently described by them. And particularly of the opinion of my son, who has become radicalized against it.
His radicalization started with outrage that when he applied to college, his excellent SAT scores were not allowed to be submitted to most of the colleges that he wanted to go to. "Because the tests are racist and sexist." Luckily he managed to get into UC San Diego. But there he found a requirement for taking a series of courses that he saw as straight up DEI indoctrination. The content of which often outraged him.
It didn't help that his very real struggles were often dismissed by the very same people who were lecturing him about his privilege. He learned that he will never be heard, and he is mad about it.
Do you have any more takes demonstrating your unwillingness to hear the lived experiences of people you disagree with? Demonstrating the dismissiveness that my son is overreacting against?
There has long been a narrative that persistent gaps on standardized tests are due to racism. This narrative has been strengthened by the fact that actual racists have seized on these gaps to argue that various minorities really are stupid. See The Bell Curve. As a result, simply arguing for standardized tests being effective has long been seen by some as a sign that you are a racist.
This did not stop universities from using standardized testing for admissions. But during COVID, they couldn't do testing. So universities had to drop the tests. Administration quickly noticed that it is a lot easier to achieve diversity goals (that's the D in DEI) if you stop including data that makes disadvantaged minorities look worse.
Coming out of COVID, testing started again. Some universities, like MIT, immediately began requiring tests again. Others, like Harvard and Yale, became test optional - you could report it, but didn't have to. But the entire University of California system took the extreme of saying that you can't report your tests at all.
Test optional universities were forced to face the reality that the students who chose to report test results performed significantly better in class than those who didn't. Countering that, the lawsuit SFFA v. Harvard created pressure against race based admissions to achieve diversity goals. (Harvard lost that in 2023.) This strengthened the conflict between testing and diversity goals. And for those on the diversity side, made existing narratives about the tests being racist more appealing.
Universities have had different responses. For example Harvard reinstated test requirements in 2024. Yale still hasn't. And the UC system has doubled down on no tests allowed.
This is a frustration for my son because he scored in the top 1% on the SATs. He believes that he would have gotten into a better university if he was allowed to use his SAT score. When he arrived, upperclassmen were admitted due to tests, and his class wasn't. My son saw the difference in quality.
And so, surrounded by the narrative that the tests were racist, my son doubled down on, "The tests are fair, and the world in general would be better off if people like me received opportunity based on our actual potential to make good use of it."
Oh no, having to take courses he didn't like. And content of which we just have to take his word for is enough to be outraged about.
Is college not a place to go to open yourself to other ideas?
I first became of it online (through ShitRedditSays, for anyone who remembers that) ~2011. Studying Physics in graduate school 2012-2018 my female contemporaries used basically the same lexicon I'd become familiar with through lurking online gender wars ("patriarchy", "male privilege", "rape culture").
In parallel to this I was involved with a competitive card game community that was initially composed of standard gamer dude types unfamiliar with the above lexicon but that eventually became very proud (in online spaces) of adopting it. This transition was sort of messy - old-guard gamer-dude types were often uncomfortable with their freshly-politicized gaming community and left for other communities. There was more ... jejune drama where guys liked their semi-horny anime-girl card-game accoutrements (playmats, card sleeves) and there was much bickering over the decision to ban this type of thing. And then, in-my-view more-serious drama over whether to ban MAGA attire from tournaments. Pre-Trump-victory people thought it was funny to do it ironically, afterwards there was again all kinds of bickering of how much MAGA stuff needed to be banned in order for the community to be sufficiently LGBT/minority-inclusive. "All of it" was the viewpoint that eventually won out. A lot of this was online but everybody had thoughts on it and talked about it at in-person tournaments, of which I attended a lot.
In general there was an implicit invitation for young men like myself to learn this lexicon and accompanying intellectual framework and distinguish ourselves from "incels" (this term was sort of late in the game, I guess its predecessor was "neckbeard"? who remembers) by using it frequently and taking the opportunity to declaim its importance to other young men who weren't yet on board. Public and vitriolic denunciation of the gaming community was expected. You can probably tell from my above recap that I engaged with all this enough to understand the main perspectives being voiced and restate them in a way that made me seem at least open-minded and thoughtful, if not fully convinced. I also believed at every point that this was pretty much necessary in order to be in good standing socially speaking.
This was pretty much orthogonal to getting laid, which occurred through other channels and with women who didn't seem particularly aware of any of this (or, in the case of my now-wife, just not all that bought-in).
I am 37 and now married with kids and the vibe has changed a lot. Women of my acquaintance use these terms a lot less but when they are used they are completely uncontroversial. Husbands now have more right to kind of push back on the whole intellectual superstructure in spots without being slapped down. Having young sons changes the texture of things, as does living in a city (Baltimore) where young (black) men are mistreated in ways that privileged women feel duty-bound to confront and discuss.
So. w/r/t your question.
That specific framing is hyperbolic.
But I do think that I viewed as necessary for me to publicly affirm my unconscious participation in Patriarchy and Rape Culture, and the importance of educating other young men on these topics, and the importance of participating in the ostracism of young men who didn't display openness to making the same kinds of affirmations, for a good decade or so of my life. I also think that the necessity I describe was something that came primarily from online spaces and bled over to interactions with hyper-online people (Physics grad students and competitive card game players). Make of that what you will.
It may not have to. There are societies where men and women can vote, and there are societies where men can vote. If there is enough male anger at the left then men can disenfranchise women (heavily correlated with Democrats) and the left loses viability due to lack of votes. And that can be the new stable equilibrium.
But the real risk isn't an attempt to appeal the 19th amendment. It is that an authoritarian executive abolishes democracy entirely. That this is the risk has been obvious for a long time. Latin America is full of countries who adopted constitutions based on the US Constitution when they threw off Spanish rule. Those democracies consistently fell when legislative deadlock and judicial corruption created a window for an authoritarian executive to declare a state of emergency and override both.
We have the legislative deadlock, and a court system that is rapidly losing public respect. We have an authoritarian leaning President who is already teasing about an unconstitutional third term. He probably doesn't have the popular support to actually abolish democracy. But if we remain this polarized for another decade or two, we're likely to go the same way as every other democracy whose constitution was based on ours.
The advice my father gave still applies today, though few people (in this case, white males) have the stomach to hear it:
Man up. Life isn't fair. Get over it.
My personal experience is that I have not seen "You are the problem" very often, but I have seen "THEY say YOU are the problem!" coming from conservative circles, very often. It's a very blatant tactic. Make "the other" an enemy, and then the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Again, nothing I said invalidates what you are saying. Both could very well be true at the same time. I live in Europe, if it helps. In any case, I wish you good raising that son.
If the targeted person fails to completely agree with that narrative, they become labeled as the problem.
This happens so quickly and consistently that hearing "people who look like you are the problem" short-circuits to "I was just told that I am the problem."
When this is a young man's lived experience, he feels heard when he hears, "THEY say YOU are the problem!" from a vocal conservative. And this emotional validation makes it comfortable and easy to try to fit into this new group by adopting various of their attitudes and beliefs.
This is exactly how I'm seeing this play out with my son. It started with experiences which felt like him being told that he is the problem. It lead to him being receptive to conservative rhetoric. I'm trying to undermine that rhetoric. But it is an uphill battle, against an emotionally comfortable slope.
I think if we want our boys to grow up and avoid being these "Monks" the author talks about, the key is to help them to avoid addiction and gambling, and to help them to avoid these persecution complexes that come from isolated online culture.
However the article connected me with the struggles of young men in my life. Which connects to what I see their problems as, and what the causes of those problems are.
The message that I've heard from professionals who work on it says that addiction is largely a symptom. The disease is the problems that they are trying to avoid facing. Dominant among those diseases is a lack of social connection. The most successful interventions out there for addiction operate on this theory. Including the interventions that accompanied decriminalization of drugs in Portugal a quarter century ago. Which managed (varies by drug) 30-50% reductions in addiction rates.
The author's theory is that the young men in question don't want social connection enough. They aren't lonely enough. This theory does not match my experience or understanding. The men in question are plenty lonely. They just have found unhealthy coping mechanisms for it. Like anger and addiction.
In particular my thinking is strongly informed by the young man that I know best with a significant loneliness problem. From his narrative as he became radicalized against narratives that are dominant in his social environment. And his story finds echoes in a variety of toxic groups in society. And which fits with trends that are broadly reflected by polling.
I think that the author brought up an issue that is important. But has the wrong prescription for it. We need to create more opportunity for social connection. And the opportunity starts with a willingness to listen to people we disagree with, rather than doubling down on polarization.
The same community where I grew up biking, walking, and wandering around as a child now has police who say that they must respond if an adult calls in about unsupervised children anywhere in town.
A combination of rising costs, privatization, social media, and smart phones has made it so children can't spend time together without adults monitoring them. They literally are not engaging with each other in physical space the way that many of us engaged with each other as children up until the 2000s. We can see and feel that things are different as adults, but for children the real impact is socially and emotionally stunting. Children no longer have any low-stakes space where they can experiment and learn. And when we destroy the physical, in-person community where children can find support and comfort, should we be surprised when they latch onto the loudest people on the internet?
Many people have talked about and analyzed this. But the analysis that I find most insightful is also the first one that I read. https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulato.... It not only discusses how the dynamics of what goes viral leads to polarization, it also explains how the economics of how news is delivered today mirror those that created the yellow press over a century ago. And why both wind up delivering polarizing conspiracy theories with limited factual accuracy.
I have no idea what to do about the problem. But at least I feel that I can understand it.
Huh? Like the idea that young men are widely being told that "everything is their fault because they have male privilege?"
Better examples include "the 2020 election was stolen from Trump" and "Ron DeSantis manipulated COVID data in Florida". (I picked one from the right and the left for equal opportunities at offending people.)
When you ask the kids why they want a smartphone, typically the main two reasons are to be able to communicate with friends and to be present on social media. A child's experience is that socializing is done through texting, video calls, and social media now, rather than being in-person at a park, store, or cafe.
When you ask parents why they gave their kids a smartphone, typically parents will cite the socialization reason above, as well as safety and "not wanting their kids to fall behind". Many parents believe it's in their and their child's best interest to have the ability to monitor where their child is and what their child is doing and are willing to go along with the socialization thing to achieve that.
Social media is a part of the problem, but the underlying problem for children is that many aren't able or willing to socialize outside of devices, and the underlying problem for parents is that they aren't able or willing to let their children be out of communication for long periods of time.
It isn't just that social media is a problem, it's that we have cultivated a world where children, parents, and cities/governments see personal devices and social media as the best available solution for the intersecting problems of community, socialization, and safety.
What it means to be progressive became so distorted, it’s almost as bad as conservative, in most cases “progressive” groups and parties are places for willing and thinking people to defuse and not actually do or contribute anything.
To minimize confusion, unless I say otherwise, I try to use political terms in accord with how they are generally used today.
It's taking it way too personally for anyone to feel they're being blamed for history. That's a choice, and a convenient justification for raging against it.
It doesn't matter how polarized "both sides" are. Both sides is a subset of the whole society. As they become more and more insane in their polarization, more and more of society realizes that they are insane, and becomes repulsed. The pendulum is restored not by the other side becoming dominant. The pendulum swings back by the middle looking at the extreme and saying "No, you're insane, we aren't going to walk down your road."
Why do you believe that this will happen?
The usual response for people whose ideologies have lead to problems, is to double down on their ideologies. After which cognitive dissonance makes it easy to reject all evidence of their own mistakes.
But your point is that most people are not zealots. True. But we live in a country which, thanks to gerrymandering, mostly sees politicians lose re-election in the primary. And since primaries bring out the most motivated people in your own party, that means that you are most likely to be replaced by someone who is more to the taste of zealots. And the sight of the other party becoming more extreme, breeds future zealots to continue the process.
This dynamic is one of the key reasons why politicians have become more extreme over the last couple of decades. With the result that, despite the fact that most of us would gladly vote for a more moderate person, in an election we're forced to choose between extremes. And for over 80% of us, our choice truly doesn't matter. We live in districts that have a sufficient partisan lean that the outcome is essentially predetermined.
The post-Cold War Clinton years was the rise of political correctness. "It's the '90s!" was a popular cultural catchphrase. Rush Limbaugh and the talk radio shock jocks who are the forefathers of today's anti-woke talking heads cut their teeth on anti-PC culture warmongering. Yet, society didn't seem all that fragmented. Maybe it was because people were well-fed and not in fear of existential issues. In fact, the late '90s became suffused with entertainment searching for new threats and fears- disaster movies, hero's journeys about white-collar cubicle drones finding enlightenment and adventure.
Then 9/11 happened, American society- and much of the West- became afraid, constantly looking over its shoulder. And that fear never went away. It simply shifted to different bogeymen. And what I would argue is the most corrosive thing about the War on Terror is that it polarized the divisions in American society, became an "us or them" thing, where being them meant becoming an existential threat to your fellow countryman. So now we see the same tired '00s cliches repackaged along different political fault-lines and social demographics. Woke/anti-woke debates, gender wars, etc. are simply updates of the same cultural struggles from the '90s- or from the '50s? ratcheted up with War on Terror paranoia and polarization. We are still living in the shadow of that era. We never depolarized from that era. Toss in the ubiquity of the internet and here you have the present.
But in some ways we are clearly worse off, and going downhill. The cost of housing is one of the most important of those.
Unfortunately both sides blame each other. While neither side takes action on the thing that is important - building more housing. If your population grows and your housing doesn't, the cost of housing must go up.
While there is growing support for "yes in my backyard", overall we're headed the wrong way. We have not enough housing, and we are not building it as fast as demand is growing. We have thickets of regulations that make building housing very difficult. And little appetite for fixing that. Even in cases that desperately need it - such as to rebuild properties that were destroyed in California fires early this year.
This kind of fear was only what the media wanted us to have. I never felt it in my social circles. Quite the opposite: in Germany there were lots of rallies against the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and basically the narrative on which there was a consensus on was
"Some terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and a few hundreds people died. But masses of US soldiers kill hundreds thousands of people in Afghanistan and the Iraq. Thus for sure Osama bin Laden is a criminal, but George W. Bush is a war criminal and guilty of genocide, thus the much worse evil."
Thus: at least in Germany I am very certain that 9/11 did not lead to paranoia and polarization, but to a unified hate against George W. Bush and US-American politics.
Hillary was exactly right when she spoke of deplorables. The mask is off these days.
We're all on top of one another, and different cross tabs feel different ways about the same thing. So there is room for empathy and antipathy to coexist
If you read the New York Times and The Atlantic there is lots of empathy for the male loneliness crisis
I am in between the age of you and your son it seems. As a man who has not missed any of the "misandry", I think the overly online conservative young men are an embarrassment and I hope they grow out of it
I too was surprised by the author's tendency to suggest that alone time is inherently bad. If you aren't particularly interested in the society you live in, there is nothing wrong with spending time alone. I don't really suggest you take up gambling, smoking, or drinking to pass the time. But spending time alone is just fine.
When I was younger, I thought I was SUPPOSED to want to party, so I went out with friends many nights a week. Sometimes I would have fun, but I would always dread it. I hate the noise, the crowded feeling, bumping into other people, trying to make small talk with people I was not that interested in talking to. I much preferred being home by myself, playing games or working on hobby projects. I remember in college I loved when I was too young to go to the bars; we would pre-party at our apartment and I would enjoy it for an hour or two, and then they would leave for the bars and I would stay home and do my own thing. It was perfect.
I just thought I was supposed to like parties and going out.
Then I got older, and I met my now-wife at work. On one of our first dates, we were going to pick up her cousin from a bar. We get there, and it is HAPPENING. Loud music, people dancing, people waiting in line to get in. It looked miserable to me, but I was getting ready to act like I enjoyed it... and then I look over to my future wife and she sighs and says "that looks awful". I knew right there she was the woman for me.
We have been married for over 10 years now, and we still hate going out to loud events. We don't mind socializing in smaller groups, but we are comfortable that we don't like going to loud bars or clubs or big parties. We like staying home with the kids, quietly playing games or reading. We have also learned, through having our kids diagnosed and then ourselves, that we are both on the autism spectrum. We are no longer ashamed of who we are, and don't pretend we are the same as everyone else.
I think people are different, and need different things. We can't assume that what we need will work for everyone else.
I don't think it is only autistic people who feel this way, and even if it was, we are people, too. Our desires aren't WRONG just because they are different.
> "The experience of young men is that they have grown up in a world where they've consistently been told that everything is their fault because they have male privilege."
Men had and have privilege, that's a simple sociological and sociohistorical fact. That, because of that fact, "everything is their [i. e. men's] fault" is a reductio ad absurdum.
> "'You think I'm the problem? I'll show YOU what it looks like if I BECOME the problem!'"
Ah, the old classic: threats and blackmail. Trad dudes just don't get, do they? After hundreds, if not thousands, of years of "I'll show YOU!1!!", that song and dance is stale. People become more empowered individually, with more individual freedom(s). So they are less inclined to settle for bad compromises.
Risk-aversion in the social sphere has combined with their risk-chasing in the market
The skinner box gives unpredictable rewards, but at the same time the user can be certain that a reward will come. Whereas (for those poor unfortunate souls), the expected reward for putting themselves out there is zero, zilch, nada. That's what it means to be hopeless.
"Porn addiction" is a paleologism that caused a lot of harm so the scientific community has largely abandoned it. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...
It's also weird to have friends who have spent time in actual monasteries and then read an article that calls people suffering from compulsive behaviors "monks". They seem awfully attached to the vices of the modern life to be anything remotely monk-like to me.
I'd be hesitant with value judgements, but this is most certainly going to affect our society massively (from decreased reproduction rates alone if nothing else).
I feel there must have been smaller similar trends in the past with easily obtainable written entertainment (books).
It does mean that the economic growth that allowed most men to be a plausible marriage partner in the mid-20th century no longer obtains, which is a bad thing, despite the small comfort of consumer goods being cheap enough to alleviate some of this pain.
> These young men seem to me like modern ascetics who find themselves somehow trapped on the betting floor of the economy. They are like monks, yes. But more than that: They are monks in a casino. Risk-aversion in the social sphere has combined with their risk-chasing in the market, and it’s created a genuinely berserk modern life script.
This seems like a bad take. There's no preference there, these people have crippling addictions, it's a form of mental illness. It's like saying schizophrenics prefer talking to voices than having a home, or that people who are clinically depressed prefer napping over going to work.
The handful of men like this who I've spoken to I find to be pretty self-aware and somewhat self-loathing. I often find that what they need is someone who can listen to them, give them some tactful encouragement, and occasionally help them find a strategy that will help them to overcome the troubles that they're facing. Be that therapy or a debtors anonymous meeting.
It's a challenging world that is often overwhelming to manage by yourself. It's easy to feel dis-empowered when you don't have a solid social circle that you can lean on, or who can help to re-direct your bad tendencies. Helping folks find their own social group can be immensely helpful for people who are trying to course correct.
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