Not all men (are in crisis)

But men without degrees really are

Perhaps you’ve read in The New York Times that “American men are stuck in a friendship recession.” Or perhaps you’ve heard on TikTok that “Men are like experiencing a ~literal~ loneliness epidemic.” But your favorite Boomer columnist and your favorite Gen Z TikTok influencer are both wrong: ~literally~ not all men are experiencing a loneliness crisis.

Here’s the thing though: When sloppy discourse becomes taken as objective reality, we begin to think and act sloppily. This is what is happening with the so-called “male loneliness crisis.” A shallow understanding of male disconnection — as something that is affecting most men, and as something that is a relatively recent phenomenon — is leading to shallow, unserious solutions that don’t come close to matching the scope of a societal rupture that was 75-plus years in the making.

What could a more serious approach look like? Correcting the record and clarifying which men are actually the most disconnected would be a good place to start. Understanding what changed in our culture, institutions, and communities that got us to this point would be helpful, too. But, perhaps more than anything, we need to imagine solutions that are big enough to overcome the extent of the civilizational problem we’re now facing.

Let’s get straight to the punch: The actual crisis of disconnection in America falls largely on the shoulders of men without college degrees. The statistical explanation for this is simple: Americans without degrees are significantly less connected to friends and community than their college-educated peers, and the vast majority of Americans without degrees are men. This reality has long been acknowledged by several notable academics and thinkers.

So where did the data for this supposed broad-based “male loneliness crisis” come from? A pandemic-era survey from our friends at the Survey Center on American Life (SCAL), as it turns out. In that 2021 survey, they found that men who reported having “no close friends” increased fivefold between 1990 and 2021, from 3 percent to 15 percent. This datapoint has been sticky: it’s been cited by the likes of Richard V Reeves in Of Boys and Men, referenced in several of Scott Galloway’s newsletters, and has even inspired an SNL sketch and Tim Robinson film.

Source: Survey Center on American Life, “Men’s Social Circles Are Shrinking,” 2021

But in the broader context of America’s growing civic and social disconnection, men, in aggregate, are not an outlier. In the survey report I published with SCAL three years later, we found that 17 percent of all Americans had no close friends — two percentage points higher than the friendship stat that has been used as the basis for the “male loneliness crisis.” In fact, men and women look practically the same in this dataset, with 17 percent of men and 16 percent of women reporting that they “do not have a close friend.” This does not mean the 2021 datapoint that contributed to the “male loneliness epidemic” discourse was inaccurate, but it does mean we have new information, and we’d do well to adjust our story of the world accordingly.

Source: Survey Center on American Life, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life,” 2024

When it comes to friendships and community, it is not men and women who are living completely different social lives, but men with degrees and men without degrees. In that same 2024 survey, we found that nearly a quarter of American men without degrees report having no close friends, and just 28 percent report having five or more close friends. In contrast, college-educated men are largely well-connected: just 11 percent of men with degrees report having no close friends, while 51 percent report having five or more. And it’s not just about friends — men without degrees are significantly less likely to have access to civic opportunities, participate in their communities, and benefit from social support.

Increasingly, the college degree has become the great sorting function in Americans’ social lives, and increasingly, men without degrees have found themselves sorted out.

What happened? At the risk of being overly alliterative and cutesy, the disconnection of men without degrees comes down to three things — college, community, and class — all of which have interacted with each other and shifted over the last 75 years.

Since the mid-20th century, women have gone from experiencing near complete exclusion from higher ed to experiencing near total domination of it. The G.I. Bill opened up college to “ordinary Americans” who had historically been left out, and Title IX, which passed 30 years later, accelerated women’s inclusion on campus. Today, young women significantly outpace young men in college enrollment and completion rates. They also now make up the vast majority of college grads for almost every generational cohort — from Gen Z to Boomers. As Richard Reeves points out in Of Boys and Men, girls and women do better at school for several reasons — and in a world without gender discrimination in admissions, women have simply outcompeted men. Unfortunately, men who don’t go to college (and don’t join the military) don’t just miss out on an education and a degree; they also miss out on a structured rite of passage to cultivate skills, relationships, and habits of participation.

Source: Brookings, “The male college crisis is not just about enrollment but completion,” 2021

Over the same time period that college transformed, participation in our bedrock American institutions of community and meaning declined, especially among Americans without degrees. Union membership has contracted overall — 33 percent of American adults belonged to a union family in the 1960s, compared to only 13 percent today — and it has particularly contracted in the private sector unions that overwhelmingly serve men without degrees. Membership in associational life has likewise fallen off a cliff by nearly every measure since the late 1960s, and Americans without degrees are participating in community at rates three times lower than their peers with degrees. Religious participation and membership have followed similar patterns, both declining in general since the early 1990s and most acutely among American men without degrees. And marriage rates are down across the board, but men without degrees have experienced the sharpest declines, from 85 percent in 1950 to only 53 percent by 2010.

Source: Lundberg, Shelly, Robert A. Pollak, and Jenna Stearns, “Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing,” 2016

Finally, it was in this mid- to late-20th century period that we also experienced the great sorting of American life by class. Our regions, cities, and neighborhoods all increasingly clustered into so-called “superstar” places and “distressed” places. The former became defined by population growth, high levels of educational attainment, good jobs, and abundant civic opportunities, while the latter often became defined by the opposite. The college degree became the great sorter of where we lived, worked, gathered, and played. In the process, the “superstar” places became “dream hoarders” — not only of economic opportunities, but also of civic and social opportunities. As Tim Carney put it in Alienated America, a rich civic and family life became “a high-end good” that many without degrees could no longer “afford.”

Men without college degrees were functionally hit with a 1-2 punch. They fell behind in college enrollment and completion, just as the college degree became the path to a flourishing economic and social life. Meanwhile, the institutions that once provided broad-based stability and social support for all Americans considerably eroded — especially in the places where Americans without degrees live — all but eliminating a critical social “safety net” of relationships and community.

The results of these shifts have been nothing short of cataclysmic. Many men without degrees — who were enmeshed in relatively good jobs, stable families, and strong communities as recently as the mid-20th century — have become almost wholly disconnected from the relationships, communities, and commitments that make life worth living.

The current reality for men without degrees today is bleak. While much is made about our “lost boys” committing acts of mass violence, more should be made about what Christine Emba calls their mass anesthetization. They’re not out and about; they’re at home, alone, addicted, and dying.

Addiction is often described as the opposite of connection, and an entire tech-enabled “loneliness industrial complex” has emerged to extract value from the isolation of men without degrees. Look at nearly every area of male addiction and you’ll find a category leader in tech. Instead of having sex, disconnected men are watching porn, and OnlyFans has the highest revenue per employee in the entire tech sector. Instead of cultivating relationships, disconnected men are chatting with AI friends and lovers, and companies like Replika and Character.AI have raised hundreds of millions of venture funding to “win” this new “AI companion space.” And instead of gambling with the boys, disconnected men are betting online at astronomical rates, leading many young men into gambling addictions and debt, and leading FanDuel and DraftKings to post “record-breaking quarters.”

But this isn’t just a matter of addiction and extraction; it’s a matter of life and death, and men without degrees have been dying at alarming rates. Overall life expectancy for men without degrees has declined by nearly three years — a trend that started gradually in the early 2010s, and then accelerated by the end of the decade. Suicides and drug overdose deaths among men without degrees have been a driver of this decline, and both have soared in recent decades. The suicide rate among all men increased by 25 percent between 2001 and 2021 — from 18.2 to 22.8 per 100,000 people — and men without degrees now die by suicide at twice the rate of their college-educated peers. But drug overdoses have been the bigger culprit: A recent study found that the overdose death rate among men without degrees is 120-150 per 100,000 people — approximately eight times the rate of men with degrees — and men without degrees now account for more than 50 percent of all overdose deaths in the U.S.

Left: Case & Deaton, "Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA,” 2023; Right: Xu, Seamans, & Friedman, “Drug overdose mortality rates by educational attainment and sex for adults aged 25–64 in the United States,” 2024

While men without degrees are dying (often alone), our political parties and most of our politicians are more concerned about “winning” working-class men than actually improving their lives. Democrats seem to be looking for a quick fix with better “podcasts” or better “messaging.” But they will be sorely disappointed in the next election cycle when they realize a few years of better ~vibes~ can’t make up for several decades of spiritual and material degradation. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to have little motivation to actually better the lives of men without degrees for a simple reason: They’ve effectively capitalized on their anger to win elections.

Even well-intentioned efforts don’t come close to matching the scale of the problem. I see the proliferation of new men’s groups like AllKings and F3 as a welcome development. But a small fraction of all men participate in these groups, and many are those who are already active in their communities. This is to say nothing of the flippant, surface-level solutions that have been proposed recently — getting more men to play pickleball, or teaching men to “text better,” for instance — which reflect a total lack of understanding and care about the conditions that men without degrees currently face.

What we’re confronting today is a tear in the cultural, social, and structural fabric of our communities that has been 75-plus years in the making. We’ve built a society where many men without degrees are neither connected with nor needed by other humans — be it romantic partners, friends, neighbors, employers, or their broader communities. There is no quick stitch and no “silver bullet” solution. The only path to repair will be through the generational work of rebirth and renewal — of our relationships, our communities, our culture, and our institutions.

Part of this renewal will involve committing to things we’ve written about before that will benefit all Americans, not just men without degrees. This includes re-embedding practices of civic membership within our towns and neighborhoods, and re-enlivening civic life to be more participatory, proximate, and relational. But another part of this renewal calls us to think big about repairing what we’ve broken and imagining what we can create, particularly as it relates to disconnected men.

What could really thinking big look like? Perhaps re-introducing a taboo topic: prohibition. If we’re serious about getting men out of addiction and into connection, we need to prohibit or significantly curtail access to the extractive technologies of the “loneliness industrial complex” — including online porn, AI companions, and sports betting apps — and we need to instantiate norms for the introduction of new technologies. And if we’re serious about reversing the social sorting that’s become the defining feature of the adult transition, we need to build new “rites of passage” during this period of the life course — creating entirely new rituals and structures, and embedding new rituals and structures within existing pathways — to promote lifelong habits of meaning-making, participation, and relationship-building for men who don’t go to college.

We can also find inspiration from the past: namely, from the YMCA’s founding story. As industrialization hit Europe and the U.S. in the mid- to late-19th century, men flooded into cities looking for jobs, leaving behind their ancestral villages, familial and communal ties, and entire ways of life. Disconnected and unmoored, they began whoring, drinking, gambling, fighting, and engaging in every other deviancy known to man. In this morass emerged the Young Men’s Christian Association to “improve the spiritual condition of young men” through bible study and prayer, social activities, and physical fitness. The YMCA quickly grew into a global movement, becoming a spiritual and social refuge for young men as the waves of industrialization (and the social dislocations it caused) spread throughout Europe and North America.

If there was ever a time when we needed a new YMCA, it would be today. As Pete Davis and I wrote in After Babel, the conditions of this moment rhyme with those of the Industrial Era. Imagine if we had a network of locally rooted, intentionally cross-class spaces for men focused on spiritual formation and mentorship, on collective physical, social, artistic, and service activities, and on shared projects and shared purpose (I already did, kind of). It’s a big idea — and it would be very difficult to pull off — but it could be the type of anchor institution that’s needed to engender men with the sense that they're connected and needed in their communities.

Now is not the time for small thinking and shallow solutions. Now is the time for big ideas that get at the root of the cultural, social, and structural changes that have left our brothers, fathers, friends, and neighbors behind. Our shared flourishing in community ~literally~ depends on it.

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