Young Men Are Lost. A New Book Can Guide the Way
The memoir Generation Desperation begins to fill the narrative gap about the journey to contemporary male adulthood
Illustration by Sandro Rybak
We call them manchildren. They live in basements, on Reddit, playing video games rather than participating in the labor market. Their communities are online, ephemeral at best, malevolent at worst. The prevailing narrative about them—about a certain extremely online cohort of millennial and Generation Z men—is of a lost tribe, troubled, privileged by the patriarchy yet failing to grow up.
The data support this story. From 2011 to 2022 the number of Americans attending college dropped by 1.2 million, according to Pew Research Center data. Men account for most of that drop; they’ve also been falling out of the workforce for decades, regardless of education level. The State of American Men 2023 report, by social justice nongovernmental organization Equimundo, found almost two-thirds of young adult males thought “no one really knows me well.” It also found around 1 in 3 spent no time in person with someone outside their household in the preceding week. Almost half said their life online felt more engaging and rewarding than the real world.