No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

Ideally, everyone should learn to take a literal or figurative punch to the face, shrug it off and refocus.

However, that doesn’t mean that someone can’t be severely traumatized or injured by a single punch to the face. The context matters.

So the ideal of ‘just learn to take it and toughen up’ is flawed because of the very real effects of trauma. And the ideal of ‘no one should ever get punched in the face’ is flawed if we never train ourselves for hardship.

It can be really unintuitive to figure out the middle path between the two.

Sometimes it should be obvious. Stuff like, kids should be made active enough to occasionally scrape their knee, but sanding a scrape into your kids knee is horrible abuse.

I feel it's always worth asking whether there are unstated axioms here being snuck into the discourse. Especially in a big conversation about how 'everything is being ruined because people won't stick to the old good ways'.

Though it may be an uncomfortable question to some, to what extent does this rest upon female humans serving as livestock and spawning/rearing children, being relatively disposable themselves?

If you REALLY want to maximize 'men attaining dignity and social respect', to what extent does this rest upon the existence of a subhuman underclass which doesn't count as 'men' and can be enslaved for their labor? Dignity and social respect are RELATIVE. The easiest way to make them seem enhanced for some is to strip 'em from others. People vary far too much to make 'free market' human interaction easy and seamless, and every time we run up against a conflict our dignity and social respect takes a hit.

How badly do you want your dignity? And how much is your end goal just you and not anybody else? (this would be an abstract 'you', not intending it as an argument that the original commenter is this 'you')

Especially the quote where an agreement that stability is important was interpreted as agreement that marriage is important.

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

Up to this point, the problem statement has all been about choices made by those lacking wealth, but now we seem to have suddenly veered into that being the fault of those "at or near the apex of the social ladder" and in a way I can't relate to. On the contrary, hard work and "hustle" seems more high status than ever!

Maybe this is a minor point, but I have been finding this two-step of 1. Identify a problem among the low status / poor / blue collar, 2. Blame it on the elite, disorienting. I first came across it in JD Vance's book where I thought he did a really good job of identifying problems with the culture he was raised in but then ended the book with (in my view) misplaced blame and no real ideas for how to fix any of the problems. And it just seems like I've seen people (JD Vance quintessentially) doubling and tripling down on that pattern ever since.

Edit to add (now that I've finished reading the article): I think there is an entire premise here that I really don't buy, that this culture is driven by the affluent and "middle class meaning college degree holders". In my experience this isn't right at all; nobody in the working class cares in the slightest what academics at Harvard or wherever think about family formation and stability. They aren't aware of what academics think, and wouldn't care what they think if they were to become aware of it. It is very roundabout to identify a cultural problem and then blame that problem on the milieu within a different culture that does not exhibit the same problem...

I'd appreciate your consideration.

Due to some widely shared youtube videos and other new and zeitgeisty trends, empathy has been put on a pedestal and sympathy and been thoroughly denigrated.

The problem is that people are not that capable of real empathy in complex or strongly divergent experiences, this modern "synthetic empathy" generated in peoples imaginations is actively harmful, is not empathy, and is worse than sympathy (which was always a serviceable emotion and the most accurate framing for many circumstances.)

As someone born with a heart defect that almost killed them and forced me into formative and constant meditation on death starting at 4 years old, and then had my parents die young and my family financially ruined by medical bills so I had to quit highschool and start working fulltime I have personally observed that empathy as a mental model has a strong failure mode.

I doubt at 15 you could have had empathy for me, (unless you shared a similar experience) I doubt older wiser you could still empathize with 15 year old me in any meaningful way, certainly no peer I ever met at the time could (agqin, unless they had dealt with the same.)

I think peoples ability to empathize has been far oversold, so while you can understand and empathize with "silly things", outside of that I'd settle for some good old fashioned (and real) sympathy.

Sympathy has a certain acknowledgment of lack of understanding and thus intellectual and emotional humility, and I think humility is what is missing in this modern synthetic empathy.

Experiences in general and certainly extremely divergent ones do not have the same qualia and empathy is a false siren.

People don't understand as much as they think, they should show sympathy to those whose experiences are far outside their own and help them tangibly when possible.