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

robkhenderson.substack.com

911–920 of 1001 posts

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

#911
post #267
post #44

Do people find this stuff compelling? Rank speculation and confident assertion with minimal substantive backing? I’d find this statement equally compelling (which is to say, not at all): > Since we stopped using horses as a primary means of transportation, men’s sense of self worth has diminished. Riding a horse carried a lot of high status connotations: drive, masculinity, towering above the land, and man’s dominati…

that's one thing i like about riding a bike. i get to look down at people in cars ;-)

And realise with growing horror how common texting and driving really is.

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

#912
post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't with the absolute level of wages but with increasing income inequality (Gini coefficient) and the resulting loss of social status for young men on the lower end of that scale.

Correct. The hierarchy is getting steeper and harder to climb. Men who don’t feel connected to a clear path of ascension become desperate and often either dangerous or losers. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the increasing number of men who feel they have “fallen off the path”. Could be scary

>It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the increasing number of men who feel they have “fallen off the path”. Could be scary

They will probably seek revenge against the social norms and classes which alienated them. History tends to repeat itself.

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

#913

So let's just blame men for everything? True, historically men have been expected to bring home the bacon, protect their families from violence and disrespect and discipline sons who may otherwise get in trouble, and that is missing nowadays. But women ALSO had responsibilities - making home pleasant even on modest means, well behaved children that are a pleasure to come home to after a long day of work, encouraging…

> statistically different - though individually variable - gender traits.

Beautifully political correct to allow for the existence of beauty magazines and mud drag racing.

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

#914

I find this line interesting: Amy, a white thirty-year-old mother of three, ages six, five, and three, had a boyfriend who worked steadily but insisted on spending on selfish pursuits. This is what eventually broke the young couple up. ‘He wouldn’t spend money for the kids’ food. I had to send my kids across the street to my mom’s to feed them and stuff. That’s what I got fed up with. I shouldn’t have to live like th…

Even if you are ready to support other children, building a connection with them can be extremely hard work and they might still reject it. Also understandable that the boyfriend didn't want to neglect himself fully. But in such a situation you have to build a relationship with multiple people.

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

#915
post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. The glaring piece missing from this analysis is the psychology of the young men themselves. Raising two young men myself, I’m blown away by how powerful cultivating intrinsic motivation is. My eldest just went from constant gaming/sleeping/hiding in his room to working a full-time job, launching a side hustle, and enrolling in classes. Yes, my modeling & encouragement mattered. But the fulcrum was him acce…

father of a 4 years old boy. please help me! How do you cultivate intrinsic motivation ? any good strategy or book?

I just use common sense, I try to explain why doing something is good and try to make the kid to have a desire to accomplish something. Also things have to feel more fun and less of a chore. If that fails, I have to resort to authority ("please do this because I ask you to"). If that also fails, I have to use carrot and stick strategy ("you will get that toy only if" or "you won't watch cartoons unless").

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

#916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pros and cons. A big challenge with rigid social expectations is identifying the beneficial ones and removing the harmful ones. In practice, there tends to be little introspection about which traditional expectations help and which ones hurt. Instead, people appeal to tradition itself as evidence that an expectation is helpful. If we could more effectively iterate on these social expectations then we'd be able to mor…

The tentatives to artificially engineer the society to be more just, fair and inclusive only resulted in a less just, less fair and less inclusive society. The society should be left to evolve on its own, in a natural way. If we don't want to replace small disasters with big disasters.

Partially. You have to have some rules to ensure people can participate. Accommodation for disabilities for example. Even if people would try to accommodate them out of a sense of duty, you cannot skip to have binding rules because it just simply isn't on peoples mind all the time.

What isn't helpful at all, on the contrary, is thinking about new words how to call disabled people.

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

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then I can absorb it uncritically and regurgitate the conclusions to people without thinking about the evidence that lead me to the conclusions You forgot the part where I then accuse you of being the one blinded by ideology and bias.

As stated elsewhere in the thread, northern Europe bucks this "trend" that the author sees. The nuclear family is as weak as it has ever been, christianity and its ideals are an afterthought, and people have never been happier.

And yet the suicide rate in Norway is among the highest in the world. Crafted studies proclaim people to be happy but they forgot what happiness is.

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

#918
post #44

Do people find this stuff compelling? Rank speculation and confident assertion with minimal substantive backing? I’d find this statement equally compelling (which is to say, not at all): > Since we stopped using horses as a primary means of transportation, men’s sense of self worth has diminished. Riding a horse carried a lot of high status connotations: drive, masculinity, towering above the land, and man’s dominati…

I don't think it's rank speculation, the article itself mentions 1 in 6 men are unemployed, and there have been plenty of other articles that have been posted on here with statistics on the number of men that aren't just unemployed but have no interest being employed. College enrollment of men is somewhere around 44% of the student body nation wide in the US, the number of men in higher education has been dropping fo…

>College enrollment of men is somewhere around 44% of the student body nation wide in the US, the number of men in higher education has been dropping for a couple of decades now. Girls are significantly outperforming boys from Kindergarten to 12 grade nearly everywhere.

Interesting. Are the changes in education biased against boys?

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

#919
Idk about over there but where I'm from men are expected to make money well, and women are expected to marry well (marry men who make money), whether they like it or not. As a man, if someone tells me there is no social expectation on me, then I don't know what to tell them, fuck off may be.

On the other hand, my younger sister received less pressure from my parents to success academically. In fact they never expected anything from her, and I feel that's unfair for her, because as a result, she's achieved less than me at her age. I know for a fact that this is a documented phenomena (first borns are more successful).

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

#920
post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that kind of makes sense. Riding horses is a bit of a masculine thing. I wonder if there's a 'tiny bit' to that. That said, I wonder if most men ever even really rode horses very often.

No, horses were incredibly expensive historically speaking. They need land, food, care, all of which were real expenses.

In my country rural areas only poor had horses. The rest had cars and agricultural tractors.
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