Untangling the “male loneliness epidemic”
☀️ Morning. Three more Thursdays until 2025.
Issue #222: subway mosquitoes + good opinions
Is there an epidemic of male loneliness?
I’ve been seeing posts alluding to it everywhere lately. Google it and you’ll find lots of supporting surveys, though they don’t tell a clear story.
A 2021 survey revealed that men have, on average, 50% fewer close friendships than women — and the number of close male friendships has plummeted over the last 20 years. Scott Galloway (podcast host, marketing professor, and masculinity pundit) writes on Medium about the “crisis of underemployment and undersocialization” young men are facing. Slightly more men than women (57% to 54%) under the age of 24 live with their parents today. Men under 30 are more likely to be single than women (maybe because women are dating above their age bracket?). A third of men haven’t had sex in the last year (Galloway has promoted this stat), but in truth, everyone is having less sex than they did a decade ago (men, women, old, young… everyone).
At the same time, research is pretty clear that we’re all lonelier today than we were a decade ago. A Gallup survey last year discovered that men and women are equally lonely. Eileen Graham, associate professor of social sciences at Northwestern University, analyzed nine longitudinal studies of loneliness and found that women self-report being lonely more than men.
To me, the conversation around a so-called “male loneliness epidemic” conflates multiple things: self-reported loneliness (a subjective experience, equally felt across all genders), singledom (which is not the same thing as loneliness), and celibacy (also not the same thing as loneliness).
What the conversation about men seems to overlook is the fact that everyone, no matter how old you are or how you identify, is more isolated than they were a decade ago. It’s not just a male loneliness epidemic. It’s a retiree loneliness epidemic, a queer loneliness epidemic, an everyone-is-staring-at-their-phones-on-the-couch epidemic. To un-isolate ourselves, we have to become more aware of who we are when we’re online. I like Richa Kaul Padte’s line in a beautiful essay about this: “I sincerely tried — and still try — to close the gap between my online and offline lives.”
I’m curious what you think.
👁️ What I’m reading
- Public health scientist Dr. Jess Steier summarizes the research around raw milk: It’s worse for digestion than pasteurized, and the risks are most pronounced among children.
- British design consultant Tom Whitwell’s “things I learned” is an annual Medium tradition. A highlight from this year’s roundup: the London tube harbors a distinct species of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, which evolved 80 years ago and is genetically distinct from above-ground skeeters.
- If you want to delight your neighbors, you could do worse than hiding tiny ducks outside people’s houses. (Gothamist)
✍️ Your daily dose of practical wisdom
To write an opinion that starts a conversation, New York Times opinion columnist Elizabeth Spiers explains, focus on making just one point. Most first-time writers make the mistake of viewing everything they write as their last chance to say something — so they cram every idea into one story. Be judicious.
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