The Agency Problem

Epistemic status: I’m writing this before I turn 22, so I’m almost certainly wrong about some of it, possibly the important parts. I have also been, at various points in my life, a version of the man I’m criticizing. Discount for both. This essay pulls together arguments scattered across my earlier posts, on the romance market, on virtue signalling, and on pornography, into a single diagnosis that I hope is coherent.

One more thing before we start. This is not a men’s rights manifesto, an incel blackpill, or a sermon about returning to some natural state of masculinity. If you came here looking for proof that women are to blame, you have the wrong address. The thing I’m blaming, explicitly and consistently, is men, or more precisely the patterns of male behaviour that, added up, damage almost every system they touch.

I.

Something is happening to men, and I mean that literally: it shows up in data you can count, including in deaths.

In the United States, men die by suicide at almost four times the rate of women, a gap that has held for decades. Deaths of despair (suicide, overdose, alcohol-related illness) disproportionately strike working-age men, especially men without a university degree; Anne Case and Angus Deaton at Princeton documented this in painful detail.

On the education side, the gap now runs in a direction that surprises people. In nearly every OECD country, women outperform men at every level of education. In the US, women earn about 60% of bachelor’s degrees and 63% of master’s degrees, and in Indonesia women’s participation in higher education has been ahead of men’s for several years. Richard Reeves at the Brookings Institution, who is nobody’s idea of a conservative (he ran strategy for Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister in the UK), wrote an entire book about this, Of Boys and Men.

In the labour market, the share of prime-age men (25 to 54) who are neither working nor looking for work has been climbing since the 1960s. That’s non-participation, which is different from unemployment: these men have left the game entirely. In the US the figure is now around 11%, up from about 3% in the mid-20th century. Structural change in the economy explains part of that rise, and I don’t think it explains all of it.

The most striking numbers may be the ones on loneliness. A 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life found that the share of men who say they have no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. Women saw an increase too, but nowhere near that size.

This data is sad, and I want to say so before an essay that is about to criticize men fairly hard. Behind each percentage are people who can’t sleep and have no one to call, and in the worst cases they decide there’s no reason to get up at all.

If your first reaction is “well, that’s the karma of patriarchy”, I understand the impulse, and I think it’s wrong on the facts and dangerous as strategy. The man dying by suicide in rural West Virginia is not the man sitting on a Fortune 500 board, and handing categorical consequences to a group this heterogeneous is exactly the habit of thought we should have outgrown. It’s dangerous because (and I’ll argue this throughout) men who break rarely break alone.

One distinction early: saying “there is a problem with men” is very different from saying “men are victims”, and I’m only saying the first. Men still hold most of the political, economic, and institutional power in almost every society on Earth, and the asymmetry between men’s and women’s experience of sexual violence, harassment, and physical danger is real. I don’t intend to minimize it here or anywhere else.

What I am saying is more specific. Something is mechanically broken in how a large share of young men live their lives, and the breakage has costs that everyone else pays, including (maybe especially) women. So the useful question is what, precisely, is broken, and whether we can understand it well enough to stop arguing about symptoms.

The left blames patriarchy; the right, and the manosphere, blame feminism. I think the main problem is older and more embarrassing than either: men are weak. I’ll define that word carefully, because it’s easy to misread, but the short version is that the weakness I mean is chosen, a long series of small choices that accumulate into character, or more precisely into the absence of it.

Added up across millions of men, that weakness pollutes almost every system that ought to work: the romance market, public discourse, community health, even politics. Weak men don’t have to be evil for this to happen, and most of the cost lands on people other than them.

This is going to be uncomfortable to read; it was uncomfortable to write. If you’re a man, there’s a non-trivial chance you’ll recognize yourself in some of what follows. I recognized myself, and I’d take that as a reason to keep reading.

II.

The word “weak” is loaded, I know. In gender discourse, calling men weak sounds like something an alpha-male podcast host says right before selling you a 499-dollar course on proper mewing. So I need to define what I mean, and what I don’t, before going further.

I don’t mean poverty: a man working two shifts on the minimum wage to feed his family might be the strongest man in any room he walks into. I don’t mean introversion, since preferring a book to a party on a Friday night says nothing about character. I don’t mean failure either; the man who goes bankrupt, or confesses his feelings and gets rejected, is doing what strength requires. And I don’t mean mental illness. Depression, anxiety disorders, and PTSD are medical conditions that need medical care, and confusing illness with weakness of character has already hurt men for long enough.

Here’s the operational definition I’ll use for the rest of the essay: a weak man is a man who refuses agency over his own life. He has choices (a man without choices is oppressed, which is a different category), but choosing costs something he isn’t willing to pay: discomfort, risk, the possibility of failure, and heaviest of all, responsibility for the outcome.

I see five patterns that show up fairly consistently. I’ll describe them as symptoms of one syndrome, which I think is more accurate, and more useful, than calling them sins.

1. Nihilism without construction

Some nihilism is productive. Nietzsche (yes, I know quoting Nietzsche in an essay on masculinity is close to self-parody by now) never meant the death of God as an end point. Dismantling the old values was supposed to be a transition toward making new ones.

The nihilism I see in most young men around me stops at the dismantling. “Life is meaningless,” full stop, with no “and therefore I’ll build my own meaning” afterwards: just emptiness decorated with irony and a detachment that feels cool at 19 and gets sadder at 25, 30, and 35.

What makes it worse is that it feels like wisdom. “A career is a hamster wheel. Relationships are temporary. All value systems are social constructs.” You might be technically right about all of it, but true and useful are different properties, and in practice this kind of nihilism works as intellectual cover for not doing anything. Indonesian Twitter calls it masturbasi intelektual, which is rude and correct.

The diagnostic test is simple. Does your nihilism produce anything (art, writing, action, a framework you actually live by), or does it only produce reasons not to start?

2. No skin in the game anywhere

Taleb’s skin in the game, the idea that you should bear the consequences of your own decisions, is usually read as an ethical rule. I find it more useful as an information mechanism. People with skin in the game learn from reality; people without it learn from narrative, and a narrative can stay wrong indefinitely because nothing forces it to correct.

The weak man usually has a job or classes and a routine, so he looks busy. What he lacks is an arena where he risks something (reputation, time, emotional energy, money) with a real chance of failing and a consequence he would feel directly. His opinions are loud on Twitter and never tested in a room where someone can answer back, and his moral positions are free: he posts a story about a social issue and never pays anything for it.

I wrote about one version of this in Against ‘All’, about the FH UI 2023 case: men posting condemnations of sexual harassment when posting was the only thing their position had ever cost them. I don’t think that was an anomaly. It has the same root, which is having no domain where what you say and what you do get tested against consequences.

For a brutal test, look at your life and ask where failure has a price, where you can be wrong and feel the wrongness instead of just knowing it abstractly. If the answer is nowhere, you’re stagnating.

3. The neglected body

This is the easiest one to misread. I don’t mean aesthetics; the fitness industry’s six-pack standards are as distorted as the beauty industry’s, and nobody needs to bench 120kg to count as strong. I mean a person’s relationship with deliberate physical discomfort.

Something happens when you put your body in an uncomfortable situation on purpose: you lift something heavy, run further than is comfortable, or train a martial art where someone is literally trying to put you on the floor, and then you keep going. Nobody forces you, and usually nobody is watching.

I think of this as pedagogy more than exercise. You’re teaching your nervous system that discomfort is information rather than an order to stop, and that capacity transfers: difficult conversations, boring work that has to be done anyway, relationships that demand emotional labour, and slow, frustrating learning all draw on it.

My suspicion, and it’s speculation rather than an empirical claim, is that one reason so many young men can’t sustain a job, a relationship, or a project for the long run is that they’ve never trained this capacity. A psyche that has never been challenged takes the path of least resistance, and in almost any meaningful context that path leads toward irrelevance. (The generational decline in young men’s testosterone might be relevant or might not: Travison et al. (2007) found a drop of roughly 1% a year that ageing, obesity, and measured lifestyle changes don’t fully explain. The correlation is there and the causality isn’t.)

Some of this is autobiographical. There were periods in my life when I didn’t exercise, and I felt the effect in how I handled hard things more than in the mirror: my threshold for giving up dropped, and my tolerance for discomfort shrank. That could be confirmation bias. I noted it anyway.

4. Consumption without production

This might be the most insidious symptom, precisely because it doesn’t look like a problem. Consuming content (social media, streaming, pornography, gaming, news, podcasts) is fine on its own; everyone does it. What matters is the ratio between what you consume and what you produce, and for a lot of the young men I know, that ratio went past dysfunctional a long time ago.

Superstimulus is a concept from ethology. Niko Tinbergen found that nesting birds would neglect their own eggs to sit on a fake one that was bigger and more brightly coloured. The fake triggered the same instinct as the real egg, only harder than anything the birds’ evolutionary environment had ever produced. The birds weren’t stupid; their firmware just wasn’t built for stimulation at that level.

Pornography is a sexual superstimulus, junk food a nutritional one, social media a social one, and modern video games compress the feedback loops of progression and status, which in the real world play out over years, into hours. None of these is evil in itself. But chronic consumption with no production to balance it calibrates your reward system to a level of stimulation ordinary life can’t match, so work feels flat, conversation feels slow, and real relationships feel like effort next to parasocial ones that ask for nothing. It also spirals, since the more you consume, the more ordinary stimulation blunts. (The neuroscience here is thinner than the popular version suggests; I go through it in the pornography essay.)

Production (writing, building, making) runs on a different reward pathway. The reward is slower and smaller per unit of time and often comes with frustration and self-doubt. But it compounds, which consumption never does: what you write today is still there tomorrow, and this month’s skill becomes next month’s foundation. Compound interest on consistent production is how people build anything that lasts.

5. Virtue without a price

There’s a difference between having a virtue and displaying one, and the difference is the price. Honesty that only shows up when it’s free doesn’t count for much; it becomes a virtue at the moment it costs you something (a friend, a position, your own comfort) and you say the true thing anyway.

Weak men, in the pattern I keep seeing, have a lot of values and very few virtues. They know what’s right in the abstract and can articulate it fluently, and when those values have to be practised at a cost, they disappear. A group chat is making harassing jokes, and you stay quiet because pushing back would be awkward. A friend treats his partner badly, and you say nothing because “that’s their business”. Every time you choose comfort over a principle you hold, you teach yourself that your principles have a price, and that the price is low.

Here’s a test I use on myself, and don’t always pass: when did a principle of yours last cost you something real (a friend, money, a position, a sense of safety) because you stood on it? A mildly awkward conversation doesn’t count. If the answer is “a long time ago” or “never”, I’d call what you have a preference. A preference asks nothing of you, which is exactly why it feels comfortable and exactly why it’s worth so little.

These five are one syndrome showing up in five places. If I had to put the underlying condition in one sentence: refusing discomfort, as the default operating mode for a life. Nihilism is easier than building a value system, consuming is easier than producing, and the same goes for staying out of every arena, skipping the 5am run, and displaying virtue instead of paying for it.

At the individual level, most of this is forgivable; everyone takes the easy option sometimes, and I take it more often than I’d like to admit. But when a large share of a generation’s men run this default mode at the same time, it stops being a personal problem and becomes a systemic pollutant, and pollution doesn’t respect property lines. First, though, the question of where it comes from.

III.

If I stopped at Section II, this essay would be a longer version of the thousand “man up” sermons already on the internet, which share one fundamental problem: they never ask why. Nobody was born weaker than his grandfather. Something in the environment changed, enough that the default developmental path for young men now produces a different output than it did a few decades ago. I’ve asked other people for analytic empathy (understanding how someone ended up where they are without justifying it), so I owe the same courtesy here. Weak men don’t need my pity, but a diagnosis without an etiology is just a label. I count five things that changed.

A. The collapse of formative institutions

For most of human history, young men didn’t become adults on their own. Institutions formed them, and those institutions were designed to channel unfocused energy into something functional.

Organized religion gave you an explicit moral framework and a story that placed your life inside something larger than yourself. I’ve written about what goes wrong when values become non-negotiable, and I can hold both thoughts at once: religion gave an answer (imperfect, sometimes dangerous, but an answer) to “what am I living for”, and that question, left with no answer at all, produces the nihilism from Section II.

Apprenticeships and guilds gave you a trajectory: novice, years of boring and difficult work under a master, honest feedback the whole way, and at the end real skill, an identity built on competence, and a place in the community. Rites of passage, from tribal initiations to military service, marked the line between boy and man, almost always with an ordeal you had to walk through, after which the community treated you as accountable.

I don’t want to romanticize any of this. Organized religion produced dogmatism and violence, compulsory military service is state coercion, and traditional rites of passage were often brutal and exclusionary. I don’t want to go back to any of it.

The trouble is that we tore those institutions down, often for good reasons, and never built replacements. The answers that filled the vacuum by default have been bad: influencers selling transactional masculinity, incel forums selling resentment as an identity, and, most common of all, no answer, just emptiness filled with superstimulus. Ecologists know the pattern: remove an apex predator because it’s dangerous, without understanding its regulatory role, and the deer explode, the vegetation goes, and the soil erodes. Taleb calls this iatrogenics, harm done by the healer.

B. The kafka trap of gender

I covered this in Against ‘All’, so here’s the short version. Some gender discourse works as education (“there’s a social pattern you need to understand, and here’s how you can help change it”) and some as indoctrination (“you’re guilty by virtue of what you are, and every response you give proves it”). Under the second, discomfort is privilege, pushback is fragility, and silence is complicity, so every exit is closed before you walk in. Most people who talk about privilege and patriarchy aren’t doing this. A vocal minority is, and the reasonable majority rarely corrects its own side.

In young men the second version rarely produces sincere compliance. It produces one of three things: resentful submission (the right vocabulary in public, a darker version of yourself in private), withdrawal from the conversation altogether, or radicalization into communities that tell you you’re right and the world is wrong. None of this excuses anyone; men who harass or radicalize are adults with agency. But fault and prevention are different questions, and a framing that reliably produces mimicry, withdrawal, or radicalization is failing at prevention.

C. A shifting labour market

This is the factor people talk about least in places like SCBD or Accounting UI, possibly because we aren’t the demographic it hits.

Through most of the 20th century, men who weren’t academic achievers had a clear pathway: manufacturing, construction, mining, and other physical work that paid enough to feed a family, gave you an identity built on competence (“I’m a good welder”), and gave you a place in your community. Deindustrialization destroyed it. In the US, manufacturing fell from about 30% of total employment in the 1950s to about 8% today, and Indonesia is on a different timeline moving in the same direction.

Meanwhile the education system, the main gateway into the knowledge economy, demands more and more sitting still, focus, and compliance, all of which are harder for boys at the same age. Reeves summarizes the developmental research: on average, boys mature more slowly in the prefrontal regions that regulate impulse control and executive function. His proposed fix is simple and radical, that boys start school a year later than girls, and it has gone almost nowhere, because talking about boys’ disadvantages still feels to many people like a betrayal of the fight for gender equality.

That’s zero-sum thinking, and zero-sum thinking about gender, from any direction, is one of the most damaging failures in public discourse right now.

D. The absence of fathers

This may be the most uncomfortable factor to discuss, because it touches nearly every assumption we hold about family structure.

Raj Chetty and his colleagues, working with tax records for millions of American children, found that the share of single-parent households in an area is among the strongest predictors of how much upward mobility children from that area get, and the effect reaches children of married parents living there too. A follow-up paper found that disadvantage hits boys harder: among children from the poorest fifth of families, the usual gender gap in employment reverses, and boys end up less likely to work than girls.

The most plausible mechanism, I think, is modelling. Boys learn how to be adult men largely by watching the adult men around them: how they manage anger, treat a partner, handle failure, and work. When that model is missing, boys look for one somewhere else, and increasingly somewhere else means the internet, whose models of masculinity (Andrew Tate, incel forums) are not ideal.

I don’t mean this as an argument for the traditional family in the conservative sense. Two mothers can raise an extraordinary boy, and single mothers often do it heroically. My reading is narrower: what seems to matter is a functional adult male role model, whether a father, an uncle, a teacher, or a mentor. The data can’t cleanly separate this from income and neighbourhood effects, so treat the role-model part as my interpretation.

E. The superstimulus environment

This one is closest to your own experience, and I covered the mechanism in Section II. For the first time in the species’ history, high-intensity stimulation is unlimited, nearly free, available twenty-four hours a day, and tuned by systems whose only objective is your time on the platform. A reward system that evolved for scarcity (food meant hunting, sex meant social bonds, status meant real contribution) handles that badly. Biologists call it evolutionary mismatch, and I think it explains more than bad character does: the young man who spends six hours a day on TikTok is no more morally inferior than the bird on the fake egg.

Knowing you’re vulnerable doesn’t give you permission to surrender, though. Unlike the birds, we can recognize the pattern and override the default. It’s expensive and willpower is finite, but once you know what’s happening, refusing to try stops being mismatch and becomes a choice.

Put the five together and you get conditions in which weakness is the path of least resistance. Does that make weak men victims? I don’t think so. The factors are real, and they make becoming strong harder, or at least hard in a different way. But everyone lives in an environment they didn’t choose. Women historically faced constraints far heavier than anything I’ve described, and as a group they now outperform men on almost every educational metric. Constraints are context, and nobody gets a pass because of them.

Context matters for a practical reason: it lets us design interventions that work. “Man up” is a slogan, and slogans don’t change environments; an understanding of the mechanism precise enough to modify it does. Before solutions, though, one more question: why is male weakness your problem, and not just a problem for the men who have it?

IV.

It’s tempting to treat the weak man as a self-contained problem: let him be, he’s the only one who suffers. If that were true, I might not have written this essay, since people have the right to ruin their own lives as long as they don’t harm anyone else.

The trouble is that weak men do harm other people. They do it without intending to, the way air pollution does: as a byproduct of behaviour that feels, to the person doing it, entirely personal.

Economists call this a negative externality, a cost of an activity that falls on people who didn’t take part in it. The factory dumping waste into the river keeps the profit, and the community downstream gets mercury in its drinking water. The aggregate pattern I’ve described is a factory dumping waste into five rivers at once.

Externality 1. Distorting the romance market

I made this argument at length in Like a Deep-Fried Stock, so here’s the compressed version. A market needs price discovery, and price discovery needs a feedback loop: unrealistic expectations should run into the fact that nobody will meet them. The men who wait indefinitely on someone who hasn’t made them a priority, who give time and resources with nothing coming back, or who accept conditions they know are below standard because they’re afraid of being alone, all absorb that feedback. When the supply of attention never falls, whatever the conditions, nobody gets accurate information about their own position, including the men who aren’t subsidizing anyone.

The layer I didn’t articulate there is that the distortion costs women too. An expectation inflated by unconditional subsidy makes a partner who is actually sekufu feel like settling, and the correction, when it comes, often comes late. High standards aren’t the problem, since they’re rational in any market. The problem is a floor that keeps falling because some men keep giving away something valuable and asking for nothing back.

Externality 2. Contaminating public discourse

A man who posts about rape culture without ever having paid anything for the position is showing the fifth symptom, virtue without a price, and nothing is cheaper than a post. The bigger cost is that discourse becomes unfalsifiable. When the loudest voices on an issue have the least skin in the game, nothing forces their claims to meet reality, and untested claims can only escalate: the motte drifts into the bailey, and “there’s a pattern that needs fixing” turns into “Kill All Men”.

Two groups pay. Women fighting for legitimate change lose credibility every time a performer borrows their language for social capital, because the suspicion doesn’t stay on the performers. And young men trying to understand themselves conclude either that nobody is sincere, which pushes them toward cynicism, or that they’d better post the same things to stay safe, which produces one more performer.

Externality 3. Funding an exploitative industry

In the pornography essay I argued that the traditional industry is what Taleb calls a Bob Rubin trade: executives take the profit and performers take the risk. The demand side belongs in the same ledger. The industry runs on traffic, and the traffic comes disproportionately from young men whose consumption far exceeds their production. Pornhub hosted abuse material for years and acted at scale only after the card networks turned against it; what let it ignore the problem that long was hundreds of millions of daily visits. “I’m only watching” may be true as a statement about you. As a statement about the system it’s wilful blindness, since without demand the supply isn’t viable.

Externality 4. Radicalization and political instability

This is the externality people least associate with “weak men”, and maybe the most dangerous at scale. I can’t think of a significant modern extremist movement that wasn’t built from the same raw material, directionless and resentful young men: ISIS and the alt-right both recruited from that population, and the incel movement is that population organizing itself.

The pipeline has become short. Recommendation algorithms optimized for engagement and indifferent to truth can walk a young man from mildly edgy content to openly extremist content in months, from self-improvement to looksmaxxing to inceldom to white supremacy. Men with purpose, community, and a stake in society are hard to recruit, because they’re busy and have too much to lose. The pipeline works on men who have none of that, and what makes them recruitable is emptiness more than malice. Any sufficiently savvy operator can fill a vacuum.

Externality 5. The extra burden carried by women

This is the most counterintuitive of the five, and possibly the most important for this essay’s audience. The standard frame says patriarchy harms women and men benefit, which is true in aggregate and historically. At the interpersonal level, though, weak men create an extra burden that falls disproportionately on the women around them.

The first form is emotional labour without reciprocity. A woman partnered with a man who has never consciously processed his emotional life (no vocabulary for his feelings, withdrawal or anger as his default response to distress) becomes his unpaid therapist, because he lacks the baseline capacity to take part in the relationship as an equal.

The second, and the starkest, is children raised without a functional co-parent. A man without agency over his own life can’t be one. When parenting falls disproportionately on the mother, because the father is absent or present in body and absent in function, calling it “family dynamics” hides what it is: an externality paid by women and children.

The third, and the bleakest, is physical safety. Most violence against women is committed by men they know. It has many causes, and one consistent thread is men who can’t manage anger and frustration constructively, whose default response to emotional discomfort is discharge instead of processing, and whose discharge often lands on the people closest to them. Many weak men aren’t violent at all; they’re withdrawn rather than aggressive. But the overlap between this syndrome and the risk profile for domestic violence is large enough that leaving it out would be dishonest.

Five rivers, then, contaminated by one source. In every one of them, the people paying the cost are mostly different from the people producing the pollution. The weak man’s own life is the most damaged, but most of the bill goes to women, children, and communities: a textbook negative externality, and a textbook Bob Rubin trade. That makes it a public problem, and public problems need change at the individual level and at the level of the system.

V.

I don’t like giving advice, and this section is going to sound a lot like advice, damn. There’s something epistemically suspicious about a man in his early twenties telling other people how to live, and I don’t always practise what’s below. It’s aimed at men who read Section II and thought “damn, some of that is me”. If you recognized nothing at all, either you’re further along than I assumed or you’re in a denial an essay won’t break, and I can’t tell which from here.

1. Find one domain where you have skin in the game

Just one, on purpose: trying to change everything at once is a reliable recipe for quitting within two weeks, because every extra domain drains the same reservoir of willpower. By a domain with skin in the game I mean an arena where failure has a price you actually feel, success takes effort you actually spend, and other people can judge the result.

It could be almost anything: a competitive sport where you lose in front of people, a small business where you stake real time and money, a skill whose output is visible and can be criticized (coding, writing, cooking, carpentry, music), a community project where other people depend on you. A committed relationship counts too, since you’re explicitly staking time, emotional energy, and the possibility of heartbreak.

Watching self-improvement videos doesn’t count (ironic, given that you’re reading this essay), and neither does planning, which is where most people get stuck because it feels like doing. The simplest test is whether there’s a scenario in which the outcome could embarrass you. If there isn’t, you’re still in the safe zone, which is where weakness compounds.

2. Do something physically hard, regularly

If you’ve never exercised consistently, I’d start with resistance training. The feedback loop is fast and unambiguous: you lift 40kg this week and 42.5kg next week, and the number either went up or it didn’t, which is therapeutic for someone whose life is full of ambiguity. The barrier to entry is low, and the discomfort is graduated: you start light and add weight in small steps, which matters because too much discomfort too fast produces avoidance instead of adaptation.

If you already have a physical habit, ask whether it still challenges you. A 5K you can run half-asleep is maintenance by now, and adaptation needs progressive overload. I suspect that principle holds outside the gym too.

3. Cut the superstimulus, gradually

Cold turkey has a low success rate for almost any entrenched behaviour, so I won’t tell you to delete everything starting today. What works better is making consumption mechanically harder and production mechanically easier: delete the apps from your home screen and keep the accounts, add friction (timers, grayscale, the phone in another room while you work), and change what you default to when you’re bored. Instagram to academic journals is too big a jump; four hours of gaming to two hours plus an hour of coding is doable.

On pornography, the full argument is in the other essay. If you consume it regularly, try stopping for thirty days as an experiment rather than a moral test, and notice whether anything changes in your energy, your motivation, or the quality of your social interactions. If nothing changes, fair enough. If something does, you’ll have personal data more valuable than any argument I could write.

One rule: don’t announce it. The moment you announce a behaviour change, you collect the social reward for intending it without having executed anything, which is exactly the pattern you’re trying to break. Peter Gollwitzer’s studies found that people who announced their goals followed through less than people who kept quiet.

4. Produce something, anything, regularly

This overlaps with skin in the game without being the same thing; a private journal is production without stakes, and gambling is stakes without production. I mean a regular habit of making something that wasn’t there before, anything you can point at afterwards and say, “this wasn’t here this morning, and now it is, because of me.”

The reason is mechanical. Production is the most direct antidote to nihilism, because it answers “nothing is meaningful” with evidence instead of counter-philosophy. I’m not recommending hustle culture, which is a different pathology (workaholism is a superstimulus dressed up as virtue). What I care about is the ratio: if the net flow of your life tilts toward consumption, and not by a little, fix the allocation.

5. Hold principles that are falsifiable, and test them

“I believe in honesty” is lovely until someone asks when your honesty last cost you anything. An unfalsifiable principle sounds nice and demands nothing. A falsifiable one has observable consequences: “I will not stay silent when my friend treats someone badly” gets tested by specific moments, and you can pass or fail.

A useful exercise: write down three principles you hold. For each, write (a) the most recent concrete situation in which it was tested and (b) what you did. If you can’t fill in (a), you don’t yet know whether the principle is yours or just an aspiration. If (b) is disappointing, now you know where the gap is. Nobody passes all of these, and I’ve failed in places I’m ashamed to describe. The useful question is whether you know where you failed and intend to do differently next time.

6. Apply sekufu to yourself first

In Like a Deep-Fried Stock I wrote about sekufu as a framework for choosing a partner: equality in epistemology, values, trajectory, and emotional capacity. The step I skipped there is that sekufu demands an honest self-assessment first. Saying “I’ll only settle for someone equal to me” assumes you know where you sit on each dimension, in the operational sense rather than the “I’m a good person, fairly smart, reasonably hard-working” sense.

Epistemology: how many times in the last year have you changed your position on something important? Values, meaning the ones you reveal through behaviour: you say you value honesty, so how many times did you lie last week, lies of omission included? Trajectory, in the actual sense rather than the LinkedIn sense: is your life moving where you want, or are you drifting with a career goal as decoration? Emotional capacity: can you sit with an uncomfortable emotion without discharging it by getting angry, withdrawing, blaming someone, or self-medicating with superstimulus? Can you listen to someone talk about something painful without rushing to fix it or change the subject?

The point is calibration, and self-flagellation doesn’t help with it. Where I see things fail most often is men who want a partner with a sophisticated epistemology, strong values, an ambitious trajectory, and mature emotional capacity, who themselves haven’t met that standard on a single dimension. I don’t think that’s sekufu. It’s wishful thinking, or as we’d say, ngarep. “Fix yourself first” is unsexy advice, and it’s mechanically necessary, since you can’t ask of someone else what you can’t offer yourself.

Read as a whole, that list is overwhelming, and if you’ve spent a long time in the default mode from Section II, the distance between you and all of it feels absurd. I don’t have a fix for that feeling, only a suggestion: look at the first step instead of the distance. It’s always small and unimpressive, but it changes your trajectory, and over a long enough horizon trajectory matters more than position. You don’t need to be a different person tomorrow, just one who is moving in the right direction, even slightly, even if nobody sees it. Especially if nobody sees it, since that’s how you tell change from performance.

VI.

“Man up” assumes the problem is entirely individual. In Section III I argued that’s partly true, since agency is real, and that the choices get made inside an environment that systematically pushes toward weakness. If 30% of a city is obese, you can blame each person for eating too much and moving too little and be technically right, but you’d miss why 30% of the population is making the same choice: food deserts, car-dependent streets, working hours that leave no time to cook. Obesity is an individual problem and a systemic one, and so is male weakness.

1. Build new formative institutions

Section III described how we tore down the institutions that used to form young men and never built replacements. Nobody needs compulsory military service back. What we need are institutions that do the same job (structure, accountability, progression, community) without the baggage, and a few already exist, just not at sufficient scale.

Structured mentorship programmes deliberately pair young men with functional adult men, so that having a mentor doesn’t depend on luck. Reeves emphasizes this for boys growing up without a father figure, and programmes like Big Brothers Big Sisters, while imperfect, show measurable benefits: better school attendance, less antisocial behaviour, more self-efficacy.

Martial arts gyms and serious athletic communities have a competence-based hierarchy, where seniors teach juniors and people face a physical challenge together. A well-run BJJ gym or boxing club is functionally a modern rite of passage: you arrive knowing nothing, get humbled regularly, slowly build competence, and are surrounded the whole time by people who have already been through it.

Vocational training, without the stigma. University isn’t for everyone, and for young men whose advantage is hands-on work, a path through welding, mechanics, or electrical work can deliver real skill, an identity built on competence, a decent income, and skin in the game. Germany’s and Switzerland’s dual-education systems, which combine apprenticeship with schooling, consistently produce good outcomes, and I can’t see a structural reason Indonesia couldn’t adopt something similar. The obstacles are mostly cultural.

Project-based communities (hackathons, maker spaces, art collectives, open-source projects) are places where people show up to make something together. Communities built on shared production tend to be sturdier than ones built on shared consumption or identity, because production gives them objective common ground that doesn’t depend on everyone liking each other.

2. Education reform that admits the gender gap

Boys are falling behind in our education systems, the gap has been opening for decades, and the policy attention it gets is close to zero next to the (legitimate) attention paid to gaps that disadvantage women in STEM and leadership. My suspicion is that admitting boys can be disadvantaged in one domain still feels, to many people, like betraying the admission that women are disadvantaged in others. Both are true, and refusing to acknowledge the first for fear it cancels the second is dogma.

Reeves’s redshirting proposal from Section III is the cheapest intervention on the table. Two others: hire more male teachers, especially in primary school, where in some countries they’re under 15% of the workforce (there’s a documented correlation with boys’ performance, though the causal story needs more research), and design pedagogy with more hands-on work, more movement, and more structured competition, which doesn’t have to come at girls’ expense.

3. Normalize corrective feedback among men

Male friendship tends to fail by under-engaging. It often runs on an unspoken contract, “I won’t comment on your life and you won’t comment on mine”, which feels like respect and is closer to negligence.

When did you last say to a male friend, “Dul, I think you’re wrecking your life”, or “the way you treat your girlfriend isn’t right”? If the answer is never, and for most men I suspect it is, you’re a comfortable friend, which in the end is the friend who watches someone he loves drown from the edge of the pool, saying “well, that’s his business”.

These conversations are awkward, they can damage the friendship, and they can be met with defensiveness. That’s exactly why they’re valuable: you’re taking on discomfort in someone else’s interest, which makes it virtue in the sense from Section II. I doubt a campaign will normalize this. More likely it happens one honest conversation at a time.

4. Regulate superstimulus for adolescents

First, what I’m not proposing: a ban on social media or gaming for adults. Prohibition pushes behaviour underground, and adults have the right to make bad decisions about their own lives. What I am proposing is meaningful barriers between adolescents and superstimulus their reward circuitry isn’t ready for, starting with algorithmic recommendation for minors. Engines optimized for engagement serve whatever triggers the strongest response (outrage, anxiety, arousal, envy), which is annoying for an adult brain and potentially formative for one whose prefrontal cortex is still under construction. When long-term effects are unknown and the downside is large and hard to reverse, the default should lean toward restriction.

The obvious counterargument is that parents should supervise. Ideally, yes. In the real world most parents aren’t digitally savvy enough to know what their kids consume, let alone manage it, and handing the whole responsibility to people you know lack the tools is abdication.

This section is much more tentative than Section V, because systemic prescriptions involve coordination problems, political will, and messy implementation, where individual ones have a small scope and a fast feedback loop. If I had to pick the item with the largest impact per unit of effort, it would be corrective feedback among men, because anyone can start it today without waiting for policy that may never arrive. You may have noticed that this is an individual prescription dressed up as a systemic one. Maybe that’s the point: systemic change might start with enough people making the same individual decision at once that it becomes a norm.

VII.

I’ve spent six sections criticizing weak men with what I hope is enough precision. Now for the question I find least comfortable: how much of this is about me?

Nihilism without construction: there was a period in my life, longer than I’d like to admit, when I used cynicism as a substitute for a personality, and “everything is meaningless” was less a philosophical conclusion than a justification for not trying. Am I fully out of it? I hope so, and hoping is weaker than knowing.

Skin in the game: I’m writing this essay, and people will read it and judge it, so there’s some. But criticizing weak men in front of an audience that will mostly applaud isn’t high-risk behaviour. The real test is the moments nobody watches.

The body: I exercise, but whether it’s challenging or a maintenance zone that feels productive depends on the week.

Consumption and production: I write, and I also consume more than I want to admit, five-minute scrolls that become forty-five. The ratio beats zero. Whether it’s good, I’m not sure.

Virtue with a price: there are conversations I should have had with friends and didn’t, because they would have been awkward, and moments when I knew something was wrong and stayed silent. By my own definition, I’m failing my own test.

The most uncomfortable question is whether this essay is itself a substitute for the harder work. There’s dopamine in feeling that you’ve identified a problem precisely and in feeling above the situation you’re describing, and that dopamine isn’t very different from what I criticized in men who post stories about social issues and never do anything about them. I think the essay is more than a longer Instagram story, since there’s real research in it and an argument that has to hold together. Whether it meets my own standard for skin in the game, I suspect the answer is “not yet”.

Part of my motivation is also less than altruistic. Part of it is wanting to feel that I’m not the man I’m describing: define the category, describe it in detail, and quietly place myself outside it. That’s an identity built on negation, and identities built on negation are fragile, because they need a “them” to function. Every layer of self-awareness about this can be one more layer of performance, and I don’t have a way out of that regress. The best I can do is pick a level at which to stop and act from there as honestly as I can.

There’s one thing, though, that I don’t think is performance, or if it is, it’s costly enough that it probably isn’t worth faking: the discomfort you’re feeling right now.

If you’re a man and parts of this made your stomach turn a little, that’s data. It’s a feedback loop doing its job, reality asking whether this is about you. For most of us, me included, the answer is partly yes. Everyone has been weak at some point, so that isn’t the interesting question. The interesting one is whether the weakness becomes an identity, something you defend and build a life on, or a data point you use to move somewhere else.

I don’t know which way you’ll go, and I don’t always know which way I’ll go. This essay is written on the premise that people can change, which is a hypothesis, and like any hypothesis it gets tested by acting. Reading doesn’t test it.

So close this tab, put the phone down, and do one thing you’ve known for a while you need to do and haven’t done, because it was uncomfortable. Today, if not right now.

If you actually do it (as opposed to thinking “yeah, later” and scrolling to the next piece of content), then maybe this essay turns out to be more than a longer Instagram story. I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet on it, which is, I suppose, a small amount of skin in the game.

Grazie, ciao.