Epistemic Note

This essay tries to consolidate a few arguments scattered across my earlier writing, on the distortion of the romance market, on virtue signalling, on pornography, into a single (hopefully) coherent diagnosis. I’m writing this before I turn 22, which means I am almost certainly wrong about some things here, possibly important ones. I’m also writing this as someone who, at various points in his life, has been a version of what I criticise. Reader, please discount accordingly for both biases.

This essay is not a men’s rights manifesto. Not an incel blackpill. Not a sermon about “returning to the natural state of masculinity”. If you came here looking for confirmation that women are at fault, you have the wrong address. The thing I’m blaming, explicitly and consistently, is men.

More precisely. The patterns of male behaviour that, in aggregate, damage almost every system they touch.

I.

Something is happening to men. Not in the rhetorical sense (“there is something wrong with modern masculinity”) but in a sense that can be measured, mapped, and counted in deaths.

In the United States, men die by suicide at a rate almost four times that of women. The data has been consistent for decades and the gap is not closing. 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 with painful detail.

On the education side, the gap is now running in a direction that might surprise people. In nearly every OECD country, women now outperform men at every level of education. In the US, women earn about 60% of bachelor’s degrees and 63% of master’s degrees. 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 not a conservative (he was an adviser in the Obama administration), wrote an entire book about this, Of Boys and Men.

In the labour market, the share of prime-age men (25-54 years old) who are neither working nor looking for work has been climbing since the 1960s. This isn’t unemployment. Unemployment assumes you are still looking. This is labour-force non-participation. Men who have opted out of the game entirely. In the US, the figure is now around 11%, up from about 3% in the mid-20th century. Part of this is explained by structural changes in the economy. Part of it is not.

The most striking data might be the data on loneliness. The American Survey of Social Life (2021) found that the share of men who report having no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. A five-fold increase in three decades. Women also experienced an increase, but the magnitude isn’t comparable.

And at the most intimate end of the data, the General Social Survey shows the proportion of young men (18-29) reporting no sexual activity in the past twelve months rose from about 10% in 2008 to roughly 27% in 2018. The same cohort for women was relatively stable.

I want to pause and say something that might sound odd given that this essay is going to criticise men fairly hard. The data is genuinely sad. These are real people who can’t sleep, who have no one to call, who have no reason to get up in the morning, and in the most extreme cases decide there is no reason to get up at all.

If your first reaction to this data is “well, that’s the karma of patriarchy” or “finally, men feel what women feel”, I get the impulse, but I think it’s empirically wrong and strategically dangerous. Empirically wrong because the man dying by suicide in rural West Virginia is not the same man sitting on a Fortune 500 board. “Men” is not a monolith, and applying categorical consequences to a deeply heterogeneous group is precisely the habit of thought we should have outgrown. Strategically dangerous because, and this is what I’ll argue throughout, men who are broken do not break alone. They break everyone around them.

There is, however, an important caveat. There is a large gap between saying “there is a problem with men” and saying “men are victims”. Men are not victims in any systemic sense. Men still hold the majority of political, economic, and institutional power in almost every society on Earth. The asymmetry of experience between men and women on sexual violence, harassment, and physical safety is real, and I do not intend to minimise it here or anywhere.

What I am saying is more specific, and I think more useful. There is something mechanically broken in how a large share of young men are living their lives, and that brokenness has externalities borne by everyone else, including (and maybe especially) by women.

The question is not “should we feel sorry for men”. I don’t think so. No more than we feel sorry for anyone who has agency and refuses to use it. The question is, what, precisely, is broken? And can that breakage be fixed, or at least understood clearly enough that we can stop arguing about symptoms and start diagnosing the disease?

I suspect the answer involves something neither side of the political spectrum likes to say. The main problem is not patriarchy (the left’s explanation). It’s not feminism (the right’s, or the manosphere’s). The main problem is simpler, older, and more embarrassing than either.

The main problem is that men are weak. And the weakness, which I’ll define carefully because the word “weak” is too easy to misread, is not a condition imposed from outside. It is a choice. A series of small choices that accumulate into character, or more precisely, into the absence of it.

That weakness, in aggregate, pollutes almost every system that ought to function. The romance market, public discourse, community health, even politics. Not because weak men are evil. Because, in more technical terminology, a weak man is a negative externality that walks and breathes.

This is going to be uncomfortable to read. It was uncomfortable to write. If you are a man, there is a non-trivial chance you will recognise yourself in some of what’s coming. I recognised myself. That is not a reason to stop reading. Actually, it’s the opposite.

II.

The word “weak” is loaded. I know that. In a gender-discourse context, calling men “weak” sounds like something an alpha-male podcast host would say to sell a 499-dollar course on proper mewing or a get-rich-in-30-days trading bootcamp. I need to define what I mean, and just as importantly, what I don’t mean, before we can go further.

What “weak” does NOT mean in this essay.

Weak isn’t poor. Someone who works two shifts to feed his family on the minimum wage is not a weak man. He might be the strongest man in any room he walks into. Resources don’t determine strength. What you do with the resources you have does.

Weak isn’t introverted. Someone who hates parties, hates small talk, and would rather read alone on a Friday night isn’t a weak man. Social preference isn’t a measure of character.

Weak isn’t failure. Someone who starts a business and goes bankrupt, who confesses feelings and gets rejected, who tries and falls short, isn’t displaying weakness. That is, if anything, a prerequisite for strength. You cannot be strong without ever bearing the consequence of an effort that didn’t work.

Weak isn’t mental illness. Clinical depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD. These are medical conditions that need medical care. Conflating illness with weakness of character is a stupidity that has already damaged men for long enough, and I’m not going to add to the damage.

Then what is it?

A weak man, by the operational definition of this essay, is a man who refuses agency over his own life. Not because he has no choices. That’s called oppression and it’s a different category. But because choosing demands something he isn’t willing to pay. Discomfort, risk, the possibility of failure, and the heaviest of all, responsibility for the outcome.

It’s a specific weakness. Not weakness of muscle, not weakness of finances. It is weakness in a person’s relationship with agency. The capacity and willingness to make choices that carry consequences, and then to stand on the consequences.

There are, I think, a few patterns that show up fairly consistently. I want to describe them not as sins, but as symptoms of one underlying syndrome.

Symptom 1. Nihilism Without Construction

There is a kind of nihilism that is productive. Nietzsche wrote about this, and yes, I’m aware that quoting Nietzsche in an essay on masculinity is nearly self-parody by now, but bear with me. Nietzsche didn’t declare the death of God as the end point. That was supposed to be the beginning. The dismantling of old values was supposed to be a transition toward creating new ones, toward the Übermensch, the man who creates his own meaning after looking into the void.

The nihilism I see in most young men around me isn’t Nietzsche’s. This is nihilism that stops at the dismantling. “Life is meaningless.” Full stop. Nothing afterwards. No “and therefore I’ll create my own meaning”. Just an emptiness decorated with irony, cynicism, and a detachment that feels cool at 19 and gets sadder at 25, 30, 35.

What makes it more problematic is that this kind of nihilism feels like wisdom. You feel as if you have seen beyond the illusion that motivates everyone else. “A career is a hamster wheel. Relationships are temporary. All value systems are social constructs.” Technically, maybe you’re right about all of that. But “true” and “useful” are not synonyms. And nihilism without construction, in practice, only ever functions as intellectual cover for not doing anything.

It isn’t philosophy. It’s cope dressed in the vocabulary of philosophy.

The diagnostic test is simple. Does your nihilism produce anything? Art, writing, action, a framework for life you actually live by? Or does it only produce reasons not to start?

Symptom 2. No Skin in the Game Anywhere

Nassim Taleb has a concept I think is underappreciated outside the circle that has already read him. Skin in the game, the idea that you have to bear the consequences of your own decisions. Not only as an ethical principle, but as an informational mechanism. People with skin in the game learn from reality. People without it learn from narrative, and narrative can be wrong indefinitely because there is no feedback loop forcing correction.

A weak man, in the pattern I observe, tends not to have skin in the game in any meaningful domain. It isn’t that he does nothing. Many have jobs, classes, routines. But there is no arena where they genuinely risk something, reputation, time, emotional energy, money, with a real chance of failure and a real consequence of failure that they will feel directly.

His job is on autopilot. His relationships are low-stakes or absent. His opinions are loud on Twitter but never staked in a room where someone can answer back. His moral positions are free. He posts an Instagram story about a social issue and never bears any social cost for the position.

I wrote about this phenomenon specifically in the context of the FH UI 2023 case. Men who post condemnations of sexual harassment whose own group chats are not clean. That isn’t an anomaly. It’s a pattern. And the pattern is rooted in the same thing. No domain in which what you say and what you do gets tested by actual consequence.

For a brutal test, look at your life and ask. Where does failure have a price? Where can you be wrong and feel the wrongness, instead of only knowing it abstractly? If the answer is “nowhere”, that isn’t stability. That’s stagnation disguised as safety.

Symptom 3. The Neglected Body

This is the easiest one to misread, so I want to be very careful.

I am not talking about aesthetics. I’m not talking about six-packs or the body standards pushed by the fitness industry, which is, frankly, as distorted as the beauty industry. I’m not saying you have to bench 120kg to be considered “strong”. Bodies come in many shapes and sizes, and reducing this to physical appearance is a shallowness I have no interest in reproducing.

What I am talking about is something more fundamental. A person’s relationship with deliberate physical discomfort.

Something happens when you, voluntarily, place your body in an uncomfortable situation. Lift a heavy weight. Run further than is comfortable. Train in martial arts where someone is literally trying to put you on the floor. And then endure. Not because anyone is forcing you. Not because anyone is watching. But because you chose not to stop.

That isn’t exercise. Or, more precisely, it isn’t only exercise. It’s pedagogy. You are teaching your nervous system something. That discomfort isn’t a signal to stop. That you can override the default that says “this is unpleasant, don’t continue”. That capacity, the ability to voluntarily persist through discomfort, transfers to almost every other domain in life.

Difficult conversations. Boring work that needs to be done anyway. Relationships that demand emotional labour. Slow, frustrating learning. All of these draw on the same base capacity. The capacity to not stop just because something is unpleasant.

I suspect, and this is speculation rather than an empirical claim, that one reason so many young men can’t sustain a job, a relationship, or a project for the long run is that they have never trained this basic capacity. A body that has never been challenged produces, or at least correlates with, a psyche that has never been challenged. And a psyche that has never been challenged will always pick the path of least resistance, which in almost any meaningful context is the path toward irrelevance.

The data on generational decline in young men’s testosterone might be relevant here, or it might not. Travison et al. (2007) showed roughly a 1% per year decline that cannot be fully explained by ageing, obesity, or controlled changes in lifestyle. The correlation is there. Causality isn’t yet clear. But the fact that we are seeing a hormonal decline running parallel to a behavioural decline is at least suggestive that there is a feedback loop between physical activity, biology, and agency.

I want to be honest about something. This section is partly autobiographical. There were periods in my life when I didn’t exercise, and I could feel the effect not in the mirror but in how I handled hard things. My threshold for giving up dropped. My tolerance for discomfort shrank. The correlation could be confirmation bias. But I noted it.

Symptom 4. Consumption Without Production

This might be the most insidious symptom, precisely because it doesn’t look like a problem.

Content consumption, social media, streaming, pornography, gaming, news, podcasts, isn’t a problem on its own. Everyone consumes. The question isn’t whether you consume. The question is the ratio between what you consume and what you produce. And for a lot of the young men I know, that ratio has been past the dysfunctional point for a long time.

I’ve written about pornography specifically, about how its algorithmically optimised delivery mechanism operates on the brain’s reward circuitry in a way that has never been tested at this scale. But pornography is only one manifestation of a broader problem. The modern superstimulus industry as a whole.

Superstimulus is a concept from ethology, the study of animal behaviour. Niko Tinbergen found that you could get gulls to prefer a fake egg that was bigger and more brightly coloured than their own real egg. The fake egg triggered the same instinct as the real one, but with an intensity that exceeded anything found in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The bird wasn’t stupid. Its firmware just wasn’t designed for stimulation at that level.

Pornography is a sexual superstimulus. Junk food is a nutritional superstimulus. Social media is a social superstimulus. Modern video games are an achievement superstimulus. You get feedback loops of accomplishment, progression, and status that in the real world would take months or years, compressed into hours.

None of it is inherently evil. But chronic superstimulus consumption without the counterbalance of meaningful production creates, I think, a modern version of what older generations used to call an empty soul. Someone whose reward system has been calibrated to a level of stimulation that ordinary activity can no longer satisfy. Work feels flat. Conversation feels slow. Real relationships feel effortful compared to parasocial relationships that demand nothing.

And this produces a spiral. The more superstimulus you consume, the more blunted your reward response to normal stimulation, the more superstimulus you need to feel anything, the deeper the spiral. Kühn and Gallinat (2014) showed a correlation between heavy pornography use and reduced gray matter in the right caudate nucleus, a brain area central to reward processing. Whether consumption caused the structural change or the other way around cannot yet be proven causally. Either way, it isn’t a healthy system.

Production, writing, building, making, creating, runs on a different reward pathway. Its reward is slower, smaller per unit of time, and often comes with a healthy amount of frustration and self-doubt. But the reward from production has one thing the reward from consumption doesn’t. It compounds. What you write today is still there tomorrow. The skill you build this month becomes the foundation for next month’s. The compound interest of consistent production is how humans build anything that lasts, careers, relationships, work, identity.

Consumption without production, at the scale I see around me, isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s parasitism disguised as leisure.

Symptom 5. Virtue Without a Price

I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, so I’ll keep it short.

There is a difference between having virtue and displaying virtue. The difference is one thing. The price.

Honesty isn’t a virtue if you are only honest when honesty is free. Honesty becomes a virtue at the moment honesty is costly, when saying what’s true costs you a friend, a position, or a sense of comfort, and you say it anyway.

Courage isn’t a virtue if you are only brave in safe situations. Courage becomes a virtue at the moment an act carries real risk, and you act anyway.

Weak men, in the pattern I observe, have a lot of values and very few virtues. They know what’s right and what’s wrong, abstractly. They can articulate it fluently, in Instagram stories, in Twitter threads, in safe conversations. But at the moment those values need to be practised at cost to themselves, they are absent.

A group chat that is making harassing jokes, and you stay quiet because pushing back would be awkward. A friend treating his partner badly, and you say nothing because “that’s their business”. A corrupt work environment, and you go along with it because “that’s just how the system is”.

Every time you know something is wrong and you choose comfort over principle, you are sending yourself the signal that your principles have a price, and the price is low.

A test I use on myself, and don’t always pass. When was the last time your principle actually cost you something? Not minor discomfort. Not a mildly awkward conversation. But losing something real, a friend, money, a position, a sense of safety, because you chose to stand on what you believed was right.

If the answer is “a long time ago” or “never”, then what you have isn’t a principle. It’s a preference. And a preference, unlike a principle, doesn’t demand anything from you. That is why it feels so comfortable. And that is why it has no value.

These five symptoms, nihilism without construction, no skin in the game, the neglected body, consumption without production, and virtue without a price, aren’t five separate problems. They are one syndrome with five manifestations. The underlying condition, if I had to reduce it to one sentence, is the refusal of discomfort as a default operating mode for life.

Look at every symptom. Each is a variant of the same thing. Choosing what’s easy over what’s meaningful. Nihilism is easier than building a value system. Life without skin in the game is easier than staking something. Not exercising is easier than getting up at 5am to run. Consuming is easier than producing. Displaying virtue is easier than paying its price.

At the individual level, this is forgivable. Everyone has weak moments. Everyone sometimes picks the easy thing. I pick the easy thing more often than I’d like to admit.

But when this stops being an individual moment and becomes a collective pattern, when a large share of men in a generation are simultaneously running this default mode, it stops being a personal problem and starts being a systemic pollutant.

And pollutants, like any pollutant, do not respect boundaries. They contaminate everything they touch. How, exactly, I’ll lay out in the next section.

III.

If I stopped at Section II, this essay would only be a longer version of the thousand “man up” sermons already on the internet. And “man up” sermons, beyond being tedious, have one fundamental problem. They never ask why.

Why is it that so many young men, in this generation specifically, exhibit the syndrome I just described? Were they born weaker than the previous generation? Was there a mass genetic mutation that deleted the agency gene? Of course not. Something in their environment changed, and changed enough that the default developmental path of young men now produces a different output than it did a few decades ago.

And if I demand analytic empathy, the ability to understand why someone arrived at a certain place without justifying the place, from nearly every other group, I have to apply it here as well. Not because weak men deserve pity. But because a diagnosis without an etiology isn’t a diagnosis. It’s labelling.

So, what changed?

A. The Collapse of Formative Institutions

For most of human history, young men did not become adults organically. They were formed by institutions explicitly designed to channel unfocused energy into something functional. These institutions varied across cultures, but their functional role was remarkably consistent.

Organised religion provided an explicit moral framework. Not only “what’s right and what’s wrong”, but a cosmological narrative that placed your life in a context larger than yourself. I’ve written elsewhere about the limits of religious dogma, and I’m not walking that critique back. But I can also acknowledge, at the same time, that religion solved a real problem. It provided an answer, imperfect, sometimes dangerous, but still an answer, to the question of “what am I living for” that, without any answer at all, produces the nihilism I described in Section II.

Apprenticeship and guild systems provided a clear trajectory. You started as a novice, learned from a master, did boring and difficult work for years, and slowly rose to become a competent craftsman. The process was slow, painful, and full of honest feedback. But at the end of it you had real skill, an identity built on competence, and a clear place in the community.

Rites of passage, from tribal initiations to compulsory military service, provided a clear threshold between “boy” and “adult man”. The threshold almost always involved an ordeal, something difficult, painful, or frightening that you had to walk through. And once you walked through it, there was a social recognition that you had changed. Not a child anymore. Now accountable.

I am not romanticising these institutions. Organised religion produced dogmatism and violence. Compulsory military service is state coercion. Traditional rites of passage were often brutal and exclusionary. I don’t want to go back to any of that, and my guess is you don’t either.

But here is the trouble. We tore those institutions down, and there were good reasons to tear many of them down, without building any replacements. We deleted the old answers to “how does a young man become an adult” without supplying any new ones. And in the vacuum that resulted, the answer that emerged by default was not a good one. Influencers selling transactional masculinity. Incel communities selling resentment as identity. Or, most common and most insidious, no answer at all. Only emptiness filled with superstimulus.

The analogy might be ecosystems. If you remove an apex predator from an ecosystem because the predator is dangerous, and it is dangerous, without understanding its regulatory role, you don’t end up with a safer ecosystem. You end up with one that collapses in ways you didn’t predict. Deer populations explode, vegetation is wiped out, soil erodes, and so on. Removing something that’s problematic without understanding the function it served isn’t a solution. It only moves the problem to somewhere less visible.

B. The Kafka Trap of Gender

I’ve covered this specifically in the essay on the FH UI 2023 case, so I’ll be briefer here. But the dynamic is too important to skip.

There is a version of gender discourse that isn’t education. It is indoctrination. The difference. Education says “there is a social pattern you need to understand, and here is how you can contribute to changing it”. Indoctrination says “you are guilty by virtue of what you are, and every response to this accusation only proves the accusation is true”.

Uncomfortable? Your privilege talking. Pushing back? Fragility. Quiet? Complicity. Agreeing? Fine, but don’t ask for a cookie, that’s just baseline. Every exit has been closed before you walked in.

I know this isn’t an accurate description of feminism as a whole. I said this in “Stop The All” and I’ll say it again here. Most people talking about privilege and patriarchy are making a legitimate point in a mostly reasonable way. The problem isn’t the reasonable majority. The problem is the vocal minority that runs the kafka trap, and the fact that the reasonable majority rarely corrects the minority, probably because correcting “inward” is more socially expensive than correcting “outward”.

The effect on young men? Not sincere compliance. The effect is one of three things.

First, submission filled with resentment. Men who learn the “right” language, who can talk about consent and toxic masculinity and intersectionality with a perfect vocabulary, but in the back, in closed spaces, become a much darker version of themselves. This is precisely what happened in the FH UI 2023 group chat. Not a failure of reform. It’s prohibition pushing behaviour underground.

Second, total withdrawal. Men who decide that participating in gender discourse is too risky (anything you say can and will be used against you) and choose to check out entirely. Not in anger. In apathy. And mass apathy from half the population on questions of gender, relationships, and society isn’t a victory for anyone.

Third, radicalisation. Men who, after feeling rejected by mainstream discourse, find alternative communities that will take them. Red Pill, MGTOW, incels.is forums, or worse. These communities don’t demand they feel guilty. These communities say “you are right, the world is wrong”. That narrative is dangerous, but for someone who has been told for years that he is categorically guilty, it is very, very appealing.

I need to repeat the caveat I wrote in “Stop The All”. None of these dynamics justifies bad behaviour. Men who harass, who radicalise, who withdraw from social responsibility, are still responsible for their choices. They are adults. They have agency.

But if the question isn’t “who is at fault” but “how do we prevent this”, we have to be honest that the discursive environment as it exists is, for a significant share of young men, not an environment that produces growth. It’s an environment that produces mimicry, withdrawal, or radicalisation. And none of those three outputs is useful to anyone.

C. A Shifting Labour Market

This is the factor that’s least talked about in places like SCBD or FE UI, possibly because we aren’t the demographic directly affected.

Through most of the 20th century, there was a clear pathway for men who weren’t academic achievers. Manufacturing jobs, construction, mining, and other physical work that paid enough to feed a family, that gave you a competence-based identity (“I’m a good welder”), and that gave you a clear place in your community.

Deindustrialisation destroyed that pathway. In the US, manufacturing employment fell from about 30% of total employment in the 1950s to about 8% today. In Indonesia the process is chronologically different but moves in the same direction. The economy shifts toward services and knowledge work, and the man whose competitive advantage is physical work slowly loses economic relevance.

At the same time, the education system, the main gateway to the knowledge economy, has become increasingly hostile to boys. Research shows boys mature more slowly neurologically, especially in the prefrontal-cortex regions that regulate impulse control and executive function. The increasingly structured education system, demanding more sitting still, more focus, more compliance, things that are neurobiologically harder for boys at the same age, systematically disadvantages them. This isn’t manosphere ideology. It’s developmental neuroscience.

Richard Reeves, again not a conservative, proposes something simple but radical. That boys start school one year later than girls, to compensate for the neurological maturation gap. The idea, predictably, has gone almost nowhere. Talking about disadvantages faced by boys in education still feels, to many people, like a betrayal of the fight for gender equality. As if acknowledging that boys can be disadvantaged in one domain automatically cancels out the acknowledgement that women are disadvantaged in another.

This is zero-sum thinking. And zero-sum thinking about gender, from any direction, is one of the most damaging cognitive failures in contemporary public discourse.

D. The Absence of Fathers

This might be the most uncomfortable factor to discuss, because the implications touch nearly every assumption we hold about family structure.

Raj Chetty, in longitudinal studies involving literally millions of data points, found that fatherlessness is one of the strongest predictors of poor outcomes for boys. Stronger than family income. Stronger than school quality. Stronger than almost any other variable they measured. And the effect is gendered. Boys are far more affected by the absence of a father than girls.

Why? The most plausible hypothesis involves modelling. Boys learn how to “be an adult man” largely by observing the adult men around them. How to manage anger. How to treat a partner. How to handle failure. How to work. When that model is absent, boys do not stop looking for one. They look elsewhere, and “elsewhere” is, increasingly, the internet. The models of masculinity the internet offers, from Andrew Tate to incel forums, are not, I think we can agree, ideal.

I’m aware that discussing father absence can sound like an argument for “the traditional family” in the conservative sense. That isn’t what I’m saying. Two mothers can raise an extraordinary boy. A single mother can and often does this heroically. What the Chetty data shows isn’t that “the traditional family” is the only working setting. It shows that the presence of a functional adult male role model, father, uncle, teacher, mentor, anyone, has a measurable and significant effect on boys’ development. And that the absence of that role model, which is increasingly common, has consequences that are also increasingly common.

E. The Superstimulus Environment

This is the factor closest to your direct experience as a reader, so I won’t have to explain much.

You live in an environment that, for the first time in this species’ history, offers unlimited access to high-intensity stimulation at near-zero cost. Free pornography. Free or cheap gaming. Free social media. Near-free streaming. All of it delivered through a device you carry in your pocket, available 24 hours a day, and optimised by machine-learning algorithms whose only objective function is to maximise the time you spend on the platform.

I’ve already written about this mechanism specifically in the pornography context. But the principle generalises. Human reward circuitry evolved for environments where rewards were scarce and required effort. Good food required hunting or gathering. Sexual stimulation required social bonds. Entertainment required community. Status required real contribution.

In the modern environment, all of those rewards are available with no effort at all. And a reward system designed for scarcity doesn’t function well in abundance. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s evolutionary mismatch. The gull that preferred the fake egg wasn’t stupid. The young man who spends six hours a day on TikTok isn’t morally inferior. Both are operating with firmware that wasn’t designed for input at that level.

But there is a crucial caveat. Knowing you are vulnerable to something is not permission to surrender to it. Humans aren’t gulls. We have a prefrontal cortex. We have the capacity to recognise patterns, understand mechanisms, and make choices that override defaults. That capacity is expensive to use. Willpower isn’t infinite. But the capacity exists. And refusing to use it, once you know what is happening, is no longer evolutionary mismatch. It’s a choice.

So. The collapse of formative institutions, the kafka trap of gender discourse, the shifting labour market, the absence of role models, and the superstimulus environment. Five structural factors that, convergently, create conditions in which weakness becomes the path of least resistance for young men.

Does this make weak men “victims”?

No.

All these factors are real. All of them make becoming strong harder than it was in earlier generations, or at least hard in a different way. I’m not going to minimise that. Environment matters. Starting conditions matter.

But ultimately, everyone faces constraints. Everyone operates in an environment they didn’t choose. Women face constraints that historically were far heavier than anything I’ve described above, and somehow, as a group, they outperform men on almost every educational metric and a growing list of professional ones. Constraints are not an excuse. Constraints are context.

Understanding the context matters not because it justifies weakness, but because it lets us design interventions that actually work. “Man up” isn’t an intervention. It’s a slogan. And slogans don’t change environments. What changes environments is sufficiently precise understanding of the mechanism producing the outcomes we don’t want, so we can modify the mechanism, not just shout at the output.

Before we talk about solutions, there is one more question worth answering. Why is this your problem? Why is male weakness not just a problem for men? Why does this pollutant, borrowing the metaphor from Section II, contaminate more than its source?

IV.

There is a temptation to treat the weak man as a self-contained problem. “Let him be. It’s only him who suffers.” I understand the impulse. I sometimes feel it myself. If weakness really were self-contained, if a weak man only damaged himself without touching anyone, I might not have written this essay. Liberty says people have the right to ruin their own lives as long as they don’t harm anyone else.

The trouble is, harming other people is precisely what they do. Not by intent. Not by plan. But in the same way air pollution harms other people, as a byproduct of behaviour that, to the person doing it, feels entirely personal and unconnected to anyone.

In economics this is called a negative externality. The cost of an activity that is borne by people who didn’t participate in it. The factory dumping waste into the river gets the profit. The downstream community gets mercury in its drinking water. The smoker gets the nicotine. The person next to him gets the smoke.

A weak man, in aggregate, is a factory dumping waste into at least four rivers at once.

Externality 1. Distortion of the Romance Market

I’ve written about this at length in “Like a Pump-and-Dump Stock”, so I’ll summarise the main argument here and add a layer I didn’t articulate at the time.

The romance market, like any market, needs functional price discovery. Price discovery needs a feedback loop. Unrealistic expectations should run into the consequence of nobody being willing to meet them, and that consequence should drive recalibration.

Weak men destroy this price discovery.

The Permanent Standby, waiting on someone who has explicitly not chosen him as a priority, sends a false signal that attention without reciprocity is sustainable. The Unconditional Subsidizer, giving emotional support, resources, and time to someone who has no intention of reciprocating, artificially inflates the recipient’s perceived market value. The Desperate Settler, accepting relationship conditions objectively below standard because he’s afraid of being alone, confirms to the market that low standards still produce committed partners.

Basic market mechanics. When the supply of male attention never falls, no matter the conditions, price discovery can’t happen. And when price discovery can’t happen, everyone operates on wrong information about their actual position. Including the men who aren’t subsidisers, who are now competing in a market whose expectations have been inflated by collective behaviour not their own.

The layer I didn’t articulate at the time. The distortion also harms women, not only men. Women whose perceived market value has been inflated by unconditional subsidy will, mechanically, reject partners who are actually sekufu with them, because those partners feel like settling relative to a distorted baseline. The outcome. Women who should be in functional, fulfilling relationships end up continuing to look for something that, statistically, doesn’t exist in their bracket. And they only realise it after years of optimal window have been wasted.

Who creates this distortion? Not women with high standards. High standards are rational behaviour in any market. Not the dating apps. The apps only accelerate dynamics that already exist. The distortion comes from men who keep giving away something valuable, time, attention, resources, commitment, with no requirement for anything in return. Weak men. Unconditional subsidisers. A floor that keeps falling.

Externality 2. Contamination of Public Discourse

In “Stop The All”, I wrote about how virtue signalling contaminates public conversation about gender. But I didn’t explicitly connect virtue signalling to the same syndrome.

A man posting an Instagram story about rape culture while his own group chat is dirty isn’t experiencing random cognitive dissonance. He is the fifth symptom of the same syndrome. Virtue without a price. A man with no skin in the game in any meaningful domain, whose default mode is avoiding discomfort, will naturally gravitate to the cheapest available form of “contribution”. And nothing is cheaper than posting on social media.

The contamination effect isn’t only that discourse becomes performative. The more damaging effect is that discourse becomes unfalsifiable. When the loudest people on a gender issue are the people with the least skin in the game, what they say never gets tested against reality. And a claim that isn’t tested against reality can only escalate. The motte shifts into the bailey. The reasonable becomes the absolutist. “There is a pattern that needs fixing” shifts into “Kill All Men”. Not because the people involved are evil, but because there is no correction mechanism, no skin in the game forcing those claims to face consequences.

Who pays the cost of this contaminated discourse? Two groups.

First, women who are genuinely fighting for legitimate change. Every time a hypocritical man co-opts the feminist narrative for social capital, he directly dilutes the credibility of the movement he is supposedly supporting. When people start to suspect that “male feminist” is only a performance, the suspicion does not stay on the performative ones. It hits everyone using the same language, including the sincere ones.

Second, young men who are genuinely trying to understand and improve themselves. They see the contaminated discourse and conclude one of two things. Either “this is all bullshit, nobody is sincere” (which pushes them toward cynicism and withdrawal), or “I had better post the same things to stay socially safe” (which produces one more virtue signaller). Neither outcome produces a better man. Both reinforce the loop.

Externality 3. The Demand That Sustains an Exploitative Industry

In the pornography essay, I argued that the traditional pornography industry is a Bob Rubin Trade. A structure where executives take the profit and performers take all the risk. But I didn’t explicitly connect the demand side of that structure to the syndrome we are discussing.

Here is the connection. An exploitative industry cannot exist without demand. And the demand for pornography at industrial scale (free, unlimited, consumed in volumes that, if applied to any psychotropic substance, would cause a moral panic) comes disproportionately from the same demographic. Young men whose consumption far exceeds their production, whose reward systems are calibrated to superstimulus, who have no alternative source of intimacy or meaningful achievement.

I am not moralising. Supply follows demand. When millions of young men spend hours that could have been used building something, skill, relationship, contribution, on consuming content produced by an industry with documented structural problems, they aren’t only damaging their own reward circuitry. They are sustaining an economic model that harms the most vulnerable people inside it.

PornHub hosted child exploitation material for years and only acted when Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut off payment processing. Who gave PornHub the leverage to ignore the problem for that long? Traffic. Hundreds of millions of visits per day. The traffic is the demand. And the demand comes from men.

Saying “I’m just watching, I’m not hurting anyone” in this context is equivalent to saying “I’m just buying, I’m not part of the factory conditions”. Strictly personally, maybe true. Systemically, it’s wilful blindness. You are the demand. Without your demand, the supply isn’t viable.

Externality 4. Radicalisation and Political Instability

This is the externality least often associated with “weak men”, but maybe the most dangerous at scale.

Every extremist movement in modern history, without significant exception, has been built on the same raw material. Directionless, resentful young men. ISIS recruited from this population. The alt-right recruited from this population. The incel movement is literally this population organising itself.

What may not be appreciated is that the pipeline from “ordinary, slightly lost young man” to “radicalised young man” is much shorter than people think. Online radicalisation can happen in months, not years. The recommendation algorithms on YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms, optimised for engagement and not for truth, efficiently funnel young men from mildly edgy content into genuinely extremist content. From self-improvement to looksmaxxing to incel to alt-right white supremacist.

Who is most vulnerable to this pipeline? Not men with purpose, community, and a stake in society. They are too busy, too invested, with too much to lose. The vulnerable men are the ones who have none of that. The nihilists. The isolated. The men with no skin in the game anywhere. The men who feel the world has no place for them. Weak men. Not because they are evil, but because they are empty. And emptiness is the vacuum any sufficiently savvy operator can fill.

Every time a directionless young man enters the rabbit hole and exits as an extremist, that isn’t only an individual tragedy. It is a threat vector against everyone around him. And the number of men sitting at the starting point of that pipeline, nihilistic, isolated, angry, purposeless, is larger today than at any point in modern history.

Externality 5. The Extra Burden Carried by Women

This is the most counterintuitive of the five, but possibly the most important for this essay’s audience.

The standard frame. Patriarchy harms women, and men are the beneficiaries. This is true in aggregate and historically. But at the interpersonal and contemporary level, something more specific is happening. Weak men create an extra burden that falls disproportionately on the women around them.

The burden takes several forms.

Emotional labour without reciprocity. A woman partnered with a man who has never consciously processed his emotional life, who has no vocabulary for his emotions, whose default response to distress is withdrawal or anger, who has never learned introspection, becomes a de facto unpaid therapist. This isn’t about a man being “unromantic”. It’s about a man not having the baseline emotional capacity required to participate as an equal in a relationship. The burden of compensating for that absence almost always falls on the woman.

Impossible standards from market distortion. As discussed. When weak-male subsidy inflates perceived market value, women operate on wrong information. They reject partners who are actually compatible (sekufu) because the baseline has been distorted. When reality eventually corrects, when age, life stage, or accumulated experience makes the distortion visible, the correction is often too late and too painful.

Children raised without a functional co-parent. This is the starkest one. A man without agency over his own life cannot be a functional co-parent. And when parenting falls disproportionately on the mother, whether because the father is literally absent or because he is physically present but functionally absent, that isn’t “family dynamics”. That’s an externality borne by women and children.

Physical safety. This is the bleakest one. Most violence against women is committed by men they know. The violence has many causes, but one consistent thread is men without the capacity to constructively manage emotion, especially anger and frustration. Men who, in this essay’s terminology, are weak. Whose default response to emotional discomfort is not processing but discharge, and whose discharge often takes the form of violence against the people closest and most vulnerable to them.

I know that paragraph is heavy. I wrote it carefully because I do not want to claim that all weak men are violent. That’s clearly not true. Many weak men are not violent at all. They are withdrawn rather than aggressive. But there is enough overlap between the syndrome I’ve been describing (inability to handle discomfort, absence of emotional regulation, nihilism) and the risk profile for domestic violence that mentioning it is not a stretch.

So. Distortion of the romance market, contamination of public discourse, sustenance of an exploitative industry, political radicalisation, and the extra burden carried by women. Five rivers contaminated by a single source.

And notice this. In every externality, the people paying the cost aren’t the people producing the pollutant. The weak man bears some of the consequence, of course. His own life is the most damaged. But most of the cost is borne by women, children, communities, and society at large. Classic negative externality. Classic Bob Rubin Trade. A weak man takes the path of least resistance and other people pay the bill.

That isn’t a personal problem. It is a public problem. And public problems require more than individual advice about “fix yourself”. They require change at the individual level and at the system level.

V.

This section is going to sound like advice. I don’t like giving advice. There is something epistemically suspicious about a person in his early twenties telling other people how to live. But I’ve already spent four sections diagnosing the problem, and a diagnosis without a prescription is only a longer complaint. So I’ll try, with the caveat that I do not always practise everything I’m about to write, and that some of it might be wrong.

Additional caveat. This prescription is aimed at men who recognised themselves in Section II. The ones who, after reading, thought “damn, some of that is about me”. If you read Section II and didn’t recognise yourself at all, you either are further along than I assumed, or you are in a denial that takes more than an essay to break. I can’t tell the two apart from here.

1. Find One Domain Where You Have Skin in the Game. One.

Not five. Not three. One.

I’m emphasising this on purpose because one of the most common failure modes of “self-improvement” is trying to change everything at once. That isn’t ambition. That’s a recipe for giving up in two weeks. Willpower isn’t infinite, and every additional domain you take on drains the same reservoir.

By “a domain with skin in the game”, I mean an arena where failure has a price you actually feel, success requires effort you actually expend, and other people can judge the result.

It can be anything. A competitive sport where you lose in front of other people. A small business where you stake real time and money. A technical skill whose result is visible and can be criticised, coding, writing, cooking, carpentry, music production, anything that produces a real output. A community project where you are responsible for an outcome to other people. Even a committed romantic relationship, where you explicitly stake time, emotional energy, and the possibility of heartbreak.

What isn’t a domain with skin in the game. Watching Zahid Ibrahim and consuming self-improvement content (ironic, given that you are reading this essay). Following Dafau Guciano’s TikTok without actually going to the gym like he does. Holding strong opinions on the internet without ever presenting them in a room where people can answer back. Planning without executing. Planning isn’t doing. A to-do list isn’t skin in the game. Crossing items off a to-do list might not be either, depending on whether the item could have failed.

The simplest test. Is there a scenario in which you could be embarrassed by the outcome? If yes, that’s skin in the game. If not, you’re still in the safe zone. And the safe zone, I’ve argued, is where weakness compounds.

Start with one. Make it non-negotiable. Only once your bandwidth allows it, add another.

2. Subject Your Body to Something Hard. Regularly.

If you have never exercised consistently, start with resistance training. Not because resistance training is objectively “the best”. There are good arguments for running, swimming, martial arts, and others. But resistance training has a few properties that make it especially suited as an entry point for someone who has never built a physical habit.

The feedback loop is fast and clear. You lift 40kg this week and 42.5kg next week and you know progress happened. No ambiguity. No interpretation. The number went up or it didn’t. For someone whose life is full of ambiguity and a lack of measurable progress, that clarity is therapeutic.

The barrier to entry is low. You don’t need athletic talent, good coordination, or teammates. You need a barbell and gravity. Both are available.

The discomfort is graduated and controllable. You can start with light loads and increase them incrementally. This matters. Too much discomfort too fast produces avoidance, not adaptation.

And there is one effect I find hard to explain mechanically but too consistent to ignore. Men who start lifting regularly almost always report a change in how they handle things outside the gym. Difficult conversations feel a little less terrifying. Boring tasks feel a little more manageable. The threshold for giving up rises. Maybe this is hormonal, resistance training does acutely raise testosterone. Maybe it’s psychological, repeated evidence that you can endure discomfort changes your self-model. Maybe both. I don’t know the exact mechanism. I do know the output is consistent enough to recommend.

If you already have a physical habit, great. But ask yourself whether the habit is still challenging. Running 5km a day that you can already do half-asleep is no longer training. It’s maintenance. And maintenance, while better than nothing, doesn’t produce adaptation. Adaptation requires progressive overload, periodically raising the stimulus above what already feels comfortable. The principle holds in the gym, and I suspect it holds in life.

3. Cut the Superstimulus. Not All at Once. But Cut.

This is the prescription that’s easiest to say and hardest to do, so I want to be realistic.

I am not going to say “delete all social media, stop gaming, and never watch pornography again starting today”. That isn’t a prescription. That’s cold turkey. And cold turkey has a low success rate for almost any addictive or entrenched behaviour.

What’s more realistic. Make superstimulus consumption mechanically harder. Make production mechanically easier.

Delete apps from the home screen, don’t delete the account. Add friction. App timers. Grayscale mode. Phone in another room while you work. Change the default behaviour when you’re bored. If your default when bored is to open Instagram, try changing the default to something marginally more productive. Not 0 to 100. From Instagram to academic journals is too big a jump. But from Instagram to a book, or from 4 hours of gaming to 2 hours plus 1 hour of coding, is feasible.

On pornography specifically, the full argument is in another essay. Here I’ll only say this. If you consume pornography regularly, try stopping for 30 days and see what happens. Not as a moral challenge. As an experiment. Notice whether there is any change in energy, motivation, the way you see people around you, the quality of your social interaction. If there is no noticeable change, fair enough. But if there is, and many people who have tried this report that there is, you have personal data more valuable than any argument I could write.

A key principle. Do not announce it to anyone. Do not post about NoFap or a digital detox. The moment you publicly announce a behaviour change, you collect the social reward of intent without having to execute. And reward without execution is precisely the pattern you are trying to break.

4. Produce Something. Anything. Regularly.

I’m putting this separately from skin in the game because, while they overlap, they aren’t the same. You can produce something without skin in the game (a personal journal that nobody reads), and you can have skin in the game without producing (gambling, for instance, real risk but no creation).

What I’m pointing at here. A regular habit of creating something that wasn’t there before. Writing. Code. Music. A meal. A design. Anything that, when you’re done, you can point at and say “this wasn’t here this morning, and now it is, because of me”.

Why does this matter mechanically, not just motivationally?

Because production is the most direct antidote to nihilism. Nihilism says “nothing is meaningful”. Production answers not with an argument, not with counter-philosophy, but with evidence. This exists now, and it didn’t before I made it. Meaning does not need to be discussed philosophically when you are actively making it.

I think this is what Nietzsche really meant. Not that you have to find meaning already lying somewhere, but that you have to make it. And you make it not by sitting around contemplating life, but by filling life with output you stake and care about.

One caveat. The production I’m talking about is not hustle culture. It isn’t “always productive every second”. That’s a different pathology. Workaholism is a superstimulus disguised as virtue. What I’m pointing at is the ratio. Does the net flow of your life tilt toward consumption or toward production? If the honest answer is “consumption, and not by a little”, something needs correcting. Fix the allocation.

5. Have Principles That Are Falsifiable, and That Have Been Tested

I’ve already written about the difference between values and virtues in Section II. Here I want to add a layer. Falsifiable principles versus unfalsifiable ones.

An unfalsifiable principle sounds nice and demands nothing of you. “I believe in honesty.” Great. When was the last time your honesty cost you something? “I value loyalty.” Great. Have you ever chosen to stay loyal to someone when betrayal would have been more profitable?

A falsifiable principle has observable consequences. From the outside, someone can see whether you actually hold the principle. The principle “I will not stay silent when my friend treats someone badly” is falsifiable. There are specific moments where the principle gets tested, and you can pass or fail. The principle “I believe all people deserve respect” is unfalsifiable. There is no situation in which you can visibly fail to hold it, because the statement is too abstract to produce a testable prediction about your behaviour.

A useful exercise. Write down three principles you hold. For each one, write (a) the most recent concrete situation in which the principle was tested, and (b) what you did. If you can’t fill in (a), the principle has never been tested, which means you don’t yet know whether it is actually your principle or just an aspiration. If you can fill in (a) but the answer to (b) is disappointing, then you now know where the gap is. This is homework. Please do it.

This isn’t about being perfect. Everyone fails to hold their principles at some point. I’ve failed in places I’m ashamed to describe. The question isn’t whether you’ve ever failed. The question is, do you know where you failed, and do you intend to do differently next time? That’s the difference between someone who has a principle and is improving the implementation, and someone who has decorative values that were never meant to be practised.

6. Apply Sekufu to Yourself First

In “Like a Pump-and-Dump Stock” I wrote about sekufu as a partner-selection framework. Looking for equality in epistemology, values, trajectory, and emotional capacity. I still hold that argument.

But there is a step I skipped in that essay, and which I should have said more explicitly. Sekufu demands an honest self-assessment that most people are not yet ready to perform.

Saying “I’ll only settle for someone equal to me” assumes you know who you are. And not in the abstract sense of “I’m a good person, fairly smart, reasonably hard-working”, but in the operational sense. Where do you actually sit on each dimension of sekufu?

Your epistemology. Can you really change your mind when given new evidence? Or are you the kind of person who feels rational but is actually only good at rationalising conclusions he already holds? How many times in the last year have you genuinely changed your position on something important, not something trivial?

Your values. Not the ones you claim, the ones you reveal through behaviour. You say you value honesty, but how many times have you lied (including lies of omission) in the past week? You say you believe in hard work, but what do you do when the hard work is genuinely unpleasant and nobody is watching?

Your trajectory. Where are you going? Not in the sense of the career goal you write on LinkedIn, that’s performance. In the actual sense. Is your life, today, moving in the direction you want? Or are you drifting, and the career goal is only the decoration covering the fact that you don’t actually know where you want to go?

Your emotional capacity. Can you sit with an uncomfortable emotion without immediately discharging it, getting angry, withdrawing, blaming someone else, self-medicating with superstimulus? Can you listen to someone talk about something painful without immediately trying to “fix” it or change the subject? Have you ever cried in front of another person? Do you know why you feel what you feel, or is the feeling something that just “happens” to you, illegible to you?

These questions are uncomfortable. That’s by design. If the question is comfortable, the question is useless.

The point of the self-assessment is not self-flagellation. It isn’t to make you feel bad about yourself. The point is calibration. Knowing your real position, so that you can (a) close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and (b) look for a partner who is genuinely equal to who you are now, not equal to the idealised version of yourself.

This is what I see fail most often. Men who want a partner with sophisticated epistemology, strong values, ambitious trajectory, and mature emotional capacity, but who themselves haven’t met that standard on a single one of those four dimensions. That isn’t sekufu. That’s wishful thinking dressed in the vocabulary of sekufu.

Fix yourself first isn’t sexy advice. But it’s mechanically necessary. You can’t accurately judge equality if you don’t know your own position. And you can’t ask of someone else what you yourself can’t offer.

One last thing about all of the prescriptions above.

I’m aware that this list, read as a whole, feels overwhelming. Find skin in the game. Exercise. Cut superstimulus. Produce something. Have real principles. Calibrate yourself. That’s a lot. It’s effortful. And if you’ve been in the default mode I described in Section II for a long time, nihilistic, passive, consumer-heavy, no skin in the game, the distance between yourself and all of this feels absurdly far.

I don’t have a solution to that feeling, except to say this. Don’t look at the distance. Look at the first step. The first step is always small and always unimpressive. But it changes one thing that crucially matters. It changes the trajectory. And trajectory, not position, is what eventually determines where you end up.

You don’t need to be a different person tomorrow. You need to be a person who, tomorrow, is moving in the right direction. Even if the movement is small. Even if nobody sees it. Especially if nobody sees it, because that is what distinguishes change from performance.

VI.

“Man up” assumes the problem is entirely individual. Weak men are weak because they choose to be weak, and the solution is choosing otherwise. I argued in Section III that this is partly true. Agency is real and choice is real. But I also showed that those choices are made inside an environment that systematically pushes toward weakness. And environments don’t change because individuals “choose better”. Environments change because systems are redesigned.

A possibly useful analogy. If 30% of a city’s population is obese, you can blame each individual for eating too much and moving too little. And you’d technically be right. Each individual is making that choice. But if you stop there, you miss the more important question. Why are 30% of this population making the same choice? Is there something about their environment, food deserts, car-dependent infrastructure, processed-food marketing, working hours that leave no time to cook, that has made the bad choice the default and the good choice an effort?

Obesity is an individual problem and a systemic one. So is male weakness.

1. Stop Using the Kafka Trap in Gender Discourse

I’ve discussed this in “Stop The All” and in Section III of this essay, but I need to say it once more in a prescriptive frame. How we talk about masculinity to young men matters, and the current approach is not working.

Telling someone “you are guilty because of who you are, and every response you give to this accusation proves it” is not education. It is a setup that produces one of three outputs, all bad. False compliance, withdrawal, or radicalisation. None of those outputs produces better men.

Is that really working?

What does work, as best I can tell from the available evidence, is an approach that does two things at once. Acknowledge the problem honestly without categorising the entire group as the cause. “There is a behavioural pattern that does harm, and you may be unconsciously participating in it. Let’s look at it together.” That’s very different from “you, as a man, are part of an oppressive system, and your privilege keeps you from seeing it”.

The first invites introspection. The second invites self-defence. And you can’t introspect while defending yourself. Both require the same cognitive resources, pulling in opposite directions.

This isn’t about being “softer” on men. It’s about being more effective. If the goal is to change behaviour, not to express anger, then framing that produces defensiveness isn’t a strategy. It’s self-sabotage that feels satisfying.

And for men who already participate in this discourse. Stop using language you don’t understand only because it is socially safe. If you post about “dismantling patriarchy” but can’t define patriarchy in a falsifiable way, you are not an ally. You are noise. And noise damages the signal from the people who are genuinely trying to do the hard work.

2. Build New Formative Institutions

In Section III I described how we tore down the old institutions that formed young men, organised religion, apprenticeship, rites of passage, without building replacements. The logical prescription. Build them.

This doesn’t mean returning to the mosque or reviving compulsory military service. It means designing new institutions that fulfil the same function. Structure, accountability, progression, community. Without the baggage that made the old ones worth tearing down.

A few that already exist and, I think, work, though not yet at sufficient scale.

Structured mentorship programmes. Not informal mentorship that depends on the luck of who you happen to know, but programmes that deliberately pair young men with functional adult men. Richard Reeves at Brookings emphasises this, especially for boys growing up without a father figure. Programmes like Big Brothers Big Sisters, while imperfect, show measurable positive outcomes for mentees. Better school attendance, less antisocial behaviour, more self-efficacy.

Martial arts gyms and serious athletic communities. Not fitness centres where you arrive, put on headphones, and never speak to anyone. Spaces where there is a competence-based hierarchy, where seniors teach juniors, where there is a physical challenge to face together. A well-run BJJ gym, boxing club, or muay thai camp is functionally a modern rite of passage. You arrive as a beginner who knows nothing. You get humbled regularly. You slowly build competence. And along the way you are surrounded by people who have already been through what you are going through. That isn’t a gym. It’s a formative institution that happens to be located in a gym.

Vocational training and trade schools, destigmatised. Not everyone has to go to university. Not everyone thrives in an academic environment. For many young men, especially those whose competitive advantage is in hands-on work, a pathway through vocational training, welding, mechanics, technicians, electricians, can deliver exactly what they need. Real skill, competence-based identity, a decent income, and skin in the game. In Germany and Switzerland, dual-education systems that integrate apprenticeship with formal schooling consistently produce good outcomes. There is no structural reason Indonesia or any other country couldn’t adopt a similar model. The reasons are mostly cultural, and culture is changeable.

Project-based communities. Hackathons, maker spaces, art collectives, open-source projects. Spaces where people show up not to socialise abstractly but to make something together. Communities built on shared production tend to be stronger and more functional than communities built on shared consumption or shared identity, because production gives an objective common ground that does not depend on whether you all like each other.

3. Education Reform That Acknowledges the Gender Gap

I’ll be blunt. Boys are failing in our education system, and almost nobody wants to talk about it.

The data I cited in Section I, that women outperform men at almost every level of education in almost every OECD country, is not new. The gap has been opening for decades. But the amount of policy attention paid to it is close to zero, especially compared with the (legitimate) attention paid to gender gaps that disadvantage women in STEM, in leadership, and in other fields.

Why? My suspicion is that acknowledging boys can be disadvantaged in one domain still feels, to many people, like betraying the acknowledgement that women are disadvantaged in another. This is zero-sum thinking, which I’ve already criticised, and it is just as damaging in this context.

Two things can be true at once. Women face structural barriers in many domains, AND boys are falling behind in education. Acknowledging the second does not cancel the first. Refusing to acknowledge the second because of fear that it cancels the first isn’t equality. It’s dogma.

A few interventions with an evidence base.

Reeves proposes that boys start school one year later than girls. This is sometimes called redshirting. The basis is developmental-neuroscience data showing that boys mature more slowly in regions of the brain crucial for academic success. It is simple, cheap, and evidence-based. It has gained almost no traction.

Increase the number of male teachers, especially in primary school. In many countries, the share of male primary teachers is very low, in some places under 15%. The correlation between male teacher presence and academic performance of boys is documented, though causality still needs more research. At minimum, this is a variable that can be intervened on.

Design curriculum and pedagogy that accommodates variation in learning styles. More hands-on learning. More physical movement. More structured competition. Less sitting still for seven hours. This isn’t about making schools “more boy-friendly” at the expense of girls. It’s about recognising that one-size-fits-all pedagogy, which has only become more dominant, systematically doesn’t fit most boys.

4. Normalise Corrective Feedback Among Men

In “Like a Pump-and-Dump Stock”, I described the echo chamber of female friendship that fails to provide corrective feedback. Men have an echo chamber of a different shape and equal damage. Avoidance.

Women tend to over-validate. Men tend to under-engage. Male friendship often runs on an unspoken contract. “I won’t comment on your life. You don’t comment on mine.” This feels like respect. It is actually negligence dressed up as respect.

When was the last time you said to a male friend, “Dul, I think you are wrecking your life”? When was the last time you said, “the way you treat your girlfriend isn’t right”? When was the last time you said, “you haven’t done anything meaningful in six months and I’m worried”?

If the answer is “never”, and for most men the answer is “never”, then you aren’t a good friend. You are a comfortable friend. And a comfortable friend is, in the end, the one who lets the person he loves drown while standing at the edge of the pool saying “well, that’s his business”.

There are reasons men don’t do this. Conversations like that are awkward. They can damage the friendship. They can be met with defensiveness or anger. All true. And that is precisely why a conversation like that is one of the most valuable contributions you can make to someone. Because it is costly. Because you are taking on discomfort in someone else’s interest. It isn’t only feedback. It is virtue in the sense I defined in Section II, something you do at cost to yourself.

Normalisation won’t come from a campaign. It will come from individual decisions by individual men to stop being bystanders in their friends’ lives. One honest conversation. One respectful but uncomfortable confrontation. One moment in which you choose to say what needs to be said instead of what is safe to say.

5. Regulate Superstimulus for Adolescents

This is the most policy-oriented prescription and probably the most controversial, so I want to be very precise about what I’m proposing and what I’m not.

What I am not proposing. A ban on social media or gaming for adults. I’ve written in the pornography essay that prohibition doesn’t work. It only pushes behaviour underground and worsens the situation for the most vulnerable. Adults have the right to make bad decisions about their own lives. That’s liberty.

What I am proposing. Meaningful barriers between adolescents and superstimulus that their reward circuitry isn’t ready to handle.

Regulate algorithmic recommendation for under-age users. Recommendation engines are optimised for engagement, which mechanically means optimised for content that triggers the strongest emotional response, outrage, anxiety, arousal, envy. For an adult brain with a matured prefrontal cortex, that’s annoying. For an adolescent brain whose prefrontal cortex is still under construction, that is potentially formative in ways we do not yet fully understand. The precautionary principle applies. If we do not know the long-term effects, and the downside is potentially large and hard to reverse, the default should be restriction, not access.

I know the counterargument. “Parents should supervise.” Yes, ideally. But in the real world, most parents aren’t digitally savvy enough to understand what their kids are consuming, let alone manage it. Handing the entire responsibility to parents when you know most parents lack the tools to fulfil it isn’t liberty. It is abdication dressed up as principle.

I’m aware that this section, “what society needs to do”, is much more tentative than Section V. Individual prescriptions are easier because the scope is small and the feedback loop is fast. You start going to BJJ camp, you feel the effect within weeks. Systemic prescriptions are harder because they involve coordination problems, political will, genuine trade-offs, and messy implementation.

But I think there is at least value in naming what needs to change, even if the how isn’t clear yet. And if I had to pick one thing from all of the above that, in my view, has the largest impact per unit of effort.

Normalise corrective feedback among men.

Not because it is the biggest solution, but because it is the solution that can start now, by anyone, without waiting for policy change, education reform, or political will that may never arrive. You only need to care enough about your friend to say the thing he doesn’t want to hear. And to be strong enough to absorb the discomfort of the conversation.

That, if you notice, is an individual prescription disguised as a systemic one. And maybe that is the point. Maybe systemic change, in the end, starts from individual decisions made by enough people at the same time that they become a norm. Maybe “top-down” and “bottom-up” aren’t a dichotomy. Maybe they meet at the same point. A person, at a particular moment, deciding to do the hard thing.

VII.

I’ve written six sections criticising weak men with what I hope is enough precision. I’ve defined them, explained why they got this way, shown the damage they cause, and offered prescriptions for how they, and the system around them, can change.

Now I have to sit with the question I find least comfortable of all. How much of this is about me?

Not as a rhetorical question. Not as a calculated humility gesture to make the essay feel more relatable. As a question that genuinely makes me, personally, uncomfortable.

Nihilism without construction? There was a period in my life, not as short as I’d like to admit, when I used cynicism as a substitute for personality. When “everything is meaningless” wasn’t a philosophical conclusion but a justification for not trying. Am I fully out of that phase? I hope so. But “I hope so” isn’t “I’m sure”.

Skin in the game? I am writing this essay. That’s some skin in the game, people will read this and judge. But writing a critique of weak men, in a social environment where the critique will be well received by most of my audience, isn’t high-risk behaviour. If I’m honest, real skin in the game isn’t writing about weakness. Real skin in the game is not being weak in practice, in the moments when nobody is watching, in the small choices that can’t be turned into an essay.

The neglected body? I exercise. But am I exercising at intensities that are genuinely challenging, or am I in a maintenance zone that feels productive while actually being comfortable? Honest answer. Depends on the week.

Consumption without production? I produce writing. But I also consume more than I want to admit. Scroll that was supposed to be five minutes becoming forty-five. Nights lost to content that adds nothing. The ratio is better than zero, but is the ratio good? I’m not sure.

Virtue without a price? I write about honesty and principle. But there are conversations I should have had with friends that I didn’t have because they would have been awkward. There are moments when I knew something was wrong and I chose silence because the social cost of pushing back felt too high. That is, by my own definition, virtue without a price. By my own standard, I’m failing my own test.

And here is the most uncomfortable one. Is this essay itself a substitute for the harder work?

Writing 15,000 words about weak men is satisfying. There is dopamine in it. The feeling of having identified the problem with precision. The feeling of being “above” the situation I’m describing. The feeling that writing about weakness is itself evidence of strength. And that dopamine, if I’m honest, isn’t all that different from the dopamine I criticise in men who post Instagram stories about social issues without ever doing anything about them.

Is writing this more than posting an Instagram story? Yes, I think so. There is real analytic effort, real research, an argument that has to hold coherently across thousands of words. But is it enough? Does it meet the standard for skin in the game that I myself set?

I don’t know. And I suspect the answer is “not yet”.

In “Stop The All” I closed by acknowledging that an essay criticising virtue signalling can itself be a form of signalling. Intellectual superiority signalling instead of moral superiority signalling, but signalling all the same. I wrote that maybe nobody is truly above this game. That the best we can do is to be aware we are playing it, and navigate who is who.

This essay sits in the same predicament, maybe more deeply.

Because here is what’s actually happening, if I unpack it honestly. I, a man not yet 22, who is himself still in the process of becoming whatever he will become, am writing a long essay criticising other men for failing to be what they should fight to become. There is something almost comically presumptuous about that. Who am I to tell anyone how to live their life, correctly? What’s my qualification beyond the ability to write like this?

And I know, I know really well, that part of my motivation for writing this isn’t altruistic. Part of the motivation is to feel that I’m not the weak man I’m describing. Defining the category, describing it in detail, then implicitly placing myself outside it. That is identity built on negation. “I’m not them.” And an identity built on negation is fragile, because it depends on the existence of “them” to function.

This is the same infinite regress I identified in “Stop The All”. Every layer of self-awareness can be a new layer of performance. “I’m aware I’m signalling”, itself signalling. “I’m aware that my self-awareness is signalling”, still signalling. Turtles all the way down.

I don’t have a solution to this regress. I’m not sure there is one. Maybe what we can do is pick a level at which we stop, and act from that level as honestly as possible, while acknowledging that the honesty itself might be a performance we can’t see from the inside.

But there is one thing that, I think, isn’t performance. Or at least, if this is performance, it’s a performance costly enough that it probably isn’t worth faking.

It’s the discomfort you are feeling right now.

If you are a man, and you read this essay all the way down here, and there are parts that made your stomach turn a little, the part about nihilism without construction, or about consumption without production, or about virtue without a price, then that turning isn’t an attack. It is data. It is a feedback loop doing its job. It is reality knocking and asking, “is this about you?”

And the honest answer, for most of us, including me, is partly, yes.

The question isn’t whether you have ever been weak. Everyone has. The question is WILL YOU STAY WEAK? Is the weakness going to become an identity, something you defend and rationalise and build your life on, or is it going to become a data point, something you acknowledge, understand the mechanism of, and then use as a starting point to move in a different direction?

I don’t know which direction you’ll pick. I don’t always know which direction I’ll pick. But I know this. This essay, with all its caveats and self-doubt and infinite regress, is written from the premise that movement is possible. That people can change. That a man who recognises himself in Section II today can, tomorrow or the day after or next month, start becoming someone who no longer recognises himself there.

That isn’t certainty. It is a hypothesis. And like any hypothesis, it can only be tested by acting, not by reading the essay.

So close this tab. Close your laptop, or put down your phone. And do one thing. One thing you have known for a while you need to do but haven’t done because it was uncomfortable.

Not tomorrow. Now. Or at least, today.

And if you do it, if you actually do it, not just think “yeah, I’ll do it later” and scroll to the next piece of content, then this essay might not, in the end, be only a longer Instagram story.

Maybe.

I’m genuinely not sure. But I’m willing to bet on the possibility.

That’s some skin in the game. Not much. But some.

Grazie, ciao.