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Below is a gift link to an article on why women live longer than men. In it, there’s a discussion of biological factors, lifestyle and behavior factors (at the individual level), and then external factors (societal level).
In terms of the discussion of struggling males under 35, I think it’s interesting how some individuals think the causes fall primarily under one of the above buckets. I personally suspect that it’s probably a combination of buckets.
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I think @ucla_cs_god’s post brought up a very good point. It is not entirely clear that young men are struggling, at least in the way that we have assumed. And even if young men as a group are “struggling,” it is even less clear what exactly this means. If it means they don’t follow our values, I’m not sure it is reasonable to call that struggling.
Just like with the members of any classification, some young men are struggling (e.g. those in prison, those depressed, those suicidal, those overdosing, homeless, mentally ill, undernourished, etc.) But this has always been the case. After thinking about @ucla_cs_god’s post, I am not entirely certain as to what it even means to say that, now, as opposed to some time in the past, that “young men are struggling.”
Before we start assigning genetic vs. environment buckets and trying to fix things, don’t we need to get a handle on what exactly it is we think we need to fix, and who exactly it impacts?
In response to @ucla_cs_god you suggested that statistics support the conclusion that young men are struggling. Maybe, but even this is less than clear. Take suicide. You note that 3-4 times more men than women commit suicide. True, but this is not new . . .
- In 1950, 21.2 per 100K men committed suicide per year. 3.8 times more men than women.
- In 2022, 23 per 100K men committed suicide per year. 3.9 times more men than women.
- In between these dates the rate was it its lowest around 2000 (17/100K), but the suicide rate was still about 4.3 times more men than women.
In my opinion, this is hardly compelling evidence that there has been a significant change regarding the relative wellbeing of young men.
Also, as I believe has been mentioned, suicide ideation is more common among females, as are suicide attempts. Male suicide attempts are more likely to result in death, though, in part because they are twice as likely to use a firearm. So this doesn’t support the hypothesis either.
With regard to ODs, addictions, and incarceration rates, men have higher rates going back through history. In other words, these stats are a lot like the life expectancy stats, they indicate a difference but not necessarily a change. Is the hypothesis that men have always been struggling? Or that something is different now? I think most are suggesting the latter.
So, to returning to @ucla_cs_god’s question, which I don’t believe has been adequately addressed::
And why?
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Well, I think a lot of us regulars find CC to be addictive and online conversation can replace real world conversation.
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I have been following this thread and have weighed in before with my anecdotal experience as parent to a male under 35 who is “struggling.” I put struggling in quotes because, as is now being discussed, while all the older adults around my kid perceive him as struggling, he is quite happy with his situation. He’s working a full-time retail job, paying us rent and covering his other expenses, is about to buy a used car, has a girlfriend and one solid friend. The struggle comes from those of us who have known him his whole life feeling that he could do so much more. As his mom, it upsets me that he has no particular goals for his life, and that he seems to have lost the curiosity that was his defining characteristic as a child.
It has taken me more than a year of this unexpected journey since he dropped out of college to fully comprehend that he himself is completely fine with this situation. He is not depressed or feeling less than his peers who have taken a different path. He doesn’t consider himself a person who needs help or needs fixing. So our role as parents has become one of helping him to understand that the ultimate goal needs to be his self-sufficiency outside of our home. If he’s content and can support himself, more power to him.
So I do agree that we need to consider what struggle, exactly, are we discussing? If males under 35 are under-achieving their potential, but completely content, are they really struggling?
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My view is “if it works for you, do it!”. So for me, someone is struggling if “it” isn’t working, and therefore they are unhappy. (“It” could be employment, romantic life, living situation etc etc)
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Just my thought, but perhaps we are discussing our struggle to understand them?
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True. But problems arise when the “it” that’s working for them (in our case the living situation) bumps into “it” not working for someone else. We’re being really open with our DS that he doesn’t have a lifetime right to dwell in our proverbial basement. He’s honestly been a little shocked at this concept, but he’s only 19, so we’re doing a sloooow push out of the nest.
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If you guys remember, there were scores of movies about underemployed Gen Xers living their best life (or feeling like something was missing, but it wasn’t the 9-5). I think it takes a while for people to adjust to living on their own. The basement situation is a different thing. 
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My perception is that your son is not currently struggling. He’s paying rent and covering his other expenses. That’s part of adulting, and he’s doing it earlier than many young adults at sleep away colleges.
One of my son’s best friends dropped out of a Neuroscience program at a Top 50 school. He just wasn’t feeling it. Now he’s an EMT. He loves it. As you might expect, he’s very intelligent. He will progress quickly up the EMS ladder to paramedic. My guess, he’ll go into nursing, a noble profession that has a decent salary and benefits. Is it the path his parents thought he’d take? No, we’ve had conversations about that. Is he struggling? Not at all.
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I wonder whether the rates of these issues have remained fairly constant over time and it’s just that there’s more media/attention on them now, or if these were always issues but the rate of people having these issues has increased.
(Kind of like how people used to think of times being so much safer way back when vs. when the nightly news was showing all type of crime going on, when in reality the levels of crime were the same or lower than they had been in the past, but that the perception was that things were more dangerous.)
This just made me feel really old, like a member of one generation referring to the newest ones with “Kids these days…” 
Le plus ça change…
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As I’ve read this thread I’ve thought about three of my nephews. At 18, 20, even 26 I, along with many others ( their parents?) would have said they were struggling.
They are all in their mid to late 30’s now and I would say they are all doing so well in their professional and personal lives. Military service, educations ( Ivy grad, 2 grad degrees). I think for them they were late bloomers, not sure what they wanted to do with their lives and so yes, there was a struggle. So, you never know how things will turn out.
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There are two different things here:
- Struggling to achieve traditional markers of adulthood (job that pays enough to afford rent, relationship with partner, leading eventually to marriage and kids, living independently on your own or with a roommate/partner), but now also amongst most middle class families, a college degree.
- Struggling with addiction or depression (although it seems that many young men don’t consider addiction to video games to be a problem, let alone a symptom of “struggling”)
The most visible external thing in most middle/upper class social circles is living with your parents and not having a college degree and job that uses that degree. But that may not feel at all problematic for many young men since it is just a continuation of their situation while growing up.
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Social media is the female equivalent of video games for males.
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I do find it interesting that many of the most vocal critics of my son are men in my family and friend group who themselves were kind of a hot mess at 19. They all grew into successful men, but they were late bloomers, as you say.
I think they view him as throwing away opportunities that would have alleviated their own struggles in young adulthood. There’s no way to know if they would have taken advantage of those opportunities at 18/19 either, though, and their struggles made them into the men they are now.
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I totally agree that there are issues of projecting our values/beliefs as to what we think the, “right,” way to do life is onto our kids.
And, I very much like the distinction another poster made between struggling with day-to-day normal markers of adult life and other more serious issues related to mental health, substance abuse, etc.
I’ve shared before the story of my nephew flunking out of college and lying to the family for all of what would have been his senior year. He didn’t come clean until three weeks before he should have been graduating spring of 2014. His parents dealt with it far better than my in-laws (his grandparents). Their reaction was anger and complete and total shame. And, honestly it was more shame about the appearance of his not graduating than the fact he’d been lying for so long!! Soooo superficial.
Nephew worked retail for a few years. Big into anime. In and out of re-enrolling a couple of times. Always so much pressure to go back to college from the in-laws. He definitely lived paycheck to paycheck but was self-supporting. Mil would lament to me his life choices. I tried to explain that his life choices didn’t have to align with the choices she would make. The thing is, his ideal life doesn’t have to look just like yours!
Nephew is now a library supervisor at a regional university and just this semester enrolled in a single class. I think there is a lot of unnecessary concern from mil that he isn’t living up to his potential. So what? If he’s content with his life situation who is to judge him?
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As to the data, for death by suicide it seems clear that the ratio has remained fairly constant. For incarceration, males have always been incarcerated at a much higher rate, but the more recent trend cuts in the opposite direction:
Though many more men are in prison than women, the rate of growth for female imprisonment has been twice as high as that of men since 1980.
Again, this cuts against the notion that young men as a group are suffering more now than they were in the past, relative to women.
(For overdoses and addiction, the data is tough to wrangle, and is greatly impacted by the opioid crisis which hard hit both male and females and people outside our age bracket.)
So to address the other part of your question, I suspect that at least in part this is a creation of media and pop culture, and that is why I pay close attention to the sources of such information. It is easy to string together moving anecdotes and stereotypes about lost and suffering men (we all know some) to create a powerful and sympathetic narrative. Sprinkle in some references to genetics and nature and it is rhetorically powerful, but I am not sure that upon close examination it passes the smell test. So I am skeptical, especially because with many of the groups and pundits pushing this narrative, there seems to be a larger agenda.
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Women were told to just suck it up for 1000s of years. They had to fight for their rights and continue to still do so. Even though laws have been changed over the years women are still fighting.
So cry me a river if males are told to suck it up.
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Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Many men have worked to make the world a better place for women.
People can work to make things better for all genders; it’s not a matter of who is going to get a bigger piece of the pie…it’s a matter of making the pie bigger so that everybody gets enough of the good stuff. This is NOT a zero-sum game.
With respect to women who are interested in marrying and having children, it is to the benefit of the females (and their progeny) to have a larger pool of non-struggling males to select from.
And please note that most of the solutions proposed in this thread are good for all.
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I like this list but as I pointed out before most of these are things parents can/should be doing in the home.
As for the comment about women dealing, women adapted when it became difficult/ impossible for a family to live on one income. Yes, some women did want and had “ careers” but the majority of women work/ed at “ jobs”.
Many were working and also doing the lions share of work at home. Some men adapted, but others did not.
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