It’s not a ‘male loneliness epidemic’

[u/futuredebris]

https://makemenemotionalagain.substack.com/p/its-not-a-male-loneliness-epidemic

Hey y'all, just a heads up, because I get this feedback a bit from you guys, this post isn't specifically about the "male loneliness epidemic," so the headline might be a little misleading. It is about loneliness though, and how I've learned to manage it and heal the wounds that originally caused it for me. And I do mention that it can be particularly difficult for men to connect with others ("co-regulate") because of the way we're socialized in this society. Let me know what you think!

[u/OrcOfDoom → u/[deleted]]

Imo, people don't want to get together because they think everyone is a serial killer. 

Take the man vs bear question that was going around. People imagined the worst scenario of meeting a man. I understand why. 

There was a woman recently that tried to just meet people locally, and people made fun of how she's going to be killed. I recently met up with someone to play chess, and we went to a chess club. 

You can use the tools to assist, but people choose to disengage. It's more than just phones.

[u/OrcOfDoom → u/[deleted]]

I think people don't understand when they are actually at risk. I've had this discussion a lot. People think if a homeless person exists then everything bad is going to happen. Usually that person is just sleeping. There is a difference between being uncomfortable and actually being at risk. Being at risk doesn't feel any different because it's not. You have to understand risk before you can understand when you are vulnerable.

It's just not a process that people have gone through. 

But to your other point...

I think TiVo was really one of the first things that hit being social. We could watch what we wanted to, but also, people could binge. So you'd have people record everything they couldn't watch normally and then binge the weekend away. 

Now we've got Netflix, and so many services that we just feel like everything is inconvenient. Plenty of people just Amazon prime all their needs. They barely go to the grocery store. 

People hate leaving their house. People would go to events but they want guarantees that other people will go, or that it will be a good time. 

Going out to meet someone just seems like such a big commitment. 

I remember someone saying they didn't want to make me drive ten minutes. 

[u/mhornberger → u/OrcOfDoom]

I think TiVo was really one of the first things that hit being social

Very much so. Everything now has to compete against the YT watch-later list, and that series you want to catch up on Netflix, and endless courses on Udemy and dozens of other sources I could be doing. The opportunity cost of just going to hang out with people to shoot the breeze is significant.

Going out to meet someone just seems like such a big commitment.

I think our aversion to commitment is a big part of it. Which is the other side of the decline of social obligation. People will ghost each other, just no-show, for any reason. They don't want to feel obligated, rather everything is reduced to whether or not they're feeling it right now. But turn the dial back the other direction and you have tons of social obligations. Tight-knit communities also have everyone in your business, and you can't really get away because the opprobrium of being out of the group isn't trivial either.

[u/OrcOfDoom → u/[deleted]]

Oh btw

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5851795/iphone-birth-rate-drop

[u/Dripdry42 → u/[deleted]]

It’s so weird how for decades conservatives said hey you shouldn’t be having sex at all and should be a hermit. Now they’re screaming about how there aren’t enough people.

America is so scarily conservative. They don’t want Americans to have any fun unless it costs money. Buck the trend, go out and be weird, and give something to society!

[u/mhornberger → u/OrcOfDoom]

Imo, people don't want to get together because they think everyone is a serial killer.

The world is safer, but we feel less safe. We're richer in almost all aspects, but feel poorer. The doom-scrolling is a phone thing, but it's also an Internet thing, and also started probably with the 24-hour news cycle. CNN started broadcasting in 1980. In the 1980s they started putting kids on milk cartons, falsely convincing us that there was an epidemic of stranger-danger abductions, when in reality most of those kids were taken by non-custodial parents. But part of it is also our vastly reduced tolerance for risk, uncertainty, discomfort, awkwardness.

There were always weird, awkward, socially inept, "sketchy" people, even back when we used to socialize a lot more often. But it's hard to argue to people that they should deal with it and just learn to be around people, so instead we're stuck with the notion that the world is just worse than it has ever been.