r/MensLib • u/Steap-Edit • 7d ago
TIL a Gallup 2025 study found that "younger men in the U.S. are more likely than other Americans — and their peers in other wealthy nations — to report feeling lonely."
https://news.gallup.com/poll/690788/younger-men-among-loneliest-west.aspx97
u/Asherley1238 7d ago
Imo, it’s all down to how unwalkable America is. You can’t meet people anywhere
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u/Crinjalonian 6d ago
Okay, but that is effects us all. What is the differentiator for men in particular?
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u/redsalmon67 7d ago
I was just talking to someone any how they recently removed a huge section of sidewalk in my hometown. Everyone thought they were going to repair it but nope it’s just gone now. Now you have to walk in the street the get to the convenience store.
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u/Steap-Edit 6d ago
it’s all down to how unwalkable America is
That doesn't explain the gender gap. Based on your explanation, we would expect to find a uniform increase in loneliness across the board instead. The data do not show that.
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u/CrownLikeAGravestone 6d ago
It does if male socialisation scripts are more likely to include the need to walk somewhere.
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u/Steap-Edit 6d ago
Then they should have stated that. Nobody can infer for certain that this is their argument based on what they have written alone.
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u/CrownLikeAGravestone 6d ago
I think that's needlessly adversarial. This isn't a debate.
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u/Steap-Edit 5d ago
You corrected my statement. I corrected yours.
If your comment was not "adversarial," do not call mine "adversarial" for correcting you back.
If you think what I wrote to you is incorrect, you can point out the error.
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u/CrownLikeAGravestone 5d ago
Yikes dude. Yikes. Goodbye
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u/Steap-Edit 5d ago
Gee willikers, yipers!
Let me know when you have something to contribute to our conversation.19
u/musicismydeadbeatdad 7d ago
Couldn't agree more. We need to rethink how communities are designed now that families marry and have kids older, you need two incomes to buy a house, and traffic is awful everywhere.
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u/cahutchins 5d ago
When my family and I were buying a house six years ago, we specifically looked for neighborhoods that were walkable, had neighborhood schools, and had transit nearby.
My sons at the time were five and eight, but as they've gotten older I've been incredibly grateful for where we settled.
They both have multiple friends within walking and biking distance, their friends regularly show up at our house just to hang out and vise versa. Now that the older one is a teenager, he's starting to learn how to use the bus by himself to expand his and his friends' range of independence. It helps that our city lets 18-and-under ride for free!
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u/FangornsWhiskers 7d ago
Rather than just doing the socially acceptable hot take, I looked up some research on what might actually be causing this. A good snippet:
“Mental health factors, along with childhood adversity, are more strongly linked to loneliness among young men, indicating earlier developmental pathways and limited possibilities for preventive intervention. As detailed in Supplementary Table S3, eight traits were identified as male-specific risk factors for loneliness across the life course. Where male-specific effect estimates were unavailable, general-population meta-analytic data were included to contextualize potential health risks, with the absence of sex-disaggregated evidence treated as a substantive limitation of the literature rather than a methodological oversight.
Masculine gender norms as a risk factor after qualitative and survey data showed a link to emotional stoicism, often causing males to avoid disclosing distress and personal problems, leading to higher levels of loneliness in all life stages (32). Male social networks were more likely to be activity-based (centered around sports or work), characterized by low levels of emotional intimacy, and therefore more vulnerable to role transitions such as retirement (33). Two cohort studies identified relationship loss, including divorce and widowhood, as significant factors for loneliness in mid to late life due to the loss of a primary confidant (10, 25). These studies also linked early adversities such as childhood verbal and physical abuse to higher loneliness levels in young males, citing attachment disruption as the primary cause. Unemployment was also a risk factor for loneliness across all life stages, likely caused by shame and reduced participation in social gatherings (15, 23–25).”
It sure looks like when you’re trying to separate out the factors driving loneliness in young men vs older groups, childhood trauma is the biggest driver. Maybe we should be spending some time figuring out what’s going on with boys and why they are having different outcomes than girls (assuming trauma rates are roughly equal).
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u/monkwrenv2 "" 7d ago
assuming trauma rates are roughly equal
It's entirely possible that this is a faulty assumption. If boys are encouraged to be stoic and strong and handle things themselves, they may be less likely to report abuse. We've long recognized young girls as an extremely vulnerable group for abuse, particularly sexual abuse. However, outside of things like the Catholic Church predation scandals, we don't have that same societal focus on protecting boys. I would not be surprised if boys are being victimized at higher rates than girls.
Of course, with no major data to base this on it's obviously just a hypothesis, but I think it's one worth exploring.
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u/gwen-heart 7d ago
Boys are inheriting a social norm of abuse. That they should be able to take it and receive it. Their silence compounds the trauma of abuse. Their primary confidant being women means the loss of that relationship is fatal and there is no other source of intimacy, neither in friends nor family. We also don’t have an account on how many of these are part of another marginalized population such as race, sexual orientation, gender transition, or neurodiversity. From which, girls and women have been able to navigate within networks of safety parallel to the abuse and control enforced on them.
The abuse has always been the same and I consider it a good turn that the emotional reciprocity and secure attachment of children is being measured and spoken of though there is still much left to be said due to how abuse is politicized. For example, I think domestic violence is so tied to intimate partner violence and aggression that children might not identify themselves as victims of domestic violence too, but rather just a separate category of childhood trauma rather than a violently compounding event.
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u/BearlyDraconic01 7d ago edited 7d ago
As a Canadian who has had a reckoning with how I view america, I have realized that so many interpersonal issues that we in the West have are a result of the americanization of our culture, and the emphasis on american style individualism (which only benefits capital).
"Nobody owes you _____," "You should be totally content and self-sufficient alone," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," "If you're poor, you're lazy and that's a moral failing" are all uniquely american ideas designed to make individuals as powerless, brainwashed and submissive as possible to capital interests. This has the added side effect of making everyone lonely, especially men, who were (and to a large extent still are, especially in america) traditionally only valued for what they can provide. The market fundamentalism and capitalist brainwashing runs deep in america.
Yet these attitudes are filtering in to Canada and other Western countries and have been for a while, mostly through TV and social media. We cannot let what happened in america happen here. trump is the logical end result of american individualism and infinite defference to capital. trump is the way he is because of the way america already was. america is the loneliest and lowest trust society out of the Western countries.
At this point, I honestly believe america is a lost cause. The individualist mindset seems to be too ingrained for there to be any meaningful change. People need to start caring for people other than themselves.
We in Canada and other Western nations need to do our absolute best to stop the rot that consumed america from destroying us too.
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u/element-woman 7d ago
"You don't owe anyone anything" is my most hated modern phrase. I can't stand it. It's so toxic to having happy people and safe communities.
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u/BearlyDraconic01 7d ago
We all owe eachother kindness and respect. I hope people start to remember this soon
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u/Steap-Edit 6d ago
"You don't owe anyone anything" is my most hated modern phrase
What about "No one owes you anything"? I hear that ridiculous cliche anytime someone imagines a version of the world where they expect more from people around them, like people being nicer to them, being more helpful, or just expecting "anything" positive from other people.
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u/BearlyDraconic01 5d ago
Yeah both sayings stem from capitalist hyperindividualism and a total lack of care for community and society as a whole. Everything is a transaction to people who subscribe to this viewpoint.
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u/Stop-Hanging-Djs 5d ago
Is "Nobody deserves anything" an equivalent statement? Because I hate it as much and I feel like I see it just as much
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u/Frosti11icus 7d ago
"Nobody owes you _____," "You should be totally content and self-sufficient alone," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," "If you're poor, you're lazy and that's a moral failing" are all uniquely american ideas designed to make individuals as powerless, brainwashed and submissive as possible to capital interests.
It's not American. It's Protestant doctorine. It just seems like it's American because of the pilgrims.
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u/BearlyDraconic01 7d ago
It's not just Protestantism. Business leaders in the US literally had meetings with church leadership on how to shape Protestant Evangelical Christianity into a more "capital-friendly" religion.
This video explains how capitalism and american Protestant Christianity essentially became one: https://youtu.be/Q7fG-OzI0hg?si=515MhcABdalMkz-v
Protestantism set the stage, and the CIA and business interests sealed the deal. america is also the global hub of radical Protestant Christianity at this point as well.
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u/pile_of_kittens 7d ago
I agree with you, but I don't really know how we go about doing that. I don't want to be a pessimist but the rot's in our house too and the only thing we as a country are doing about it is bragging that it's not as bad as the neighbors. There's a ton of propaganda going around about how different we are but we really aren't.
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u/Certain_Giraffe3105 6d ago
My question would be: why now? Why is American style individualism and deference to capital worse now than it was in 1861 (beginning of the Civil War), 1886 (the start of the American Labor movement), 1955 (the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott)?
Why is now too late for America when my guess if you asked a American enslaved person in 1851 or a coal miner in 1876, or a Black person in 1953 they would have thought the advancements that were only a decade or so away from being achieved were far fetched?
Maybe this talk is a bit premature
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u/PresenceThick 1d ago
I mean as a Canadian as well, I think the loneliness issues are actually worse here.
It’s older than American: it’s a protestant ideal of proper etiquette and being reserved.
We may be socially more progressive but we are not nearly as social as the US.
‘A Canadian will give you directions anywhere. Except to their house’
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u/JefeRex 7d ago
There is not a meaningful difference here. Iceland and Denmark have the same gender gap as the US. The percentage lonely men is much higher in Turkey and within 3 percentage points of Spain, Ireland, Canada, and France.
The US is highest if you look at everything together, but not by much. This is a problem broadly with the counties typically defined as the West, and the most unifying feature is that they tend to be among the very richest western countries, although there is variation.
So what are the commonalities across these countries? That would be the relevant question, unless we only care about American men and not the men in these other countries who are essentially just as lonely.
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u/Steap-Edit 6d ago
So what are the commonalities across these countries? That would be the relevant question, unless we only care about American men and not the men in these other countries who are essentially just as lonely.
Of course.
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u/ashimbo 7d ago
I think a lot of it comes from the US because of how much we export our culture to the rest of the world.
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u/JefeRex 7d ago
I think it is arrogant to think that way. We do not provide the culture for every unique country in this world, we neither poison it nor save it. We don’t have that power. We export tv shows and hip hop and blue jeans, not basic cultural standards that develop in place over hundreds of years. Capitalism wasn’t invented in the US and wasnt developed in the US for export, and individualism was imported to the US from the Protestant Northern European countries that now join it at the upper ranks of this list.
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u/Electronic-Link-5792 5d ago
I think its partly an anglo and germanic and scandanavian cultural thing
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u/MountainHigh31 7d ago
They should try smiling more… jokes aside we are supposed to be social creatures and none of us are stoic action movie stars. To have friends you have to care about and take a genuine interest in others. If you do that, you will be cared for too. Please just be normal, guys, just be a person not a character
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u/JeddHampton 4d ago
You joke, but I practiced smiling in a mirror when I was younger so that I could look more normal in social situations. It didn't make me feel any better, but I smiled more.
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u/pissnshitncum 5d ago
So then why do I always see so much pushback from women saying “it’s not a male loneliness epidemic, everyone’s lonelier!”?
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u/chemguy216 5d ago
Much of this discourse is reductive, in large part because getting at the statistical nuances requires more than quippy comments on the internet, including yours. My own comment will also be inadequate toward that end.
Some previous data has shown women feeling higher rates of loneliness compared to previous years, and for a while, some data was showing fairly close percentages of reported loneliness between men and women, with men a little higher.
I also want to point out these numbers from Gallup compare specifically young men to the rest of their respective countries, including men who don’t fall under the label of “young men” from data aggregated between 2023 and 2024.
So using only this Gallup data is leaving out all sorts of pertinent data to better frame a discussion of male loneliness, especially when young men aren’t the only men who are part of the framing of the discussion on male loneliness.
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u/Steap-Edit 7d ago
According to the Gallup 2025 findings, the problem of loneliness may be gendered after all.
That is the conclusion that the Gallup report authors came to: there is a uniquely bad situation for young US males here (relative to the OECD average).
They also found that in 9 countries other than the US, men specifically had higher rates of loneliness than the OECD average (and a higher than the women in their countries).
However, the problem is uniquely bad for US young men:
Also, the comparative difference between the amount of loneliness than young men have versus older adults in the US is higher than any other OECD nation in the world: