Family and Nothing Else: Relationships and Purpose For Working-Class Men

“I mean, I've always been real close to family, [but] my mother, she passed away, and then my father passed away. So it's really my girl—I call her my girl—we've been together over 20 years. Her parents and my brother, we all need each other … It’s mostly just my family.”— Douglas

Douglas is a 40-year-old man from South Carolina. He works for a moving company by day, and restores old chainsaws in his spare time. Douglas lost his two closest friends: one to suicide and one to prison. He also lost his only mentor in life—his father—when he died. And he lost his only attachment to community—weekly church attendance—when his grandmother and mother passed away in close succession, and he stopped going. 

Family is all Douglas has left. Supporting his family is his core source of purpose in life, and his wife and brother are the only people he can turn to for support. For Douglas, family is the one remaining commitment that gives his life meaning, and the one remaining thread in the relational safety net that has not broken. 

'Nobody to Call'

Douglas is one of the 30 men my colleague, Soren Duggan, interviewed for Nobody to Call, our qualitative research project on friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees.¹ Like Douglas, many of the men we spoke to had a strong connection to their families. In fact, the sense of purpose and social support that familial relationships offered emerged as the sole bright spot across our conversations. 

For the working-class men we interviewed, it was family, and nothing else.

But also, like Douglas, family was often all these men had left. Many had no close friends, no community, no mentors, and no sense of purpose beyond supporting their families. It wasn’t just one thing that was missing for living a flourishing, connected life; it was almost everything.

What follows is a synthesis of what we heard across our interviews: the purpose that emerged through familial relationships, the tenuousness of these family ties, and the questions about working-class men and family life we’re asking on the other side of this project.

Family is often described as the anchor or foundation of a robust relational life. It’s seen as the one association we inherit that can embed us in many other overlapping webs of association we participate in throughout life. But this wasn’t the case for the working-class men we interviewed. For them, it was family, and nothing else. 

Family as Purpose

Family was everything for most of the men we spoke to. Whether their primary familial role was father, uncle, spouse, or brother, supporting their families was often the source of purpose and meaning in life. 

For these men, there was nothing better than becoming a dad. Where men felt any sense of purpose, it was almost always related to providing and caring for their children. Notably, many of them rarely felt needed elsewhere—not at work, not in their communities. It was at home, with their kids and spouses, where they felt their contributions made a difference.

“I have two daughters, so most of my time goes to my kids. I'm a single father, so … I’m just trying to be there, trying to support all the stuff that they come up with,” said Cedric, a 31-year-old from Texas. “I just try to support everything, because I never know what's going to stick. And that's why I feel like that's my purpose—just being there for my kids.”

Many men described the experience of becoming fathers as transformational. There was life before fatherhood: irresponsible, aimless, at times unmoored. Then there was life as fathers: committed, purposeful, even hopeful. These men spoke emotionally, both about the maturation they experienced and how their newfound purpose made even the hardest days better. This was the case for Javon, a 28-year-old father of two from Pennsylvania:

Being able to provide my kids and my wife with the best life that I possibly can is my purpose … Before my kids, man, I'm not even gonna lie—I was a drinker. I was going out and partying and things like that. Ever since my kids, that stopped because I can't be six beers deep around a two-year-old and a four-year-old. That's just not doable. It definitely helped with my addiction. Especially on the long days — the long shifts at work—my kids and my wife are what I look forward to when I come home.

Family was also a source of purpose for uncles, especially those without children. For these men, it was in the role of uncle where they felt both needed and responsible. Uncles described how supporting and serving as role models to their nieces and nephews imbued their lives with meaning and fulfillment they wouldn’t otherwise have. Josiah, a 40-year-old from South Carolina, directly connected his active role as uncle to his purpose in life: 

I've been spending a lot of time the past few months with [my nieces and nephews], because their parents are going through a divorce, and … the kids sometimes get forgotten when the parents are fighting. So I'm trying to alleviate that in the best way I can … That actually has given me a great sense of [purpose] … if I didn't have that, I really wouldn't [have any] … It's restabilizing my identity as Josiah. Otherwise, I would be adrift in the wind.

Other men without kids talked about the purpose that came from being needed by their spouses, parents, siblings, in-laws, and extended families. Many of these men described need in mutual or reciprocal terms. They spoke of their sense of being needed by family members, but also a sense of needing them for support. Some version of Douglas’ “We all need each other” refrain came up a few times during our interviews. 

“There's a lot of stuff going on right now, personally, where [our] family is trying to step up and deal with a major illness. My grandmother is very sick,” explained Kyle, a 34-year-old from Kansas. “So, the rest of the family is all looking to each other—trying to lean on each other.”

Family, and Nothing Else

For most of the men we interviewed, family was all they had left. Familial relationships weren’t the foundation of a flourishing life. Instead, they were often the only thing standing between these men and complete isolation, and, at times, even made relationship-formation outside the family more difficult. These few remaining family ties were often tenuously held, and when they broke, men often found themselves alone with nobody to call. 

Interview after interview, we heard a similar refrain: family, and nothing else. 

Here’s Josiah again: “Except for my family, I don’t regularly do anything with anybody.” Here’s what Darryl, a 37-year-old from Michigan, had to say: “I'm needed by my family. Outside of that, I don't know anything else.” Or, as Silvio, a 28-year-old from Washington, put it: “Close friends? Other than my parents? I would say no.”

We also heard another refrain: family consumes everything else. Men with caregiving roles saw their familial obligations as preventing them from building relationships outside the family. These men described the responsibilities of caregiving as so time- and energy-intensive that they precluded them from doing anything else. For these men, caregiving was a lonely burden that left them feeling lost and emotionally unsupported.

Benjamin, a 39-year-old from Nevada who works full-time and is a full-time caregiver for his mother, described this predicament in poignant terms:

I feel like I'm needed more by my mother than I need myself … The last 10 years of my life, taking care of her, I felt as though that was the only purpose I had in life. I have no sense of direction anymore. It's kind of just vanquished … Pretty much everything I do, I end up second guessing, like, ‘Okay, well, do I need to be there for her as well?’ 

Even men who derived a significant sense of purpose through fatherhood described the all-encompassing nature of these responsibilities. These men felt they neither had the time nor capacity to commit to anything else beyond their kids’ lives. “Again, I'm a single father, so most of my time goes to my kids … all my hobbies just turned into the kids’ hobbies,” reflected Cedric.  “I haven't been involved in anything. I haven't been super open to anything, because I don't feel like I'll be able to commit to anything.” 

A flourishing future for working-class men is one where work, family, and community all mutually reinforce one another, not compete with each other for time and resources.

The dynamics of “family, and nothing else” or “family consuming everything else” led men to have tenuous ties that created single points of failure for their relational lives. 

When a mother or grandmother passed away, men lost their only connection to church and community. “But then my grandmother passed away … and right after that, my mother passed away. And when she passed away, we all kind of quit going [to church],” Douglas shared. “I still have a relationship with God—I still pray to him and talk to him all the time. I just don't go to church that much.” 

When a father, grandfather, or uncle passed away, men lost their only mentor. “[Over] the last 10 years since my father passed away, I can say I felt the big difference, the big emptiness since … I lost that mentor,” said Austin, a 39-year-old from California. “After that, I didn't have a mentor—I didn't have somebody to look up to too much.”

And when kids entered their pre-teen years, men lost their purpose as active fathers. “I cut all the bulls**t out of my life. I focused on being a dad and being a goofball and being there,” explained Jacob, a 47-year-old divorced father of two from Florida. “Now, it's like, ‘Oh, you guys aren't coming this weekend? Okay, cool... What am I supposed to do?… I'm just gonna curl up and go to sleep.”

What made the stakes of these losses so high is that these men had few, if any, other relationships or roles to fall back on. For these men, family as everything meant family as the only thing. When it came to feeling connected and needed versus isolated and adrift, the line was often razor thin. 

A Generational Project

What will it take to make family the anchor of a flourishing relational life for working-class men, rather than the last set of ties that stands between them and complete isolation? This is, admittedly, a question far too big for a single essay (or, even, a single study!). We’re not family policy experts, either. But we did spend a lot of time listening to this group of men who are often talked about but rarely heard from directly. And we do think some clues lie in the words these men shared about their own lives—the bright spots of family and fatherhood, and the pain points of precarious work and caregiving. This, in turn, led us to a whole new set of questions, both about the relational lives of working-class men and the material conditions that shape them. 

• If family ties are often the only ones these men have, how can we support their families to get them connected to friends and community? This could start with interviewing family members—especially parents, spouses, and siblings—to get a better sense of their needs. Because relationships beget more relationships, understanding how to support these family members to support their men is the most direct path toward getting them more connected.  
• And if families are better seen as anchor associations of communal life, what role can the broader community play in inviting these men to connect and contribute? This introduces a few related questions. For instance, how are houses of worship, YMCAs, United Ways, 4-Hs, parent groups, neighborhood groups, men’s groups, and upstart community groups already supporting the families of disconnected men? And what are these groups doing, if anything, to bring disconnected men into their communities, and what challenges do they experience in doing so? Just as civic groups like the YMCA and Boy Scouts stepped up to address the boys and men crisis of the early 20th century, so too can similar groups step up today. 
• Finally, if many working-class men are attempting to work full-time and now also working the “second-shift"—both as fathers and caregivers—how can we account for this reality? Part of this involves policies that make work more stable, such as Fair Workweek laws, that would allow men to better plan to spend time with family and community. Another part of this likely involves pro-family policies that have already been introduced, including (but not limited to) paid family leave for new parents, an expanded child tax credit, and family caregiving subsidies for caregivers. But because this is a relatively recent phenomenon, it likely also involves asking new questions. What support do working-class fathers need? What support do working-class male caregivers need? 

A flourishing future for working-class men is one where work, family, and community all mutually reinforce one another, not compete with each other for time and resources. If that sounds way off—and if all of the above sounds woefully insufficient—that’s because it is. There are no “silver bullets” here, and no easy answers. The disintegration of a stable, connected working-class life in America has been several generations in the making. It will take several generations to build it back, and the form it takes will, by necessity, look much different than it did in the mid-20th century. 

But family can again become the relational anchor for working-class men, not the last thread in the relational safety net. The answer is to embrace this generational project, not cower in the face of its bigness. It’s not like we have a viable alternative anyway. The well-being of our sons, nephews, and grandsons—and, by virtue, their future families and communities—depend on it. 

Editor’s Note: This essay is based on Nobody to Call, Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan’s qualitative research project on the relational lives of men without degrees. Please consider checking out the full project at nobodytocall.org—including the full report and case studies—and reading the full “Needed” chapter from which this essay was adapted. 

Sam Pressler is a writer, researcher, and community-builder focused on the intersection of civic life and class. He’s currently a Practitioner Fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, a Research Affiliate at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, and the creator of the Connective Tissue newsletter.

*Photo credit: Cover photo designed by EJ Baker.

1.  In the past, we’ve received the question: “Why focus on men without degrees?” So, we wanted to share an excerpt from our launch essay to provide context on our reasoning: “In 2024, Sam teamed up with the Survey Center on American Life to design and publish the “Disconnected” survey report, which showed the extent to which the college degree has become the dividing line in American civic life. We found that, compared to college grads, Americans without degrees are significantly less likely to participate in religious and community groups, and they have far fewer close friends and people to turn to for social support. What we didn’t find was evidence of the so-called “male loneliness” crisis; education was the dividing line in Americans’ relational lives, not gender.

But there was still an education and gender story hidden in the data. For the past several decades, even as overall college completion rates have increased for women and men, women have been enrolling in and completing college at significantly higher rates than men. Men today make up just over 40 percent of those who enroll in and complete four-year colleges, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1970. More Americans, especially more women, are graduating from four-year colleges, but a growing proportion of the Americans who aren’t graduating are men. So as the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life, men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.”