Highlights
“Despite their vocations [my father, a special ops soldier; my mother, a bartender/house cleaner] and geography [small town Tennessee], I was not spared from the radical individualist ethic.”
These words came from a 25-year-old young man, whom I’ll call Redford, who wrote to me just as Part II of the IFS survey report was being published. He continued, “I picked it up quite early that recognition by teachers, administrators, local luminaries, and college admissions officers (i.e., the conformist institutional elite) is the true test of success in this ethic.”
In America’s Demoralized Men, the individualist ethic plays an important explanatory role in our findings. It is a critical part of the context in which young men’s lives are unfolding. This ethic arose as many previously existing social forms, such as patterns of family and neighborhood life, predictable work trajectories, and firm structures of values and standards, disappeared or became fragmented into options and choices. With far less socially given or settled, many new demands and responsibilities have fallen on young people to bear. They are required to supply, in large part, what has gone missing. On their own initiative, they must build a career, decide their own values, develop their own relationships, and, crucially, use their freedom to make something of themselves and demonstrate it to others.
If that wasn’t enough, as Redford’s comment about conformity suggests, the new demands have been taken up by our educational and economic institutions and now define the path to success and social esteem. Schools urge students to acquire the competencies for endless activity, competitively stockpile as many qualifications and achievements as possible, and cultivate the personal qualities that lead to winning, such as being sociable, self-aware, artful in self-presentation, and mobile and flexible enough (geographically, personally, even ethically) to seize opportunities. These are the self-optimization tickets you punch for “good” colleges and high-paying jobs. In our survey, when we asked young men if “the constant pressure to perform and achieve just never ends,” 77% agreed.
As it happens, Redford cleared the approval bar: “I did ultimately accomplish this recognition and received multiple full-ride offers from elite universities.” But ultimately, he did not go. He “spurned” this coveted opportunity “in favor of the non-selective local regional university.” He made this choice, he told me, so that he “could stick with my friends, play Call of Duty, and ride skateboards with fewer life obstacles.” The obstacles, as he had found from participating in selective summer programs at elite colleges during high school, included the “complex social jockeying” and “constantly shifting language game.” He found all this tedious and “dishonest.” He added, “I did not like the pervasive trope of being obviously high-powered and effortful but pretending like it was all effortless.”
Something 'close and important' might be a good way to describe what many young men want but most have not yet found: a community and a role worthy of their energy and dedication.
Redford knew, as we note in our report, that flouting expectations and overcoming obstacles is institutionally esteemed only when the defiance is socially approved. He knew that choosing a college to attend with his life-long friends was not that kind; instead, he was going against the “prevailing individualist wisdom” in which prioritizing geographic rootedness and resisting social competition are the path to downward mobility.
Perhaps for many young men like Redford, the prevailing individualist wisdom just doesn’t compute very well. Another comment from his email is worth unpacking:
I agree with [pioneering French sociologist Emile] Durkheim that the motive force in the boy-becoming-man must necessarily be supported by a community, oriented beyond the self, AND meaningfully impact others in a visceral way.
What community? This support is what the loss of social forms and institutional pathways has undermined. And it is why young men must, like it or not, take their lives into their own hands. The motive force for this do-it-yourself biography is not “oriented beyond the self” but to the self.
The “remarkable thing,” write psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Muraven, about the way we value “selfhood is that it puts morality and self-interest on the same side.”1 We can even speak of a moral duty, enforced by our institutions, to make choices based on what is best for ourselves individually—my life, my health, my career, my happiness—as long they fall within the prescribed institutional parameters.
In the IFS survey, we found that 73% of young men think it is “harder to know what it means to be a man today than it was 20 to 30 years ago.” One reason, as we suggest in the report, may be in the capacities that now have to be balanced for success: assertive and confident on one side, emotionally intelligent and expressive on the other. Equating the good with self-interest may be another reason. When we asked young men if they thought, “being a man requires a willingness to sacrifice for others,” 85% agreed. Asked if “manhood is viewed negatively in our society,” 69% agreed.
The same disconnect may be at work in young men’s concern with providing for others. Among the milestones for reaching adulthood, we listed an old criterion: “being able to provide for others.” Roughly three-quarters of young men ranked this ability as either “extremely” or “very” important for becoming an adult. Only 6% thought it not too or not at all important. And while about 1 in 10 young men said they had no plans to ever marry, concern about an adequate income was a substantial issue for many. When asked about their most significant challenge so far, young men mentioned money and finding a good job by a wide margin. When asked about the characteristics of work they would enjoy, “earning a high income” topped the list (followed by “helping or protecting other people”). Maybe these answers mean that young men are just more materialistic these days, but under our individualist conditions, when much that was previously given—from safe neighborhoods to reliable public schools—must now be acquired, the cost of supporting a family is higher than ever.2
This sense of obligation does not mean that young men envisioned a life in which their wife did not work. When presented with statements about the ideal division of labor in the family, more than two-thirds of young men endorsed “the couple should divide work and home responsibilities in whatever way best suits them.” Nor does a desire to provide for others mean prioritizing work above other family responsibilities. When asked if “a man’s role as a father is more important than his paid occupation,” 87% of young men agreed.
Finally, Redford pointed out the importance for men of having a meaningful impact on others “in a visceral way,” that is, in a way that is tangible and transparent. As with other young men I have interviewed, he finds much contemporary white-collar work lacking a clear point and often empty of inspiration. As he shared:
The nature of corporate economy, however, is that impacts happen at a distance in some vague, theoretical way. Some men may be able to hype themselves up into a decades-long careerist frenzy using theories of accumulated human capital and trickle-down effects from investor gains. But most cannot …
Most young men, it seems fair to say, don’t want to spend their “lives competing to win games that other people have set up for them,” to quote a law journal article reflecting on the experience of big firm lawyers.3 Rather than play such games, as Redford suggests, they “simply execute to preserve something close and important.”
In our times, something “close and important” might be a good way to describe what many young men want but that most have not yet found: a community and a role worthy of their energy and dedication. As the survey responses made clear, the individualist ethic won’t do it.
As for Redford, he was—as he put it—“stupid” and continued flouting the individualist wisdom. Unconventionally and “before everything else had gone perfectly,” he got married. After teaching high school for a year, he “stumbled into an easy 6-figure ‘bull**** tech job,” and now is the father of two children. This community of family, he told me, “depends on me in ways I cannot outsource or delegate,” and though he doesn’t care a whit for the rat race, he gets up every morning and goes to work.
1. Roy F. Baumeister and Mark Muraven, “Identity as Adaptation to Social, Cultural, and Historical Context.” Journal of Adolescence 19 (1996): 405–416, at 410.
2. For an insightful commentary on the cost of this new situation, see Johann Kurtz, “Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise.”
3. Patrick J. Schiltz, “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession.” Vanderbilt Law Review 52 (1999): 871-951, at 905.
