Young Men Are Slowly Giving Up And Nobody Cares

Simpson begins with the story that clearly haunts him: seeing his father for the first time in seven years and discovering he has no friends at all, not from work, not from anywhere. When Simpson asked his mother why she referred to their family friends as simply 'her friends,' she answered bluntly that almost none of them stayed in touch with his father after the divorce. That single exchange becomes the emotional anchor for the entire episode, a lived example of what happens when a man's social life was never really his own but borrowed through his marriage.

He pairs this with a striking statistic: Black women have the lowest suicide rate of any group in America, which he attributes to consistently reporting having many close friends. That comparison sets up his central argument, that the male loneliness crisis isn't really about men lacking romantic partners, it's about a collapse in platonic friendship and the skill of initiating and maintaining it.

Simpson traces the roots of the crisis back to the shift from pre-industrial to industrial societies. He describes visiting a hospital serving indigenous communities in Costa Rica, where he watched three generations of women running a shop together while children played, essentially living every moment of life in each other's company, many without ever owning a computer. A college professor's account of Lebanon reinforced the same picture: kids who didn't stop talking, playing, and roughhousing with each other until they fell asleep.

Once societies industrialized, Simpson argues, people started meeting their needs through markets and governments instead of family and neighbors, and relationships became optional for the first time in human history. Americans now spend more than double the hours alone that they did just twenty years ago, one in ten Americans has no close friends at all, and that figure rises to one in seven among men specifically.

Simpson's key diagnostic claim is that women are simply better at initiating and sustaining friendships than men, a pattern that held true for his own parents and that he sees playing out among his friend groups today, where his female friends move in tight groups of eight while his male friends spend most nights alone without even calling anyone. This gap mattered less when everyone was automatically embedded in dense community networks, but now that default social fabric has receded, exposing who built real friendships and who simply had proximity. He links this directly to the nine-to-one ratio of male to female suicide after divorce, since ex-wives typically keep the couple's shared friends while ex-husbands lose them.

He illustrates the dynamic with the cliché of husbands awkwardly making small talk while their wives run the actual social calendar, planning virtually every gathering, playdate, and dinner. The flip side, he says, is the equally real stereotype of male best friends who don't know each other's basic biographical facts yet would supposedly take a bullet for one another, a bond built on presence and shared jokes rather than the kind of active relational maintenance women tend to practice.

Because male friendship has withered, Simpson argues, men have become more desperate for romantic relationships than they otherwise would be, since a girlfriend often becomes the only person who listens, talks, and actually invites them somewhere. He cites reports of men hiring strippers and prostitutes not for sex but simply to talk, and argues that being listened to may be the most fundamental human longing, the same need that underlies therapy and confession. He invokes Chris McCandless, the radical individualist who died alone in the Alaskan wilderness, whose final written words were 'Happiness only real when shared.'

This desperation, he says, explains why ordinary friendliness from cashiers or baristas goes viral, like a takeout-order video from Alabama that hit fourteen million views, and why lonely men shower approachable, non-hostile young women with outsized attention. He recounts a high school classmate who masturbated in front of a kind, friendly girl in class, arguing the disturbing act was less about attraction than about a starved craving to feel special and listened to for the first time.

Simpson traces some of today's dating antagonism to the romantic scripts his generation absorbed from shows like Can't Hardly Wait, Girl Next Door, and The OC, where quietly pining for a girl for years eventually wins her over. When real life doesn't work that way, and guys who did everything 'right' get cheated on or ignored, some turn toward red pill content, which he says mixes genuinely useful advice with resentment that curdles into hostility toward women as a category. He argues that projecting 'how all women are' onto individual women, just like reducing a person to their political party, makes real connection impossible.

He also acknowledges the other side of the equation, describing women who grow suspicious or resentful after being hurt, some swearing off dating altogether or judging men against rigid checklists. He closes the section with the TikTok trend of women leaning in to kiss male best friends to test their reactions, and the near-universal result that the guy kisses back, evidence of how much unspoken longing sits inside so-called platonic friendships.

Turning philosophical, Simpson leans on C.S. Lewis's writing to explain why friendship is treated as society's most disposable relationship. Lewis argued most people never experience real friendship at all, only acquaintances bound by shared activity that dissolves the moment the activity ends. Simpson adds that close male friendships get dismissed as secretly homosexual, which he says only proves the accuser has never experienced true friendship, since lovers face each other and talk about their relationship constantly, while friends stand side by side looking outward at some shared passion, rarely discussing the friendship itself.

He quotes Montaigne's line about his best friend, 'it is because he is he and because I am I,' to capture how true friendship attaches to a person's essential self rather than convenience or shared hobbies. Simpson insists that losing this kind of bond is a spiritual loss, illustrated by the darkly comic parade of divorced men's unhinged social media posts about ex-wives and 'spies,' and by his own bit about discovering after a divorce that half his supposed friends never even knew he was married.

Simpson pivots to what actually helps, using the cautionary tale of an online figure named Clavicular who spent enormous sums on cosmetic surgery yet still reads as visibly insecure and gets rejected on livestreams, contrasted with Kevin Hart, who commands more presence than men a foot taller simply by owning who he is without shame. He brings in Bryan Cranston's account of realizing an audition isn't about winning approval but about offering a service, walking in confidently and letting the outcome go, a mindset shift Cranston says transformed his career.

Simpson mirrors this with his own story of forcing himself, via a ten-minute timer left over from managing his OCD, to run up to a stranger and blurt out a compliment, getting laughed off but pumping his fist anyway because he'd proven to himself he wasn't a coward. He contrasts that with a mortifying story of being roped into asking a girl out on behalf of another guy on a TV set, a humiliation that reinforced his point that no one respects the go-between.

In the closing stretch, Simpson defends the specific texture of male friendship, the inside jokes repeated into absurdity, the punches and insults that mask real affection, the roles within a friend group like the victim, the instigator, the joker, the glue guy, and the motivator that internet trends have started cataloguing. He shares his own example of a friendship sustained almost entirely by yelling the nonsense phrase 'bot loot' at each other for days, arguing that this kind of low-stakes, high-frequency joy is just as vital as deep emotional disclosure.

He closes by noting that internet culture is often unsympathetic to male struggle, pointing out the hypocrisy of romanticizing Vincent van Gogh, a chronically isolated, friendless man, in art class while mocking timid modern men for the same struggles. His final call to action is simple, for both men and women, stop scrolling, go ask someone to be your friend or go on a date, and start a club, because loneliness is rising for women too, just not yet as steeply as for men.