What the manosphere yappers won't tell you about the cure for male loneliness

Guys don't need to be infantilized or sold a bill of goods, but maybe it wouldn't hurt for us to write a few letters, host a few baby showers and organize a few meal trains

You’ve heard the news, I assume? We, as a society, are concerned about men. I mean, we are always concerned about men, but currently we are concerned about the problem with men. How we’re lonely. How we’re falling behind. How we’re in crisis. More to the point, everyone has a pitch to solve what’s ailing men, one that usually conveniently aligns with either their political priors or career interests. The cure for male loneliness, it seems, lies less in the eye of the beholder than in the PowerPoint of the be-grifter.

Like all of us, I have my thoughts (definitely about the fuzzy line between the material reality of the situation and its discursive role in trojan horsing yet another anti-feminist backlash into the Zeitgeist, but also about what might help matters¹). But don’t worry. I’m not auditioning to be the Joe Rogan of the Left. I hear you have to live in Austin for that, and while I love many Texans, I don’t do well with humidity or Greg Abbott. More to the point— my ideas aren’t lucrative. There’s no ticket to riches or glory here, either for myself or others.

What I have to offer is low on grandiosity and high on lessons learned the hard way. It’s a simple list of actions that will not solve the male loneliness epidemic, followed by one that, in my experience at least, will help a great deal. Now, if you personally enjoy a handful of activities from the first list, that’s great (so do I). They are not all toxic hellmouths, though a few definitely are. All I am saying is that, if the name of the game is combatting loneliness, none of them, even the benign ones, will do the trick.

My dudes, none of these things will truly make us less lonely:

-Listening to a podcast.

-Running for President.

-Hosting a podcast and/or appearing on other people’s podcasts in order to position oneself as a “regular guy” or a “common sense thinker” in advance of a Presidential run.

-Lifting weights.

-Tracking macros.

-Intermittent fasting.

-Asking Chat GPT (anything).

-Openly supporting a fascist administration.

-Disengaging from politics.

-”Engaging in politics,” but in that suspended animation high school debate way where “politics” is just about amassing a pristine set of opinions, expressed loudly.

-Becoming a libertarian (but also: becoming a socialist, becoming a reactionary centrist, becoming a born again Christian, becoming a decolonial anarchist, becoming a “Common Sense Democrat,” becoming a Reagan Republican, becoming a feminist, becoming MAGA or MAHA or adopting any ideology whatsoever, if the point of that ideology is a mere declaration of how correct you are rather than a set of actions and relationships that make other people’s lives better).

-Developing a sudden and curiously timed interest in issues of fairness in girls’ high school athletics.

-Saving ten dollars on your first bet at FanDuel, the official sports betting partner of Major League Baseball.

-Buying a gun.

-Cryptocurrency (Just in general. Definitely investing in it, but literally giving it any consideration. Not to “wild and precious life” you all, but truly… crypto? In this mortal coil?).

-But in particular: Getting so into cryptocurrency that you become involved in a scheme to throw (may God have mercy on our souls) dildos onto the floor of WNBA games.

-Woodworking.

-Golf.

-Craft beer.

-Nashville hot chicken.

-Swiping right.

-Heterosexual marriage, especially if “getting married” means following the general pattern of straight relationships, where a man’s emotional well-being is just one more work function outsourced from husbands to wives.

-Remembering niche sports figures from when you were twelve years old (sadly, even if the sports figure in question is Billy Ripken and you know the story about that one baseball card).

-Getting a job.

-Getting a promotion.

-Working in a much romanticized but under-compensated blue collar profession.

-Working in a less romanticized but much more generously compensated white collar profession.

-Receiving professional accolades.

-Considering buying a boat.

-Actually buying a boat.

-Cursing the fat cats who can afford to buy boats.

-Spending your free time posting on either boat buying or boat bombing Subreddits [Note: I do not know if either of these Subreddits exist, and I do not plan on finding out].

-Getting really into the Pusha T’s discography (or cassette-era Mountain Goats, or Michael Mann films, or Pynchon novels).

-List making (especially top five lists, and most especially top five lists about Pusha T, cassette-era Mountain Goats, Michael Mann films, or Pynchon novels).

-Having literally any opinion about Sydney Sweeney’s recent American Eagle campaign.

-Becoming the most successful contemporary male recording artist but branding yourself as an iconoclastic underdog on account of you being a messy drunk who likes slurs and hates patio furniture.

-Moving to an expensive and photogenic corner of the rural West, wearing a very specific hat, and staring meaningfully into the middle distance while your wife homeschools your natalist-approved gaggle of children and pours you a tall glass of raw milk.

-Deploying the National Guard into major American cities because those municipalities are coded, in the conservative imagination, as being associated with Blackness and Brownness and you hope that, by pretending to stand against that fever dream of a racialized “threat,” you might distract your base from both the very bad economy and your association with infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

-Pickleball.

And here’s one thing that I’ve found (from personal experience) will make you meaningfully less lonely:

-Care.

Which sounds trite and unsatisfying, I know, but that’s the thing about emotionally healthy life lessons.

I’m truly not being cute here, I promise. And there’s a reason why this essay is specifically about “male loneliness” and not “loneliness in general,” though I believe both are legitimate societal epidemics. I have been a cis guy for over four decades. In that lifetime, I have seen the depth and breadth of my relationships ebb and flow multiple times. They’ve been on an upswing for a few years now (though, like all things, it’s not linear and there are facets of my life where my relationships could use some mending), and I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned both in eras of social verdancy and drought.

In the times when I have been most lonely, it’s not necessarily because I wasn’t interacting with other people. I’ve felt profoundly alone at times when I was literally talking to other human beings for 90% of my waking hours. I’ve felt alone when I was an active member of clubs and teams and organizations. I’ve felt alone when I was both cultivating and receiving a great deal of external validation. Yes, the stages of life when I’ve interacted with fewer people outside of my nuclear family have been particularly lonesome, but merely “catching up for a drink” or “bowling (not alone)” haven’t, in my experience, been enough to stave off the ghosts of alienation and disconnection.

But care. Genuine care. My friends, that’s always made a difference— showing up for other people, actively and regularly. Not because they can do something for me (validate me, sleep with me, advance my career, temporarily quiet my doubt and self loathing, etc.) but because we all share a world and therefore deserve to have one more person give a damn about us.

If I am less lonely than I was a few years ago, it is because I have more frequently raised my hand— to wrangle allergen-friendly dishes for the potluck, to watch other people’s children, to coordinate snacks for youth sports practices, to text a friend whom I know is going through a hard time, to talk to a newcomer after Quaker Meeting, to get more deeply involved in my union, to show up to community meetings that I previously would have skipped (and then to sign up for a clean-up shift the following month), to host community building classes for free (you will not be surprised to learn that there is a stark gender gap in the student roster), to say yes to a would-be organizer halfway across the world who doesn’t have the money to subscribe to my newsletter but who was brave and kind enough to reach out²

Crucially, I haven’t raised my hand explicitly in order to become less lonely, or to play any other transactional long game. That’s not to say that there’s no selfishness involved, since “re-discovering the version of myself that is most fully alive” is its own form of self-interest, but that truly is the whole shooting match, at least on my better days.

And again, I’m making some progress, but none of us can or should aspire to be saints. There are friends and even family members about whom I care deeply, but whom I haven’t shown that care recently. There are people on my block who remain strangers. There are weeks where self-doubt or fear takes over, where I tell myself, in essence that “I deserve a break” from care, before realizing that I’ve squandered an embarrassing amount of that break scrolling social media. There is still ego and ambition. If I were to open my email tomorrow and there were two messages awaiting me— one from an editor at a Big Five house saying “hey, make sure you reach out to me first when you have a new book idea” and the other from a big-hearted stranger seeking connection, I’d very likely respond to the first over the second. But I’m trying, and there’s been joy in trying, and I don’t think that discovery is unique to me.

Up to this point, I’ve tried to speak as concretely and non-theoretically possible, more how-to than dissertation. But it isn’t a coincidence that— as a cis guy— the idea that "the more you care about others, the less lonely you are” has emerged as a mid-life revelation rather than a lifelong constant. Also not a coincidence: the omnipresent housework/care gap in heterosexual relationships, the comparative dearth of men in helping professions (teachers, nurses, etc.), the fact that women, trans men and non-binary people are also lonely, but are far less likely to take their loneliness out on the rest of us in a storm of bullets or fists.

All of this, I’d argue, has the same root. And as fraught as discourse about patriarchy has become in this time of anti-woke backlash, it remains a deeply accurate descriptor for the gendered trap we’ve set for ourselves. To speak of patriarchy isn’t to villainize men, but merely to appropriately reflect reality. If you buy into all of society’s stories about man as protector, man as leader, man as defender of honor, man of perpetrator of righteous violence, man as settler of scores, man as recipient of womens’ unlimited attention and labor, man who doesn’t have to engage in care work because he supposedly has “more important things to do,” it won’t take long before you’ve run out of rope and all your left with is man alone, fully severed from everything that makes us human.

To be clear, I do believe that cis dudes would be a bit less lonely if we bowled with each other (or golfed together or played pickleball with the boys or hosted a Michael Mann film series), but those alone remain surface-level correctives. So too will the cure for male loneliness take more than politicians issuing Executive Orders For Men, or tech bros offering a shinier app (Frndshp, they’ll call it), or anything that promises deliverance for a nation of lonesome fellas without any of us (individually or collectively) being asked to make meaningful changes in our lives.

When we talk about loneliness, what we’re really talking about is a lack of connection. And you don’t cure disconnection through pandering, or even through proximity. True connection comes through interdependence, through bonds that emerge when people trust that you actually care about them, rather than viewing them as means to an end.

My guys, there is a world available to us where we feel far less alone. It’s right around the corner, in fact, because regardless of where you live that’s where other people are waiting for you. There are people in or near your life who would like to be seen and noticed and listened to. There are group projects that currently need more participants, volunteer shifts that are open, people who have nothing immediately to offer you but who, like you, wouldn’t mind a decent conversation. There is a friend who is sick who would love a freezer-ready lasagna, an exhausted couple next door who need a sitter, trash in the park begging to be picked up on Saturday morning. Your loneliness deserves care, but so to do your neighbors. For once, start there.

End notes:

1. The sticker is a joke! But it does look nice, doesn’t it? And I still have some available for paid subscribers who’d like one (note to those waiting from the last raffle— I’m doing a big mail run as soon as I return from vacation). And yes, I do offer a whole bunch of perks for paid subscribers, including free sticker giveaways and raffles for bigger merch, both because I’m deeply grateful for you all showing care for me, but perhaps also because all those “perks” (like the weekly discussions and Discord and mail exchanges) make us all feel a little more connected to each other. Thanks, as always, for considering joining what is a truly lovely disaporic community (and also, of course, for wrapping me and my family in your arms and allowing this to be my day job). It helps!

2. I would be remiss if I did not also share that one way I learn to care better is to read writers who teach me the myriad forms that loving community can take. One of my favorites is

   Lisa Sibbett
   , the author of
   The Auntie Bulletin
   . Do you already read Lisa? I hope you do! If so, you might know that, because of America’s broken social network, Lisa could particularly benefit from a network of care and support right now (read: more paid subscribers!). It’s worth it, I promise, but also: If you are a paid White Pages subscriber and email me to tell me that you also support Lisa’s work financially, I’ll let you skip the upcoming merch raffle and jump to the front of the for either a Barnraisers shirt or tote or a “love harder than the fascists can hate” shirt/tote. I’m garrett at barnraisersproject.org

3. I know I’m not perfect when it comes to inbox maintenance, but I ask particular patience this week, because while I do want to reply to your messages I’m also on vacation (family reunion! home in Missoula! ahhhh!).

4. On the profoundly important topic of cassette-era Mountain Goats releases: I do have opinions, and I also have a song of the week for you. I bought this record in Flagstaff, Arizona, back when I was teaching in rural New Mexico. I was with one of my best friends in the world (still true, and I would drive to Indiana overnight if this friend or his family needed me). I knew, at the time, that this was one of our last trips together before I flew across an ocean to chase a girl (reader, we married). I drove back to Crownpoint in my white Corolla, singing along on repeat, tears streaming down my cheeks: “We had hot caramel/sticking to our teeth/the only love I’ve ever known/burning underneath/ I’m gonna miss you, when you’re gone/I’m gonna miss you/when you’re gone” The cure for male loneliness is (quite often) blubbery and overwrought and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

   [And as always, the full song of the week playlist is available on Apple Music and Spotify].

5. Re: Billy Ripken, and the infamous baseball card. This is not the original image, the one that inspired so much giggling on Howard County school buses back in the day. It is a photoshopped retouching, but an extremely White Pages coded one, so how could I keep from sharing?

   

1. If you want a deeper discussion of how I’m parsing this issue— which I think is simultaneously rooted in a reality about which I care a great deal and often weaponized in bad faith ways, here are a couple previous pieces.

2. Even if I’m behind in my inbox and sometimes that (deeply apologetic) reply comes many months later.