Shalom Akolatse ’26 is a Math major and Chemistry minor. He is Internal Vice President for Pi Kappa Alpha. Rumor has it that he can be caught napping in his lab’s couch in the ISC. Contact him at scakolatse@wm.edu
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
I’m not going to lie, as a man, the concept of a male loneliness epidemic really confuses me. If you’re unaware, this is a concept being vocalized with increasing fervor, especially in online platforms such as Twitter, about how men are facing a brand of loneliness that it’s our collective job to figure out. My first response to this was: Is this even true? Are men particularly lonely in a way that no one else is? And my second response was: Is this something pressing that warrants me thinking about it? For the first question, the answer is: kind of. For the second, the answer is: definitely. Let’s get into it.
Everyone, especially in our day and age (and doubly so for my fellow members of Generation Z), is lonely. We’re all aware of the effect of the digital revolution, leaving us overstimulated and isolated, and we’re all participants in a society that really isn’t designed for genuine human connection. It really is not surprising that anyone is particularly lonely.
So that would lead us to think that men don’t deserve a special moniker so grave as the “male loneliness epidemic.” But would we apply this logic to a member of a marginalized class? If I caught wind of, say, a queer or Black loneliness epidemic, I’d take the idea and run. And the astute among you could probably articulate how being one of those identities or something alike can be an isolating experience, but therein lies the problem: you can articulate the how and why of it all.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that the people who voice these sorts of opinions often have some warped views on gender, and either have some sort of preoccupation with masculinity and how men should perform it properly, speak about women in overly restrictive ways or both. In other words, they strongly identify with gender roles. The emotional frameworks that develop in the mind of someone who is raised with the kinds of ideas that men are generally expected to hold are not frameworks that empower strong, fulfilling friendships. I mean, of course, these people don’t have friends; that’s what they’ve been screaming from the rooftops. But the typical “male loneliness” complainers are actually the canary in the coal mine for a much deeper and complex problem that men face as individuals.
A brief intermission. You will have noticed that I, as a man, am talking about men somewhat as an outsider. But I’m not, really. I actually do somewhat understand what these people are talking about with regard to the problem. My experience with masculinity, however, is one where I fell just on its periphery. I didn’t really have a lot of good friendships with guys growing up, and throughout my teenage years, I felt like something about me was different, preventing me from connecting with a lot of my male friends in a meaningful way. But I think that the friendships I developed instead — friendships with women — allowed me to develop the sensitivity that I had already had — and that I believe almost every child has, regardless of gender — and with it robust working models of my own feelings and how to process them, and how to share them with others.
And that’s really what I think the problem is here — and what we can learn from those voicing concerns about the male loneliness epidemic. These people, because of the socialization that a lot of men undergo, don’t have access to the emotions that are very much there. They suppress them, they view them as not worth voicing, as not worth exploring. Not only that, they view them as an active detriment to anything productive and as a distraction best left to women. They certainly don’t view them as something worth sharing with trusted friends, and they punish themselves for ever feeling these emotions. These people have learned to completely dissociate themselves from a large swath of their emotions — besides certain ones, like anger, which they rather readily over-identify with — and they don’t have the tools to respond to their own emotional experiences.
While this certainly doesn’t hold for every typical male relationship, many of those I have seen both online and in my personal life talk about this problem, and do not share their lives beyond work, dating and the occasional activity like a sport or hobby. They often don’t feel comfortable having relationships with women outside of romantic ones. This state, the state of their status quo being completely bereft of emotional understanding for themselves and others, has left them completely unequipped to handle the absurdity and alienation that every single working-class person experiences on a day-to-day basis. It leads them to be unable to understand the very real feelings of dissatisfaction that arise from the thorough isolation that many of us undergo as the hyperindividualist philosophy of American culture seeps into the very nature of our social fabric, and it has left them, just like everyone else, yearning for community and to simply be understood and cared for. They are, just as they have said, utterly, totally and completely lonely.
And as a man, the even bigger tragedy is that we have done it to ourselves. This is a horrid state of affairs for any group to live in, and the fact that this is not only possible, but necessary in our capitalist patriarchal society is actually a pitiful condition for a supposedly dominant class to have. For all the power we wield as a group, we are humans before anything else; humans with a very real need for care and tenderness and affection and belonging, and no amount of societal power can change that.
These men, because they have no other framework for dealing with things than what they already have, readily look for a source of their suffering, and instead of leveling the blame on the system that is causing them pain, they level it against those whom the system tells them they have power over. I assured you at the beginning of this essay that this was something that warrants thinking about. This is why we have to. Sociopolitically, as tensions rise and the price of eggs does too, leftists get more and more confirmation that our corporate capitalist society is unsustainably designed. But consider that for people like those sounding the alarm about male loneliness online, with a rigid set of ideas about how they should relate to the world and what they are owed, they can easily — though of course not correctly — draw causal relationships between minorities getting rights and the stress they are experiencing. When someone, say, a right-wing populist, assures them they’re not crazy and that the world is falling apart and that he will fix it for them, they will respond to that. They will respond to the rhetoric that has led them to believe that things are out of control, that gender is out of whack and that they will be left behind, that they need to get their power back, that men are owed something special that has been lost and that the reason that they feel so stressed and angry is “woke culture” and “Marxism.” They will respond, and they will elect Donald Trump as the 45th and 47th President of the United States, and they will do it gladly. They’ll fall for the social grift of alpha culture and the manosphere. In the best-case scenario, they alienate the women around them, and in the worst case, turn to violence that we don’t know how to address besides the violence of incarceration. Because, by their own admission, they don’t feel like they can turn to anyone but their own for support.
Class-conscious individuals may understand that it’s really not about gender. They will understand that because the fact that it’s not immediately profitable for us to design societies that allow us to be fulfilled emotionally, and because an isolated worker robbed of community is easier to exploit, any society with priorities like ours (that is, hypercapitalist priorities) would easily fall into a place where everyone is isolated and lonely. But the men we’ve been discussing are not immediately inclined to listen to this line of thinking. They will go with the quick option. And that’s hating marginalized groups. Online, many have rightfully pointed out that it’s not really society’s responsibility to fix this problem, and that the blame is often wrongfully placed on women. But, if we want our society to be equitably designed, we have to include men who are concerned about the loneliness epidemic in our vision of the future. Otherwise, they will use their immense social power to impose a vision strictly concerned about themselves.
But also, we should care. We should care about them even before we realize that they have such a capacity for (and social conditioning towards) violence. We should care because they actually are our own, whether we realize it or not. Any Marxist knows that at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, the only important distinction is that of two classes: ruling and working. They deserve to have consideration because they are humans looking for connection. And when they say that men are lonely, we should listen, even if they are annoying online. Because it’s not just them — it’s essentially every man reared in this social landscape that has to contend with this, and they don’t deserve to feel that they have to choose between having friends and feeling like they’re a man. We — including the lonely men reading this — are all more alike than dissimilar. And it’s time to recognize that we all deserve to treat each other with kindness and that we deserve to treat ourselves with kindness. To actually address the male loneliness epidemic is to undergo the hard process of uncovering yourself, and to be open to genuine connection from all sources. It’s even going the extra mile of seeking it out from those different from you. Fundamentally, it’s about encouraging each other to do the same. It’s time to stop punishing each other for just being human.
