More young men look up to Obama than a religious leader and 12% have been incarcerated — what explains the massive male malaise?

The common narrative about the troubles facing young men goes like this: A growing number are failing in school, not working or studying, not dating or forming families and not leaving their childhood bedrooms. 

They are checked out from social life. Their mental health is poor, their habits are bad — video games, pornography, gambling — and their views are extremist. What happened to America’s men?

My peers and I at the Institute of Family Studies surveyed 2,000 young men to hear what they have to say. Our results show a substantial number of young men are struggling mightily. That should worry everyone.

Three common explanations are usually given for male malaise: institutional structure, individual deficiency and socialization.

The structural argument finds by far the most support from our data. The social fabric itself has thinned —a deinstitutionalization, as sociologists call it, that has left our world more formless. 

Over time, there has been a sharp decline of prescribed roles, inherited life courses, and clear occupational and educational trajectories.

We see what is lost by examining the positive effect of the last remaining American institutions with any strength, the formal-education track.

Men who took this route — college, trade school, apprenticeships — are faring the best. This often does not appear while they were in college or training, which can be a distressing time. Rather, it comes afterward, widening men’s horizons for stable employment, friendships, marriage and community.

But the higher-education pathway is not open to many men — whether for financial reasons, family responsibilities or fear of failure. A sad finding: 43% of young men agreed with the appraisal “I am inclined to think I am a failure.”

In today’s economy, the focus for many young men is not employment, but a good income. There’s a logic to this position. Real wages for young men have stagnated in recent decades. Gig work and the disruption of new technologies have brought further uncertainties.

This is not the old job market, and attitudes have changed accordingly. Many young men do not see a direct relationship between hard work and getting ahead. More than 60% said they feel they have little control over the things that happen to them. They appear to view things as random and circumstantial.

With the lack of institutionalized social forms — churches, volunteer service, and recreation — young men are left for themselves to build relationships. Even worse, only about 60% of our respondents report a consistently present father. Perhaps this helps explain the terrifying statistic that 12% of our young men reported that they’d been incarcerated at some point.

On these points and much else, we find social formlessness to be like a raging storm in which many young men are struggling to find some secure foothold. 

Then there’s the problem of individual deficiency. The deficiency argument assumes young men are lost because they are simply apathetic, resentful and nihilistic. But when we asked them, we found nothing of the sort. 

Most young men have worthy goals, including marriage, children and financial independence. They value belonging, relationships, and respect. In addition, they understand their manly role as requiring responsibility and sacrifices. If they blame anyone for falling short, it is themselves. 

Many young men are in a liminal position. On the one hand, they have a sense for what a full life might look like, complete with a loving and productive family.

On the other hand, they are not living that life or even moving toward that goal, and this paralysis is a source of immense distress.

All this is worsened by frequent recourse to online activities such as gambling and pornography consumption. We discovered that 23% of young men gamble daily, and 27% watch porn daily. These habits are associated with greater loneliness and depression.

Although these are self-destructive activities, young men are turning to them as a coping mechanism.

So dismissing these men as simply deficient misses the broader point: These young men want to transcend their circumstances, but can’t locate the path to do so.

The rise of formlessness requires young men to be more self-determining. They have to do more with less institutional support than prior generations.

This demands them to be assertive, confident and flexible, while also being emotionally intelligent, sensitive, caring and team oriented.

That’s a complex mix. We find that a large majority of men (73%) believe that in recent decades it has become harder to know what it is to be a man. They may be referring to this new combination of required qualities.

Their views of proper manhood are varied. They affirm that no one should be coerced to fit any one model, and when it comes to those they looked up to, mothers (79%) and fathers (69%) led by a wide margin. 

Interestingly, the most commonly cited celebrity role models were Barack Obama (54%) and Lebron James (54%). More young men said they looked up to these two than said they looked up to a religious leader (46%). Andrew Tate came in at a worrying 31%.

Considering the views of manhood that young men endorse, it is not readily apparent that they have no vision for masculinity, though many of them espouse troubling role models.

The wider problem is that young people have never been asked to shoulder such burdens of autonomous self-making.

Withdrawing may not be a failure of manhood. It may be a symptom of our collective impoverishment, which asks young men for something that our society no longer helps provide.

Joseph E. Davis is a research professor of sociology and director of the Picturing the Human Project of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.