The Real Reason Young Men Are Struggling To Succeed

Some old-school conservatives say that the problem of young people failing to launch is nothing more than a failure of personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is certainly good and necessary. But it seems unlikely that today’s young people are inherently different and less responsible than people used to be. And indeed, a new Institute for Family Studies study finds “nothing of the sort.” Most young men, it says, “have worthy goals, including for marriage, children, and financial independence,” and they “value a sense of belonging, warm relationships, and being well-respected.” 

The most compelling reason for failure to launch, according to the report, is a loss of social structure: “Over time, there has been a sharp decline of prescribed roles, inherited life courses, clear occupational and educational trajectories, and the like. Where there was once a given social pattern, an ‘institution,’ like sustained work for the same company, there is now a more open and indeterminate field of options and choices.”

Put another way, social norms used to give men a road map to success. There was a sort of cultural default to the American dream: If you stayed on the path, you’d get a good job, a family, and so forth. Personal responsibility was seen as the culprit when a man strayed from it because, essentially, he had been set up for success and had squandered it.

Those men who have hewed the closest to what remains of the pathway, that is, getting some form of higher education, are the ones with the best social outcomes. “By nearly every metric,” the report says, “men who took this route and stayed with it to graduation — college, trade school, apprenticeships — are faring the best … it opened doors or widened horizons to stable employment, friendships, marital partners, household establishment, community affiliation, and much else.”

This runs contrary to the advice of some conservatives who say going to college isn’t worth it. While there is much to deplore about the state of higher education — and the Trump administration is doing yeoman’s work attempting to fix it — casting it aside seems to do more harm than good.

Community is also harder to achieve. It’s still out there, but it’s a pathway that now needs to be consciously chosen and sought after, rather than the default. It’s easy to fall into a familiar pattern. Wake up, go to work, come home, scroll social media or play video games, go to sleep, repeat.

You don’t actually need to do anything else. And once that’s your life, it’s a difficult spell to break. Start a new hobby? Why? You’re tired from working all day, and it’s much easier not to. Absent some epiphany, some realization that better things are possible if you take a different approach to life, why put in more effort for the same outcomes?

This leads to a compounding problem: many young men aren’t confident that, even after putting in the work, they’ll achieve their goals. More than seven in 10 agreed that “who you know is more important than ability or hard work in getting ahead,” and over half said they “never seem to do enough to please people.”

That doesn’t mean, though, they’re giving in to nihilism. At least not yet. Although “many young men may have lost faith in meritocracy and felt the sting of structural obstacles to their attainment of adult social goals, they still retain a faith in their own powers to get them through … they are still young and have not necessarily given up on themselves, or on the possibility that things might develop in their favor. They are, we might say, alienated from the system but optimistic about themselves.”

A coping mechanism? Maybe. But it’s also the only attitude that can, on an individual level, extricate them from their situation. The source of existential frustration or, as the report puts it, alienation, is that young men want better but often aren’t sure how or even if it’s possible.

When I was in elementary school, my father once scolded me for acting like a child. “I am a child, Dad,” I retorted. “What did you expect?” My saying so didn’t earn me anything beyond a time-out, but the underlying logic wasn’t completely off base. Can we really expect people who haven’t been given the tools to navigate modern life to succeed?

“Never have young people been asked to shoulder such burdens of autonomous self-making,” the report concludes. Each individual is responsible for his own life choices and life outcomes. However, it is entirely expected that fewer people will succeed when incentive structures make it more arduous to do so.

That some of them are staring down that challenge with quiet dignity doesn’t mitigate that something significant has been lost, and too many of our young men are paying the price for it.

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Stephan Kapustka is a writer. Follow him on X @SteveKapustka.

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