Transcript 0:00 [gentle music] Thanks for tuning in to Wit and Wisdom with Tom Green, where we start conversations on the things that really matter. 0:11 So today, I wanna talk about something that doesn't get discussed very often, but it probably should. See, there's a quiet crisis going on today with young men. 0:21 Not all young men, of course, but enough that the trend is hard for us to ignore, and we see the symptoms everywhere: delayed adulthood, disengagement, too much time online, 0:34 fewer relationships, and fewer careers started. And from the outside, it's easy to look at this as laziness or a lack of motivation, but I don't think that's really what's happening. 0:48 I think what we're seeing is something deeper. I think there's a generation here that still wants responsibility, still wants adulthood, but maybe just isn't exactly sure how to get there, 1:00 or maybe they're too afraid to try. So let's jump in together and see if we can learn something. So I think we can both agree that we pushed this generation hard, both boys and girls, and the message was pretty clear. 1:18 They should work hard and get good grades and stay out of trouble. They should go to college and get good grades in college, and maybe if they do all of those things, everything will just work out. 1:31 And that was pretty good advice at the time, and a lot of folks followed that script. But the reality is when a lot of these kids reached adulthood, they figured out that maybe we'd sold them a bill of goods 1:44 and that the world we'd promised them didn't exist, or maybe it no longer existed. But many young men still followed the script, and when they got to adulthood, 1:58 they realized we'd been training them for a world that was quickly evaporating. See, what I think we're seeing is not laziness, and it's not a lack of ambition. It's more of a crisis of direction. 2:16 So here's a couple stats to back it up. If you take a look at young men today between the ages of, say, 18 and 23, and you ask them the question, "Are you inclined to think you're a failure?" 2:30 It's stunning to find out that nearly half of all young men between the ages of 18 and 23 agree with that statement. They actually think they're a failure. But how could they be a failure? They haven't even started yet. 2:45 But it doesn't stop there. If you look at older men, older young men, and you look at them in their late 20s, what you find is 38% of them agree with that statement, that they still feel like failures 3:01 even in their late 20s. So why does this matter? Well, I think it matters because for men in particular, confidence is the foundation of effort. 3:14 You've got to be confident about what you're doing and where you're going to put in the effort. I mean, think about that for a minute. If you believe that you're currently failing, how hard are you gonna try? 3:28 And more importantly, if you feel like the deck is stacked against you, or maybe the plan of action you'd created long ago or that your parents put in motion is no longer a possibility, 3:41 then the chances of you working really hard and being ambitious are, are pretty slim. If you think you're losing the game, most of the time you just quit. It's human nature. 3:57 So let's take a look at some education trends. You've probably heard this before, but there's a shrinking number of people going to college. 4:06 And if you look at the long-term trend, we're probably going to have a lot of colleges going out of business in the near future. 4:14 And those that are left are gonna have to compete a lot more aggressively for the young kids that are going to college. Because with all the trends on the horizon, 4:25 it's not so clear today that college is going to be worth the investment. But if you look at the kids who are in college today, they're shrinking, and only about 41% of all its college grads are male. That's right. 4:42 The women are actually taking over college campuses. It's a complete shift over what we've seen in the past, which was college campuses dominated by men. 4:53 But there seems to me more headwinds today when it comes to young men. 4:58 So today, with the legalization of weed in a number of states, it appears that the addiction rate for young men and the rate of substance abuse is going up. 5:09 And you probably know this already, but access to free high-definition online porn is ubiquitous. Nearly every young man is looking at porn, no matter what they tell you. 5:22 And with the legalization of online gambling, it appears that an enormous number of young men are spending whatever savings they have gambling on sports. 5:32 Now, you might not think that's a problem, but remember, these online gaming platforms are as addictive as the social media platforms they grew up on, 5:43 and that's creating a group of young men who are getting addicted to gambling and also wasting their savings betting on games. 5:53 Add into that the fact that young men have much higher rates of ADHD and autism than young women, and when you put all that together, 6:03 it simply becomes a recipe for disaster.But I think young men continue to get a bad rap. They're getting the rap that they're not motivated and that they're lazy and that they have no direction. 6:15 And again, I don't think that's the case because when you look at survey results, thirty-one percent of young men still say completing a formal education is extremely important, 6:26 and more than half of young men say that being financially independent is extremely important, and fifty-five percent say taking responsibility for yourself is also extremely important. 6:39 These are not exactly statistics of folks that look like they wanna lay around on the couch and be dependent on their parents for the rest of their life. 6:48 But the most important statistic I've come across is that nearly sixty percent of young men in their late twenties don't feel like adults. Again, sixty percent of young men in their late twenties don't feel like adults. 7:02 So they're stuck in this no-man land in between being a teenager and being an adult. So they're not a teenager, but they don't feel like they're fully adult. They're in no man's land, and this is a problem. 7:19 Ironically, if you ask a young man whether he wants to get married someday, sixty-eight percent say yes. And if you ask them whether they wanna be a parent someday, fifty-seven percent say yes. 7:32 Those are pretty good numbers. When you compare that to women's responses, only forty-five percent of young women are now saying that they want children. Okay, so riddle me this. 7:43 How is it that more young men wanna have children someday than young women, yet young men are the ones that don't feel like adults? Something in here doesn't add up. 7:54 But I don't think it's that this generation has opted out of adulthood or they've opted out of wanting to have children. I think part of the problem is the generation has just lost the roadmap to adulthood. 8:09 And frankly, things are changing so quickly in this world, I'm not sure we're the ones that can draw them a map. 8:16 I mean, if you look back historically on what that roadmap would look like, it would be finish school, get a job, move out of your mom's basement, and get married. 8:27 And then from there, buy a house and have kids and have a great life. But today's reality is pretty different. So today, college is incredibly expensive. 8:39 And when most kids get out of college these days, unfortunately, they're strapped with debt from paying for college education. And then when you look at housing, it's become incredibly expensive. 8:52 So telling someone to simply move out of their parents' basement and buy a house is unrealistic advice. And jobs are changing. I think we all can agree to that. 9:05 I was just listening to a podcast the other day, and the CEO of Anthropic, who's a really large artificial intelligence company, said he believes that fifty percent of all entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out in the next one to five years. 9:27 Imagine if you're one of these kids and you're hearing that in a podcast, that all this work that you're putting into college and the first couple of years working is gonna be wiped out in the next one to five years. 9:40 It's understandable that if you heard that at their age, you might lose some motivation as well. Nobody really knows where this is headed, but I think we all know that careers are changing, and they're changing quickly. 9:54 In fact, the running joke is there's no point in going to law school. You might as well just become an electrician or a plumber because they're the ones that are gonna make all the money in the future. 10:05 And that might be right, but it's not helpful if you're the one that's going to law school or thinking about a career in consulting or in investment banking. 10:18 So I think the key point here is that many young men are old enough to be an adult, but frankly, they're not stable enough or maybe not motivated enough to become one. 10:31 As I pointed out earlier, young men are spending an enormous amount of time online. Online doing things like video games and high-definition porn and gambling on sporting events. 10:43 And people might say that these are the culprits that are taking men's eyes off the prize, taking away their motivation. But I often find that distraction is a symptom, not a cause. 10:58 See, I think when people feel lost or unmotivated or not good enough, it seems like they try to find ways to distract themselves. Distraction is often what they do when they don't know what to do next. 11:14 So if you listen to me on a regular basis, you know that I love statistics. And one of them that I think applies here to young men is that seventy-seven percent of all teachers today are women, 11:25 and seventy to eighty percent of all therapists are women. That's a field that used to be dominated by men. And you might say, "Why does that matter?" 11:36 Well, I think it matters because young men are growing up increasingly with female influence in their lives, and conversely, they're growing up with a lot fewer men in their lives. 11:49 And why it matters is that a lot of times when you find young men who've failed to launch, the answer is, "Well, maybe they should get some therapy." But the problem is therapy is relational. 12:02 Therapy requires trust and comfort with the person you're talking to. 12:07 And it seems to me that if you're a young man and you're struggling with porn and gambling and other online addictionsI might not be that comfortable discussing all those issues with a woman. It's just a fact. 12:21 And so while some men will go to therapy, they may not engage, because we all know you can go to therapy, but that doesn't mean you're doing therapy. 12:32 So young men might go seeking help, but might not get the help that they're looking for. Again, all of the things we're talking about are symptoms of a bigger diagnosis, but what is that diagnosis? 12:46 For me, I think the root cause of all these issues is that young men have a tremendous fear of failure. If you ask older men what they feared most when they were growing up, most will say failure. 13:00 See, failure today is, is much different than it used to be. Failure today is public, and it's online, and at least in young men's minds, it's permanent. 13:12 See, their lives of social media and platforms like LinkedIn for career growth and announcements, there's a constant comparison game taking place. 13:22 And for young men, there's nothing worse than being seen as a failure in the eyes of your peers. 13:29 And so it seems to me that if we're being measured constantly by money and status and followers and lifestyle and announcements, the last thing I want is to be seen as a failure. And the easiest way not to fail 13:47 is not to try. And from the outside, that looks like laziness or a lack of motivation. But in reality, I think it may be fear and self-protection, and that's different. 14:03 So if fear of failure is the diagnosis here, then maybe the real failure was on us. Maybe young men didn't really fail after all. Maybe we failed them. 14:15 I mean, we told them that life in the future would be linear and predictable, that everything would be fair. Get good grades, stay out of trouble, and everything will work out for you. 14:26 All your wildest dreams will come true. But things have changed. The world got a whole lot more expensive and a whole lot more competitive. And again, the roadmap that we laid out either forked or came to a dead end. 14:43 And so as young men look forward, they just see a future of uncertainty, a world that's constantly changing. And that's not what we presented to them. And you can imagine if they're sitting in their shoes, 14:56 failure looks like a very real option, particularly when you don't even feel like an adult. So from the outside looking in, from our vantage point, it looks like hesitation, and it looks like disengagement. 15:12 But underneath it all may be something totally different, maybe a calculation, a fear of failure, and an unwillingness to take the risks that need to be taken to succeed. 15:25 To be sure, what they don't need is more shame and more lectures and more pressure and more criticism. They've got plenty of that. 15:35 What I think they need today is more direction and more mentorship, more people telling them that there is a path forward and that taking a little bit of risk and maybe failing a couple times isn't the end of the world. 15:51 What they really need is permission to try, permission to fail, and maybe even a new definition of what adulthood might look like. See, adulthood was never really about having everything figured out. 16:07 It was about showing up and taking responsibility. It was about trying things, things that were difficult, and sometimes failing and then trying again and becoming someone that others can rely on. 16:21 That's what it means to be an adult. So maybe what young men need now is not more pressure. Maybe they need our permission, our permission to fail and to find their footing 16:35 without feeling like every mistake proves that they were never enough to begin with. Wit and Wisdom is a free weekly podcast for people who are curious about the world. 16:49 If you learned something today, or if this podcast challenged you, or it made you think differently about the world, how about sharing it with a few people you care about? 16:58 Maybe you too can have your own honest conversation about the things that really matter. So thanks again for tuning in. I hope you'll come back next week for another episode of Wit and Wisdom. 17:10 And in the meantime, always remember, nothing beats nice. 17:17 [outro music]
