Society Spoke And Men Are Listening
For generations, we’ve told men that they don’t matter and don’t belong
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss how we broke the male mind.
Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.
When I first started writing my column for the Daily Caller, I saw an Axios piece about how many women were in the workforce. Of course, Axios was treating the closing gender gap in the workplace as a celebration of how far women’s equality has come in the last several decades. The author even gleefully pointed out that the female line of the workforce graph was going up while the male line was going down.
Hidden in the data was the fact that seven million prime-aged men were already sitting out of the labor market. This was in 2023, and the demoralization of men has only gotten worse.
Somehow, as a woman, I was supposed to see this as a victory for my sex, but it enraged me. Treating this as acceptable ignores the absolute distress that comes with large numbers of men checking out.
The societal cost of men exiting our nation’s workforce is first paid by the men themselves before trickling down to the women who end up dating or marrying them, onto the kids who grow up without steady fathers, and then on everyone else.
Male labor-force participation has been sliding for decades, but in 2026, women now hold more nonfarm payroll jobs than men in the U.S. That’s only the third time in our nation’s history that this has happened.
So what are these men doing if they aren’t working? Well, unfortunately, stay-at-home boyfriends and husbands are now a real, measurable thing. Fathers make up about 18 percent of stay-at-home parents according to recent Pew numbers. This is something we used to joke about, but never thought would actually become a reality. And if you actually listen to what young men are saying about their own lives, the picture gets a lot darker.
The Institute for Family Studies released the second half of a big YouGov survey of 2,000 guys ages 18 to 29. Forty-three percent of these young men say they’re inclined to think of themselves as failures. Sixty-one percent feel like they have little control over the things that happen to them. Fifty-four percent feel they never seem to do enough to please people. One in four feel lonely most or all of the time. Nearly half say they don’t belong to anything they’d call a community.
These aren’t the numbers of a generation that just decided they have nothing to offer. They didn’t wake up one day thinking that work and responsibility were optional. In fact, the same study showed the exact opposite; 84 percent of these men say having ambitious plans describes them at least somewhat, and 81 percent think they can do almost anything they set their mind to. Still, about half agree that people like them will never reach the American Dream no matter how hard they work.
That combination is interesting. The gap between what they want and how much agency they feel is its own source of stress. These men believe they are failures, have no control over what happens to their lives, and are lonely.
For generations, we’ve told men that they don’t matter and don’t belong, and, unfortunately, they are finally listening to us.
Loneliness isn’t just “I don’t see people.” You can have some relationships and still feel isolated. Friendships help, but they don’t automatically create belonging. The reality is that men are told to build their own networks in a place that is steadily declining in accepting male membership.
Men, and society at large, fare better when a high percentage of them are in the workforce. But working alone doesn’t bring purpose. Culture matters too. The institutions that still buffer against isolation need cultural room to be valued. Churches and civic groups still correlate with better outcomes, yet they reach a shrinking share of young men. This is extremely sad considering the report found that men who participated in things like attending regular religious services are substantially more likely to feel a sense of community.
The issue isn’t that women moved forward. But we can’t pretend that female advancement hasn’t come at a clear and expensive cost. Many of these women in the workforce are still looking for a husband. And we are staring down the barrel of a large share of American men who lost reliable ways to perform the roles – protect and provide – that still shape how many of them measure their own worth.
I’m not suggesting that we return to the 1950s. But elevating traditional male virtues is extremely important. It’s clear that men still define their worth through their capacity to contribute, and when we erode the pathways for that contribution, the human toll is undeniable.
Men who feel they have little to offer are less likely to form stable families. Children without engaged fathers face higher risks of lower educational and emotional outcomes. Communities with a concentration of disconnected men tend to have higher rates of crime. All you have to do is visit any major U.S. city, and you’ll see this trend playing out in real time.
It might seem odd that I am so focused on men if you’ve been reading my newsletter for long. Most of you know that I am a mother of four girls. I am obviously not looking at this through the lens of what will happen to my sons. Instead, I worry about what will happen to my daughters when they reach the marriage stage of their lives.
We cannot sit back and allow men to continue to suffer. It’s not good for anyone. Our culture created a crisis, and we can no longer ignore the rotten fruit it’s borne.
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to goodlife@dailycaller.com
Heard It Through The Grapevine
Amber Duke writes about how even leftist media isn’t immune to their own side tuning them out. For years, they told us the decline in trust in media was strictly a conservative trait, but now they are seeing what happens when no one cares what they have to say. Unfit to Print: THE LEFT’S MEDIA REVOLT
It’s always so interesting to read about Reagan Reese’s perspective on covering the comings and goings of her White House reporter beat. Her latest is no different. The Room Where It Happens
Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.
If you are already a paid subscriber, make sure to join the conversation in our subscribers-only chat below.
