Young men aren’t doing well. In 2022, among those ages 10 to 24, males accounted for 78 percent of fatal suicide attempts. In 2023, males who graduated from high school were about 8 percent less likely to enroll in college. The labor-force participation rate has dropped around 10 percent for young men ages 20 to 24 in the last 30 years; it has dropped more than 20 percent for the 16–19 age range.
In Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway, a popular podcaster and a professor of marketing at NYU, takes this masculinity crisis head-on. He offers an “aspirational vision of masculinity” for those who desire “to be a responsible human flooded with testosterone” (9). As he describes the problem, there’s an entire “generation of young men from all backgrounds who are (a) unbearably lonely, (b) not economically viable, (c) not emotionally viable, and (d) basically adrift” (5).
