Gen-Z Men Are Lacking A Very Basic Human Need And It's Turning Them Into Pariahs
I see a lot of my young self in the angry young men of today. That’s not a good thing.
Peopleimages.com - YuriArcurs | Canva The other night, I was on Reddit and found a post from a “high-value man” who was having a meltdown. This is a fairly normal occurrence online since guys seem to be triggered over intimacy they’re not having.
I shrugged and was about to close the view, but then I read the comments. My heart sank. Several things became clear here:
- The guy having a meltdown wasn’t 18 yet
- He had asked on another forum “how to be cool"
- He was very lonely and very obsessed with getting women
The feminist in me wanted to shrug and say, “Well, that’s a guy who hates women enough to die alone,” but the other part of me felt a sympathetic pang of grief for him.
You see, there’s an elephant in the room. In a weird, messed up way, what I was going through was the same thing that he is currently going through — and it never ends well with the road he’s on.
Gen-Z men are lacking a very basic human need and it's making them into pariahs.
MANDY GODBEHEAR / Shutterstock
Back when I was in school, the only real goal I had was to be popular.
I desperately wanted to be part of the cool crowd. Every time I saw a group of kids hanging out together, I marveled at them. I wanted to figure out how to get that level of acceptance, love, or admiration that Johnny Football Star or Betty Cheerleader naturally obtains.
Popularity is one of those things that messes with your mind. When you’re popular, you don’t realize you’re popular. You just see others scrambling for your attention, and you’re like, “Wait, what? Why?!”
You think you’re well-liked but not popular, popular. After all, you’re not like Regina George from Mean Girls or the evil sorority girls from House Bunny. You’re nice. You just have friends with everyone and just have a certain look, that’s all.
When you aren’t popular and you’re stuck on the outside, popularity looks amazing. It looks like it feels like a warm hug in the even warmer glow of a summer sun. Popularity makes everything seem so secure — and somehow, it also makes you feel lonelier knowing you don’t have that in your life.
When you’re popular, people pay attention to you. You get to feel like a star. When you’re not, you often wonder what you can do to get people to talk to you, to be around you, and to chase you. And that makes you do weird stuff.
As weird as it sounds, most of my acting out during my youth was a twisted attempt at popularity — getting that “cool” factor that seemed to naturally ooze off certain classmates.
The older I get, the more I see Gen-Z men suffer from the pursuit of popularity.
fizkes / Shutterstock
When you’re a guy, certain things become very difficult to do in the society we have right now. Men are often discouraged from crying. They’re often treated like threats or “marks” for scammers.
Because of how men are socialized, they also have a very hard time having friends. Speaking as someone who is non-binary and acts like a guy, male friendships tend to be way less intimate than female friendships.
There’s this odd thing we do when we hang out: we don’t talk about how we feel, usually. A lot of my guyfriends only talk to me about their breakups one-on-one because they feel safer with me. After all, I present and appear to be female.
Then, when we’re all hanging out as a group, the talk immediately becomes activity-oriented. This made me realize something about mainstream male behavior that has major implications for guys.
Men bond by doing stuff together. Women tend to bond by talking and offering moral support. That’s support men often don’t have from their guy friends.
Much of this is because too many guys think it’s “weird” if a guy asks for emotional support that goes beyond dapping you up and drinking with you. If they ask for support from a cishet male, it often ends up with them “losing face” among their peers.
When you’re a guy (or have only loose male friendships), you look at the cool crowd and all you think is, “Wow. They must feel so loved and wanted. It must be nice to feel that way.”
In other words, these Gen-Z men are lacking a very basic human need: companionship.
Companionship is a human need — and it’s one that’s rarely acknowledged these days. When you have a need that’s not met, it’s not something you can ignore. It affects your body and mind in really weird ways.
People like myself and other neurodivergent people often feel lost when it comes to actually getting that popularity — or even a gaggle of friends. It’s doubly difficult as a guy because guys struggle with friendships because of all the weird messaging they get growing up.
And no, online interactions are not enough to feel like your needs are met. You need actual time with friends and family. Once in a while, you need to have a hug — even if it’s platonic.
Physical touch and in-person conversations are legitimate physical and mental needs. People get sick if they don’t have basic physical contact from time to time. When you’re not getting those needs met, your body and mind will react.
When you’re a pariah or ostracized past a certain point, you start getting weird about human interaction.
This is a lot like the phenomenon that happens when people starve: they start obsessing over food, often going so far as to collect photos and recipes of food.
You start hunting for ways to “hack” socializing. You start seeing friendships as a zero-sum game. You start looking for numerical “stats” where you can measure how close you are to popularity.
For me, I was obsessed with party invitations for a while. And inside jokes. And the more I tried to get my weird, obsessive “stats” up, the stranger I’d act, which pushed people away harder.
Eventually, I started using intimacy as a way to find friends. Why? Because that was the only time anyone gave me the time of day. Intimacy became the most obvious status symbol I could get to prove to myself and others that I was worth consorting with.
You know what? I think that’s where a lot of these guys are — using intimacy as a sign that they’re worthy of attention, inclusion, and acceptance. Because they think intimacy will solve their bigger problem: the crippling isolation of modern living paired with the pain of being an outcast.
Like it or hate it, the modern young man is frantic for some kind of easy, rejection-free solution to the loneliness and hopelessness they feel.
The Red Pill and the right-wing era did something brilliant when it came to radicalizing men.
The phenomenon of lonely men is not a new one. It’s been around since I was a kid in the 90s. However, it’s been worsening with every year that passes. Most men don’t have the dubious luck of appeal that most AFAB (assigned female at birth) women do.
So, they have to rely on their personalities — up to a point. There is a thing as an appeal for women, though it rarely ever looks like the “gym bro beefcake” aesthetic men assume women want. But I digress.
Hooking up, finding intimate friendships, and getting popular are much harder for men because society makes it hard for them to connect. It’s the double standards they deal with.
Men want to be given a quick solution that doesn’t involve them constantly being rejected. They want to figure out how to make people like them and respect them. They want to have a role in society where they feel like they matter.
The obsession they have with intimacy is them scrambling for something, anything that makes them feel attractive…or even normal. They feel unwanted and unloved by everyone around them.
What the Red Pill and alt-right did was simple. They offered a community where men could feel wanted, paid attention to, and appreciated. They told them. “Do this, this, and this, and you’ll get women and be an Alpha male in everyone’s eyes.”
Remember how I said they’re desperately seeking out to be cool and popular? Yeah. That’s where this comes into play. The promise of a “cooler” future is like drugs for a person who feels ostracized.
When you’re that alone and desperate, you don’t listen to reason or question when people offer you a place where you’re wanted. You simply ask, “How high do you need me to jump?”
The Red Pill is a “poison pill” that ends up making men hate women while further pushing well-meaning people away. But when you’re being radicalized, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
So, they never realize they’re being robbed blind by the very advice they followed to gain what they felt they needed.
I don’t think most women appreciate how desperate for companionship Gen-Z men have become.
America’s young men have become radicalized because the right-wing world was the only world that listened to them when they said they were lonely. And that’s bad. Like, bad. In a lot of ways, the left failed America’s young men.
While we were working to lift minorities and women, we stopped looking at what was happening with men on a systemic level. We stopped noticing that more and more men were just withdrawing from everything.
The way men act out, throw tantrums, and get violent is a major sign of something wrong with their collective. Is it women’s fault? No. Is it the minorities’ fault? No.
voronaman / Shutterstock
But to a desperate man asking why he’s not where he should be, a manipulative person can point to them and say, “They’re stealing your future,” and it’ll sound believable. Conservatives knew that snared vulnerable men into their trap, and here we are today.
Who’s to blame for the isolation Gen-Z men feel?
Women are not to blame for the isolation men feel. It’s not women’s responsibility to teach men how to behave or to support angry men. At the end of the day, we’re all responsible for how we act in society.
But are these same young men and boys to blame? Not quite. It’s no one’s fault and yet everyone’s fault because it’s a systemic issue. You can’t blame a person for not doing what they don’t know how to do, especially when no one explains it to them.
These guys are lost. They don’t know what to do with themselves to carve out their niche in life. And mothers can’t always be the ones to teach them the basics of being a decent man — though they can teach them how to be decent people.
Men need other men. A lot of men don’t have strong male role models they can look up to. Meanwhile, the world of mentorships for women and minorities exploded. It’s never been easier to find a Mama Bear mentor in your field.
Conservatives and neo-Nazis offered men a way to get a mentor, a community, and an alleged “simple solution to get girls” when no one else did. All things considered, is it shocking to see how many young boys turned conservative?
It shouldn’t be this way and Gen-Z men need to lead.
If we want to see a genuine change in the way Gen-Z men behave, we need left-leaning men to step up to the plate. What we’re seeing right now is a crisis of boys who need good, non-misogynistic father figures.
These boys and young men want (and crave) a community where they feel they’re treasured, where they can ask for genuine advice, and where they feel like they can be vulnerable.
If the left had the same amount of outreach toward men that conservatives do, Trump would never have been elected. Men are in crisis right now and we need older guys to help lift them in a way women can’t.
If we don’t learn from the warning signs going on right now, we’ll be doomed to see angrier and angrier young men for years to come.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.