In this episode, I look in depth at four related questions: What is wrong with young men, what are their problems? What are the secondary and contributing problems? What are the masculine role models they find in the popular culture? And what are the usual, presenting problems that they’re dealing with? I look at issues like
–“failure to launch,”
–lack of information about how to grow up or access their masculinity,
–the felt need for structure and stability for their lives,
–the inability to formulate a positive vision for themselves,
–running away from their pain,
–existential longing,
–the anxious state of the world at large,
–the failure of materialism and Nietzschian nihilism to provide adequate answers for life,
–the effects of Covid on their sense of mortality and the urgency to do something meaningful with their lives,
–self-medicating behaviors like porn, video games, sports, workaholism, and substance abuse,
–cynicism and irony, hopelessness and despair, depression and suicide, boredom, curated consumerism, LARPing masculinity, and
–all of the shadow forms of masculinity in the popular culture, from the buffoon dad of sitcoms, to “toxic masculinity.”
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