Derek Thompson, showing that isolated, hyper-online young men are not actually experiencing “a loneliness crisis”:
While I know that some men are lonely, I do not think that what afflicts America’s young today can be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-consantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them. […]
When porn seems less fraught than sexual partners, and when late night parties seem lower status than early-morning Pilates, a toxic asceticism is spreading throughout American life. No, the problem is not loneliness. The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to feel lonely in the first place.
The whole essay is chilling and well worth your time. The only part I tripped over was Thompson calling these hyper-online young men “the monks in the casino” (which is the title of the essay). His point is easy enough to grasp: “monks” because isolated and cut off from social life; “in the casino” because addicted to the stimulation of online porn and gambling. But I just kept thinking about the monks at Monte Cassino. Oh well.