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title: A Generation of Boys

date: 2026-05-10 description: ... category: "personal" showToc: true showTopImage: false unlisted: true

How the internet destroyed men What Happened to Men Under 27 The Permanent Adolescent Men Under 27 The Boys Who Stayed Inside

Caveats

• This is a story about a specific type of man, not all men. That specific type of man was predisposed to being highly online in his adolescence. — What follows is likely descriptive of men in a very specific age range. It is likely true of some people older than 27 (born in 1998), and is true of very many more people under the age of 27.

Thesis: A man needs Connection, Challenge, Conquest; and the internet has delivered substitutes for all three. In doing so, the internet has helped produce a particular type of man: one who resembles a shell of the men before him. This type of man is not worse on all fronts, but has specific quirks that resemble permanent adolescence.

The Three Desires

• Connection
• Challenge
• Courtship

The Three Counterfeits

• Discord
• Video games
• Pornography

Chronology

• Rise of the internet, mostly mediated (for men) through social media, YouTube, and video games
• Started as a gathering place for physical friends in digital spaces; was not a substitute for physical social interaction
• The quick (phasic?) dopamine associated with digital interactions, traversing digital worlds, winning digital games was compelling, and for many, forged new ___
• What started as a digital accompaniment for physical friendships slowly mutated into a replacement, accelerated by two trends
  • Cultural concerns around men and their proximity to women; most noticeably through "cancel culture" and the "me-too" movement
  • COVID-19 making physical relationships hard to maintain
• After COVID had ended, the phyiscal world was a shell of what it once was. Consider the third places of 2010s—movies, barbershops, ___—they are empty arenas compared to what they once were
• The brain of a young man, who might have been an adolescent when he started gaming but is now a young adult, still craved 1) the connection of being with peers, 2) the excitement of winning challenges, 3) the idea of being with a woman
• But his muscle for doing these things in person—1) being in a community (church, local rec league), 2) having a productive hobby, 3) seeking a physical relationship—had been atrophied. In its place were there digital alternatives: 1) Discord, 2) video games, 3) pornography

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Structure

Introduction

A man aged twenty-seven is, statistically, doing worse than his older brother on most of the measures that historically tracked the transition into adulthood. He is less likely to have a job, a romantic partner, a driver's license, a close friend, a hobby that involves leaving the house, or any clear sense of what he is going to do with the next decade. He is more likely to live with his parents, to consume four to six hours of mediated content a day, and to describe his life as fine while being deeply unsatisfied. None of this is particularly controversial. The "masculinity crisis" has been written about by plenty of people [1, 2, 3].

Most thinkpieces on the topic of boys and men have been almost entirely focused on adolescents in real time — thirteen-year-olds now, fourteen-year-olds now, the children currently inside the storm. But the boys who were thirteen when smartphones became universal are not thirteen anymore. They are twenty-six. They aged out of the conversation about them without the conversation following them. The diagnostic literature stopped at puberty; meanwhile, they kept living. This is my best attempt to describe what happened to them, and the type of person they have become.

My thesis is they are [...]. This isn't anyone's fault, exactly, and that calling it any single thing — a loneliness epidemic, a byproduct of feminism, a ... — undersells how integrated the condition is.

In short, a young man's brain wants three things, more or less in this order: 1) connection with peers, 2) the dopamine of mastery and challenge, and 3) the pursuit of romantic and sexual partners. Call them Connection, Challenge, and Courtship.

These three desires have been the engine of male adolescence for as long as there has been male adolescence, and the activities they push young men toward — 1) friendship, 2) work, 3) courtship — are the activities that historically turned boys into adults. What changed, in a narrow window between roughly 2010 and 2012, is that for each of those three desires, a digitally engineered substitute became universally available, all on a single device, in his pocket, for free.

These boys are now young adults, and they are a unique cohort. They are the first cohort in human history whose adolescence could have taken place entirely inside a smartphone. This is what happened to them.

The Three Desires: What a young man needs

A young man needs three things: 1) connection, 2) challenge, and 3) courtship. Let's define each precisely.

Connection

Long before a boy wants a job or a girlfriend, he wants a friend; his first vehicle for connection. Connection usually takes the form of friendship; specifically, the kind of friendship where you spend hours doing nothing in particular with the same three or four guys.

Why does a boy crave connection? The same reason any person would crave connection: it is the most direct proof that you can earn respect and admiration from someone who is not obligated to love you. Connection in adolescence often takes the form of stupid rituals and a bad sense of humor; but it nonetheless proves to a young man that people like him for who he is. [more here?]

The benefits of human connection are mostly obvious and need not be stated; but for a developing mind, it's particularly important. First, as mentioned above, a group of friendly peers can be a boy's first source of non-familial validation. Second, a boy's first friend group is where he will start to play the miniature version of his upcoming life. In other words, he first gets to navigate moments that resemble the challenges that he will face as an adult; resolving awkward moments with peers, being told he's wrong by someone whose opinion he cared about, and finding pieces of his identity in the moments he disagrees with his friend group.

Challenge

Alongside a boy's need for friendship and connection, he has a deep need to be good at something. He craves a challenge. This comes second in chronology, after connection, because socialization gives way to visibility, and visibility prompts a boy to be perceived not just as present but as impressive.

Challenge usually takes the form of a sport, an instrument, a craft, a job, or a hobby. (Most modern parents recognize the importance of this and find their quickest win will be some version of sports or an instrument.)

Developmentally, the important part is that the boy participates in some meaningful activity, that when done with intention and repetition, will yield improvements in that activity. Intention and repetition are important here: to spend much time with a challenge and not see results until much later helps remind the brain that the most rewarding things are not the ones that pay out immediately. The brain is built with two reward systems: one that fires quickly and rewards small wins ("fast" or phasic dopamine), and one that fires slowly and rewards sustained effort ("slow" or tonic dopamine). Challenge, done right, builds the second one. When effort and reward are separated by months or years, the brain learns that often effort itself is the signal worth following — not the reward.

Courtship

Courtship is the pursuit of an intimate relationship. A better word might be intimacy—but that didn't fit within the tautology.

Why courtship? The biological reason is obvious and doesn't need explaining. The more interesting reason is that courtship can provide even more robust evidence that a boy can be liked for who he is. By middle school, a boy already knows that people lie about whether they like you. His friends will tell him he's funny because he is their friend, but a woman he approaches owes him nothing. And so her interest is a uniquely reliable piece of information about who he is.

(This is the same instinct that drove him toward friendship (Connection) in the first place — wanting validation from someone who isn't required to give it — but with new audiences and higher stakes.)

The Three Counterfeits: What he got instead

Discord, video games, pornography. One paragraph each. Short, parallel, brutal. Presence without co-presence, mastery without time, sexual reward without rejection.

What The Desires Share

Why are these substitutes counterfeits? Because they are not the real thing...

These three desires are, in my view, three core developmental desires an adolescent man should have and traverse. They are also notable in that they share the same common elements: active participation, tolerance of ambiguity, and a long time horizon.

• Active participation
  • Connection: Make friends
  • Challenge: Play the sports game
  • Courtship: Ask the girl out
• Tolerance of ambiguity
  • Connection: Trust that they like you back
  • Challenge: Be bad at something (temporarily) on purpose
  • Courtship: Cold approach before you're sure
• A long time horizon
  • Connection: Stay friends through rough patches
  • Challenge: Practice for months before you're any good
  • Courtship: Survive rejections and failed relationships

In all three cases, a young man earns the benefits of Connection, Challenge, or Courtship: a friend group, a win, or a relationship. But also in all three cases, the dopamine has been a fruit of labor. It was never frictionless, guaranteed, or instant. And I think this is an important point: the brain rewards effort because effort is what produces development.

The Twenty-Four Months That Made This Possible

Connection → frictionless co-presence. Pre-2010, connecting with friends required showing up somewhere. The smartphone made the feeling of co-presence available continuously — group chat, Discord voice, Snapchat streaks — without leaving your room. For video game players, it was likely some version of Skype or TeamSpeak, later to be replaced by Discord.

Challenge → frictionless reward loops. Pre-2010, the dopamine of mastery required practice, and practice required tolerating long stretches of being bad at something. What changed wasn't the existence of video games (those are old) but the engineering of the reward curves inside them. Free-to-play matchmaking, ranked ladders, daily quests — all of these are post-2010 and all of them are explicitly designed to keep the boy in the dopamine zone. And now in 2026, frictionless reward loops are more evident than ever, ... algorithms, etc.

Courtship → frictionless sexual reward. Pre-2010, sexual reward at scale required money, effort, or a partner. What changed wasn't porn's existence but its zero-friction infinite availability — free tube sites, smartphone access, infinite catalog. PornHub launched 2007, hit critical mass 2010–2012, smartphone porn became dominant in the same window.

Why the Real World Couldn't Compete

Third places, institutions, mentors, unstructured male space. The slow collapse that made the digital substitutes feel like upgrades rather than downgrades.

Neurochemistry: phasic vs tonic dopamine.

(Parenthetical: The pandemic compressed years of digital substitution into months — arriving on top of an already-charged moment in which a generation of adolescent boys had received, through algorithmic feeds and opportunistic commentary, a distorted reading of MeToo as a generalized warning against approaching girls at all.)

What Atrophied?

He is not unhappy in the way previous generations of unhappy men were unhappy. Previous generations of men were characterized by emotional unavailability, giving way to rage, ..., and ... The modern man is fine in that his base needs are more often met... Whereas men of the past either "made it" or did not—and would crash out if they did not; most modern men have their base needs met (friends, games, and pornography)—but these substitutes do not fulfill him. He has built a life that meets the dopamine requirements of all three cravings without ever requiring him to leave the basement metaphorically or literally.

He is, by historical standards, weirdly competent at narrow things and weirdly incompetent at broad ones. He can build a PC, is in the top 5 of a video a game most adults haven't heard of, navigate Reddit's social hierarchy, hold forth on cryptocurrency or AI or whatever the current internet topic is. He cannot, with confidence, ask a stranger for directions, call to make a doctor's appointment, attend a wedding where he doesn't know many people, sit in silence with another man, tolerate boredom for more than ninety seconds. The competence and the incompetence have the same root: the things he is good at are the things he has practiced thousands of hours, and the things he is bad at are the things he has avoided.

His relationship to women is stranger than his predecessors'. His attitude toward women is not hostile; it is uncertain, deferential, and underprepared. He has interacted with thousands of images of women and very few real ones. His deep fear of rejection (see the above section about his general timidity) prevents him from approaching women outside of the digital sphere.

He is strangely articulate about his own condition. Whereas men of the past could not articulate their ailments to save their lives, the modern man knows about all his problems. He does not publicly talk about such problems, nor does he go to therapy, but "therapy talk" and the internet has made him acutely aware of his own problems. He has heard podcasters talk about the importance of dopamine detoxes, healthy sleep, and reducing screentime; but he hasn't done much with this information. Without action, conscientousness of his condition does not help; it probably hurts.

He has trouble with time. Not in the sense that ... but in the sense that days are more fluid than they once were; due likely to his aimlessness in his career and his misalignment of dopamine, he lacks a serious routine that grounds him. He likely stays up too late in the evening and sleeps too late in the morning.

He is lonely in a way that does not feel like loneliness. He "interacts" with, vis-a-vis the internet, 10x the number of people his father interacted with—but these interactions are 1/50th as deep and meaningful. He witnesses hundreds to thousands of micro-conversations occur every day but is a participant in none of them.

There are elements of this type of man that are better than his predecessors. Not as often fully emotionally unavailable; less likely to abuse alcohol or his partner; less likely to...

The Boy, Now Twenty-Six

It's been 16 years since the Call of Duty game he played in the basement...