#but we don't talk about durkeheim here

[shituationist]

With regards to "lonely young men" discourse, people often talk as though this is a new problem which confronts young men and often as if it's a problem that's unique to the digitalized world, that the internet plays a casual role.

That kind of attribution is wrong-headed even if digital technology has exacerbated it, but the decline in socialization among young men predates the internet reaching into everyday life. The decline starts by the 1950s. If there's a technology that's responsible, it's the suburb, which isolated individuals into nuclear families, couples, or themselves alone. The increased distance between individuals, represented easily by population density statistics, obviously created the material basis for social estrangement and isolation. That, combined with the technology of the car, which isolates the individual even further into a cell with antagonistic relations to other cells on the highways, did a number on the very possibility of socialization in our everyday lives. Even at work, the tendency of capitalists to reduce the number of people on the job to a minimum has done damage to the potential of workers to socialize on the job.

Plenty of young men have false consciousness about the causes of their isolation or estrangement from society, but they are a real problem (and it doesn't just afflict young men). When the average young person is not contributing to society in a way that makes them feel like a part of it, when the society their labor reproduces also reproduces their isolation and estrangement, what else can you expect but the rise of anti-social ideology corresponding to the anti-social material conditions?

Left-wing theorists have had all kinds of analyses of these issues, with Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, and Raoul Vaneigem coming to my mind as theorists from the mid-20th century who tackled the subject. But even liberal sociologists have been able to see it, the book that's usually cited on this front is "Bowling Alone". Reducing the issue to resentments from men who aren't trying hard enough to get laid just recycles that resentment and fails to account for the non-sexual aspects of this isolation which are just as damaging to the individual psyche: the lack of friends, colleagues, and confidants to share their thoughts with, and the stunted social skills that many young people (and the rest of us) are dealing with as a result of a lack of socialization.