Against Scott Galloway and the Supposed “Male Loneliness Epidemic”

Message to the pearl clutching establishment: Take our concerns seriously.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the liberal press focus more and more attention on “men’s issues”, and especially a supposed “Male Loneliness Epidemic”. Prestige media outlets like The Atlantic stopped printing out triumphalist screeds entitled “The End of Men” and switched to writing about “Zach Bryan’s message to Young Men” or “The Stavvy Method for Saving Young Men”. Amidst a changing culture marked by the loosening of online censorship and young men embracing radicalism, the powers that be are searching for an antidote to take down the rhetorical temperature.

Enter Scott Galloway, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and a multi millionaire entrepreneur. Galloway has recently made headlines talking about the “male loneliness epidemic”, primarily on his podcast TheProfGShow. He also wrote a book explaining his views on Men’s issues, entitled “Notes on Being a Man”, which was published this year. The book was quite a success among the commentariat class, winning him interviews with The Guardian, Oprah, and Zach Braff. In this media circuit, Galloway has done his best to explain what he thinks went wrong and why young men are drifting to figures like Donald Trump, who he’s called a fascist.

Now, you might expect someone with my profile to be grateful for what Galloway is doing. I fit the general picture of the young, politically engaged, right leaning young man that Galloway and his fellow travelers want to reach. I should be happy that the liberal press finally seems to be taking my generation seriously. However, when I pull back the curtain, I find that this discourse is based of a host of contrived and hyperbolized issues, and is being weaponized to force young men back in line politically.

To get a better understanding of what I’m saying, let’s take a look at a recent quote by Galloway in an interview. When talking about how men and women fare when single, Galloway says “And unfortunately for men, they come off the rails without the guardrails of a romantic relationship. They stop showering, they start demonizing people, they become more prone to misogynistic content, They don’t believe in climate change, and someday become really shitty citizens.”

That’s a weird way to frame an argument. Instead of addressing young men directly in the second person and telling them why being single is bad for them, Galloway takes a third person tone, almost as if he’s an anthropologist explaining the behavior of a little known group of humans. Although Galloway is a man himself, he’s quite confident that he isn’t part of the group of ne’er-do-well’s that he’s describing. Unlike NYU professors and writers for The Atlantic, Galloway’s “lonely men” are apparently apt to not shower, demonize people, not believe in climate change, and become “shitty citizens”. In other words, Galloway is concerned that these aggrieved men aren’t fulfilling their role in the social contract, which is to accept a diminished place in society, continue to dutifully hold the right opinions, and clock in for work.

If you want more proof on the myopic nature of Galloway’s concerns, here’s a quote from a recent interview in the New Yorker:

In “Notes on Being a Man,” Galloway declares that discontented members of Gen Z and the boys and teens of Gen Alpha need an “aspirational vision of masculinity.” Part self-help memoir and part Dudes Rock polemic, the book presents a capital-letter credo: “Men Protect, Provide, and Procreate.” Masculinity can be expressed simply by “getting up at fucking six in the morning and going to work and doing shitty work such that you can protect your family economically,” Galloway once said. And the evolved man also insures that he does not slack off “domestically, emotionally, or logistically,”

Now Galloway’s thinking becomes more clear. The problem is that “men are isolated and are increasingly turning to radical politics as a coping mechanism”. The solution is “a healthy masculinity based on getting up early to go to work, procreating, and providing emotional labor”.

If I wanted to be less charitable, I would say that Galloway is telling young men to “put on a happy face, get back to work, and do not radically critique your place in the broader economic, social, and political order.”

To say that this is not a realistic or attractive message for young men is an understatement. For one, young men know that they aren’t at fault for the supposed loneliness epidemic. They know this because the women in their generational cohort are faring just as poorly. Young women are twice as likely as young men to be on antidepressants. Anecdotally, multiple women at my college have complained to me about roomates being emotionless and hooked on SSRIs. Statista also reports that “Women aged 18 to 20 were the most likely to suffer from a major depressive episode with up to 21 percent reporting such an episode in 2023. In comparison, just 12 percent of men aged 18 to 20 said they had a major depressive episode at that time.”

It goes without saying that these statistics aren’t good, and I’m not sharing them out of an attempt to blame women for structural issues. I’m sharing them because they show that Galloway is mistaken that there is some sort of special crisis in this country affecting young men. With his credentials and mainstream platform, Galloway could have jumpstarted an interesting conversation about how feminism and atomizing technology might be responsible for the drop in happiness in both genders. But instead, Galloway and his friends in the establishment commentariat decided they would rather cherry pick data and shame young men for exploring radical alternatives to a broken system. America’s youth are drowning in a crisis of unaffordability, mass migration, and a decadent culture, but if a young man voices his displeasure because H1-Bs took his job or because a loose culture has made it difficult to establish long term relationships, Galloway and his ilk immediately write him off as a loser who needs to shut up and work harder.

Galloway and other centrist liberals aren’t the only offenders. Last month Ben Shapiro did an episode where he examined the trend of young people embracing radicalism on the right and left. In that episode he said, “If you are a young person and you can’t afford to live here [NYC], then maybe you should not live here.”

Predictably, Shapiro faced grassroots backlash from both the right and left, as many wondered why a city where illegal immigrants are housed in hotels and billionaires cloister themselves in eyesore pencil towers must necessarily be unaffordable to native residents. They also wondered what purpose poltically passive slogans like “you must move out of your hometown” and “protect, provide, and procreate” might serve to a parasitic class of elites who thrive when ordinary people keep their heads down and only focus on immediate personal concerns.

Our economic and cultural problems are simple and straightforward, but before we can solve them, our elites need to first recognize that there is indeed a structural, societal problem that is impacting all young people, not a few edge cases of young men spending too much time on the internet. Until that happens, justified radicalism and resentment will grow, to the chagrin of concern trolls like Galloway and Shapiro.