A young man ain't nothing in the world these days.

The boys are not all right.

There's a theory that sums up everything about young men. It's quick and simple. You don't have to think about anything complex or specific. You can say, "Ah yes, the crisis," and move on, knowing the crisis will still be there when you return.

Most young men aren't out to disrupt society. They're working, or trying to figure out who they're supposed to be, and sometimes making questionable choices. You don't hear much from them because they aren't issuing manifestos.

What's different now is that a smaller but still significant group has learned to turn everyday frustration into something more focused, organized, and sometimes even dangerous.

Sometimes it turns lethal.

When I was in my 20s back in the 1980s, I worked, dated, saw friends. Still, there were long periods when it felt like I'd never own a house, never settle down, and maybe never make sense of it all. It felt like truth.

The blues have always understood that condition. Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues"--which you should know from the Who's "Live at Leeds" cover--notes the fact: you're young, you're out of step, you want something you don't have, and sometimes you suspect you may never have it. What's new is what happens to that feeling when it meets the attention economy.

The system sends it back to you with an explanation that's simple, easy to repeat, and easy to share. It comes with guides. Andrew Tate divides the world into winners and losers. Jake Paul teaches to treat life like a performance, always stay on camera, and turn attention into status, then into money.

These ideas move through what is sometimes called the "manosphere," a loose set of overlapping communities where advice, resentment, performance, and self-improvement blur. You can enter it looking for help and come away with a theory of why help is pointless.

None of this creates the underlying hunger. It just gives it a shape. It suggests that confusion is a system, and that you can understand it if you act tough enough, make yourself seen, and act sure of yourself. For a young man who already feels left out, that kind of certainty holds appeal.

You might hear that there's a hierarchy and you're not at the top. The outcome is set. You've been sorted, so you can stop questioning it.

Or you might be told the hierarchy is real but you can change your place in it if you treat yourself like a project. This is where looksmaxxing comes in: You focus on grooming, fitness, clothes, posture, diet, sleep, and how you present yourself. Some of this is just normal self-care. But after a while, you stop being a person with habits and start seeing yourself as a system to be adjusted.

Both of these approaches try to answer the same question: How much control do you have? One gives up control, the other tries to create it. Neither leaves much space for the slower answer that builds up over time, as you keep showing up, make mistakes, adjust, and try again with the same people.

Young men used to get a set of rough instructions for life. Sometimes they limited more than they helped. But they did give direction. Jobs came with a script, as did churches, unions, teams, and neighborhoods. You showed up and stayed. The structure helped carry some of the load.

Those structures have faded away. Now we have exposure. You can be anything, but you can also feel like nothing for a long time. The gap between those two can feel like failure if you judge yourself too soon.

A young man used to fail in more familiar places. He might get rejected by someone, in a place he'd have to go back to. Feedback was personal. Now the room is as big as your phone. Rejection comes as silence or as a number that doesn't change. It feels final because there's no context.

So the explanation rushes in.

The incel perspective turns a run of bad luck into a permanent condition. Looksmaxxing does the opposite and arrives at the same place, elevating one variable until it crowds out the rest. Both take a messy situation and make it legible. Once it's legible, it can be argued. The argument becomes a community, and the community turns a hunch into a certainty. You're no longer just struggling--you're correct.

If you spend enough time in these spaces, the loudest 5 percent start to seem like the majority.

Most young men get through this without much drama. They find jobs that suit them well enough. They make friends. They build lives outside the attention economy.

Another group drifts along. They drop out of school or never connect with it. They work jobs that don't demand much and offer little in return. They spend a lot of time alone. The loneliness lingers and makes everything else feel sharper.

If nothing changes, that loneliness builds up.

Combine that with a system that constantly measures everything, and life starts to feel both understandable and out of reach. If you can argue about it, you can build a whole world around it. It colonizes a man. After a while, it looks less like an idea than a pathology.

It doesn't take a crowd to cause harm. One person with a grievance and a settled sense of certainty can do things that don't resolve cleanly.

Most people don't go down that path. At worst, they're a bit lost, a bit isolated, and a little too ready to accept the first explanation that presents itself.

So the answer isn't to call an entire generation broken or to pretend nothing is happening. It's to pay attention to the edges where things tend to fray, and to the middle where most lives still take shape the slow way.

It means showing up again and again, doing work where others can see you, joining groups that expect you at a set time, and having conversations that aren't mediated by a system designed to keep you there--one that comes from spending enough time with others to develop skills, comfort, maybe even friendship without anyone having to spell it out.

The attention economy will keep producing easier explanations. That's what it's built to do. The feeling itself isn't new. The explanations are.

And now, they're waiting for you before you know you need one.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

Philip Martin has been a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1993. In that time, he has won more than 100 regional and statewide journalism prizes, including five Green Eyeshade awards, published six books and released eight albums of original music. He appears weekly on “The Zone” with Justin Acri and D.J. Williams on 103.7 FM in Little Rock.

© Arkansas Online