To the bitter young men feeling left behind

In 2005, I was 16 years old. A kid obsessed with sports and emo music, pushed to the brim with hormones and a disaffected world view. Growing up in a conservative city and in an American culture currently being defined by Bush era politics, I was begging for a purpose or a place. It is a natural position for many young men in any generation. I detached from a lot of things in search of a counter culture. A way to be my own person or make my own way that was outside what I didn’t like about the world.

What I’m saying here is, I understand what young men are going through. I understand that you grew up in a world asking you to be somebody and then all of the sudden you’re 16 or 17 or 20 and you don’t know what that means. Maybe nobody gave you a good nudge in the right direction like me, maybe you don’t have a good male role model like so many other people. But I can tell you, from experience, you will not find that purpose or place online. You will not find it in the comments section of Instagram or Twitter or 4chan. Andrew Tate, Luke Belmar, Andy Elliot, Kris Krohn, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Jr, JD Vance. These guys are not your friends, they are not your role model, they do not have your best interest at heart.

You are lonely, you are insecure, you are depressed. But these men that preach to you that the world is transactional, that there are only winners and losers, these cold hearted men that treat relationships as property and see others as NPCs or suckers, they are exploiting you for their power. They are using your pain against you to enrich themselves. Their business models are built on you never finding your way out of that pain. You are of no use to them when you are not lonely. You finding love or security or confidence is not their goal or their endgame. They are taking your valid feelings and directing them towards their enemy. Not a shared enemy, their enemy. These directions suit their needs and allow them to continue to enrich themselves. The solutions to your problems will not be found in a movement that requires them to exist. These men need you to continue to feel this way. That hollow lonely feeling you have, that belief that you haven’t found your place in the world or that you are of lesser status, it will not go away with your support of them. Financially or emotionally, your purpose to them is not to better yourself.

Your feelings and your problems are not invalid. I understand them. You struggle with finding community, friendship, love. You find yourself awash in the belief that you are disliked because of who you are and that isn’t fair. This is not a feeling that will be solved with traditional masculinity or societal values. They offer you nothing but the continued sorrow you find yourself in today. You will never be the high value man that they demand because there will always be something else they call weak. You won’t lift right, you drive the wrong car, you live in the wrong house. They do not want you to be fulfilled.

Your purpose in life is not to be the last man standing. It is not to ditch your friends if they do not fulfill your goals of power and money. It is not to live constantly evaluating whether what you are doing is high value. It is not to hate others for choosing to live differently or finding happiness in non-profit methods. You will not wake up one day after you have destroyed your so-called societal ills feeling fulfilled. You will not close the hole in yourself by judging the lifestyles of everyone around you to a set of rules created by men who will never respect you.

I come to you with genuine dismay. Like you, I have felt like I was left behind in a world that valued things I didn’t agree with. I felt like a community would be impossible to build and that my own individual shortcomings would prevent me from ever getting to a place I need.

I say that to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way. That you can devote yourself to a community and it will devote itself right back to you. That you can love for the sake of it and it will bring you a joy that a man drinking whiskey never intends to provide you. But this can’t be found in judgement or hate, it won’t be found in a fake podcast clip telling you that if you are not selling you are buying. The doctrine of hyper-individualism is one that intends to keep you angry. There will never be enough to keep it fueled. It only consumes feelings and people until there is nothing left. Your mental health will not be healed by caring what these frauds and criminals think of you.

Your belief that the universe is against you is unfounded not because there aren’t hard things out there. Not because you won’t be rejected or disappointed. It’s not because of some bullshit about how you only have yourself to trust or that you are a lone wolf. The world, the universe, is you. We are carbon matter, a make up of the universe itself. The parts in stars, the parts in the trees, the parts in your chair. These are the same parts in you. This might sound like some bullshit like “reflect the values you want to see and the world will show them to you” and it sort of is. But more importantly, it is an undying belief that because you love, there is love in the world. Because you are good, there is good in the world. Because you refuse to hold others in contempt, then others will refuse to hold you in contempt. When you choose to love for the sake of love, when you love your friends because they make you laugh not because they make you money, when you choose to love your interests because they bring you happiness and not because they bring you income, you will feel good. You will feel fulfilled and righteous and all of the things these men promise you. Your neighbors, your town, your country, your world. They are all you.

I can’t force you to choose a different way. I won’t hold a gun to your head and demand your adherence. But you have to know the way you’re living is not a way for you to feel better about your shortcomings. This system they have setup, it will only benefit them. Your continued sadness is your continued subservience. There is nothing they can give you that accepting you are part of all of things won’t give you more of. That caring without yield won’t provide you. You are a vessel, a channel. You are an ever constant impact on the world around you and so is everyone else. The only way you can truly be happy is by removing yourself from the transactional nature these men demand and believing that the world can only be better when are all parts of it. Because we are.