Chapter 7 What Is Happening to Boys?

Chapter 7

What Is Happening to Boys?

In the important book Stolen Focus , the journalist Johann Hari describes the transformation of his nine-year-old godson, a sweet child who became obsessed with Elvis Presley and who begged Hari to take him, someday, to Elvis’s home at Graceland. Hari agreed to do so. But on a visit six years later, Hari found that the boy had changed, and was lost:

He spent literally almost all his waking hours at home alternating blankly between screens—his phone, an infinite scroll of WhatsApp and Facebook messages, and his iPad, on which he watched a blur of YouTube and porn. At moments, I could still see in him traces of the joyful little boy who sang “Viva Las Vegas,” but it was like that person had broken into smaller, disconnected fragments. He struggled to stay with a topic of conversation for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or abruptly switching to another topic. He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, somewhere where nothing still or serious could reach him. [1]

Hari’s godson is an extreme case but not a unique one. I have heard many stories from parents about boys who fell into similar digital pits. Chris, a young man I hired to help me finalize this book, told me about his own struggles with video games and pornography that began in elementary school and have lasted to this day. He said that the combination of the two activities grew to occupy nearly every waking moment of his life, pushing out in-person play with friends, sleep, school, and later, dating. After much struggle and with the help of friends and family, Chris pulled his life together in college and found ways to moderate his gaming and pornography use. When he looks back on his years of high-intensity gaming, he remembers how much fun he had and is still grateful that gaming was a part of his life. But he is keenly aware of what he sacrificed:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Boys have followed a different path through the Great Rewiring from girls, on average. Girls have long had higher rates of internalizing disorders than boys, and as I showed in chapter 1, that gap increased when adolescent life moved onto smartphones and social media. If we confine ourselves to examining graphs about depression, anxiety, and self-harm, we’d conclude that the Great Rewiring has been harder on girls than on boys.

No Chance of a Successful Life

Figure 7.1. Percent of U.S. high school seniors who agreed or mostly agreed with the statement “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (Source: Monitoring the Future.) [2]

And yet, if we look carefully at many of the graphs, there’s plenty of evidence that boys are suffering too. Since the early 2010s, adolescent boys’ rates of depression and anxiety have been rising, across many nations, though they remain at lower absolute levels than girls’. In the United States, the U.K., and Australia, suicide rates have been rising too, hitting both sexes, with rates always much higher for boys. [3]

There are other warning signs: Boys show evidence of pulling away from engagement with the real world well before the mental health declines of the 2010s. For boys, their time spent with friends started declining in the early 2000s, with an acceleration after 2010. Girls’ rates were flatter until 2011, with a decline after that. Consider also the response to this statement: “People like me don’t have much of a chance for a successful life.” Only 5% of American girls used to agree with that statement back in the 1970s, and there was essentially no change until the early 2010s, as you can see in Figure 7.1. But for boys, the story is different. Their rates of agreement rose slowly, from the late 1970s through the 2000s, and then rose more quickly in the early 2010s.

In other words, the girls’ story is more compact. For girls, most of the transformation in mental health takes place between 2010 and 2015, across multiple nations, and the evidence points repeatedly to the combination of smartphones and social media as major contributors to their increased anxiety and depression. For boys, in contrast, the story is more diffuse. Their decline in real-world engagement starts earlier, their mental health outcomes are more varied, and I can’t point to one single technology as the primary cause of their distress. In this chapter, I’ll tell a story about gradual disengagement with the real world and deepening immersion in the virtual world that reached a critical threshold when most teens got smartphones in the early 2010s, plugging them into the internet anywhere and anytime. [4] My story is more speculative than the one I told about girls in the previous chapter because we just don’t know as much about what’s happening to boys.

I’ll tell this story using a “push-pull” analysis. First I’ll show how the real world changed, since the 1970s, in ways that have made it less hospitable to boys and young men—leading many to feel more purposeless, useless, and adrift. That’s the push away from the real world. Then I’ll show how, starting in the 1970s and accelerating through the 2010s, the digital world brought more ways for boys to do the agency-building activities they craved, such as exploring, competing, playing at war, mastering skills, and watching increasingly hardcore pornography, all through a screen and eventually one that fit in their pockets. That’s the pull.

The net effect of this push-pull is that boys have increasingly disconnected from the real world and invested their time and talents in the virtual world instead. Some boys will find career success there, because their mastery of that world can lead to lucrative jobs in the tech industry or as influencers. But for many, though it can be an escape from an increasingly inhospitable world, growing up in the virtual world makes them less likely to develop into men with the social skills and competencies to achieve success in the real world.

The Long Decline of Males

In 2023, Richard Reeves left his position at the Brookings Institution, where he had been a policy analyst studying economic inequality, in order to create a new organization focused on the problems of boys and men. [5] That move followed the publication of his 2022 book, Of Boys and Men , which laid out the evidence of a long decline in men’s fortunes, achievements, and welfare in the United States since the 1970s. Part of the decline was caused by structural and economic changes that made physical strength less valuable. As America and other Western nations deindustrialized, factory work was sent to less developed nations or was done increasingly by robots. The service economy grew in its place, and women have several advantages over men, on average, in service jobs. [6]

Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men , explains this transformation well: “What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills: You need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. Those are things that women do extremely well.” [7] She notes that by 2009, “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to occupy around half of the nation’s jobs.” [8]

Reeves welcomes the rising fortunes of women as a desirable outcome—the natural effect of removing prior constraints on their educational and employment opportunities. For example, in 1972, women earned only 42% of bachelor’s degrees. By 1982, women were just as likely as men to graduate from college. But for the next 20 years, women’s enrollment rose rapidly while men’s did not, so that by 2019 the gap had reversed: Women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, while men earned just 41%. [9]

It’s not just college completion. Reeves shows that at every level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way. [10] The gender disparities are often small at the upper end, among the wealthiest families, but they grow much larger as we move down the socioeconomic ladder.

Is this a victory for girls and women? Only if you see life as a zero-sum battle between the sexes. In contrast, as Reeves puts it, “a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.” [11] And the data shows that we now live in a world of floundering young men. [12]

Reeves’s book helps us see the structural factors that have made it harder for boys to succeed. He describes factors such as an economy that no longer rewards physical strength, an educational system that prizes the ability to sit still and listen, and a decline in the availability of positive male role models, including fathers. After listing several such factors, Reeves adds, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.” [13]

I think Reeves is right to focus on structural factors, but I also think there are two psychological factors missing from his story. First, the rise of safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s hit boys harder than girls, because boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play and more risky play. When playtime was shortened, pulled indoors, and over-supervised, boys lost more than girls.

The second psychological effect is the result of boys taking up online multiplayer video games in the late 2000s and smartphones in the early 2010s, both of which pulled boys decisively away from face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder interaction. At that point, I think we do see signs of a “mass psychological breakdown.” Or, at least, a mass psychological change . Once boys had multiple internet-connected devices, many of them were swallowed whole, like Johann Hari’s godson. Many boys got lost in cyberspace, which made them more fragile, fearful, and risk averse on Earth. Beginning in the late 2000s and early 2010s, American boys’ rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide began rising. [14] Boys across the Western world began showing concerning declines in their mental health. [15] By 2015, a staggering number of them said that they had no close friends, that they were lonely, and that there was no meaning or direction to their lives. [16]

Boys Who Fail to Launch

Americans have long used the term “failure to launch” to describe anyone who gets off track, doesn’t find employment, and ends up living back with their parents for an indefinite period of time. Young men in their late 20s are more likely to live with their parents (27% of them, in 2018), compared with young women (17%). [17] A more formal term is NEET, created by economists in the U.K. to refer to those between the ages of 16 and 24 who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Such young people are said to be “economically inactive.” NEETs in the U.K. [18] and the United States [19] are mostly men, once you exclude all those who are disabled or who are parents caring for their own children.

American parents are more likely to say that they are worried about whether their sons will become successful adults than to say that they have that worry about their daughters. [20] Parents are also much more likely to agree with this statement about their daughters than about their sons: “Setbacks don’t discourage him/her. He/she doesn’t give up easily.”

Parents are understandably concerned. Boys are also more vulnerable to becoming complete shut-ins, as has happened in Japan. Japanese society had long placed intense pressures on young men to succeed in school, get a prestigious job, and conform to the social expectations placed on a “salaryman.” In the 1990s, when the bubble economy of the 1980s popped and the hurdles to success became higher, many young men retreated to their childhood bedrooms and shut their doors. As the economic decline made it harder for them to engage productively with the outside world, the new internet made it possible, for the first time in history, for young men to meet their agency and communion needs, to some degree, alone in their bedrooms.

These young people are called hikikomori , a Japanese term that means “pulling inward.” [21] They live like hermits, emerging from their caves mostly at odd hours when they are less likely to see anyone, including family members. In some families, parents leave food for them by their doors. They calm their anxieties by staying inside, but the longer they stay in, the less competent they become in the outside world, fueling their anxiety about the outside world. They are trapped.

For many years, the psychiatric community treated hikikomori as a uniquely Japanese condition. [22] But in recent years, some young men in America and elsewhere are behaving like hikikomori . Some young men have even taken both the Japanese word and “NEET” as tribal identifiers. On Reddit, the r/NEET and r/hikikomori subreddits discuss everything from TV shows that espouse shut-in lifestyles to the specifics of peeing in a litter box to avoid leaving one’s room.

Allie Conti at New York magazine spoke to one such Reddit user from North Carolina named Luca. Luca suffered from anxiety in middle school. His mother withdrew him when he was 12 and allowed him to study online from his bedroom. Boys of past generations who retreated to their bedrooms would have been confronted by boredom and almost unimaginable loneliness—conditions that would compel most homebound adolescents to change their ways or find help. Luca, however, found an online world just vivid enough to keep his mind from starving. Ten years later, he still plays video games and surfs the web all night. He sleeps all day.

Luca explains that he is not ashamed of his lifestyle. In fact, he says he’s proud of it, and he contrasts it with the working lives of other young men, who let a boss tell them what to do. His room is “the opposite of a prison,” he tells Conti. “It is freedom. There’s no one in here but me. I can do whatever, whenever. Going outside is a prison. But this room—this room is clarity.”

Luca’s worldview is possible because his internet connection gives him access to a convincing simulation of many real-world pleasures—social connection, games, learning, and sex—without needing to face his anxieties and the uncomfortable uncertainty of real life. It is also representative of the swaggering and aggressive spirit that pervades the male-dominated subreddits, “chans” (such as 4chan and 8chan), and online communities (such as MGTOW—Men Going Their Own Way, without women).

Boyhood Without Real-World Risk

Imagine a childhood where all risk had been eliminated. Nobody ever felt the rush of adrenaline from climbing a tree when an adult had told them not to. Nobody ever experienced butterflies in their stomach as they mustered the courage to ask someone out. Picture a world where late-night outdoor adventures with friends were a thing of the past. In this childhood, there would be fewer bruises, broken bones, and broken hearts. It might sound like a safer world, but is it one you would want for your children?

Most parents would say no. And yet, somehow, something close to this is the world in which many members of Gen Z are growing up. A world with too much supervision and not enough risk is bad for all children, but it seems to be having a larger impact on boys. [23]

When I began examining boys’ mental health trends for this book, I came across a striking finding. Throughout my research career, it has been common knowledge that as adolescents reach puberty, boys and girls exhibit distinct patterns in their mental health challenges. Girls typically exhibit higher rates of internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety, turning their emotions and suffering inward. Boys, on the other hand, tend to exhibit higher rates of externalizing disorders, turning their emotions outward and engaging in high risk or antisocial behavior that often affects others, such as drunk driving, violence, and drug abuse.

But around 2010, something unprecedented started happening: Both sexes shifted rapidly toward the pattern traditionally associated with females. There has been a notable increase in agreement with items related to internalizing disorders (such as “I feel that I can’t do anything right”) for both sexes, with a sharper rise among girls as you can see in figure 7.2. At the same time, agreement with items related to externalizing disorders (such as “how often have you damaged school property on purpose?”) plummeted for both sexes, more sharply for boys. By 2017, boys’ responses looked like those from girls in the 1990s.

One of the most widely noted traits of Gen Z is that they are not doing as much of the bad stuff that teenagers used to do. They drink less alcohol, have fewer car accidents, and get fewer speeding tickets. They have far fewer physical fights or unplanned pregnancies. [24] These are, of course, wonderful trends—nobody wants more car accidents. But because the rate of change for so many risky behaviors has been so rapid, I also look at these trends with concern. What if these changes came about not because Gen Z is getting wiser, but because they are withdrawing from the physical world? What if they are engaging in less risk-taking overall—healthy as well as unhealthy—and therefore learning less about how to manage risks in the real world?

Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms (U.S. Teens)

Figure 7.2. Internalizing and externalizing symptoms of U.S. high school seniors. In the 2010s, externalizing scores dropped for both sexes while internalizing scores rose. (Source: Askari et al. [2022], with data from Monitoring the Future.) [25]

Enjoyment of Risk-Taking

Figure 7.3. Percent of U.S. students (8th, 10th, and 12th grade) who agreed with the statement “I like to test myself every now and then by doing something a little bit risky.” Enjoyment of risk-taking declined more rapidly for boys than for girls in the 2010s. (Source: Monitoring the Future.) [26]

That seems to be what happened, at least in part. Figure 7.3 shows the percentage of American students (in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades) who agreed with this statement: “I like to test myself every now and then by doing something a little bit risky.”

As you can see, boys used to be much more likely to agree with that statement, and both lines in the graph hold steady in the 2000s. But then something changes. The lines decline for both genders, but the decline is steeper for boys. By 2019, boys were not far from where girls had been 10 years earlier. [27]

Hospital Admissions for Unintentional Injuries

Figure 7.4 . On the left: Annual rate at which U.S. males are admitted to hospitals for unintentional injuries, by age group. On the right: Same, for U.S. females. Black line is ages 10–19, the age group that used to have the highest rates of injury and now has among the lowest. (Source: Centers for Disease Control.) [28]

Boys are not just changing how they talk or think about risk; they are truly taking fewer risks. Figure 7.4 plots the rate of hospitalizations for unintentional injuries for four age bands, with males in the left panel and females on the right. If we look only at the years before 2010, we see that rates of hospitalization are under 10,000 per 100,000, for males as well as for females, for all age groups—with the exception of young men. Before 2010, males 10–19, along with males in their 20s, had much higher rates of hospitalization than everyone else, partly because they engaged in more risky activities and made poorer decisions.

Something changed in the 21st century. Rates of injury began to drop slowly in the 2000s, for young men only. The drop then accelerated after 2012 (and began happening for girls as well). By 2019, adolescent boys were less likely to be injured than adolescent girls had been in 2010. In fact, adolescent boys are now not much different from adolescent girls, or from men in their 50s and 60s. [29]

Further evidence of a change: A nationally representative study found that fall-related fractures (e.g., broken fingers and wrists) decreased slowly and steadily, among boys and girls, from 2001 to 2015, but there was one group that stood out—boys ages 10–14 showed a sharp drop after 2009. This suggests a sharp drop in doing things that could lead to a fall, such as riding bicycles over jump ramps, or climbing trees. [30]

What changed for boys? Why have they pulled away from risk in the real world? And why did these trends accelerate after 2010? We can see a possible clue in figure 7.2. The decline in boys’ externalizing attitudes seems to have happened in two phases: a slow decline beginning in the late 1990s, with an acceleration after 2010. We see the same pattern in the decline in boys’ hospitalizations for injury: slow decline in the 2000s followed by faster decline in the 2010s. We don’t see that first phase of decline in either figure for girls. But the increase in internalizing attitudes happened only in the second phase, around the same time as girls.

So let’s look at how those two phases might have affected boys in particular. How might safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s (along with males’ declining societal value) and the move onto online gaming followed by smartphones in the 2000s and early 2010s have worked together to push boys away from the real world, pull them into the virtual world, and fuel their mental health crisis?

The Virtual World Welcomes Boys

As boys began to find fewer opportunities to exercise agency, develop friendships through risky play, and pursue unsupervised adventure in the increasingly overprotective real world, they found ever increasing opportunities to build agency and friendships in the virtual world. The story starts in the 1970s with early arcade video games such as Pong (1972), which could later be played on one’s home TV set. The first home computers arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. Computers and video games in this era, and throughout the 1990s, were of greater interest to boys than to girls.

The virtual world really began to bloom in the 1990s with the opening of the internet to the general public via web browsers such as Mosaic (1993) and AltaVista (1995), and the development of full-fledged 3-D graphics. New video game genres were developed, including “first-person shooter” games such as Doom , and later, massively multiplayer online games such as RuneScape and World of Warcraft .

In the 2000s, everything got faster, brighter, better, cheaper, and more private. The arrival of Wi-Fi technology increased the utility and popularity of laptop computers. Broadband high-speed internet spread quickly in this decade, making it much easier to watch videos on YouTube or Pornhub and play highly engaging online multiplayer video games on the newly released Xbox 360 (2005) and PS3 (2006). These internet-connected consoles enabled adolescents to sit alone in a room, playing for extended hours with a shifting set of strangers from around the globe. Prior to this, when boys played multiplayer video games, the other players were their friends or their siblings, sitting next to them and sharing excitement, jokes, and food.

As adolescents of both sexes got their own laptops, cell phones, and internet-connected gaming consoles, everyone was increasingly free to retreat to private spaces and do as they pleased. For boys, this opened up many new ways to satisfy their desires for agency as well as communion. In particular, it meant that boys could spend much larger amounts of time playing video games and watching pornography while alone in their bedrooms. They no longer had to use the family desktop computer or gaming console out in the living room. But did this new lifestyle—sitting alone in a room while interacting virtually—really satisfy their needs for either agency or communion?

The Virtual World Consumes Boys

As boys became more immersed in ever more immersive games, we see no sign of a decline in their mental health, at least until the late 2000s and early 2010s. [31] At that point, rates of suicide, depression, and anxiety all began to rise. The timing forces us to look closely at how the smartphone changed boys’ tech use and engagement with the world beyond their devices. Before smartphones replaced flip phones, companies could extract children’s attention only when they were seated at a computer or using a gaming console. But in the early 2010s, adolescents with smartphones became available to companies at every waking moment.

It was as if the U.S. government suddenly opened up the entire state of Alaska for drilling, and oil companies competed fiercely to stake out the best territories and start sinking wells. It is often said these days that “data is the new oil.” But so is attention.

With a smartphone in every pocket, companies quickly pivoted to mobile apps, offering adolescents endless high-stimulation activities. Video game producers, pornography providers, and social media platforms adopted free-to-use, advertising-driven strategies. [32] Games also instituted pay-to-progress options—business decisions that tapped players’ wallets (or parents’ credit cards) directly—and got kids hooked.

Mirroring the trend seen among adolescent girls, boys’ status negotiations, as well as their social and entertainment lives, increasingly moved online. Boys wandered through a bazaar of different apps, including social media, online communities, streaming platforms, gaming, pornography, and, when they got a little older, gambling and dating apps. By 2015, many boys found themselves exposed to a level of stimulation and attention extraction that had been unimaginable just 15 years earlier.

From the beginning of the digital age, the tech industry has found ever more compelling ways to help boys do the things they want to do, without having to take social and physical risks that were once needed to satisfy those desires. As traditionally “manly” skills and attributes became less valued, economically and culturally, and as the culture of safetyism grew, the virtual world stepped in to fulfill these needs directly, though not in a way that promoted skills needed for the transition to adulthood. I’ll briefly discuss two of the main areas in which this happened: pornography and video games.

Pornography

Online hardcore pornography offers a good example of the way companies can hijack deep evolutionary drives. Evolution makes things alluring and rewarding (with a little pulse of dopamine) only when—over thousands of generations—striving for those things caused individuals to leave more surviving offspring than individuals who felt no such desire or made no such effort. Sexual attraction and mating are areas of life where evolution has left us lures and strong strivings.

In previous decades, the main way for heterosexual boys [33] to get a look at naked girls was through what we’d now consider very low-quality pornography—printed magazines that could not be sold to minors. As puberty progressed and the sex drive increased, it motivated boys to do things that were frightening and awkward, such as trying to talk to a girl, or asking a girl to dance at events organized by adults.

The internet, on the other hand, is ideally suited for the distribution of pornographic images. As data speeds increased, so did the availability of hardcore pornographic videos. Perhaps as much as 40% of all internet traffic in the late 1990s was porn. [34] The long-running Broadway play Avenue Q , which opened in 2003, even contained a song in which colorful puppets sang, “The internet is for porn!”

Once boys got laptops and high-speed internet, they had an infinite supply of high-quality videos showing every conceivable act, body part, and fetish, which they could watch in private, multiple times each day. A Swedish study found that 11% of boys were daily consumers in 2004 and that the number increased to 24% in 2014. [35] Another study noted that among adolescent boys who watch pornography, 59% describe it as “always stimulating”; 22% describe their use as “habitual”; 10% report that it reduces sexual interest toward potential real-life partners; and 10% said it is “a kind of addiction.” [37] Of course, many teen girls watch porn too, but surveys find much higher rates among boys, whether they are heterosexual or members of a sexual or gender minority. [38] When we look at daily users or users for whom porn has become an addiction that interferes with daily functioning, the male-female ratios are generally more than five or 10 to one, as in figure 7.5.

Daily Porn Users, Swedish 12th Graders

Figure 7.5. Percent of Swedish 12th graders who watch pornography “more or less daily.” (Source: Donevan et al., 2022.) [36]

The problem is not just that modern pornography amplifies the risk for porn addiction, but that heavy porn use can lead boys to choose the easy option for sexual satisfaction (by watching porn) rather than trying to engage in the more uncertain and risky dating world. Additionally, there is evidence that heavy use can disrupt boys’ and young men’s romantic and sexual relationships. For example, several studies indicate that after watching porn, heterosexual men find real women less attractive, including their own partners. [39] Compulsive pornography users, who are predominantly men, are more likely to avoid sexual interactions with a partner and tend to experience lower sexual satisfaction. [40] In a 2017 meta-analysis of over 50 studies collectively including more than 50,000 participants from 10 countries, pornography consumption was “associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, and experiments.” Importantly, the relationship was only significant among males. [41]

Porn separates the evolved lure (sexual pleasure) from its real-world reward (a sexual relationship), potentially making boys who are heavy users turn into men who are less able to find sex, love, intimacy, and marriage in the real world.

These trends are likely to get worse with the arrival of the metaverse, spatial video, and generative AI. Now that Meta and Apple offer headsets that let users wander through any kind of world that someone else can imagine for them, three-dimensional porn featuring “perfect” people with impossible bodies is sure to become an even stronger lure. Generative AI has already produced virtual girlfriends and boyfriends, such as CarynAI, an AI clone of a real-life 23-year-old Snapchat influencer who used thousands of hours of her YouTube content to create a sexting chatbot. [42] People are already falling madly in love with these bots as they flirt and share intimate secrets with them. [43]

As generative AI personalities improve, and as they are implanted into ever-more-lifelike sex dolls and sex robots, [44] an increasing number of heterosexual men may find that a hikikomori lifestyle with a programmable mechanical girlfriend is preferable to the thousands of left swipes they get on dating apps, to say nothing of the social risk of approaching a girl or woman in real life and asking her out on a date. These are the sorts of healthy risks that young men should be taking to become more competent and successful romantically.

I’m not saying that all pornography is harmful; I’m saying that immersing boys in an infinite playlist of hardcore porn videos during the sensitive period in which the sexual centers of their brains are being rewired is maybe not so good for their sexual and romantic development, or for their future partners.

Video Games

The story around hardcore online porn is bleak, but for video games it is more complicated. When I began writing this book, I had suspected that video games would play the same role in explaining boys’ problems as social media does for girls. Indeed, a meta-analysis of dozens of studies confirms that around the world men have substantially higher rates of “internet gaming disorder,” while women have substantially higher rates of “social media addiction.”? [45] But after wading into one of the largest and most contentious areas of media research, I do not find clear evidence that would support a blanket warning to parents to keep their boys entirely away from video games. [46] The situation is different from the many studies that link girls, social media, anxiety, and depression. [47]

Unlike online pornography, researchers have found that a number of benefits accrue to adolescents who play video games. Some research has demonstrated that video game use is associated with increased cognitive and intellectual functioning, such as improved working memory, response inhibition, and even school competence. [48] One experiment found significant decreases in depression symptoms when an experimental group was assigned to play 30 minutes of video games three times a week for a month. [49] Other studies have found playing games cooperatively can induce players to cooperate outside the game. [50]

Nonetheless, there are at least two major harms associated with video games. First, video games can cause severe problems for a substantial subset of heavy users, like Chris, where the key is not just the quantity of play; it is the role that games have come to play in their lives. [51] For example, one systematic review of studies conducted during the COVID pandemic found that video game use sometimes mitigated feelings of loneliness in the short run, but it put some users into a vicious cycle because they used gaming to distract themselves from feelings of loneliness. Over time they developed a reliance on the games instead of forming long-term friendships, and this resulted in long-term stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms. [52] Building in-person relationships was, of course, difficult during COVID, but these findings are consistent with findings linking loneliness and problematic video game use from before the pandemic. [53]

Using the seven-item Gaming Addiction Scale for Adolescents, researchers have found that gamers can be divided into four groups: addicted, problematic, engaged, and casual. [54] Addicted gamers include those who admit to suffering all four of the items on a questionnaire that asks about addiction symptoms: relapse, withdrawal, conflict, and gaming causing problems. These gamers lose control over their gaming habits, as can happen with any addiction. They “become preoccupied with gaming, lie about their gaming use, lose interest in other activities just to game, withdraw from family and friends to game, and use gaming as a means of psychological escape.” [55] A Canadian judge ruled in 2023 that a group of parents could sue Epic Games for the way that its game Fortnite addicted their sons and took over the boys’ lives, leading them to skip eating, showering, and sleeping for extended periods. [56] (I note that researchers are divided on whether gaming addiction is its own disorder or if the behaviors are indicative of underlying disorders like depression or anxiety. [57] )

Using the four-group framework, a “problematic gamer” endorses just two or three of those four addiction criteria. They experience negative consequences from their heavy gaming, but they don’t lose control to the same degree. In contrast, “engaged gamers” play for many hours, but do not endorse any of the addictive items. Prevalence estimates vary, [58] but one 2016 study found that 1 or 2% of adult gamers qualify as having gaming addiction, 7% are problematic gamers, 4% are engaged gamers, and 87% are casual gamers. [59] Using a different set of criteria, a 2018 meta-analysis [60] found that 7% of adolescent boys can be classified as having “internet gaming disorder.” That diagnosis requires “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of a person’s life. [61] (The rate for adolescent girls was estimated to be just above 1%. [62] )

Different studies find different numbers, but 7% seems to be a reasonable middle-ground estimate for the percent of adolescent boys who are suffering substantial impairment in the real world (school, work, relationships) because of their heavy engagement with video games. That is one out of every 13 boys. [63]

The second major harm associated with video games is that they impose a large opportunity cost; they take up an enormous amount of time. Common Sense Media reported in 2019 (before COVID) that 41% of adolescent boys play more than two hours per day, and 17% report playing more than four hours per day. [64] Just as with girls who devote that much time to social media, the time has to come from somewhere. [65] Those heavy gamers are missing out on sleep, exercise, and in-person social interaction with friends and family. [66] As one young man I know put it, “I really wish I had gotten to know my grandfather better before he died, instead of always playing video games when he visited.”

All Screens and No (Real-World) Play

The large reduction of face-to-face social interaction is especially important for understanding what the Great Rewiring did to boys. Of course, boys are mostly playing games with other boys, so a defender of video games might argue that boys are getting more social interaction than they did before internet gaming, just as girls are getting more social interaction via social media. But is online gaming as good for social development as hanging out with friends in person? Or is gaming like social media, giving a lot more quantity but of much lower quality?

Video game play is happening within virtual worlds designed to maximize time spent on the platforms—just like social media. Video games are not designed to foster a small number of lasting friendships or to develop their players’ social skills. As Peter Gray and other play researchers point out, one of the most beneficial parts of free play is that kids must act as legislators (who jointly make up the rules) and as judges and juries (who jointly decide what to do when rules appear to be violated). In most multiplayer video games, all of that is done by the platform. Unlike free play in the real world, most video games give no practice in the skills of self-governance.

Video games also deliver far less of the anti-phobic benefits of risky play. Video games are disembodied. They are thrilling in their own way, but they can’t activate the kind of physical fear, thrill, and pounding heart that riding a roller coaster, or playing full-court basketball, or using hammers to smash things at an adventure playground can give. Jumping out of planes, having knife fights, and getting brutally murdered are just things that happen dozens of times each day for boys playing Fortnite or Call of Duty . They do not teach boys how to judge and manage risks for themselves in the real world. When video games replace real-world exploration and adventure with one’s buddies, as they do for heavy users, they often produce young men who feel that they are missing something, like Chris at the opening of this chapter.

Furthermore, if video games really are a net benefit for friendships, then today’s boys and young men should have more friends and be less lonely than those of 20 years ago. But in fact, the opposite is true. In 2000, 28% of 12th-grade boys reported that they often feel lonely. By 2019, that had risen to 35%. This is symptomatic of a broader “friendship recession” among men in the United States. In the 1990s, only 3% of American men reported having no close friends. By 2021, that number had risen fivefold, to 15%. A different survey in 2021 asked Americans whether there was “someone you talked to within the last six months about an important personal matter.” Young men fared the worst on this question: 28% of them said no. [67] Of course, these survey questions can’t prove that the arrival of online gaming in the 2000s caused the national increase in male loneliness, but they cast doubt on any suggestion that when boys and young men entrusted their social lives to video game companies, they entered a golden age of social connection.

Just as when girls’ friendships moved onto social media platforms, boys gained quantity and lost quality. Boys thrive when they have a stable group of reliable friends, and they create their strongest and most durable friendships from being on the same team or in a stable pack, facing risks or rival teams. Virtual packs create weaker bonds, although today’s increasingly lonely boys cling to them and value them because that’s all they have. That’s where their friends are, as Chris told me.

Technology, Freedom, and Meaninglessness

Why, then, did boys’ mental health get worse in the 2010s, just as they attained unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free? Maybe it’s because it’s not healthy for any human being to have unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free.

In 1897, the French sociologist émile Durkheim—perhaps the most profound thinker about the nature of society—wrote a book about the social causes of suicide. Drawing on data that was just becoming available as governments began to keep statistics, he noted that in Europe the general rule was that the more tightly people are bound into a community that has the moral authority to restrain their desires, the less likely they are to kill themselves.

A central concept for Durkheim was anomie , or normlessness—an absence of stable and widely shared norms and rules. Durkheim was concerned that modernity, with its rapid and disorienting changes and its tendency to weaken the grip of traditional religions, fostered anomie and thus suicide. He wrote that when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don’t feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious:

If this [binding social order] dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation. All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action. [68]

That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later. Communities are the social environments in which humans, and human childhood, evolved. In contrast, children growing up after the Great Rewiring skip through multiple networks whose nodes are a mix of known and unknown people, some using aliases and avatars, many of whom will have vanished by next year, or perhaps by tomorrow. Life in these networks is often a daily tornado of memes, fads, and ephemeral micro-dramas, played out among a rotating cast of millions of bit players. They have no roots to anchor them or nourish them; they have no clear set of norms to constrain them and guide them on the path to adulthood.

Life Often Feels Meaningless

Figure 7.6. Percent of U.S. high school seniors who agreed or mostly agreed with the statement “Life often feels meaningless.” (Source: Monitoring the Future.)

Durkheim and his concept of anomie can explain why all of a sudden, in the early 2010s, boys as well as girls began to agree much more vigorously with the statement “Life often feels meaningless.”

Boys and girls have taken different paths through the Great Rewiring, yet somehow they have ended up in the same pit, where many are drowning in anomie and despair. It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks. Like Johann Hari’s godson, their consciousness ends up “broken into smaller, disconnected fragments.” Human children and human bodies need to be rooted in human communities. Children must grow up on Earth before we can send them to Mars.

In Sum

Like girls, boys got more depressed and anxious in the early 2010s, in many countries. Unlike girls, boys experienced a slow decline since the 1970s in achievement and engagement in school, work, and family life.

Boys and young men withdrew much of their time and effort from the physical world (which was increasingly opposed to unsupervised play, exploration, and risk-taking) and invested it in the rapidly expanding virtual world.

Boys are at greater risk than girls of “failure to launch.” They are more likely to become young adults who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” Some Japanese men developed an extreme form of lifelong withdrawal to their bedrooms; they are called hikikomori .

In the early 2010s, American teen boys’ thinking patterns shifted from what they had traditionally been (higher rates of externalizing cognitions and behaviors than internalizing) to a pattern more commonly shown by girls (higher rates of internalizing). At the same time, boys also began to shun risk (more so than happened for girls).

As boys engaged in fewer risky activities outdoors or away from home, and began spending more time at home on screens, their mental health did not decline in the 1990s and 2000s. But something changed in the early 2010s, and their mental health then began to decline.

Once boys got smartphones, they—like girls—moved even more of their social lives online, and their mental health declined.

One way that smartphones—amplified by high-speed internet—have affected boys’ lives is by providing unlimited, free, hardcore pornography accessible anytime, anywhere. Porn is an example of how tech companies have made it easy for boys to satisfy powerful evolved desires without having to develop any skills that would help them make the transition to adulthood.

Video games offer boys and girls a number of benefits, but there are also harms, especially for the subset of boys (in the ballpark of 7%) who end up as problematic or addicted users. For them, video games do seem to cause declining mental and physical health, family strife, and difficulties in other areas of life.

As with social media for girls, spending hours “connecting” with others online produces an increase in the quantity of social interactions and a decrease in the quality of social relationships. Boys, like girls, became lonelier during the Great Rewiring. Some boys use video games to strengthen their real-world packs, but for many others, video games made it easier for them to retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world.

The Great Rewiring of Childhood pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple rapidly shifting networks. One inevitable result was anomie, or normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux, including the members of the network.

As the sociologist émile Durkheim showed, anomie breeds despair and suicide. This may be why boys and girls, who followed different paths through the Great Rewiring, ended up in the same place, with a sudden and rapid increase in the feeling that their lives were meaningless.