It seems a little perverse to be celebrating International Men’s Day next week. American voters have again rejected a woman candidate for president in favour of that well-known feminist Donald Trump. “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realise everything is at stake,” tweeted Elon Musk on polling day.
The gender shift was most pronounced among men aged 18-29, though it’s not as clear-cut as Musk and his Maga bros would make out. Trump won this demographic by 49 per cent to Kamala Harris’s 47 per cent (the balance going to independents), a 6-8 point swing on Trump’s previous campaigns. That still means roughly half of Gen Z men voted against the convicted felon and climate denier.
What is more definite is that many young men are not in a happy place. This influences politics but goes way beyond it. Signs can be found in the United States, Ireland and elsewhere of widespread anxiety, depression and loneliness. These maladies can affect everyone, but they have unique male varieties – as International Men’s Day seeks to highlight.
Much progress has been made normalising discussion about men’s mental health. Comedian PJ Gallagher’s documentary on mental health problems in Ireland was one of the most affecting things on television this year. And it’s delightful to see The Cure – trailblazers of unfiltered male angst – having a musical renaissance more than 40 years after first releasing Boys Don’t Cry.
But there is no inoculation against depression. There is no set of words that can wipe away anxieties for good. “Walk and talk” is often used as a mental health catchphrase: walking takes us physically into proximity with other people, and talking reminds us we’re not alone. Today, many young men just “sit and type”.
Don’t blame them. Societal and technological change is forcing us further apart. That’s why it’s more important than ever to “penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that”, as philosopher Bertrand Russell recommended.
Talking about “what men want” still feels taboo. Generalisations are dangerous, but my own hunch is that men crave more external validation than women. It’s why they feel loss of reputation so severely.
Ultimately, men just want to be loved – or, at least, to know they’re not completely unloved. They need a shoulder to cry on when they screw up, and they want reassurance that they’re not weird for being deeply insecure. Not to go all Saoirse Ronan about it, but: “Am I right, fellas?”
Someone I think about occasionally is Enoch Burke (now in prison for more than 400 days for failing to obey a court order to suspend his one-man protest at the school where he had taught). I don’t know him from Adam but I’d like to give him a hug – I feel he could do with one. He reminds me of many young men who go through a phase of extreme religiosity before they eventually grow out of it. That may not happen in Burke’s case, but a question lingers in my mind: would Irish society tolerate locking up a young woman for the same length of time for similar behaviour?
These kinds of discussion very easily fall into the trap of listing male versus female grievances. We must do better than that, while accepting that penetrating “the core of loneliness in each person” can take us to some uncomfortable places.
[ All the lonely men: how to survive the ‘friendship recession’Opens in new window ]
Byung-Chul Han, one of the most prolific philosophers writing about modern anxiety, emphasises the need to go beyond argumentation. We will never find peace – either individually or as a society – until we risk letting go of logic.
In his latest book The Spirit of Hope, Han says you can’t reason yourself into a more positive frame of mind. You can only do mental, or physical, groundwork to make yourself more receptive to the “mood” – if and when it hits you. “Hope therefore approximates faith,” he says. It is a kind of “transcendence”.
Russell – a mathematician, atheist and pacifist (whose writings on logic, incidentally, make an appearance in Sally Rooney’s latest novel) – similarly identified a limit to reasoning. He described a spiritual epiphany in his late 20s that led him to acknowledge “the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached”.
For all our so-called progressivism today, delving into such spiritual territory remains largely off-limits. Talking about “the meaning of life” is mortifying in polite society, and especially alien to men. But if we don’t allow people to voice their innermost feelings, should we be surprised if they turn to charlatans who purport to understand how they are hurting, and who have ready scapegoats in feminists, liberals or “elites”?
Han notes that the German verb hoffen – to hope – has its origins in the idea of “leaning forward” and “to look further with greater precision”. Philosophy and psychology seem united here. Getting our minds into a healthier state, and bringing us closer as individuals in society, may start with the smallest of movements. Lean forward. Walk and talk.