If You Think Men Are in Crisis Now … Just Wait

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Men, you may have heard, are in crisis. The causes are many, and the left and right identify different villains (toxic masculinity, according to the former; feminism and gynecocracy, says the latter). But there seems to be a growing consensus that something is rotten in man-land. And across the political spectrum there is at least a consensus that male despair and disconnect is fueled in large part by dramatic changes in society, the economy, and the family—all of which have left many men feeling dangerously unmoored, isolated, and purposeless.

Despite frustrated men rallying behind a president who promises to restore them (and America) to their former glory, a peek over the tech horizon doesn’t suggest a golden age for the postfeminist American male. If anything, A.I.—a force already changing work, education, research, romance, and even the human brain—seems virtually guaranteed to magnify today’s boy problems into a full-blown man-sized catastrophe. If we are collectively concerned about the well-being of men—and those of us on the left and right alike should be concerned—then we need to grapple with the many ways A.I. is set to supercharge male loneliness, aimlessness, isolation, illness, malaise, and deadly rage, to the detriment of us all.

Sure, it can sometimes feel like a bit much to hear, yet again, about how men are suffering. Men make up more than 70 percent of law firm partners, 72 percent of Congress, 86 percent of tech founders, 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, and 100 percent of U.S. presidents. Men are much more likely than women to occupy the 10 highest-paying professions in the U.S., dominating the ranks of physicians, dentists, and lawyers, even though women have for years earned graduate degrees in those fields in equal or greater numbers. And it’s not just at the top levels that men are doing better: Men without college degrees outearn women with the same educational attainment. Women earn more college degrees than men, but men with college degrees outearn women with the same.

But these statistics don’t tell the whole story. Men generally find themselves in worse health than women, job or no job: They are sicker, they become addicted to drugs and alcohol more regularly, they go to the doctor less often, and they die earlier. The male loneliness epidemic—particularly acute among young men in the West—has by now been well covered. And as it stands, more than 10 percent of prime-age working men in America are out of the workforce and not even looking for jobs. Add that to the 3.5 percent who are unemployed, and roughly 1 in every 8 American men between 25 and 54 isn’t working.

Unemployment in men is concentrated among those without college degrees and overrepresented among those whose lives go badly off the rails: those who wind up in jail, or struggling with drug or alcohol addiction, or dying the now-notorious “deaths of despair” that have ravaged working-class communities (suicides, overdoses). Correlation, of course, is not causation, and it stands to reason that men who struggle with addiction or impulse control probably also struggle to stay employed. But one study published in 2024 found a strong link between these deaths and a combination of unemployment and social disengagement—stronger, even, than psychological and economic distress.

There does seem to be something to the theory that employment itself is a stabilizing force that keeps young men in particular out of trouble. One survey of several thousand British men found that “the strongest predictor of a positive mindset in men—by far—is secure and satisfying employment.” Work far outpaced health, relationships, and family as the most important factor for feeling good about one’s life. Decades of research have also found that unemployment causes precipitous declines in men’s physical and mental health: It increases the risk of suicide, death, drug use, alcohol addiction, sleep problems, chronic health problems, even obesity.

All of which is one big reason A.I. should worry us.

Sam Altman of OpenAI has said that with the growth of A.I., “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.” (Jobs that will remain valuable? Those that find new uses for A.I. and new jobs for the robots to take.)

“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Dario Amodei, the CEO of the A.I. company Anthropic, told Axios. What might that look like? According to Amodei, “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced—and 20% of people don’t have jobs.”

Other estimates are even more dire. The International Monetary Fund found that in advanced economies, 60 percent of jobs may be significantly altered by A.I.; this lines up with McKinsey’s finding that 60 percent of U.S. jobs will be significantly changed by that time and 30 percent will be automated altogether. This includes white-collar jobs in fields that have been more insulated, till now, from the disruptions of globalization, like law, health care, media, finance, and education. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2030, some 92 million jobs will be taken from humans because of A.I.—though the group also predicts that 170 million new positions will be created, “with the jobs expected to see the most growth including farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, salespeople and food processing workers.”

Meanwhile, the job losses are already starting. Meta recently announced it’s sloughing off 5 percent of its workforce, confirming CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that “probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.” Other companies are making similar cuts: Microsoft recently axed 4 percent of its workers, some 9,000 people; Walmart cut 1,500 technology jobs while expanding its use of and investment in A.I.; at CrowdStrike, 5 percent of employees were let go.

Women, of course, also stand to be walloped by A.I.’s disruption. Recent research suggests that women may be even harder hit than men when it comes to A.I. job displacement, from the scores of law firm associates who are largely female to admin staff who are overwhelmingly female. From health care work (A.I. can read a cancer scan) to education (A.I. can tutor a child) to psychological support (A.I. can provide therapy), scores of women’s jobs are about to be made robot-redundant.

But men may be less well equipped, in many ways, to weather these shifts and adapt. And the changes A.I. will make to work in the coming years threaten to worsen the question of purpose that seems to be at the heart of today’s male malaise: What is a man for?

Across many decades and many cultures, maleness was defined by provision, procreation, and protection. Now women can provide for themselves, can procreate by themselves, and are increasingly aware that men are the people they need to be protected from. Many women have found purpose and identity in their professional work, a privilege long held by men; for others, having children brings with it tremendous meaning; still others are active in their communities (women are much more likely to volunteer their time than men are) or for particular causes; for many women, it’s all of the above. There are of course still conservative communities in which a woman’s primary purpose in life is to be a wife and mother. But most women in the United States gain purpose and status from many sources, often all at once—which also creates a useful emotional and psychological cushion if one of those sources dries up (a job loss, a financial setback, a last child leaving the house).

Researchers have found that when women hit stressful times, they are more likely than men to “tend and befriend”—to cultivate relationships, to reach out to others, to seek out others’ company and help. Men are more likely to respond to stress with fight or flight—and to go at it alone. That was probably useful in a hunter-gatherer society. It’s less helpful in suburban Cleveland, and it’s much less helpful in a 2025 A.I.-ravaged San Francisco.

Friendships generally are waning, but men’s are declining more precipitously than women’s, and women’s are typically emotionally deeper to begin with: About twice as many women as men say that in the past week, they’ve received emotional support from a friend or told a friend they loved them. Women have more work friends than men do, broader social universes, and more pulls on their time (volunteerism, social activities, kids, the PTA, caring for ill or older relatives), which helps to feel useful even if paid work has dried up. Women are also more likely to be raising children than men—85 percent of single parents are women, and mothers generally spend about twice as much time as fathers caring for their children—an activity that is itself socially connective (the kids need to go to school, to day care, to the doctor, to Grandma’s, to activities, to the park) or, at the very least, forces you to get up in the morning and accomplish the basics of feeding and caring for another human. This combination of role flexibility and relational tendencies has not insulated women from the shake-ups of a globalized economy, technology, and social media, but it has given them more tools with which to navigate these big changes.

Bigger changes are coming. As Ross Andersen wrote in the Atlantic, the A.I. revolution threatens to bring about a “mass desocialization event,” promising us less time at work with other people and more time on our devices, whatever those might eventually look like. As our social skills erode, dating, mating, and marrying—all already on the decline—seem virtually guaranteed to crater further, only worsening the male loneliness crisis. (Single women, on the other hand, are generally happier than single men.) And A.I. threatens to take away even the shallow interpersonal interactions that may be a lonely person’s last tethers to broader society: ordering coffee from a barista or bodega guy, scheduling a dentist appointment with a receptionist, waving down a taxi driver. As more and more of these jobs become automated, and more workers simply stay home, less and less of our day to day will involve other people.

Isolation and unemployment are also mutually reinforcing dynamics. According to a report from former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “activities that better connect individuals to one another, including immersion in local community-based activities or volunteering, can also equip individuals with desirable skills that make them more employable, and significantly increase the likelihood of unemployed individuals becoming employed.”

And men becoming increasingly disconnected from society is a problem for all of us—it could lead to an uptick in violence. Already, it is overwhelmingly young men who commit crime, and especially violent crimes (nearly 90 percent of murders are committed by men). According to Murthy’s report, fraying social ties only stand to exacerbate this. “One recent study on community violence,” the report says, “showed that a one standard deviation increase in social connectedness was associated with a 21 percent reduction in murders and a 20 percent reduction in motor vehicle thefts.”

Researchers have found that when men have other sources of self-worth and respect in their lives—namely, a good job and the social status that comes with it—they’re less likely to react to other forms of disrespect with violence. “When someone bumps into someone on the dance floor, looks too long at someone else’s girlfriend or makes an insulting remark, it doesn’t threaten the self-respect of people who have other types of status the way it can when you feel this is your only source of value,” is how the writer Maia Szalavitz put it in the Guardian. When a man’s sense of status and masculine identity isn’t derived from good work, other forms of macho posturing may take over, and that doesn’t generally go very well.

There is no obvious solution here, and the ones on offer from those who stand to reap the benefits of A.I. (those building the robots) seem even more dystopian than A.I. itself. One idea is a universal basic income scheme, which would help at least some people materially, but it wouldn’t address this loneliness and crisis of purpose. Humans are, in my view, essentially working dogs, and research confirms this: We need discipline and routine to thrive, and part of what is so destabilizing about job loss is that sudden lack of structure. It is very, very difficult to wholly self-impose a daily routine with zero external demands; things like jobs and school, which require us to show up at certain places and perform certain tasks, help foster conscientiousness and a sense of control over our lives.

Married, working mothers spend about twice as much time as married, working fathers on child care and household labor, while working fathers enjoy more leisure time. The fact that women tend to take on many more of the tasks and logistics of running a household than men do—a complaint so pervasive it’s basically a cliché at this point—is sexist and exhausting, but it is also a gendered buffer to a breakdown: If a mother loses her job, that’s devastating, but she’s still got a PTA meeting at 7 and a pediatrician appointment at 10 and the carpool at 8. These external obligations and routines are what can help us keep going even though adversity, and many of them entail connection with other people. And the expanded social networks they provide, in addition to the more positive mindset they help cultivate, can translate into finding new employment more quickly. (Here is another argument for gender equality: Men taking on more of these tasks would lighten women’s load and help men cultivate greater discipline, foster deeper connections, and better weather adversity.)

All of these dynamics are coming for women as well. But men, with their greater reliance on work for purpose, their greater reliance on women for connection, and their more tenuous social ties, seem primed to suffer some of the worst of A.I.’s mass un-humaning of society.

And in this moment, there is a lot of justified concern for men on the left and the right—and there is a conservative, patriarchal, and ostensibly male-focused administration in charge that has promised American men it will return their jobs, their status, and their dignity. This same administration is trying to take any guardrails off A.I. development and use.

We need legislators who are taking these changes seriously now, for everyone. We need men who look up and see the tsunami headed at them. And as a culture, we may be wise to help men figure out how to forge the kind of expansive identities that women have, so that even if they fail to stop the deluge, they may find high enough ground to survive it.

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