Boys Are From Skyrim, Girls Are From Instagram

Some thoughts on the gender gap in the youth mental health crisis

The findings in Jonathan Haidt’s work on the teen mental health crisis all point to growing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among girls and young women, associated with high rates of social media usage. He finds relatively stable rates of the same mental health markers among boys and young men, who spend less time on social media, but far more time playing video games. We should not take their relatively stable mental health to mean that boys and young men are doing alright, though. As Richard Reeves points out, boys’ plummeting educational attainment is a dire indicator of something going wrong. Relatively speaking, women are thriving in school, and quickly surpassing men in the knowledge economy¹.

I am quite partial to the theory that the causality of social media and mental health issues has to do with simply how spending so much time on social media displaces genuine social connection, and anxiety and depression are downstream from loneliness. But then why are men not getting far more unwell through spending so much time playing video games? One hand-wavey explanation is that men are “socializing” by playing games online with their friends, but I’m skeptical. Lots of dudes are sinking countless hours into single-player games, or playing online games with randos and not talking to them. Even if they are playing with their friends, we know disembodied voice chats are no substitute for in-person interaction.

Hanging out irl

Any good definition of loneliness has to include that it’s not a simple matter of the quantity of one’s social interaction—it’s a question of whether one feels subjectively satisfied with the quantity and quality of their social interactions. A hermit can be less lonely than a social butterfly. Advertising is based on the principle of stoking desire, and so the advertising model of social media creates loneliness in the user by constantly trying to sell the user on a life with more money, more stuff, more status, and more friends.

Video games are one of the only forms of media left that aren’t funded with an advertising model. Instead, the game makes sure the buyer feels they get their money's worth by offering “hours of gameplay.” And they keep the player hooked for those hours through a gameplay loop wherein they run into challenges that are at first difficult to overcome, and as the player gets better at the game² , they feel personal satisfaction from overcoming challenges they previously couldn’t.

I think this explanation is much more intertwined with the educational and economic rise of women, and the dropping out of men. Social media inflames desires, while video games simulate the satisfaction of desires³.

Richard Reeves cites often that the key recurring keywords in men’s suicide notes are “useless” and “worthless.” A man who lies flat and doesn’t achieve anything in real life can bat away the feelings of uselessness and worthlessness by being useful and worthy in the video game. Money and status and skill in the game world can serve as effective simulacra of real life achievement, so that the lack of real life achievement doesn’t bother the man quite so much. Time spent gaming might displace time spent socializing as much as social media does, but the game, like an opioid, numbs the pain of loneliness.

The reality is that a certain amount of anxiety and desire is necessary to drive achievement. In our nearly-post-scarcity society, one doesn’t need to be a particularly high-achiever in order to satisfy the basic biological needs of food, clean water, basic shelter, etc.. So we are driven to achieve by our desires for things that aren’t strictly necessary. Critiques of consumerism and advertising always focus on how we’re being manipulated into buying shit we don’t need. I increasingly realize, though, that buying unnecessary shit is simply how the world goes around when our society becomes this rich. We’re simply past worrying about need.

I would not be able to make a living in San Francisco by playing the French horn if I hadn’t spent a few years being dreadfully anxious about whether or not I would “make it” in this silly career field. The anxiety wasn’t simply pathology, it was the brain’s motivational system working as intended. I don’t need to have this particular career or live in this particularly expensive city. I could instead have dropped out of college in Ohio, where I could have afforded a decent home in some decaying small town off the pay of a mediocre job, so that I could sit around and play video games all day. I participated in the real world, and I worked hard and pushed myself, because society inculcated in me a desire for things I didn’t need. Some of society’s tools for inculcating these desires in me were advertising, consumerism, and status signaling. If you refuse to buy into consumerism, the only alternative might be anomie. Running the hedonic treadmill of unnecessary status signifiers is the only normative life path we have left.

There is in this sense a tragic silver lining to girls’ rising anxiety and loneliness: at least their yearning and loneliness is driving them to do something. At least they are getting good grades, going to college, and studying hard so that one day they’ll be able to afford shit they don’t need. Then the wiser among them will realize with age that the stuff won’t make them happy, but at least by spending their youth advancing goals in the real world, by getting educated and building a career, they will be equipped to build real community.

Liberal democracy, international alliances and norms, and the wealth-generating power of industrial capitalism have eradicated a lot of the meaningful struggles of the past. We’re incredibly fortunate to not have to worry about basic subsistence and barbarians at the gates. But the lack of struggle threatens meaninglessness. Now we just have the struggle for status. Many subcultures like to decry that status is bullshit, which is in itself usually a bid for status within their subculture⁴. At least caring about status gives us a path towards meaning.

Status is simply our word for the cumulative positive regard of others. Advertising tells you that the positive regard of others you already have is not enough, and you need to buy this thing in order to have the positive regard of more and/or more valuable people. This dissatisfaction with your current relationships inflames loneliness. There’s obviously a lot to dislike about this when it comes to the advertising of particularly vapid or anti-social products or brands, but on the whole, I think there’s a positive side to having a force in society making people care more about the positive regard of others.

If you agree that atomization is a big problem, I think that encouraging people to care more about status necessarily nudges them towards community. We need people to have a strong enough yearning for the positive regard of others for them to choose the inconvenience of other people over the low-friction ease of isolation. If you, like me, believe that morality is a social construction, then it also follows that pursuing the positive regard of others heavily overlaps with just being a moral person. This suggestion may chafe against American individualistic values, but the reality is that conforming yourself to others’ expectations is a pathway to becoming a better person, as long as you choose with care who you’re trying to impress. Consumerism gets criticized as “working a job you hate, to buy shit you don’t need, to impress people you don’t like.” But what about impressing people you like?

One could argue that the problem is advertising making us dissatisfied with the positive regard of others we already have, but at least when it comes to the youth, I think that’s still a prosocial force. Having the positive regard of other teens doesn’t really count for much—they aren’t wise enough for their assessments of character to be a particularly prosocial force. A good parent should ideally love their child unconditionally, so the positive regard of your parents doesn’t count for much either. Earning status in the real world, from other adults who aren’t biased in your favor, is a necessary rite of passage to adulthood. That’s why a man who opts for the game world over the real world will become a manchild. That’s why so many unwell young adults adopt infantilizing language towards themselves and make excuses for how they “can’t adult,” or whatever. A young person should care about social climbing, and claims to the contrary strike me as crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. The American dream is doing better than your parents, and having your kids do better than you, no?

From a broader perspective, at least advertising inculcates a culture that keeps us interested in impressing each other. We need to care about being perceived as a worthy person in order to be motivated to become worthy. It’s worth considering the counterfactual of our consumerist, advertising-driven economy: without these social forces at play, how many more people would choose the simulacra of achievement, love, and community over the real things? Maybe some youthful anxiety is just the entrance price to a life well-lived in a free society. Maybe social media companies stoking girls’ anxiety about being unworthy is at least better than video games making boys complacent in their unworthiness.

1. At the median, albeit not in the top 1%.

2. Or just levels up or gains more powerful in-game items, thereby making the challenge easier to overcome without any increase in player skill.

3. Perhaps there’s something underlying these musings coming from being amidst a run of Tristan und Isolde at the San Francisco Opera right now. Wagner was heavily inspired in writing Tristan by Schopenhauer’s notion that reality is fundamentally driven by a sort of abstract striving and yearning force he calls “will.” Or something like that—I haven’t actually read Schopenhauer. Still, the idea that there may be some transcendent meaning to be found in unresolved desire, tumbling into unresolved desire, tumbling into yet more unresolved desire, is perhaps more appealing than the idea that our cascade of desires is inherently meaningless.

4. See: Status is Weird from the excellent Substack Everything is Bullshit.