How porn and gaming sapped young men of their desire to work
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
This frequently sparks mental health issues down the line, experts say, which in turn damages prospects for employment.
A US study in 2017 warned that young men were spending more of their free time on video games “and other recreational computer activities”.
The economists behind the report said the increased time spent gaming had fuelled a drop in working hours for young men between 2000 and 2015.
For some, the rise of easy entertainment online has made the idea of employment seem like a lot of effort for little return.
Graham Cowley, who works with unemployed young men in Blackpool, said last month that there are “kids on the internet 24 hours a day, and they don’t want to work for anything less than 40 grand”.
Reshaping real-life
As evidenced by the figures, this problem is disproportionately skewed towards boys.
Some believe that issues start at an early age, particularly as almost all children own a smartphone by the age of 12.
This has fuelled concerns that boys are being influenced by porn, gaming and toxic online role models.
For example, in 2023, the third most Googled person in the world was Andrew Tate.
The virtual world is reshaping real-life behaviour.
Around 90pc of those using the National Centre for Gaming Disorder, which was set up in 2020, are male. And a report published earlier this year by the Centre for Social Justice warned that men aged 18-29 were far more likely to watch porn every day or most days than women (25pc compared to 2pc).
In education, an increasing number of female teachers and pupils are also reporting sexual harassment from male pupils in school.
Men who have been unemployed for years and now feel trapped in a digital world are searching the internet for signs of hope.
A 29-year-old man seeking support on online forum Reddit writes how he is jobless, isolated and has had an addiction to porn since the age of 12. “I have no motivation to do anything,” he writes.
He is not alone. A 2023 study published in the US Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that anxiety and depression were “strongly related” to problematic pornography consumption.
Last year Mel Stride, then the work and pensions secretary, blamed porn and video games for the surge in jobless men.
He argued that technology had a different impact on boys’ and girls’ mental health, with women more likely to suffer because of unrealistic ideals portrayed on social media platforms such as Instagram.
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What a mess.
"Damn milkshake!"...
ew
I saw this today. The iphone and immersion on the internet is having all sorts of downstream effects that can be catastrophic if it continues
It was only a few decades ago that the same thing was being said about television.
Its just my opinion, but I think the current situation is more serious than the "dangers" of television. I dont think tv was ever considered an alternative reality.
Except people a few decades ago were still leaving the house, having sex and reproducing.
You really don't remember the outcry of television rotting the children's brains? I sure do and was not much older than a child myself.
Before television it was that satanic rock 'n roll music that was making children behave in a unacceptable (in their opinion) manner.
It's always going to be something, and in the future it'll be something else while people look back at the good ole days where they only had to deal with gaming and porn.
We're talking children, so that's just gross. And, no. That was the whole bit about television, that the kids weren't going outside, they were just sitting in front of the television all day.
Oh yeah. That went on for decades.
I think those overlapped considerably, timing wise, but yeah, I remember that too.
Wow. I see your point. That's just a tough thing to imagine as we sit here today.
But to your point, it would have been a tough thing for our parents to imagine back then.
Television is not an interactive experience.
But more importantly the people discussed in the article are not children.
If the internet did not have a harmful effect on society the world would not be as fucked up as it is today.
The first I Phone that reached a mass audience was 2009 or 2010 I believe. That time period was the true birth of social media as people could interact with the content from anywhere, not just tethered to a desk top computer. One could argue its been all downhill from there.
Of course it is. Just watching game shows with my mother proved that. She got very upset if she wasn't able to answer some of the questions first.
Neither was my mother, but you didn't bother her during General Hospital.
The internet is one thing, it is information and experiences in multiple forms. Wait, that's 2 things....
Like most things in this world it can be misused. But you don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
What you are talking about is their ability to communicate with other people with different world views, different experiences, and the start of a global information age. Blocking the internet is what Russia and North Korea do to keep their people away from knowledge.
All knowledge is now available to anyone with a few clicks of a keyboard.
The thing about TV when I was growing up is that it wasn't constantly putting out content directed at kids. There were 3 networks plus PBS. Kids' shows were pretty much only broadcast on Saturday mornings and (in my area, anyway) after school for about half an hour. Even as teens, there were a few nights with shows we (and usually our parents) would plan to watch every week (remember programming blocks with The Cosby Show on NBC on Thursday and the TGIF shows on ABC?), with the rest of TV programming not aimed at us. "There's nothing to watch on TV" was heard pretty often at our house.
We weren't immersed like today's kids are. There was no TV channel with round-the-clock content aimed at us. Now, kids (and adults) can find just that - unlimited games, movies, series, social media, blogs - all at the click of a button, and nobody even has to hold the rabbit ears to get the snow out of the picture.
One name for ya.....
Benny Hill.
I wonder if we're not talking about the effect instead of the cause.
If you take fathers out of the equation, you end up with poorly adjusted sons.
That’s definitely True, but young women are also struggling as well.
Certainly a part of the cause, but to expand on that it might be poor parenting by all involved
I wouldn't argue that, but when we're specifically talking about the struggles of boys/young men, the absence of fathers becomes more acutely significant.
Over the last several decades, American society has come to operate on a perilous set of practices and erroneous assumptions. One of those is that we've allowed key lessons boys learn from fathers like accountability, discipline, consequences, and emotional control to be labeled as undesirable or even detrimental. We've reduced fathers to walking checkbooks and actively interfered with their opportunities to influence their children.
The statistics on fatherless boys are staggering, but we're sticking to the "deadbeat dad" and "toxic masculinity" mindset.
Maybe so though I tend to to believe that all those things can be learned from people other than just fathers
It may be possible, but the statistics are pretty clear that it's not happening.
I certainly learned accountability, discipline, consequences, and emotional control from both my parents and other people in positions of authority over me
Sure. As did I.
But let's start with a key phrase here.... "both my parents". We had both parents around. That changes everything. The numbers are very clear.
But let's also talk about the importance of non-familial authority figures. The majority of these are usually teachers, and statistically they are overwhelmingly (77%) female. So you have plenty of role models for girls to emulate. That doesn't address how the educational process itself is more suited to girls than boys, even before we talk about all the teachers being women.
So for girls.... yeah... we've got fantastic role models everywhere.
For boys... we're just hoping the coaches aren't terrible humans....which is not a given. And if the boys don't play sports... well....maybe there is an uncle or somebody at church... but that's not a lot of time to help and we're even limiting that contact because we're scared of child predators.
So these boys are having to learn how to be men from each other... like Lord of the Flies. Well when that inevitably goes badly, it's not surprising that they escape to video games or porn or that they find characters like Andrew Tate appealing.
The surprise here, IMO, is that the statistics aren't worse than they are.
Because I am almost 76 and for medical reasons effectively disabled for much activity outside my house , I will spend most of my time being entertained by various forms of modern media. Hopefully a lot of that will be reading and listening to books, but I am open to it all.
Young people should have more productive inclinations.
I'm sure they do. But with younger people you have to understand that porn and gaming will be involved (just like it was for you and me, to a greater or lesser extent). With very few exceptions it is harmless.