So It Goes for Young Men

The numbers are bleak, the causes murky, and somewhere in the background, Scott Galloway will not stop reminding you what they all add up to.

The American Condition · Vol. XXIV · February 2026

Essay / Social Analysis

Listen. Here is a fact that nobody quite knows what to do with: four out of every five people who die by suicide in the United States are men. You can write that down. You can put it on a little card and keep it in your wallet, next to your insurance information and the rewards card for the coffee shop you visit three times a week because human contact has become expensive and rare. Go ahead. The number won't change. It just sits there, patient and indifferent, the way bad statistics always do.

So it goes.

We are somewhere in the middle of a crisis that most people still aren't sure they are allowed to name out loud. It involves young men — American ones, mostly, though the problem has been generous enough to spread to other wealthy nations. It involves the way they are being left behind in schools and workplaces and bedrooms and the general project of becoming functional adults. It involves the question of what, exactly, a man is supposed to be when the old script has been shredded, no new one has been issued, and a very handsome man on the internet with a great deal of money is more than happy to sell you a terrible one.

Scott Galloway has been saying this for years. Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business, a podcaster, a serial entrepreneur, and a man who speaks in statistics the way other men speak in sports metaphors — fluently, passionately, and with the slightly alarming energy of someone who cannot believe you haven't already heard this particular number. He is not a conservative. He is not a men's rights activist. He is, as best as one can tell, a person who looked at the data and decided it would be irresponsible to pretend he hadn't.

The Numbers

Here, then, are some numbers. Not Galloway's numbers, exactly — they belong to the actuaries and the demographers and the researchers who spent careers in rooms without windows. But Galloway is the man who keeps picking them up off the floor and holding them in front of our faces, so we should at least credit him with the effort.

The Galloway Dashboard — Key Statistics on American Men

• 4× More likely to die by suicide than women

• 3× More likely to be homeless or addicted

• 12× More likely to be incarcerated

• 1 in 5 Men in their 30s still live with a parent

• 15%. Of men report having no close friends at all

• 43% Share of bachelor's degrees going to men — a 50-year low

• 1 in 3 Men under 30 are in a romantic relationship

• 98% Of mass shooters are male

  
  

That last one tends to stop conversations. It shouldn't, but it does. Because you might expect that a statistic of that magnitude — 98 percent — would prompt a serious national conversation about young men and isolation and what happens when a human being is left entirely outside the normal bonds of community and work and love. Instead we mostly have the conversation about the guns, which is also a real conversation worth having, and yet somehow the shooter himself, the demographic fact of his maleness, gets treated as incidental. A footnote. Atmospheric detail. So it goes.

In 1970, men made up roughly 59 percent of college students in America. By 2025, that number had flipped almost completely: women now hold 57 percent of undergraduate enrollments and receive nearly two college degrees for every one earned by a man. The American Institute for Boys and Men reports that there are now 2.4 million more women than men on U.S. campuses. Galloway, characteristically, frames the downstream consequence in the most economically bracing terms available: three-quarters of women, he reports, say that economic viability is a key factor in choosing a partner. Men who are not in school, not progressing in careers, not building toward something — those men are being quietly de-prioritized in the romantic market. Which might sound cold. It is also, most likely, just true.

"The most dangerous person in the world is a broke and alone male, and we are producing too many of them."

— Scott Galloway, NYU Stern School of Business

This is the part of the essay where a writer with different inclinations would reassure you. Would gesture toward nuance. Would note, correctly, that women have suffered under patriarchal structures for centuries and that any analysis of male disadvantage must be held alongside that history. All of that is true. Galloway says so himself, repeatedly, noting that empathy is not a zero-sum game and that civil rights did not hurt white people and that celebrating women's ascent and addressing men's decline are not mutually exclusive projects. He is correct. The numbers do not care about the politics. They just sit there, keeping their own company.

The Drift

What happens to a young man who falls off the tracks? Galloway has a theory about this, and it is blunter than most people are comfortable with. The single point of failure, he argues, is the loss of a male role model. Not ideology. Not economic policy. Not video games or social media, though those are contributing factors. The loss — to divorce, to death, to emotional absence — of a man who is doing reasonably well and is willing to be involved.

The U.S. has more single-parent households than nearly any other developed country. Until third grade, 92 percent of teachers are women. The majority of therapists are women. The result, as Galloway describes it, is that enormous numbers of boys pass through their entire adolescence with almost no meaningful involvement from men. Into that vacuum, the internet has been pleased to offer alternatives. Andrew Tate has been pleased to offer alternatives, albeit maybe not exactly a role model, uhm... The manosphere — that vast, profitable ecosystem of grievance and performance and weaponized loneliness — has been extremely pleased to offer alternatives.

Galloway's diagnosis: When a boy loses a male role model, he becomes statistically more likely to be incarcerated than to graduate from college.

The irony, which Galloway does not miss, is that the right noticed this crisis before the left did. The right has been speaking to young men's sense of displacement, their unemployment anxieties, their bewilderment in the new romantic landscape, for over a decade. The problem is that the right's proposed solution — a kind of retrofitted 1950s masculinity, coarseness dressed as strength, nostalgia dressed as purpose — is, as Galloway sees it, not masculinity at all. It is anti-masculinity. A real man, in Galloway's formulation, protects rather than bullies, provides rather than takes, and extends care outward rather than hoarding it inward. A mensch, in the Yiddish sense: a just, honest, honorable person. That's the shorthand for healthy masculinity in 2025. The data, unfortunately, suggests we are producing fewer of them than we used to.

Over 56 percent of men under 30 voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Galloway does not express particular surprise. When a large demographic group feels economically sidelined, romantically invisible, and culturally unwelcome, they tend to vote for disruption. They do not care much about the fine print. "If you're not doing well," Galloway said, "you just want change." One man with a mission and a microphone and a comprehensive theory of your enemies is more compelling, at 23, than a nuanced policy paper about labor force participation rates. So it goes.

The Screens

Here is another number that Galloway keeps returning to, one so surreal it deserves its own sentence: the amount of time young American men spend outside is now less than the amount of time prison inmates spend outside. Read that again. Young men, living in freedom, in the most entertainment-rich environment in human history, go outside less than people who are incarcerated. They are not outside. They are on screens. They are in loops. They are being served content calibrated, at the algorithmic level, to maximize engagement and minimize the uncomfortable friction of human society.

Nearly 40 percent of bars and pubs have closed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Community organizations have been declining for decades — Robert Putnam wrote about this in Bowling Alone back in 2000, and it has only accelerated since. The places where men once bumped into each other accidentally, where friendships formed from proximity and boredom and shared complaint, are vanishing. What has replaced them are para-social relationships with streamers and pod-casters and influencers who are always available, always entertaining, and never actually there.

Galloway puts the tech industry's role bluntly: "I think the biggest threat of AI is not self-dealing weapons or becoming sentient, but they tap into an immature brain, especially young men." These platforms are not designed to make young men better. They are designed to keep young men watching. Those are not the same objective. They are, in fact, almost opposite objectives. This is what it looks like when an economy's prosperity is attached to producing ever more isolated, screen-captivated individuals who are very good at being an audience and not particularly good at being a person.

"On a very meta level, the most violent and unstable places in the world have one thing in common. They have a disproportionate number of young men without opportunity — and we are producing way too many of them."

— Scott Galloway, MSNBC

The Mating Math

One in three men under 30 is in a romantic relationship. Two in three women under 30 are. Galloway acknowledges the obvious mathematical confusion this creates — those numbers do not add up to a symmetrical dating pool — and then explains the asymmetry: women are increasingly dating older. They are seeking men who are more economically and emotionally developed. The men they are skipping over, the men of their own age, are in their childhood bedrooms, or drifting between low-wage jobs, or marinating in bitterness on forums that will confirm whatever they already suspect about women and the world.

A third of men haven't had sex in the past year. That number has been rising. Everyone is having less sex than before — this is a generational trend that crosses gender lines — but young men have experienced the steepest drop. The loneliness this produces is not merely inconvenient. It is, clinically and sociologically, dangerous. Isolation is a precursor to radicalization. It is a precursor to addiction. It is a precursor to the kinds of despair that end in drunk driving accidents and overdoses and the morgue statistics with which we opened this piece. Four out of five. Four out of five. The number keeps its vigil.

What Galloway finds infuriating — and you can hear it in his voice across dozens of interviews and podcast appearances — is that neither political party has mounted a serious, sustained response. The Democrats, he suggests, have struggled to talk about male suffering without feeling they are betraying the long struggle for gender equality. The Republicans have talked about it, loudly, but mostly as a vehicle for grievance rather than genuine repair. The boys in the middle of all this are getting the worst of both failures.

The Remedy, Such As It Is

Galloway's proposals, when he makes them, have the quality of sensible things said in an era that finds sensible things difficult to implement. More vocational training. Expanded apprenticeship programs. Affordable childcare that allows young couples to build two-income households instead of drowning in the attempt. Age verification and algorithmic guardrails on platforms that are currently quite free to serve adolescent boys a steady diet of rage and loneliness and impossible standards of dominance. These are not radical ideas. They are barely even controversial. They are just not happening.

The thing Galloway returns to most often, with the insistence of someone who has tried everything else and keeps arriving at the same door, is mentorship. Men who are doing reasonably well — not rich, not famous, just functional and decent and trying — reaching deliberately into the lives of boys who have no one. He grew up with a single mother. Men came into his life: a stockbroker, a neighbor who took him horseback riding, men who owed him nothing and gave him something anyway. He credits them, without irony or exaggeration, with the difference between the life he has and the statistics he keeps quoting.

"If we want better men, we have to be better men. The ultimate expression of masculinity is for a man who is doing well to reach out and get involved in the life of a boy."

— Scott Galloway, The View / TODAY

There is something almost old-fashioned about this prescription. Mentorship. Presence. Showing up in someone else's life when you are not required to. It does not scale easily. It cannot be coded into an app. It does not generate shareholder value. It is slow and imprecise and has no dashboard. And yet there is a body of evidence, extending across every civilization that has ever tried to raise boys into decent men, that suggests it is the thing that works. The data is pretty stark, as Galloway likes to say. The data has always been pretty stark. We have just been busy looking at our phones.

Coda

And so here we are. A country that can build models of human thought and rockets that land themselves and pharmaceuticals that dissolve tumors has failed to figure out what a young man without a job, a relationship, or a reason to get off the couch is supposed to do next. We have produced a generation of boys who were told to be better and given no instruction in how. We have built platforms that profit enormously from their confusion. We have allowed the ideologues — both the ones who think the answer is returning to 1955 and the ones who think the question itself is politically suspect — to dominate a conversation that deserves something much calmer and much more practical.

Scott Galloway is not a perfect messenger. He is a rich man giving advice about poverty of purpose. He is occasionally glib. He is sometimes more comfortable with the provocation than the solution. But he keeps saying the number. Four times more likely to kill themselves. And that number keeps being true. The morgue does not care about the politics. The empty bedroom doesn't care. The boy without a role model doesn't care who is technically responsible for his situation. He is just there, in it, waiting for someone to come through the door.

We might want to think about who is going to be that person.

So it goes.

Sources & Notes: Statistics sourced from Scott Galloway's appearances on The View (May 2024), TODAY (November 2025), PBS Amanpour and Company (November 2025), MSNBC, NewsNation, and his book Notes on Being a Man (2025). Supporting data from the American Institute for Boys and Men, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The enrollment data reflects 2021–2025 figures across multiple institutional reports. Friendship and loneliness data from the Survey Center on American Life (2021). All quoted statistics are attributed as reported; independent verification recommended for academic citation.