During my time in junior high school, a boy in the senior grades committed suicide in the family home. This wasn’t a boy who was in trouble, skipped school and so on. He was an A student, a little quiet but popular and friendly. The overall conversation, after the initial shock, was stunned disbelief that someone with “everything to live for” could commit suicide.

Recently, two young men whose lives are within the circle of my adult children, took their own lives within a couple weeks of each other. In both cases the same description applies: they had everything to live for, careers, friends, family, children.

In the ensuing conversations we’ve touched on mental health, suffering in silence, economic, social and political anxiety and pressure but also an intangible yet very real hopelessness, young men’s confusion about their roles. As one friend put it, “men don’t know what it means to be a man anymore”.

Once a journalist, always a journalist so I am attempting to take an enormously complex and multi-faceted issue and present it in digestible bite-sized pieces, in hopes of coming to some understanding of this tragic landscape. Maybe we can be more aware of the men around us, as this PSA from the Norwich FC suggests, but even more importantly, we have to come to grips with this monster if we are to raise healthy sons because, if our sons are not fully functioning humans, our daughters will also suffer the consequences.

Because I’m an observer of men and not inside your heads, I reached out to men I know and trust, over a broad age range. Here are some of their comments.

* I think one of the key elements leading to despair amongst young men is social media. Economic times and opportunities and social connections are changing very quickly,  and from the perspective of age, one can see a lot of opportunity, but when you're much closer to the immediate difficulties of seeing jobs, industries, housing and whole ways of life disappear, it can seem overwhelming. Doomscrolling is a self-reinforcing activity, and given the tendency of many young men to be less confident than they appear (or wish to appear), it takes a toll. In Canada , the suicide rate among men is least double that of women, and in the States, it’s closer to 4X, and I think it's because men are less able to see the upside of what's in front of them in the longer term. There is a lesson here somewhere.

* Men have not been well socialized to be resilient to challenges in life which require emotional intelligence. We've been raised by a generation of men not up to the task of creating well rounded, emotionally and mentally grounded boys and men. In my circles I've lost two friends and a colleague to suicide in the past few years. A friend passed away from suicide and I blame his religious conservative family for never accepting he was homosexual.

Most of my very successful friends come from a good household with present, understanding parents, usually two of them. They typically are engaged in the work of knowing themselves deeply, they're typically aware of the shortfalls of their fathers and are conscious about navigating a new path.

It’s not only sexual orientation that erodes resilience but also racism, he noted.

* There is a lot of pressure on men to comply with the new and emerging ethic which diminishes the role males have historically played and still do in many parts of the world. This must be framed with more than one lens. One of those is the emerging fear of the future which frightens many and I have little doubt we will see an increase in this trend in coming years. Those fears include degrading political climates, changing climate, financial disparity, social media addictions, cost of living and a subsequent sense of hopelessness. How will I ever match up? In the Western world men feel this more acutely.

We are entering a generation where future prospects do not look better than the past. On some measures they are already worse. This runs contrary to much of the cultural conditioning that suggests we can lead better lives. Again, for men they feel this more acutely.

Another pressure is men not understanding the changing landscape in relationship to women…Roles are becoming confusing. It's like I must carry the collective guilt of every man who has raped a woman. Is the media coverage of all the ruthless pricks who have exploited women when in positions of power, being constantly played somehow infusing a collective guilt in men?

In a fit of inspiration, I accosted a group of retired men who had met up at a local coffee shop, asking them if they often, or ever, discussed their struggles and feelings when they got together. They said, “nah, we’re car guys. We talk about cars.” One of them offered up that if he had a real personal issue he might confide in one of his closest male friends, another said 3 beers usually fixed everything up. Another of the group, however, said the biggest problem facing men today, young and old, is the lack of hope. That’s all he was prepared to say on the subject.

A physician friend throws up her hands when I broach the topic and says, “I could talk about this for days”. She endured the scorn of other parents when she allowed her three sons to play, responsibly, with water guns and toy weapons, and to chase each other in flashlight tag. Today, she believes, we have let our boys down, suppressing their natural proclivities for rough play at an early age and leaving them rudderless on a choppy sea where the landmarks are no longer visible, or comprehensible as they age. She acknowledges that there’s an aspect of hyper masculinity that’s toxic but also a confused, watered down masculinity that’s equally disturbing, and confusing for the young men caught up in it.

Recently, we’ve seen research into how badly children need risky play to build resilience, another aspect of childhood that has been suppressed, ostensibly for the benefit of the child. These things are clearly related.

It’s not as if any of this insight is actually new, but decades of ignoring it has brought us to a time where young men are truly adrift. It’s no good blaming women for “taking all the jobs”; we can certainly find room for both genders to pursue their individual potential. It doesn’t have to be winners and losers.

This pressure to reject the feminine in order to be masculine is the subject of Justin Baldoni's TED talk where he recounts his upbringing and how he resented his father for not teaching him to be tough and “manly”, a decision he now understands and embraces. Baldoni has created a men’s community where sharing those personal anxieties and fears is encouraged and celebrated. This has also spawned a podcast.

As Richard Reeves writes in his excellent Substack:

* Young men see feminism as having metastasized from a movement for equality for women into a movement against men, or at least against masculinity.

* Young men are struggling on lots of fronts, especially in terms of education and mental health.

* Young men feel like these concerns are not being addressed, or sometimes even acknowledged, by mainstream institutions.

Here’s the thing: they’re not wrong.

Reeves goes on to characterize the current wave of right wingism as a political response to this lack of visibility and hope and dissects the stats to show that it’s mostly young men moving to the right, with young women moving in the opposite direction. At its extremes we get incels and trad-fanatics, insisting women should go back to “their place”. Luckily this is the extremist view, and not broadly held, but we are seeing scary premonitions in all the places I’m finding it increasingly difficult to look.

I will leave you with this beautiful video of the late, immeasurably great, John Mann, introducing and performing his song, “When I Played Around With Knives”.

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