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The Real Crisis Young Men Are Facing Today
If you aren’t on X — or Twitter, if you insist on deadnaming it — you will often be surprised to learn about the kinds of things people are arguing about on that platform. In many cases, the debates do not resemble anything that anyone outside of the site is talking about. These debates are often insular and parochial. Groups of people will get into heated disputes that last sometimes for weeks or months or longer, and yet which have no relevance beyond the confines of the platform itself.
I’ll give just one example of millions. Among Right-wingers on X, there has been a long running and quite tedious quarrel over the term “Woke Right.” Various groups of conservatives are accusing each other of being “Woke Right,” as they debate what the term means, and whether it describes anything real. I don’t know where this “Woke Right” idea comes from, but I do know that I’ve never heard a single soul in the three dimensional, physical world ever use the phrase or express any opinion on it one way or another. There are relatively prominent conservatives on X who have spent months locked in combat over a concept that has no real political or cultural relevance whatsoever. Nobody cares about it but them. Needless to say, there are a great many examples of this sort of thing. And even less do I need to say that I have myself been guilty of arguing about things on X that nobody outside of the app cares about. I might even sometimes be the one starting the argument, admittedly.
However, not every debate on X is so trivial. Sometimes the conversation is relevant beyond social media. Sometimes it reflects what’s actually happening in the world. Sometimes — more often now in the Elon era — a debate on X is actually important. And this week there has been one of those kinds of arguments — another round of it, anyway, as this has been a long running dispute. It’s important enough to write about here. And it will lead me to a very crucial point that I want to make, especially for younger people.
The debate revolves around the economic situation that young people in particular are facing today. One side of the argument says that although it is a challenging landscape for young people who are just starting out in the world, the best thing they can do is get an entry level job somewhere and work their way up in the world from that starting point. The other side says that this “bootstraps” mentality is obsolete. Young people have been totally screwed. They can’t just get a job and work their way up. And, they say, telling a young person to go work some low paying customer service job is insulting and out of touch. The game is rigged. American jobs are being stolen en masse by foreigners. The American dream, says this side of the debate, is effectively dead. Therefore the old school “go out there and work your way up the ladder” approach is simply to antiquated to be useful.
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As you already guessed, out of the two camps, I tend to fall more into the former. Although the latter camp isn’t wrong about many of the fundamental points they’re making about the system as it’s currently constructed. I’ll get into that in a moment.
First, let’s take a look at how this exchange is playing out. I think the debate may be best encapsulated by this. Chris Rufo, in a series of tweets a couple of days ago, wrote the following:
Every generation has challenges. We currently have huge problems with the cost of housing and a splintering culture, but the economy is strong, incomes have never been higher, trades are hiring apprentices straight out of high school, and tech has enabled a wave of entrepreneurship and high-income “email jobs” from anywhere on Earth. We should remember that the Boomers, whatever their faults, had to make their way in a much poorer America and had to navigate war, stagflation, recession, and high interest rates. It’s never a cakewalk. We should work to provide opportunity for our kids, but should also remind them to be grateful for the opportunities they have. I didn’t make $50,000 a year or own a car until I was 30, then, after years of struggle in a creative field, things paid off. I could live in Seattle or New York or DC, but choose to live in a small town. It’s all a tradeoff, and one can make a good life in almost any metro area in the US.
In a follow up, he posted a job listing from Panda Express:
This is basically “full employment.” The Panda Express near my house is offering $70k/yr plus benefits for the assistant manager. You can make $100k/yr working at Chipotle for a few years and working up to store manager.
A prominent account that goes by the handle “Bronze Age Pervert” responded in a way that I think captures the general attitude of the other side of this argument.
He wrote:
This is an absurd thing to post. This environment is the worst in decades and maybe ever in America to build wealth through any normal career. It’s the worst work environment and worst prospects for wealth accumulation ever. For a young person it’s next to impossible in fact even with the best degrees and “elite” job. It’s absurd and a joke to see conservative pundits, who work as writers and commentators in media and aren’t frankly exemplars of Protestant capitalist enterprise recommend working at Chipotle and UPS for a few smart young right wing men who are deploring decades-long trends. Maybe you’ll care to also give them advice on manning up and marrying a local sweet girl/highschool sweetheart.
The debate spiraled from there. A writer named Aaron McIntyre agrees with Bronze Age Pervert. He posted:
If you are worried about Andrew Tate’s influence on young men telling them to climb the fast food ladder probably isn’t the move.
Another commentator named Scott Greer chimes in with a similar sentiment:
Conservatives wonder why young men turn to Andrew Tate when they tell the same demographic to be content with fast food work and marrying much-older single moms.
Someone else gave his perspective. He said that it is possible for a young person to get started and succeed even in this tough environment. He offered the example of his own 22-year-old son, who he said has a job at UPS making $70,000 a year. He’s about to marry his girlfriend who is ten years older.
To that, someone else, in a post that has 27,000 likes, said:
Poor kid is grinding, about to marry a 32 year old, living in his dad’s basement, stuck in a dead end job. He will likely never have kids or own a home. Imagine how out of touch you have to be to post this proudly. This is losing. But boomer dad imagines everything is ok.
Mike Cernovich is on the other side. What we might call the bootstraps camp. He thinks — and so do I — that work is not supposed to be fun. It’s not even necessarily going to be fulfilling. But you have to do it because that’s life and always has been. He wrote:
You’re supposed to hate your job. That’s why it’s a job. Someone pays you because they don’t want to do it. Most of us had s*** jobs. It’s nothing special. You’re not a snowflake. Fight Club and Office Space covered this decades ago. Work sucks. This isn’t new.
But it’s this reply to that post that I think best captures the essence — and the fatal flaw — in the, I guess, anti-bootstraps position. Someone responded:
The reason why jobs were worth it is that you could afford a home in a nice high trust society and support a family. Why do it now? I will not be reduced to an f-ing serf.
Jobs are not worth it, he says. Jobs make you a serf. This is why it’s worth talking about this very online controversy. It’s not just online. It seems clear to me that a lot of demoralized young people feel exactly this way. They think jobs aren’t worth it. There’s no point in even trying. They have it harder than anyone has ever had it. It’s hopeless. Everything is unfair. And so on.
These young people are being encouraged down this hopeless road by people who are considered intellectuals on the right, like Bronze Age Pervert, who we recall said that today’s work environment is the worst ever — the worst ever, in history — and that it is “next to impossible” to become successful and accumulate wealth. They’re told by these supposed thought leaders that they should ignore anyone who even suggests that they start off in a low paying job working customer service or something similar. And a lot of young people — especially young men — have heeded this advice, to their own detriment.
So here’s what I want to say, after this very long preamble where I unfortunately had to give you a blow by blow account of a Twitter war. I acknowledge that young people face serious challenges starting out in the workforce. I can clearly see and do not deny that it is harder than it should be for a young man to get into a stable career, buy a house, and start a family. I agree that we are importing foreigners to take American jobs. That is hideously evil and unfair. I am in favor of any policy that puts an end to that scam. I agree with the anti-bootstrappers on that point. They will hear no argument from me.
Okay. Once we’ve agreed on that, what then? What is a young adult supposed to actually do tomorrow? This is the question that matters. It’s the question that, in these kinds of conversations, most people just skip over. It reminds me of my frequent debates with the Red Pillers and Manosphere where they declare that the dating scene is a disaster and young men have no hope of meeting a quality woman and building a stable family. My question to them is always the same: What do you want these young men to do then? What do you want them to actually do with their lives? Give up and die alone? What do you want them to do?
I ask that here as well: What should they do tomorrow? I’m not asking what the president should do or what congress should do or what government agencies should do. I’m asking what the actual individual human beings we’re talking about here — the newly minted young adults — should do. They will wake up in the morning and brush their teeth and eat breakfast — and then what? That young man who is 22-years-old and has no job. If you believe it is deeply insulting to suggest that he should go apply at Panda Express or UPS, what do you want him to do instead? What do you recommend? What is your plan?
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Complaining about it incessantly on Twitter is not a plan. Calling for policy solutions is fine and I agree that we should work on those. But what about tomorrow? What is the demoralized young person supposed to actually do in his life tomorrow? Don’t deflect. Don’t tell me about the H1-B program. I think we should abolish it. I don’t want to import any foreign labor at all. But a young man who wakes up in the morning can’t abolish the H1-B program. That’s not something he can accomplish tomorrow. So what should he do? Should he post about abolishing it? Fine. That takes about 60 seconds. Let’s give him 30 minutes for a series of tweets about H1-B visas. Okay. What next? How’s he spending the rest of his day? If you have no answer to that question, then your contribution to this conversation is worthless. You have nothing of value to offer to this young man.
Here’s what I say. I say that he must get up onto his feet in spite of it all and begin to pursue his goals one small step at a time. He must get the best job he possibly can, which will almost certainly not be a very good job or a very fun job. But he is not in a position where he can afford to worry about what is fun. He has to work as hard as he can to achieve what he can. He must gain experience and establish himself. And if he’s just starting out in the world, the best job is whatever job he can get. You have to start somewhere. And a job is better than no job.
He has a difficult road. Every young man in his position throughout the entire history of the Earth has had a difficult road. Life itself is a difficult road. Is his road more difficult than the road that young men of my generation had to walk? Perhaps. I entered adult life right around the time of a great recession and housing market collapse. It wasn’t exactly an easy path. I worked many awful customer service jobs that I hated with every fiber of my being. My hatred of them fueled me even more. I was more determined to become successful so that I would never again have to work the kind of job where you wear a name tag and get paid by the hour. But I had to work those jobs in order to get to a point where I didn’t have to work those jobs. That’s how it goes. So I am not recommending that anyone do anything that I have not already done. Is it harder now? Maybe. Is it harder than it was for the Boomers when they were just starting out? Probably, although I think the comparison is overstated.
Is it the hardest ever? Is a young person in America today facing “next to impossible odds” and unprecedented hardship? Of course not. That is an absurd suggestion. If you are a 22-year-old man today, you may have it a bit harder than your parents and grandparents, but that is as far as it even theoretically goes. World history did not begin in 1955. No matter what, you and I and our parents all had it and have it easier than the vast majority of human beings who have ever existed on the planet. We are all in the top 1% of the easiest lives ever lived. Which is why, even with all of our problems, you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else on the planet today. And if you had a time machine, the farthest you might want to go back is the middle of the 20th century and no farther. And if you did go back even that far, you would almost certainly discover that it was not the cakewalk you imagine it to be.
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None of this diminishes the difficulties that you, as a young person, are currently experiencing. I only mean to put it in context. The context is important. Because if you think that nobody has ever had it harder than you, you may be justified in wondering whether success is simply impossible in your case. After all, no one has ever succeeded against odds so great as what you are facing. But the point is that many millions of people have succeeded against odds many times greater. This should inspire you, not offend you. Either way, my message to the young man is that he has to get up and walk. Even if he did have the hardest life anyone has ever lived on this or any other planet. Still I would say, well then, get up and move forward. What else are you going to do? Lie down and die?
My attitude is condemned by some Right-wingers whose doomerism has now descended to a point where they will call you a traitor for suggesting that a young man has any agency at all in his life. They want to hear nothing but misery porn and hopelessness. Anything else makes you a Boomer cuck. That’s because they don’t actually give the slightest damn about the young people they pretend to be speaking for.
Instead we end up with the “solution” (which I’ve seen repeated in different forms countless times) offered by the commenter I mentioned earlier. Jobs aren’t “worth it,” he says. He will not be a serf. Instead he will, presumably, live off of the government or his parents. But here’s the problem: that’s not how you escape being a serf. That’s how you become one. You are volunteering for a life of failure and servitude. Working at Panda Express is beneath you, but to eat it for lunch on your dad’s dime because you refuse to support yourself is not beneath you?
That makes no sense.
So again I ask: what is your plan? What are you going to do tomorrow? Some people like to mock the “bootstraps” mentality but they have given young people precisely zero alternatives. They have not given them any idea of what they should do tomorrow. And to me that is the most important and useful question here. What should you do tomorrow? My answer is simple. Tomorrow you should get up, put on your shoes, and get started.
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