Men: More Than the Sum Their Product
The defining crisis for young men today isn’t economic. Nor is it political. It’s not even cultural in the narrow sense.
It is ontological.
Everywhere they turn, men of Gen Y to Gen Z are told their worth depends on their output. If they don’t produce, they don’t count.
Alway sleft unsaid is how much, and exactly what, a man has to produce to earn his place in society. Because the role men have been reduced to is a slave class whose sole purpose is to generate value for someone else.
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It’s no surprise that many young men fall into despair as the bar keeps moving while the reward is always one more double shift away. At this point, you would think that the powers that be would offer young men at glimmer of even false hope, just out of enlightened self-interest. Because a man who believes he exists only to churn out utility will eventually burn out—or worse.
Graph: CDC
How did this unsustainable state of affairs befall the West?
The crisis confronting young males is founded on two diabolical lies.
The first lie, absorbed almost unconsciously by most, is that men are valuable only insofar as they contribute measurable productivity. Salary, assets, and hours worked become not just economic categories but moral duties.
That impossible standard is materialism dressed up as virtue. Push it to its logical conclusion, and you end up with a brutal ethic indistinguishable from social Darwinism. If your worth equals your output, then the sick, the elderly, the disabled, and the unemployed have no worth. Nobody really believes it—if they did, they wouldn’t clutch their pearls at the utility-driven crimes of past despotic regimes—but they’re conditioned to keep repeating the script.
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Most men sense the contradiction. But without a higher principle, they don’t know how to refute it. They’re told their anxiety is weakness instead of recognizing that the premise itself is false. If they dare complain, or worse, stand up for their own interests, they’re told to put down the Switch controller and get back to work.
That brings us to the second big lie used to dehumanize and commodify men. This one is subtler but just as corrosive: that leisure is subordinate to work.
This lie is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that even some who are sympathetic to the plight of young men will balk upon hearing it questioned.
But it’s true. Work serves leisure; not the other way around.
Think about it. If the purpose of leisure is to prepare you for work, then you’re no different than a machine which needs to be recharged between jobs.
Philosopher Josef Pieper dismantled this notion in Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Pieper makles the case that it is leisure—not toil—that gives rise to the highest expressions of man: worship, art, philosophy, and love. Those are all leisure activities, properly understood.
Work is not an end in itself. It exists to serve the conditions under which true leisure is possible. A culture that reverses this order strips life of meaning. If all time must justify itself by usefulness, then nothing transcendent can survive. Men intrinsically hunger for more, and when they are told there is nothing more, the hunger festers into despair.
The antidote is neither to idolize idleness nor to scorn work. Instead, the answer is to recall a truth older than and with primacy over modern economics: Man’s dignity is not conditional.
Every person possesses innate worth by virtue of being created in the image of God. That dignity cannot be tracked on a balance sheet. A man has value whether he’s swinging a hammer, composing symphonies, playing video games, or incapacitated by illness.
Of course work matters. But leisure matters more. And neither defines the whole essence of a man.
Young men searching for meaning will not find it in ledgers. They can only find it by rejecting the lies that reduce them to what they produce, and by embracing the eternal truth that their dignity is not earned but given.
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Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.