MEDIAWATCH: Verity Johnston is the columnist we deserve

I am a huge fan of Verity Johnston, I think her columns are genuinely insightful and she represents liberal Auckland better than any other columnist next to Simon Wilson.

Her latest is another must read…

Verity Johnson: Can we stop laughing at the male loneliness epidemic

I’m guessing by now you folks have heard of the Male Loneliness Epidemic?

It’s been floating around the internet for a while now, but it recently made the jump from digital conversation to IRL conversation. You’ll have overheard it in coffee shops, often being used as a punchline. Something to roll your eyes at. Something to sigh, “Ugh, I’m so not here for the Male Loneliness Epidemic…”.

Now, just for reference, the Male Loneliness Epidemic is a new phrase for an old phenomenon.

Anyone who has ever been in a heterosexual relationship, or just thought about it for more than five minutes, knows that men don’t really have friends. Not like women do.

They have mates they drink with, train with or play Call of Duty with for six hours. But they don’t really talk. If they’re lucky, men’s best friends are their wives. And that’s kinda it.

Now, this old phenomenon has rocketed back into popular consciousness because of recent research that suggests that men are in a friendship recession. In 2018, Movemeber released research saying that 47% of men do not talk openly with their friends about problems and 27% reported they don’t have any close friends at all. And in 2021, studies out of America showed a 50% decline over the past 30 years in the number of close friends men have. Hence the phrase Male Loneliness Epidemic was born.

And, since this term has entered the mainstream, we’ve had a very clear cultural response. Especially among women. Basically, we’ve just laughed at it.

…we have massive issues in our culture with lonely boys and men fed crazy bullshit online and radicalising them into incel culture…

Loneliness spike

Nowhere in the world are young men as lonely in comparison to other people in their country as in the U.S., Axios’ Carly Mallenbaum writes from a new Gallup poll.

• • One in four U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day. That’s a higher proportion than young American women (18%

We hate each other thanks to social media.

While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.

We are lonely,  more depressed and sicker.

Teen loneliness machine

The tech ecosystem that surrounds today’s teens is fueling loneliness.

• • • Why it matters: It’s a dangerous environment for a generation that’s already sad and stressed. And it’s more difficult than ever for their parents, teachers and coaches to understand and help them, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.

📈 The big picture: Data shows that teens are spending less time hanging out with friends in person, and more time on their devices.

• • • America’s 15- to 24-year-olds spend 35% less time socializing face-to-face than they did 20 years ago, The Atlantic reports.
    • Instead, American kids and teenagers spend nearly six hours a day looking at screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative.

Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.

I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000  years of evolution and replaced that  with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.

Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.

We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.

Verity notes this can’t just be another relationship management process for women and men, but Masculinity in crisis will impact women whether they feel sympathetic or not.

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