My notepad at the youth agency where I work never quite gets cleared. Over nearly a decade of working with young men, I fill it with questions they bring us—questions about friendship, loneliness, what it means to be a man in a world that seems to have stopped agreeing on an answer. The questions accumulate faster than the answers.
I recognised something in those questions. Something I'd felt myself.
I grew up in a different time, and without a clear template for manhood. Raised in a house of three women, (my mother and two sisters) until I was eleven, I learned early that masculinity was something people had strong opinions about but few could explain clearly. When a new stepfather entered the picture, his lessons came hard and simple: never trust anyone. Take it like a man. And,take the first punch cause it might be your last. It was a roadmap, technically, but not one that led anywhere I thought I wanted to go.
Those early experiences shaped me, though not always in positive ways. They left me with questions that wouldn't resolve—questions about what healthy manhood could look like when the models you inherit are incomplete or actively harmful. To be fair, I had men around (relatives, friends’ dads, family friends) but they were old school in attitudes toward women, toughness and showing your emotions.
Years later, as a father to two children including a son, I found myself on the other side of those same questions. How do you guide a young person towards healthy adulthood when your own map has gaping holes? What do you say when the cultural messages about manhood range from outdated to toxic?
I didn't have good answers. But I had something else: a willingness to sit with the uncertainty, to keep asking, to refuse the easy answers that sounded confident but led nowhere useful.
That willingness would matter more than I knew.
Working at a youth agency through the past nine years, I had a front-row seat to what researchers now call the loneliness epidemic. I watched it unfold in real time—not as statistics, but as lived experience in the young men who showed up to our programs; especially after Covid.
What I saw and heard convinced me the problem had gotten worse, not better. The structural supports that previous generations took for granted—extended families living nearby, neighbourhood networks, civic organisations, the "third places" where people could gather without agenda or cost—had largely disappeared. Young men were trying to build social lives in a landscape stripped of the infrastructure that used to make connection almost automatic.
And into that vacuum rushed something darker. Online communities built around resentment. Influencers monetising male insecurity. Entire ecosystems designed to turn confusion into rage, loneliness into extremism. I watched young men I knew—good kids, smart kids—get pulled towards figures like Andrew Tate, towards incel ideology, towards messages that promised clarity but delivered only deeper isolation.
The traditional masculine script made it worse. Self-reliance as the highest virtue. Needing help as weakness. For young men especially, admitting loneliness or struggling with connection didn't fit the story they'd been told about what men should be. So they didn't admit it, even to themselves, and the isolation deepened.
Feeling the need to respond, I got serious about understanding the problem. I immersed myself in academic research on masculinity and feminism, read widely in the popular literature, studied what actually helped versus what just sounded good. I looked at the structural dimensions—how economic inequality tracks with loneliness, how poverty becomes a sentence of isolation when every social opportunity requires money, how marginalised identities multiply the barriers.
I also listened. To the young men themselves, describing what they were up against. To what landed in conversation and what didn't. To the questions that came up when you created space for honest dialogue about what manhood could be, rather than what the internet said it had to be.
That research became the Healthy Manhood program—an initiative offering young men an alternative to the toxic narratives dominating their screens. Not a quick fix or a set of rules, but a framework for thinking clearly about the landscape they were navigating.
What I learned through this work was that most young men were working from the wrong diagnosis. They thought the problem was them—that they weren't charismatic enough, confident enough, alpha enough. So they spent energy trying to optimise themselves into connection. They bought courses on social skills. They performed versions of masculinity that felt foreign. They compared themselves to people whose lives looked effortless online and concluded they were broken.
This diagnosis kept them stuck. It also kept them isolated, because it framed connection as something you achieve alone through self-improvement rather than something you build with others. And it served the interests of people profiting from their insecurity—the influencers, the platforms, the entire industry built around monetising male loneliness.
The alternative we offered was simpler and harder: see clearly. Understand that loneliness is rising because the structures facilitating connection have been dismantled without replacement. Recognise this as a collective problem requiring collective solutions—public spaces that don't charge admission, economic policies giving people time and resources for social lives, communities prioritising connection as infrastructure rather than luxury.
But also recognise it requires individual action. Not self-optimisation, but the harder work of actually reaching out, risking vulnerability, building relationships in an environment that doesn't make it easy.
My writing emerges from this work, research, and conversation. I'm clear about what I'm not: I'm not someone who has it all figured out, not an expert handing down answers from a position of mastery. I'm someone with lived experience who has made mistakes, learned from them slowly, studied the problem seriously, and spent years in dialogue with young men crossing terrain that keeps shifting under their feet.
That positioning matters. I can’t offer easy answers because there aren't any. What can be said instead is clarity about what young men are up against—the structural nature of their loneliness, the inadequacy of self-blame, the necessity of building something better together rather than optimising themselves in isolation.
It's creating a map drawn from shared experience of terrain we're all still crossing. Not a GPS route to guaranteed success, but an honest accounting of the landscape and what it takes to navigate it without getting lost.
That notepad never gets fully cleared because the work is ongoing. The questions keep coming because the landscape keeps shifting. What worked for previous generations doesn't automatically transfer. What the culture offers as guidance ranges from inadequate to actively harmful.
But my work suggests a way forward: start not with fixing yourself, but with seeing clearly what you're up against. Understand the structural nature of the problem. Stop wasting energy on shame. Recognise that the difficulty is real, not entirely your fault, and not insurmountable.
Then do the work anyway. Show up. Be willing to be awkward, to risk rejection, to put yourself in proximity to others and let that proximity turn into something more. Do it without the added weight of thinking you're uniquely deficient, that everyone else has some secret you're missing.
They don't. They're navigating the same collapsed landscape. The difference is whether you do it alone, convinced you're the problem, or with clear eyes, understanding that the problem is bigger than you and that solving it requires building something better together.
That's the work I've committed myself to—not as someone who has escaped the terrain, but as someone still crossing it, just with a better sense of direction and a commitment to helping others find their way.
The map is still being drawn. But it's being drawn honestly, from lived experience, with attention to what actually helps rather than what sounds good. For young men trying to navigate unmapped terrain, that might be the most valuable thing anyone can offer: not certainty, but clarity. Not answers, but better questions. Not a destination, but a direction well worth walking.