Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
It's more than lost boys… It's a lost generation
I was at the gym about a month ago.
My gym has five adjustable benches for dumbbell work.
All five were occupied by teenage boys.
Not a single one was lifting weights.
They were all on their phones.
I walked up to the nearest kid, pointed at the sign on the wall that says you have to leave the gym to use your phone, and said, “You. Move. Now.”
He barely glanced up from his phone as he dutifully relocated himself…
…to the flat bench station.
A few days later — I lift most Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — I walked into the change room to see two teenage boys sprawled out on the benches on their phones.
Neither acknowledged my existence.
“Afternoon, gentlemen.”
They looked up, confused.
“What are you training today?” I asked.
One managed to shake himself from his screen stupor.
“Uhh… chest and triceps.”
“Good for you. Now go get after it.”
They both scurried out of the change room, no doubt to consume 4–6 minutes of screentime between each set of six to eight reps.
A few weeks ago, there was a teen couple at my gym.
I know they’re a couple because they occasionally make out between sets.
But mostly, they look at their phones.
Do you remember the feeling of being a hormonal teenager “in love?” The passion, the excitement, the tension, the heat?
They have none of that.
These two are beside each other, but they aren’t together.
Each is miles and miles — potentially thousands of miles — away.
Remember, these are the intentional teenagers.
These aren’t the tens of millions of teens who are locked in their bedrooms like vampires allergic to the sun, doomscrolling social media and porn, watching others play video games, avoiding human interaction like the plague, and then wondering why they’re crushed with mental illness and crippling social anxiety.
These are the teens who actually bought gym memberships.
These are the ones who actually bothered to go to the gym.
Their bodies checked in, but their brains checked out.
I started to ask myself?
Where are all these teenagers?
Their bodies are in the gym, but where are they?
Where are their minds?
Where is their attention?
I decided to launch an investigation.
I decided to start spying.
Rather than immediately booting cell-bound teens off equipment, I decided to first look over their shoulders to see what they are consuming and what is consuming them.
Not one of the dozens has ever been weirded out by this.
None has even noticed.
So deep is teenage screen addiction that one could easily and consecutively rob, maim, kill, and/or clip the hair off five hundred teenagers on their phones without them noticing.
The results of my spying?
Not one teen was watching a movie.
Not one teen was watching a YouTube instructional video on proper lifting form.
None were even texting with their girlfriends or boyfriends.
Where were the minds of these teenage bodies?
The answer was disturbing.
These teenagers aren’t anywhere.
They’re in a place called in between.
What I witnessed was the rapid, endless movement of thumbs and thumbnails.
Like junkies looking for a hit of heroin, teenagers are swiping left, right, up, and down, popping between video shorts, photos, and games (but rarely text), even popping from app to app, but barely pausing to watch anything for longer than three seconds.
Honestly, even TikTok shorts are now way too long for the average teen’s attention span.
I didn’t witness a single kid consume a single piece of content for more than twenty seconds.
Where are all the kids these days?
They’re down the dopamine rabbit hole.
They’re desperately searching for a buzz that makes them feel anything.
But they’ve seen it all.
And it no longer registers a dopamine hit.
So they have to keep searching.
Where are all the kids these days?
They’re nowhere.
They’re totally and utterly lost.
There’s a growing movement to ban smartphones in schools and to ban social media for teenagers.
That’s because teachers aren’t stupid.
They know their students are bodily present, but they haven’t actually been in school for years.
We’re raising a generation of lost boys (and girls).
When they’re alone, they’re not alone.
When they’re with their friends, they’re not with their friends.
When they’re at the gym, they’re anywhere but the gym.
They’re nowhere.
They’re everywhere, except where they are.
If our children are anywhere, they’re in the demonic data centers and server farms of China and Silicon Valley.
Kidnapping the minds of children (and adults) and addicting them to brain-mush is the most profitable invention in human history.
All the trillion-dollar tech companies exist to mind-capture.
Here’s how it works:
Hijack attention → chemically addict people to the dopamine chase → serve them ads → shareholders profit.
That’s the entire business model.
If you own index funds or mutual funds or retirement accounts that contain the S&P, you’re profiting from the kidnapping of children.
We should do more than ban smartphones and social media.
We should destroy the business model that has exorcised the souls of a billion people and imprisoned them in server farms.
This look at the “kids” entertainment consumption, or lack of it, frightens the hell out of me. I’ve definitely noticed it in my own 20 and 17 year old’s but hadn’t really thought through or recognized the complete mindless and numbness of it. I’m guilty of way too much much screen time, as well, but I love long-form articles and deep-dives. (As well as substack type bite-sized pieces.)
I read books to the kids nightly when they were younger and consciously tried to model silently reading books to myself in front of them. We don’t have a tv in the main living space and when someone does use it, its for an intentional show and isn’t left on. Of course, now, they have their own laptops and can stream the world. They have seemingly, absorbed the current zeitgeist and addictive qualities from tech. The missed school from the covid shutdowns certainly exacerbated this trend but there is something else going on.
Combining this lack of attention span and the immediate gratification and dopamine seeking from tech with the society wide reevaluating of higher education (which I’m not necessarily against) seems like it will lead to a major intellectual drop-off. Cue the Idiocracy comparisons.