Basically a repost pf things I said in the mega, but anecdotally I’m hearing that sales of fiction read by men are dropping precipitously, and English and literature classes in colleges are now dominated by women. It seems like young men are not being exposed to literature in the same way that they used to. Like, when I was in high school and college, you could be a “bro” kind of guy and read Chuck Palahniuk, or Hunter S. Thompson, or David Foster Wallace. For decades, authors like Hemmingway and Bukowski found receptive audiences in young men, not to mention all the crime fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that men have traditionally consumed. The “guy in your English class who loves David Foster Wallace” was a stereotype for a reason. I read in another thread that music is less culturally important to young men than it used to be. It seems like younger men just straight up see no value in reading literature or fiction, or exposing themselves or critically engaging with art and music, because the algorithms just railroad them into Alpha Gridset world.
Am I wrong about this? Am I being condescending and out of touch, or is this a real thing that’s happening, where the whole “male” culture is turning into grindset podcasts and streamers?
Edit: Okay, so the impression I’m getting is that everything is worse but also kind of the same as it ever was, which sounds right.
In that sense, yes absolutely. There’s a huge prevalent mindset of anti-intellectualism and hopelessness that leads to individualistic hustle culture with no appreciation for the arts. I think you’d see the same thing in any nascent fascist society in history, where any actual love for art is replaced by much shallower symbols in the service of reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. But even among my leftier friends, if I send them a message that’s longer than 2 sentences I’m very likely to receive an “I ain’t reading all that” (even a literal 3 sentence message).
I think music has probably retained a similar relevance for my age group as previous ones, but the way that people engage with music is a lot more easy come easy go, which means that unless you have a specific kind of personality you’re unlikely to try to dig much meaning out of music, especially men with lower emotional intelligence. But there’s still the same drive to make music a part of your identity, just shallower.
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i ain’t reading all that
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This was my go to when I was arguing debate bros on
“Uhm, whatever that means” Gestures broadly, appealing to nonexistant crowd
This is wild, are all your conversations lacking any challenging thoughts?
Well I said “very likely,” the truth is probably closer to “I’m autistic and sometimes start a mini infodump on a friend who isn’t interested, but also sometimes I have a genuine thing to share that gets boy-who-cried-wolfed into being ignored.” If we’re already in conversation in person or over a call, we can usually talk about deeper subjects, although usually the men don’t participate as much in a deep convo. I don’t know how much of that is unique to my age group, but it lines up with OP’s observations.
Funny enough one of my close friends, same age group, tells me he almost never talks about politics with another circle of friends of his, but one time got into a huge struggle session because one of them very dumbly kept defending the idea that it was cool and good that people could buy up and own lakes, while everyone else rejected the idea because it just seemed incongruent with their values, without much theoretical basis. And it makes sense that something like that happens, right? Private property is a downright intuitive ideological principle, but also has all sorts of points of contradiction with other values people have, even when people don’t go and read up on the enclosure of the commons, primitive accumulation, etc they understand that it’s not natural for a single person to be able to claim a whole lake. But because no one had the language or a system to talk about this problem, they just went in circles. Would this discussion have happened in a gen X group of dumb guys? I think it easily could have, but something about the fact that no one involved had a real dog in the race ideologically, they were just saying “no it doesn’t work that way” or “yeah but if you think about it should work that way,” is new.
Many such cases, down with neurotypicals.
I have interest in this, could you expand on it by chance?
I don’t have a huge sample size, since I’m the only COVID conscious person I know and therefore haven’t been social IRL since 2020, but out of everyone I talk with the only one who bothers talking about the themes and framing of media in a deeper level is a femme NB friend. All the guys subscribe to the “it ain’t that deep” school of thought. That’s just my anecdotal experience though.
I have this anecdote more broadly, I can count on one hand the amount of deep, considered discussions I’ve had with men in my life, lol. Ty for sharing.
The way people engage with music these days seems to be whatever gets popular on tiktok and whatever hits the spotify algorithm jackpot. Outside of my friends who are musicians, I don’t think I’ve talked to single person under 40 that listens to albums.
That’s interesting, you don’t know many terminally online (online outside of tiktok) people? All the terminally online guys I know are at least kinda into some music subculture, usually some kind of indie rock or hip hop subgenre. The more normie types of guy aren’t listening to albums though.
Keepin it a band I cut people off and out for this.
If you can’t be fucked to read something longer than two sentences I don’t fuckin want you around me; and I don’t give a fuck how elitist that makes me come off. I don’t have time, energy, or patience for the willfully ignorant; and with my list of comorbidities, that kind of flippant comment is probably one of the quickest ways to tempt me into splitting on a motherfucker.