Over the course of the next year, we’re partnering with National Research Group (NRG) on an ambitious project examining young men’s wellbeing and how it relates to their lives online.
While the study's structure is set, we’re still developing our hypotheses, and we’d like your help. What should we be asking young men about the pathways to purpose, connection, and flourishing? What hypotheses should we have in mind when we’re studying how young men use technology to meet their goals and desires? But before we ask for your input, first some background on where we are now:
For too long, it was difficult to ask whether boys and men were doing okay without appearing to diminish the challenges facing women. Much of the public conversation about young men focused on harmful masculine norms, including aggression, misogyny, emotional suppression, domination, and the influence of the so-called manosphere. Those are real concerns, but they offer an incomplete framework to understand how young men are actually doing, what they want from life, and what might help them flourish.
Thankfully, the conversation about young men is becoming more curious, with growing recognition that concern for men and concern for women are complementary. Over the past 18 months, the Institute for Family Studies, Public Agenda, Cygnal, the Young Men Research Project, and Equimundo have all published survey research examining young men’s goals, identities, relationships, worries, and wellbeing. Qualitative work, including Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan’s Nobody to Call report, offers texture to the findings in the words of young men themselves through in-depth interviews.1
The reports have some differences. They cover various age ranges, ask different questions, and assess through different interpretive lenses. Most are cross-sectional surveys, meaning they can describe patterns but cannot tell us what causes them.
Even so, a fairly consistent picture emerges.
Young men are not without goals
None of the reports reveal a generation of apathetic young men.
Young men commonly say they want financial stability, decent work, independence, housing, close relationships, family, connection, respect, and the opportunity to contribute. What varies is whether they can see a clear, credible path toward the lives they want.
Cygnal found financial stability to be young men’s top current priority. The Young Men Research Project found respondents nearly divided over whether they felt financially secure. Equimundo emphasized the psychological consequences of economic insecurity in a culture where many men still feel pressure to provide.
The Institute for Family Studies reached a similar conclusion: Financial independence and personal responsibility ranked among the most important markers of adulthood. The report’s authors argue that many young men are not apathetic but demoralized. They have the same conventional aspirations as previous generations while doubting the pathways to achieve them.
Young men’s attitudes toward education illustrate the gap between conventional aspirations and uncertain pathways to success. Young men are often described as turning against college, but the surveys reveal something more complicated. Many believe college can create opportunities while also worrying about debt, uncertain returns, or choosing the wrong course of study. Trade school, apprenticeships, online learning, and entrepreneurship appear increasingly attractive, but none offers a risk-free path to economic stability.
The reports also complicate common portrayals of masculinity. Young men typically describe manhood with the prosocial language of virtue: responsibility, honesty, confidence, sacrifice, providing for others. Rarely do they cite dominance or aggression. At the same time, gender-based ideals can become burdens. Being relied upon can provide purpose, but feeling unable to provide can produce shame.
The same tension appears in relationships. Forming a family has not disappeared as an aspiration, but it has often become conditional on financial and emotional readiness. A young man may want a partner, marriage, or children while believing he must first secure a stable job or a place of his own.
And young men can be connected online without feeling known. Group chats, multiplayer games, Discord servers, subreddits, forums, and social media may satisfy their desire for companionship and community. But online interactions do not necessarily produce trust, recognition, or someone to call during a crisis.
The tensions are the story
Understanding the tensions running through these reports — rather than explaining them away as complications — is essential to developing realistic and credible solutions.
In focus groups and surveys, young men report feeling optimistic about their own lives while believing that success is becoming harder for men generally. They can doubt college while recognizing the advantages enjoyed by graduates. They can value autonomy while wanting more guidance. They can spend much of the day interacting with others while feeling lonely. A growing sense of responsibility manifests as both purpose and pressure.
Their online lives contain similar apparent contradictions. The same phone can teach a trade, maintain a friendship, organize a sports league, or dissolve an evening into a zombie night of doomscrolling. Gaming can provide mastery and camaraderie, or become a place to escape anxiety. YouTube can offer education, aspiration, and entertainment — and also contribute to social isolation.
Screen time is too blunt an instrument to distinguish between what enhances and inhibits thriving. Such blunt measures produce confusing results, and we can do better with more specificity: which young men, using which technologies in what ways, affect which outcomes — and through what mechanisms?
Better measures distinguish between what a young man is doing, why he is doing it, whether he chose it, who is with him, and what it displaces.
Survey data can tell us a good deal about what young men value and fear, but they reveal less about whether young men align their days with their aspirations, and what obstacles get in the way.
That is a gap we aim to address through our new research partnership with NRG.
Our research starts where other studies end
The study includes boys and young men across four distinct life stages: ages 14 to 18; ages 19 to 22 in college; ages 19 to 22 outside college; and ages 23 to 29.
We will include young men who consider themselves thriving, struggling, and the many who feel somewhere in between. We will also include variation in geography, socioeconomic background, identity, education, work, and patterns of technology use.
During phase 1, we’ll develop a detailed understanding of the online and offline lives and wellbeing of a sample of 30 young men through behavioral tracking of their devices, time diaries, and in-depth interviews.
In phase 2, we’ll broaden our focus to validate those findings and identify solutions through co-creation groups, digital ethnographies, and a nationally representative survey.
The goal is not to divide their days into a virtuous offline life and a harmful online life. Digital and physical experiences shape a single ecosystem of habits, routines, and relationships. We want to understand how that ecosystem supports and interferes with the life a young man is trying to build.
We aim to go beyond mere diagnosis by providing young men with the data, tools, and dialogues to identify what healthier relationships with technology would look like, and how to build them.
Our framework for young men’s wellbeing provides a starting point for this research
We need a descriptive framework of thriving and struggling to understand the role of technology in shaping young men’s wellbeing. Informed by academic literature on youth development and flourishing, our current framework has five layers:
First are goals, such as financial stability, work, learning, independence, health, relationships, family, connection, and civic leadership.
Second are four psychological needs. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, we include autonomy, competence, and belonging — along with mattering:
Autonomy: feeling ownership over one’s choices and time.
Competence: feeling capable and able to make progress.
Belonging/relatedness: feeling accepted and connected to others.
Mattering: feeling valued and able to add value to one’s communities.
Third are the character strengths and supports that may help translate intentions into action: judgment, self-regulation, perseverance, initiative, reliability, care, mentorship, routines, useful feedback, and credible institutions.
We initially considered calling this the “virtues” layer. There is something important in that language: living well involves not only feeling good, but developing the character to pursue goals and meet obligations to others.
But “virtue” also risks implying that young men struggle because they lack character. No amount of perseverance can manufacture an affordable apartment, reliable transportation, a decent job, or a welcoming community. Personal capacities always operate within economic conditions, family circumstances, institutional opportunities, and digital environments.
Fourth is daily behavior: how time is actually distributed across work, school, relationships, exercise, sleep, hobbies, care, gaming, social media, video, and unstructured hours.
Fifth are the resulting outcomes. For instance: connection, confidence, progress, satisfaction, distress, or regret.
The framework is not a causal chain. Wellbeing can influence behavior just as behavior can influence wellbeing. Young men with greater resources may find it easier to exercise, join groups, sleep well, or use technology intentionally. Heavy online use may contribute to distress, or distress may lead people online.
Those rival explanations are part of what we want to investigate. Another goal is to move beyond simple models — “phones are bad (or good)” — to specific hypotheses that inform solutions, such as:
Isolated young men with few offline alternatives may experience stronger social connection and reduced loneliness through multiplayer games with voice chat.
Short-form video feeds may keep adolescent boys up late at night, disrupting their sleep and impairing their concentration and performance in school.
Young men whose only dating experience is through dating apps may experience greater romantic frustration, increasing their chances of giving up on dating altogether.
We also hope to shed light on foundational questions about how young men find pathways to thriving:
What gives a young man credible evidence and recognition that he is making progress?
What forms of guidance support autonomy, rather than coming off as controlling or patronizing?
Does having a recognized role — on a team, at work, in a family, or in a community— strengthen one’s sense of mattering and self-esteem?
This framework is provisional. Before we enter the field, we would value feedback and criticism from researchers, practitioners, parents, educators, technology professionals, and young men themselves.
You can respond via a brief Google Form, in a comment below, or by sending a direct message:
Full disclosure: The Public Agenda and Nobody to Call reports support from Rise Together, a donor-advised fund established by Richard Reeves, AIBM’s founding president.
Data collection can always tell a story, which is why it's important to have people being clear and careful about what their data tells us and what it doesn't. Thank you for being clear and careful in telling us a more complete story for young men right now.
There are a number of things in these numbers that are interesting, but the one that I see impacting my young clients the most is the lack of membership in groups. So many of my young guys find a massive improvement when they find a place and activity to connect in. The fact that more than 1/3 of young guys don't have any group affiliation is telling.
Do you all have numbers on how that's changed over the years?
I really like where this is trying to go, especially the move from broad claims about technology to specific questions about when it helps, when it hurts, and for whom. As a behavioral scientist, that drive towards specificity is one of our core techniques to move the needle on behavior. If your target is too general, you're less likely to make a meaningful assessment and find a mechanism to drive change.
I found it harder to assess the layers - there's a lot of important concepts and dimensions of thriving there but it's hard to work out exactly what each layer is aiming to capture and why there are five tiers. I found myself searching for an overarching narrative or rationale.
I wondered if it would be easier to work through if they were organised around a few key questions?
First, what are the main aspects of young men’s lives that we care about - relationships, health, work, learning, agency, belonging, and so on?
Second, what personal capacities and external conditions make it easier or harder to do well in those areas - things like judgment, confidence, supportive relationships, money, institutions, or opportunities?
Third, what kinds of experiences help build or weaken those capacities over time - for example responsibility, feedback, friendship, or trying and sometimes failing at things?
And then you could ask how particular technologies affect any of these: the opportunities people have, the experiences they go through, the capacities they build, or how well they are doing.
Measurement could then sit across the whole framework, asking what evidence would tell us where someone stands on each of these dimensions.
There are different ways you could cut this up - and probably no perfect way - but i'd love to see an overarching rationale to make it easier to grasp and deploy.