i.
Last summer, I watched a man in his 30s slam two young women onto the concrete. My brain took a few seconds to process what was happening. By the time I realized that this man had lunged out of the train car to chase them down, his hands were already driving into their mid-backs. Then they were facedown on the concrete, one woman’s arm dangling through the gap between the train and the platform. And amidst all of this, somehow the most dystopian part of the whole scene was that he never took his AirPods out.
For forty minutes, we stood there with the women (now, in my mind, girls who were only 19 and 20). They were both bleeding from scrapes — shaking — explaining to us that they hadn’t done anything. I pushed back, emphasizing that even if they had nothing warrants that behavior ever. Then, we explained again and again to the British Transport Police what had happened while waiting for them to arrive (after nearly 40 minutes of waiting, we all called it). I thought about the perpetrator.
It was the first time in my life I’ve seen that kind of violence against women, committed as though it were a blasé, passing high-five. I am, disturbingly, lucky for that.
A whole evening was derailed, a lasting memory was imparted on those girls, on me and on my husband, while that man continued on — maybe to dinner, maybe to a pub with the friend he’d been with on the train — as though the whole exchange had been normal. Maybe his friend and him would joke about it later, maybe they would just act like it never happened. I wonder if the people he was meeting knew about this sadistic undercurrent in their friend.
Sometimes, on the train late at night, the quiet rumble of the subway car will suddenly be interrupted by the cacophony of raucous voices — sometimes drunk and sometimes not — which puts me on edge. Usually, I realize the shouting is actually just chanting following a football match, yet the adrenaline spikes regardless. Twice I have seen a man get into an unprovoked physical altercation with another man on the train because of a perceived slight. I shrink quietly into a corner, hoping not to draw attention. It takes something away from me each time. It’s a cruel punishment to witness injustice while knowing I’m afraid to put my own body on the line because a man could do the worst kind of damage.
Over a year on, this recollection sits heavy with me as I watch powerful men try to rectify what appears to be their crippling and all-encompassing insecurity by taking a battle axe to all things fair and righteous in this world, and many more kowtow to them. I see male violence beget male violence beget male violence.
I’ve joked before that men must prove themselves not to be assholes before I let them in. What a disappointment when they prove you right.
ii.
And yet, this is a mindset I must actively combat. I refuse to resort to us vs. them, or buying into biological pre-determinism about traits, or the trope that men are from Venus, women are from Mars, with an unbridgeable chasm between.
I would instead like to extend my empathy to men. They are having a hard time. They are lonely, struggling to find partnership or community. They are not pursuing higher education and are therefore struggling to access the same level of high paying jobs. They consistently have higher rates of deaths of despair.
But what is happening with men is not just happening to men. Like so many other crises of our modern time, it is a symptom, not a cause, and we’re all impacted by it, even if the outcomes show up differently.
So, if it’s a symptom, what is its cause?
I’m beginning to formulate a broad, admittedly oversimplified hypothesis: the systematic devaluation of character in our culture. In its wake, we’ve been left with two young and foolish cousins: greed and hyper-individualism.
Character historically was reinforced by spiritual or religious institutions alongside community structures, however imperfect. Character — or its presumption — conferred status within a community. I think of the early American experiment, which was effectively an experiment in intellectualism, borne out of a framework of character that considered intellectual rigor and civic participation as fundamental responsibilities.
Yet as our modern technologies have replaced our historic epistemologies, the slow, unsexy work of developing character ceded to extractive metrics like net worth, follower count, and click-optimized videos exhorting us to learn about “How I crushed X.” Greed and hyper-individualism are treated as virtues instead of vices, and the only question that matters now is ‘what can I get’ instead of ‘who can I become.’ Status becomes attributed to these arbitrary numerical markers, which one can achieve even if (or often because) one is a moral vacuum.
With the loss of character-building, we’ve lost purpose.
Real purpose comes from instilling practices to reflect — to better know yourself and to show up as that person consistently, allowing for change as you learn and grow. It is not about optimizing your spiritual, emotional, and physical wellbeing to crush it for capitalism. Character is the substrate for purpose.
But if we are all stewing in this morally vacuous soup, why are men struggling more than women (or at least outwardly)?
I wouldn’t say that women are necessarily having a great time — many are still anxious, depressed, unmoored. After hard-won (and still continuing) fights to secure equal rights and respect in an entrenched patriarchy, we too were sold a promise of careerism filling all requisite human needs, from intellectual, to communal, to financial, to spiritual. We’re experiencing the same existential dislocation, but we redirect the circumstantial anger differently, and this is because of our historic existence in aforementioned entrenched patriarchy.
Women tend to internalize first — blame ourselves, question our choices, wonder what we did wrong and how we can fix it. Then we abstract, raging at “the system” as diffuse enemy. We cope through lateral networks, find meaning in community, care and creative practice. This is not some innate trait, but a long-standing, generational adaptation to systematic exclusion. We’ve developed a practiced illegibility to enable us to function in structures that don’t acknowledge our full humanity and to build meaning in spaces the system doesn’t value. Indeed, it is only in the past generation — between my mother and me — that women have more explicitly been told, if you do X, you have the chance to get Y.
Men have been sold this tale since the end of feudalism. Men, particularly white men raised with implicit promises about how life would unfold, have been culturally permitted — even encouraged — to externalize. The broken promises must be someone else’s fault. Women’s gains, immigration, cultural shifts. Our technological age monetizes that grievance: more impassioned grievances, equals more clicks for engagement. It’s no wonder we see growing affinity for strongmen who promise restoration of an order that was always more mythology than material reality.
What this means is that when the equations break down — when the degree doesn’t guarantee the job, when hard work doesn’t secure housing, when provision doesn’t command respect — women already have the general pathways for navigating ambiguity. Not because we’re more resilient, but because we’ve been doing it longer.
Men were sold something different: transactional certainty. The promise that effort would translate directly into outcomes, that there was a legible path from action to reward. Those promises are breaking down not because feminism took something away, but because the systems that made those promises possible — stable industrial employment, affordable housing, a social contract that rewarded labor with security — have been systematically dismantled by the very forces now selling young men narratives of grievance.
We told young men to figure it out themselves, while simultaneously selling them the message that character doesn’t matter, only winning does. It’s no wonder they’re lost.
Men are four times as likely to commit suicide — not just because they’re economically struggling (though that matters), but because without character as a framework, there’s no purpose. And without purpose, what’s the point?
If your whole identity is tied to metrics (job, money, status) and those metrics fail, you have nothing. But if your identity is tied to character (I’m someone who shows up, who cares, who protects), then even when external circumstances fail, you still know who you are and why you matter.
The men in my life understand this. Not because they’re exceptional, but because they’ve done the work.
iii.
Yesterday I spent the day with a close friend who was in town for a last minute work trip, who embodies this kind of character work. We talked and strolled together with my husband for hours, in contemplation and reflection, and I was struck — as I have been since we met on the first day of university — by the quality of his engagement. He shared openly and thoughtfully, asked questions that showed he’d been listening, offered reflections that deepened rather than diluted. I’ve never known a time where he does not show up in this way.
I see this similarly in my husband. The day the girls were attacked, as I stood paralyzed by fear, Chris was the one who physically put his body in the way of the man and the girls. He held the ground, chest to chest, shouting “What the fuck do you think you’re doing!” at the perpetrator — a proverbial moat that the man didn’t dare cross to continue his assault. Chris was the one, of all the people on the train and platform, who took the man’s photo, who spent more time on the phone with British Transport Police as they asked us to explain what happened over and over and over again, as the girls shook and bled and shook.
Chris is the kind of person who began a deep practice of self-reflection early in life, and has carried this forward into his way of existing with others in the world. Chris works to make things better for people—not by steamrolling them with his opinions, but by genuinely engaging, by actually hearing what they’re saying (even if he doesn’t get it right all the time).
Here’s what I actually believe: men like Chris and like my friend aren’t rare. They’re just quiet. They’re at home, at work, in their communities, doing the unsexy work of showing up. They’re not on podcasts selling courses about alpha mindset. They don’t have time for that because they’re busy being present for the people who need them. But because character doesn’t perform well, because virtue is boring, because sustained presence can’t go viral, we’ve created a culture where the loudest voices — the extractive, the aggrieved, the performatively dominant — are mistaken for the norm. Our media environment structurally selects for the AirPods guy over the Chrises of the world, because the AirPods guy gives us content and Chris just gives us... presence.
What I want for young men isn’t just better role models. It’s the understanding that character and purpose are the same thing. You don’t need to find your calling. You need to build your character, and your calling will emerge from that. Chris didn’t decide to be the guy who steps between attackers and victims. His years of self-reflection, accountability, and care meant that when the moment came, he already knew who he was. That’s not exceptional. That’s just what happens when you do the boring, unsexy work of becoming someone worth being—work that includes using your gifts and agency to help others flourish, to protect their agency rather than restrict it because you feel threatened. That work is available to everyone.
Until next time,
AL
