Why so many men in the US have stopped working

I am completely speaking my thoughts but I think it's of course a multitude of reasons that can all bubble up when the economy slips.

Men are the dominant gender in the workforce and are commonly the one supporting themselves or the household financially. This is an enormous amount of pressure and that pressure is built up through personal expectations on ourselves and the supposed expectations of others. We are getting to a stage where we're having to work harder for not much more in return and that reduces our belief in the benefits of doing that work.

All it takes is a recession, lay off, mental illness or disability to create a break in which those social norms fall away and may make some men question why they were putting as much effort in as they were before. Settling for perhaps a lower paying job with less effort and realising that this provides just as much if not more fulfillment. Or perhaps it's also the workload now being shared by their partners.

If you have no hope of landing a good partner and a job with enough money to raise kids, is scraping by with enough money to play video games and eat junk food not an attractive alternative?

> With so many factors at play, it's difficult to tease out which issues may affect the number of men in the workforce the most

This bit at the end makes the article seem very incomplete, especially since data on the number of men in jail, in schools, on disability, is readily available.

Just anecdata, but my 90+ yo mother, living in a 60's 3-bedroom ranch neighborhood, is surrounded by three single men not working. All three live in houses owned by their parents or siblings, all of whom live elsewhere. All three have struggled with life-long chemical addictions, and only one of the three seems to be solidly in recovery. One is on disability after a work-related injury years ago. One has been in and out of jail. The third (and youngest) is the only one with some college, but somehow never got a degree and now refuses to make himself presentable enough to get through even an entry-level interview. Without their families' support, the two not on disability would probably be on the streets.

I'm no expert, but from what I know of these men (over many years), they all have an independent streak and never conformed well to "working for the man," i.e., being told what to do. There are certainly ways for someone with that mindset to succeed, but many just don't seem to be able to figure it out.

Some reason is because consolidation of business. The local world around us, local business, has evaporated. Instead of making things & running loc shops - which requires local people to take command, to be entrepreneurial - there's now some vast far off corporate hierarchy doing all the decision making and rolling it out to an ever changing workforce of people they probably havent nor will ever meet.

There's not much dignity here. The opportunity to be the boots on the ground figuring out & doing things is semi done for. We don't see & witness the work of others around us, don't have the example of good rewarding work. Thus the social contract slips & gives.

The assume this is voluntary we have been ejecting a certain demographic of male in the hopes to extra judicially eliminate them in an environment with 0 social safety net.

The article mentions a lot of external reasons, but what about men who are just lazy and have the opportunity to do nothing? Be it because it's easier to claim benefits, or they still depend on their parents (or wife). All factors I would imagine are more common than in the 50's.

More and more I've been reading articles where misfortunes are mostly-if not exclusively-due to external factors, and personal responsibility is seldom mentioned.

I have a bunch of friends and family who are in their mid-late 20s, don't work, and spend all their time consuming entertainment. I do think that this is the real culprit. We have a situation where you can very cheaply block out the world and immerse yourself in digital wonderlands, and it's quite frankly a lot better than working some shit job in the real world. And at a certain point these folks say to themselves, "I haven't worked in years, so there's no chance I could find a job now". And the cycle continues.

Something I didn't see in the article: the effect of competition on expectations. The majority of males in the US are of course white. Increased access to the workforce for women and minority men means competition is greater than the days of their fathers/grandfathers etc when white males had a monopoly on all but the lowest-level jobs. As such, those who fail to see the context of that system may feel despair over what they see as lower standards than they were raised to believe were possible.

Lack of affordable housing, many can't find girlfriends, and good paying jobs are far and few between.

I don't blame NEETs and I honestly think they're the smart ones gaming the system until it collapses.

I personally have not seen a strong relationship between employment status and attracting a good partner. Women are not impressed by miserable decent paying corporate jobs. Theres no incentive

I know the discourse around this topic is going to be an incel dumpster fire, but please consider all the positive reasons that could cause this, for example just being rich enough to retire at 50. Also consider that the population aged 25-54 is not just flatly distributed: there are dips and waves, the process of which changes the likelihood of being in the workforce.

Who on HN is not Going Galt?