Why Young Men Are Failing to Launch

For Gen Z men who feel purposeless and lost, the way off the couch is the way of the Cross.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of men—some atheists, some Christians, some Jews; some conservatives, some progressives, some centrists—from completely different geographical, cultural, and vocational backgrounds.

They all wanted to talk about one thing: the number of young men they know who seem purposeless and lost. For some of them, the problem was pressing because it was about their own sons. For most, it was about their nephews or godsons or the sons of their friends and neighbors.

In most cases, they weren’t talking about the sort of things people used to worry about with boys and young men. They weren’t concerned about gang violence or drug addiction or drag racing or street fights. They weren’t even talking about sexual promiscuity or binge drinking. They were talking about something quite different: a kind of hopelessness, a lack of ambition, in some cases even to leave the house at all, much less to go out into the world and start families of their own.

One way to identify this problem is to follow the old tried-and-true path of blaming the next generation for laziness and being coddled. You know you are getting old not when you see the first gray hairs or when your muscles ache from picking up a sock on the floor, but when you see Instagram memes for your generation showing streetlights at dusk with the words Hey Gen Z, this was the app that told us when to come home.

Usually this kind of You kids get off my lawn (or Get on your own lawn instead of gaming on the couch) mentality is vapid—a mixture of self-deceiving nostalgia with We’re better than you generational narcissism.

Plus, those ...

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from Christianity Today Magazine
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