[allovernow]

>But we keep making the world safer and safer and now we are finding out that our culture no longer effectively knows what to do.

I can't say I agree with everything in your post, but this assertion is reasonable. I'd say civilization has already discovered a partial solution to this problem: monogamy where men satisfy their evolutionary urges for usefulness through breadwinning. It isn't perfect for everyone but it's probably the most optimal overall solution, especially when you consider that once basic needs are met, the average person is content to live the life prescribed to them by society. What I'm saying is that maybe we don't need to indoctrinate our youth with the notion that historic gender roles are totally evil and oppressive - we're seeing a lot of the fallout from that practice in contemporary Western society.

No, not every woman wants to be constrained to a life of housework and childrearing, and not every man has the ambition to make a name for himself; but on average humans have innate desires/drives which have specialized, over tens of thousands of generations such that average life satisfaction is strongly predicated upon traditional gender roles.

[munificent]

> I'd say civilization has already discovered a partial solution to this problem: monogamy where men satisfy their evolutionary urges for usefulness through breadwinning.

Yes, I agree. Strangely enough, I think outlawing polygamy is probably one of the most profoundly powerful cultural technologies humans have ever invented.

So putting this back together with the article, the author is showing how unskilled men are dropping out of the social contract. Because, for them, the opportunities for breadwinning are harder to find.

[jotakami]

My own anecdotal experience says that not all the dropouts are, by typical definitions, unskilled. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and I believe it is closely connected to psychological factors such as susceptibility to anxiety and depression.