All human beings, if unbroken, have an inbred drive to love and to be loved. Universally held by each and every one of the 8 billion healthy people alive on this planet today and that fact has been forever. From the peasant in the rice paddies in Southeast Asia to the billionaire tech bros of Silicon Valley to the heroin addict curled up in an alleyway with a syringe in their arm.
Most of us have enough equity and agency in our individual station of life to get our needs met. Some struggle; some give up, while others fail miserably and often in their quest to find their better half they never really become introspective. Looking for Love in all the wrong places is more than just the title of a country western song. Tragically it’s a strategy employed by many men. This I believe is not just an opinion but rather a societal trend. Sad but true.
Scott Galloway is a marketing professor at NYU Stern, entrepreneur, author, and media personality. He’s known for his candor, self-deprecating humor, and predictions. Galloway teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to MBA students.
His latest book is Notes on Being a Man a 2025 non-fiction, memoir book, Insights into what modern men and young men are experiencing in the 21st century. He argues that American young men are facing an unprecedented crisis defined by economic displacement, isolation, and a lack of positive role models. He highlights three key structural and cultural failures.
- Economic Inviability: Stagnant wages, high housing costs, and the decline of non-college-degree manufacturing jobs make it difficult for young men to achieve financial independence, which society and dating markets historically demand of them. Age of first-time home buyers in America today is forty years old.
- Digital Isolation and Withdrawal: Algorithms, online gaming, and synthetic pornography offer frictionless alternatives to real life, fostering a growing breed of asocial, unpartnered young men who fail to launch or engage socially. They never develop the ability to have a difficult dialogue or an uncomfortable conversation. Truth be told the porn queen never says no.
- The Empathy and Role Model Gap: A cultural void in addressing male struggles—often dismissed due to historical male privilege—has left young boys without positive mentorship, leading to soaring rates of loneliness, dropouts, addiction, and deaths of despair
His book and general philosophy shed new light on how and why we as a culture got here. Men, especially young men have difficulty showing up enough to attract attention in a healthy way from healthy women. It’s an alarming yet wonderful read.
So read this slowly and try to digest this and accept it as empirical truth.
You must be whole before you can find your better half. Water always seeks its own level. You must be able to discern the difference between Ms. Right and Ms. Right Now.
Start first by getting your own house in order. Learn to be OK by yourself, for yourself. You clean your house because you wanna live in a clean house not because you want to invite somebody over. When you get ready to go out on a date, don’t reach for the first T-shirt in the drawer and put a baseball hat on backwards. Chances are your date is looking for a man not a man child.
Young men between 18 and 25 when moving out of their family home for the first time and into a place with a buddy are fine having two cinder blocks and a 2 x 4 be a bookcase. That strategy is a failing one when you’re 28 to 35 and trying to impress a real grown-up woman. Just a thought, I might be wrong.
Some of these men have great insight, but insight is cheap. I always say that awareness without action is useless. It’s like knowing that the car is out of gas and not having willingness to go to the gas station and fill it up and then to be pissed off that the car still doesn’t run.
Instead of using their insight to develop new and hopefully better behavior, they often use it as a reason to continue with all destructive behavior. They’re not willing to go through the pain it takes to change, even though the pain of staying the same is often killing them, they become perennial victims. They cling to their character defects with feral and alarming tenacity.
This is hard, especially for men with stunted emotional development, but it can be overcome with work and introspection. Ask for help. There is no need for you to act like you’re ten feet tall and bulletproof and have an S on your chest.
That strategy is not real, and it will not work. It is not sustainable. It’s a high price for a low life.
Rinse and repeat; emotional immaturity, coupled with a lack of discipline. It’s hard getting the job with that on the top of your résumé.
You need not be alone forever. As the great soul singer, Sam Cooke said, “A change is going to come” and remember like I always say misery is optional.
NO MORE SECRETS 