To the men of this generation, my brothers,

Are We Experiencing a Crisis of Masculinity?

One of my friends loves to bring up that we are experiencing a crisis of masculinity; usually, the punchline of his joke is that the evidence for said crisis is whatever I happened to be doing at the moment of his announcement. It’s a reliable joke so I hear it often. But I have been thinking for a while that we truly may be witnessing a real crisis for men. I’ve heard it said that there is a coordinated attack on masculinity; I would more likely attribute these attacks to a Moloch-like, disembodied degradation of society. I won’t explain the Moloch concept in detail here, but it is essentially the agglomeration of all negative or chaotic entities driving the world to destruction. It is more likely that a combination of 1) isolated players influencing the game to favor their own interests at the expense of the greater good, and 2) the tendency for people and society to choose the path of least resistance, combined have led to the ailments we see in contemporary society (Moloch); versus the actions of a single, coordinated group conspiring against humanity. One of the reasons (but not the only) for this current crisis, I believe, lies in the concept that more energy is required to go from 0 to 1, than it takes to go from 1 to ‘n’, and that men have found a backdoor to this critical process as it pertains to sex.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

G. Michael Hopf

The 0 to 1 Concept Applied to Life

In “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel describes his observations that starting a business requires disproportionately more energy when going from 0 to 1, than from 1 to ‘n’. For example, it is much harder to invent the first smartphone than it is to create competing models, harder to create the first commercial car than create competitors, the first printer than the second, etc. Essentially, creating something from nothing is much more difficult than copying or iterating off an existing creation. In our lives, both personal and professional, the first time we do something (e.g. installing a new toilet or performing a hydraulic calculation) always takes the longest time, the second time is shorter by half, the third is even shorter, until we reach a plateau once that activity becomes routine. Going from no workout plan to a consistent one is hard, but once you’ve developed that routine, modifying it is easy.

What Gave Birth to Invention?

A fundamental concept in chemistry is diffusion, the movement of particles from a high concentration solution to a low concentration solution. For example, when concentrated sea water is dumped into a tank of distilled water, the salt ions from the sea water will move into the fresh water until the whole mixture has the same concentration of salt. The speed at which the salt ions move is called the rate of diffusion: the higher the difference in concentrations of the two substances, the higher the rate of transfer; so, as particles transfer over in a given tranche of time, the concentration delta decreases, causing less particles to move in the next tranche of time, and so on. We end up with a familiar graph relating rate of diffusion to time.

We can abstract this scientific concept to life where the larger the need, the larger the motivating energy to satisfy that need. For example, someone who hasn’t eaten for 3 days will have a much higher motivation to eat than someone who hasn’t eaten in 5 hours and is starting to experience a sense of hunger, a man freezing outside has a higher motivation to seek warmth than someone who is slightly cold in the office due to the air-conditioning kicking on, and so on. If we visit the quote from Hopf above, “hard times create strong men”: the harder the environment, the greater the driver for men to become strong to overcome the difficulties that life throws at them. Another popular proverb that illustrates this point,

Necessity if the mother of invention.

Various, ancient proverb

We see repeatedly the core truth that generations of humans have observed: that pain, discomfort, negative drivers are required to move people to take action to generate a solution and improve their situation; and the greater the negative stimulus, the greater the motivation to resolve the situation. An increase in cost of living leads to a disgruntled populace; but if hyperinflation reaches an unbearable level where essential goods are no longer affordable, that populace will revolt (see the Arab Spring).

“Woohoo! We Found a Shortcut!”

We live today in a world where our neurocircuits are constantly being hijacked via the attention-seeking algorithms of social media and advertisements everywhere you look. It is a well-known fact that sex is a primary driver for men; there are other motivating factors of course, but to say that sex is not ranked near the top would be false. Not so long ago, for the average man to engage in sexual activity, he had to become somewhat useful to society. The barriers to sex were high: a man had to attract the affections of a women in the first place, then have a prospective future and a decent reputation to be accepted by her family, and so on until he was married. To go from 0 to 1, most men were forced to actually develop themselves into competent, respectable human beings to reach a win-condition in this one area of life. There are always a subset of men that cheat the system, work outside the rules, but we won’t discuss that minority group in this letter and instead focus on the bulk of the population.

“Oh No… We Found a Shortcut…”

Today, men have easy access to porn which short-circuits the process, albeit, with rewards that are far inferior to the real thing. But the return on investment (ROI) is so much higher with porn that, to the short-sighted dopamine neurocircuitry of our brains, the short payback period associated with a few clicks outperforms the longer game of pursuing a real relationship with greater reward. Even in pre-internet years, the energy required to acquire a porn magazine was higher, and the reward was lower (in comparison to online porn); the ROI was still higher than a real relationship, but the ROI of the internet landscape we operate in today is magnitudes higher still. With the introduction of internet porn, a trivial cost yields almost infinite rewards (high in quantity, low in quality). The issue is that going from this low reward state to the next level requires a disproportionate amount of energy. If we think back to the 0 to 1 graph above, the energy required for the first reward should be the highest, progressively getting easier with more iterations. Pre-porn, it used to be that most men would stay at 0 (no sexual activity) until they developed into someone who could convince a woman to marry him. Competition was necessary because that woman would spend a long time with him so he had to have long-term value, not just ephemeral qualities that would disappear in a year.

As you can see in the graph above, the energy required to reach reward level 1 via porn is almost negligible compared to achieving it through a normal relationship. On the other hand, the porn reward function is asymptotic and doesn’t even reach level 2. However, because the ROI to attain the first reward is so low, an individual can stay in that zone satisfying a base level of reward on repeat, instead of expending the energy required to jump to the blue line and attain higher quality rewards in the long run. A man essentially reaches a local peak in ROI on the yellow line which strongly disincentives further energy investment to reach the global peak that is only attainable via the blue line. This is no longer a theoretical scenario as we are seeing it more and more in younger generations of men, men who are opting out of the high-energy competition of real dating and settling for low-energy digital satisfaction in lieu. With the rise of more and more “realistic” experiences (VR, AI girlfriends, sex robots, etc.), this trend will only worsen in the future.

I don’t know if there is a solution to this problem. On the individual level, there are men who are being woken up to the impacts of porn and short-term gratification on the brain circuitry, but it is not enough to battle the mass-sedation that is being pumped into the male population daily. This drug is keeping generations of men living in “good times”, an environment where the delta required to achieve sexual activity has been lowered by raising the baseline which dulls the motivation and urgency that used to drive men to become more. It is a low quality reward, but just enough to ease the pressure, and with it, the drive to push forward to the next level. The jump from 0 to 1 is supposed to the hardest one, after which that particular game becomes easier. But when you create a backdoor to the problem and short-circuit the entire process, you’re left with a gap, with boys being content to stay as boys and failing to become the supply of men for the demands of the world; you’re left with a crisis of masculinity.

Sincerely,

A concerned citizen and fellow man.