Link / Archive
By Ludovic - Sep 14, 2025
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have the one. For he will bring the others back.”
-Heraclitus
By now you’ve probably seen the viral New York Times piece by Rachel Drucker, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” that came out a few months ago. It’s essentially a long complaint from a mid-thirties' female journalist about her disappointing love life in New York (or Chicongo or whatever major city, I’m not going to read it again to find out), which for some reason went viral. Perhaps the reason for its virality was that it struck a nerve of sorts, women across the internet echoed her frustration: the men they want for stable relationships just aren’t showing up.
The article itself is indulgent, overly emotive, and at times painfully naïve. Yet as a kind of cultural “heat check,” it’s worth paying attention to. In part, because until very recently the conversation about the “decline of men” has largely been confined to the political right. Drucker’s piece, despite being written from a libtarded NYT vantage point, touches, perhaps unwittingly on many of the same themes that the online right has spoken about for years. What makes the article interesting, then, is not its originality or analytical depth, but the fact that this sentiment has finally broken through into the mainstream discourse (It seems that Copernican’s predictions may be coming true). In this stack, I’d like to unpack a few specific claims from Drucker’s essay before stepping back to make a broader point: that the apparent disappearance of men is not a sudden or uniquely modern development. With the exception of the anomalous post–WWII decades, male “absence” in one form or another has always been part of the social fabric. By situating today’s so-called “plight of men” in a longer historical frame, we can see how large numbers of men have routinely failed, or been unwilling to integrate into society, and why the current moment is less an unprecedented crisis than another turn of an old pattern.
Thanks for reading Midheaven Variations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
One detail of the article that did stand out to me, though, was the opening vignette Drucker shares: one evening she found herself at a fashionable bar-restaurant, only to realize that the room was conspicuously lacking in men. Instead, she observed table after table of women in clusters of two, three, or more animatedly chatting among themselves, but very few men, and certainly not couples out on dates. This struck me because it mirrors my own experiences in similar venues. More than once I’ve turned to a friend and remarked on the gender imbalance: bars crowded with women in groups, with men scattered sparsely and almost incidental to the atmosphere. After noticing it once, I began looking for it more deliberately, and the pattern became undeniable. Again and again, in these trendy social spaces, women seemed to dominate the landscape, while men were present only in small, almost token numbers. I think this is a perhaps very recent social phenomenon, the absence of males particularly the rowdy groups of young men who used to dominate even these so called ‘trendy’ bars.
When talking about gender issues, it’s very easy for the conversation to veer into sensationalism, since the topic is so emotionally charged and deeply personal for many people. The Nuance Pill does an admirable job of cutting through some of that noise, especially in pushing back against the more exaggerated claims from the red-pill sphere about a supposed wholesale “collapse” of men. This Substack piece in particular is a strong example of how to re-anchor the debate in data rather than memes. Still, I think the very latest numbers suggest a shift may be underway: men really are beginning to drop out of society in more visible ways, especially over the past few years. In this sense, Drucker’s “vibes-based” observations about the absence of men in social and romantic spaces seems to line up with some emerging data. As I noted in my introduction, I don’t see this as an entirely new phenomenon , history shows us that male absence or exclusion has always been part of the social fabric. But before turning to that deeper historical context, I want to pause on a couple of the specific points Drucker raises in her article and maybe offer her some consolation as to why she seems so unlucky in love.
In addition to the physical absence of men from spaces once associated with dating and courtship, Drucker also laments that the men she does meet seem unwilling or perhaps unable to pursue real romantic commitment. I think there are a couple of key reasons for this. Firstly, while young men slightly outnumber young women in the population overall, in most big cities the situation flips: women actually outnumber men, and this skew is most pronounced in the younger age groups. This inversion of the usual ratios clearly doesn’t favour women looking for long-term partners in major urban centres by the basic laws of supply and demand in the sexual marketplace, it gives men more options and less incentive to commit. Secondly, cities themselves act almost like a kind of behavioural sink: the sheer density and the unnatural conditions of urban life can warp normal human behaviour, especially around sexuality( John Carter explores the topic of the behavioural sink well here). Of course, there are other factors in play too, but I think these two forces, the demographic skew and the distortions of city life go a long way to explaining why a thirty-something professional woman in New York (or Melbourne, or London) finds it so difficult to secure a man who’s both available and willing to commit.
The modern ‘bar scene.’
On the political right, we often compare our generation unfavorably with the baby boomers, lamenting how much harder things seem now than they were for them. Yet it’s important to remember that the post–WWII generations were arguably the luckiest cohorts in history, at least economically. Never before, and perhaps never again, has broad-based prosperity surged so quickly. The combination of strong economic growth, cheap housing, expanding welfare states, and stable jobs created a uniquely favorable environment for ordinary men to integrate into family and community life. In hindsight, this looks more like a historical anomaly than a baseline. What we are witnessing today is not so much an unprecedented collapse, but a reversion to the mean: material conditions for the average person are receding, inequality is widening, and life is once again beginning to look like it did for most of human history. Within those harsher historical norms, the phenomenon of men “leaving society” whether through vagrancy, monastic withdrawal, other bachelor subcultures or simply failure to establish themselves, was well known. In that sense, today’s dropout crisis is not entirely new, but rather a resurfacing of an older pattern.
Before continuing, it’s worth pausing to address the deeper question of why, both historically and today, some men are more likely than women to end up excluded from, or to actively withdraw from society. The short answer is nature. As is well established in these circles, men tend to show far greater variance across a range of psychological and behavioral traits. Factors like IQ, aggression, impulsivity, and the so-called “dark triad” cluster of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are all more overrepresented among men, particularly at the extremes. Put simply, men are the more variable sex: the bell curve for women is tighter around the mean, while men are more scattered across the tails. The practical outcome of this is straightforward: there will always be more men than women whose traits render them unwilling or unable to function within the structures of organized society, especially in modern, bureaucratic, rule-bound systems that demand conformity and self-regulation.
This isn’t speculative or novel. We see the evidence all around us. Men are disproportionately found in both the highest and lowest echelons of achievement: overrepresented among geniuses, innovators, and entrepreneurs, but also among the homeless, the chronically unemployed, and the incarcerated. The prison population alone makes this imbalance impossible to ignore: across every society, men vastly outnumber women behind bars. In other words, male volatility is a structural fact of human populations, and the phenomenon of men “dropping out” is not an aberration of modernity but an enduring consequence of sexual dimorphism in psychology and behavior. As Camille Paglia famously remarked “There is no female Jack the Ripper, for the same reason there is no female Mozart.”
Related to this variability is the basic hormonal profile of men compared to women. Without going too deep into endocrinology, the higher prevalence of testosterone in men tends to promote behaviors that are often read as aggressive, impulsive, or anti-social in domesticated environments. This is not unique to humans, across the animal kingdom, sex-linked hormone ratios consistently produce males who are more difficult to socialize, regulate, or contain. In many species, males are the ones more prone to fighting, wandering off, or resisting hierarchies. Modern society, for all its comforts, functions in some sense like a vast system of captivity: an elaborate network of rules, constraints, and norms that require individuals to suppress instincts in order to fit into stable, predictable patterns of life. And, for better or worse, this artificial environment is one that women, hormonally and temperamentally, tend to adapt to more easily than men. There is a reason, after all, why male pets are almost universally desexed.
Thus, for all these reasons, there will always be a subsection of men at any given time who are fundamentally unsuited to structured society. Some are too low in IQ, others perhaps too high; some too impulsive, others too antisocial. In short, their psychological profiles make them maladapted to the kind of regulated, rule-bound existence that complex societies demand. In a state of nature, however, this very variability in male psychology was adaptive. It allowed the species to maintain resilience, flexibility, and a broader repertoire of survival strategies. The presence of outliers such as risk-takers, wanderers, fighters, eccentrics etc. conferred an advantage to the tribe as a whole, even if it came at the cost of stability for individuals. In modernity, by contrast, these same outlier traits tend to be maladaptive for the individuals who possess them, cutting them off from the pathways to stability, success, and belonging.
The proportion of men who end up “dropped out” at any given moment is not fixed; it fluctuates with broader social and economic conditions. In times of abundance and strong social cohesion, even marginal men can often limp along or find niches where they can survive and sometimes even thrive. This was especially true for the postwar generations, who came of age in perhaps the most prosperous economic window in history. Many men who, under harsher conditions, might have been cast adrift or gone their own way were instead buoyed along by cheap housing, plentiful jobs, and broad-based growth. But as conditions revert back to historical norms such as slower growth, rising inequality and weaker communal bonds, the proportion of unassimilable men grows. And unless something changes, it will likely continue to grow in the years ahead.
Pulling up at the Qing dynasty bachelor club
These roles varied enormously in nature and in the kind of men they attracted, reflecting the broad “tails” of male psychology. Perhaps the more aggressive or impulsive gravitated toward soldiering, raiding, or piracy, while the more introspective, high-IQ outliers found meaning in monastic life. And while these men were often feared, pitied, or treated as social problems, their existence was not entirely useless. In fact, many societies found ways to harness these outlier male traits, whether channeling violence into military service, turning wanderlust into exploration and colonization, or transforming misfits into religious specialists. In this sense, the history of surplus men is not just one of exclusion, but also of societies improvising ways to make use of those who could not easily be domesticated.
You may have realised from that list that many of those roles no longer really exist in modern society, I will touch more upon that shortly, however I’d like to focus now on briefly exploring the Hobo subculture, as it is one of the most recent phenomena and gives a good insight into how and why many men decided to go down his path of living society.
There were even well-documented cases of young men from comfortable, even privileged backgrounds who voluntarily embraced the hobo life. Jefferson Davis, the son of a wealthy Ohio industrialist, famously abandoned his inheritance to become known as the “King of the Hobos,” while Jack London deliberately rode the rails in his youth and later immortalised the experience in his classic memoir The Road (1907). Some historians have suggested that the origins of the hobo subculture can be traced back to the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, when thousands of dislocated young soldiers, already accustomed to the camaraderie and mobility of camp life, found themselves unwilling, or unable to return to the routines of settled society. Whatever its roots, hobo culture developed into a fully fledged subculture with its own slang, songs, codes of conduct, and even a symbolic system of carved or chalked signs to help fellow travelers navigate danger or opportunity. In this sense, hobos fit neatly into the broader pattern of bachelor subcultures across history: self-contained male worlds, defined by mobility, codes, and rituals. I can think of modern parallels that are somewhat similar, though much less in scale?
To me, this points toward an enduring archetype of male bachelor societies, a primal pattern that can be traced deep into prehistory. One could imagine it harking back to the “wolf packs” often celebrated by the history nerds of the far right: surplus males, unable or unwilling to adapt to the constraints of settled life, banding together in rough brotherhoods on the margins. These groups lived hard, itinerant lives, but in many ways such conditions suited their temperaments better than domesticity. Their existence was always precarious and on the edge of survival, yet it also gave them freedom to carve out roles for themselves that mainstream society could not or would not provide. Some succeeded and even thrived by raiding, exploring, soldiering, or innovating; others simply perished. But the recurring theme is clear: whenever society produces men it cannot absorb, those men tend to regroup into bachelor bands, rough male-only societies that sit just outside the borders of civilization.
As I mentioned at the outset, this phenomenon should not be read purely as a negative, nor as an indictment of the men who cannot, or will not adapt to the structures of society. As mentioned many of the very traits that make some men unfit for settled life can, under different conditions, prove to be enormous advantages. Rome itself was founded by a band of outcasts, criminals, and adventurers who forged not only a city but eventually the greatest empire in history. Alexander the Great famously remarked, upon meeting Diogenes the Cynic living half-naked in a barrel, that if he were not Alexander he would wish to be Diogenes, a recognition that even radical rejection of society can embody a kind of strength. One could also point to the conquistadors like Hernán Cortés, reckless and often socially marginal men who went on to reshape entire continents. Again and again, history shows that the raw, difficult traits of men who fall outside the boundaries of polite society commonly through traits such as restlessness, aggression, eccentricity, defiance can, when harnessed, become a vital and even revitalising force.
At the same time, it must be remembered that these figures are the rare exceptions. For every Diogenes, there are countless men who retreat into obscurity; for every Cortés, far more vanish into poverty, addiction, or despair. The outliers who go on to remake the world are only a small fraction of the broader population of men who fail to integrate. Most remain: misfits at the margins, whose traits burn out in self-destruction rather than transforming into civilisation’s next engine of change. Nevertheless, it is vital for the species that such differentiation among men exists. Individually, to fall at the extreme tails of the psychological or behavioural spectrum may often be a personal tragedy: the man who is too reckless, too restless, or too eccentric to fit within the ordinary rhythms of society usually pays a heavy price for it. Yet when viewed in the aggregate, these very outliers serve a crucial evolutionary and civilisational function. They inject variability, unpredictability, and creative force into the human population. They are the ones who test limits, who explore new frontiers, who challenge stagnant norms. Even if most burn out or self-destruct, the small minority who succeed can shift the trajectory of entire cultures. In that sense, the existence of such men is not simply a social problem to be lamented, but a structural necessity for the resilience and progression of mankind.
To recap, the latest data showing male disengagement is not the beginning of some unprecedented collapse, but a reversion to conditions that have always existed in one form or another. The tails of male psychology have always produced men who drop out of society. The only difference is that, in an unusually prosperous postwar window, these men could be absorbed, at least partially. That window is now closed.
If I were to hazard a prediction, I suspect we will see the revival of bachelor subcultures in new forms. At present, the outlets for surplus men are thin: crime or digital addiction. Yet subcultures are already germinating on the internet: MGTOW, incels etc. strange, digital-age analogues of the old bachelor brotherhoods. Whether these ever spill back into physical reality is unclear. Graffiti crews, for example, already show shades of a modern urban bachelor culture: young men, marginal, restless, bonded together through risk, code, and transgression. But there is a complicating factor. We live in one of the oldest, most bureaucratic societies in history, where rambunctiousness and risk-taking are on the decline. The world of the hobo or the mercenary band may not easily reappear under such conditions.
Still, history suggests that when society produces a surplus of men it cannot absorb, new outlets eventually form. Perhaps nothing will come of it, and today’s disconnected men will simply fade into private despair. Or perhaps, as in ages past, a fraction of them will find ways to redirect their volatility into something larger, a revitalising force that reshapes society itself. Only time will tell.
By Ludovic - Sep 14, 2025
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have the one. For he will bring the others back.”
-Heraclitus
By now you’ve probably seen the viral New York Times piece by Rachel Drucker, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” that came out a few months ago. It’s essentially a long complaint from a mid-thirties' female journalist about her disappointing love life in New York (or Chicongo or whatever major city, I’m not going to read it again to find out), which for some reason went viral. Perhaps the reason for its virality was that it struck a nerve of sorts, women across the internet echoed her frustration: the men they want for stable relationships just aren’t showing up.
The article itself is indulgent, overly emotive, and at times painfully naïve. Yet as a kind of cultural “heat check,” it’s worth paying attention to. In part, because until very recently the conversation about the “decline of men” has largely been confined to the political right. Drucker’s piece, despite being written from a libtarded NYT vantage point, touches, perhaps unwittingly on many of the same themes that the online right has spoken about for years. What makes the article interesting, then, is not its originality or analytical depth, but the fact that this sentiment has finally broken through into the mainstream discourse (It seems that Copernican’s predictions may be coming true). In this stack, I’d like to unpack a few specific claims from Drucker’s essay before stepping back to make a broader point: that the apparent disappearance of men is not a sudden or uniquely modern development. With the exception of the anomalous post–WWII decades, male “absence” in one form or another has always been part of the social fabric. By situating today’s so-called “plight of men” in a longer historical frame, we can see how large numbers of men have routinely failed, or been unwilling to integrate into society, and why the current moment is less an unprecedented crisis than another turn of an old pattern.
Thanks for reading Midheaven Variations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
The Article:
One detail of the article that did stand out to me, though, was the opening vignette Drucker shares: one evening she found herself at a fashionable bar-restaurant, only to realize that the room was conspicuously lacking in men. Instead, she observed table after table of women in clusters of two, three, or more animatedly chatting among themselves, but very few men, and certainly not couples out on dates. This struck me because it mirrors my own experiences in similar venues. More than once I’ve turned to a friend and remarked on the gender imbalance: bars crowded with women in groups, with men scattered sparsely and almost incidental to the atmosphere. After noticing it once, I began looking for it more deliberately, and the pattern became undeniable. Again and again, in these trendy social spaces, women seemed to dominate the landscape, while men were present only in small, almost token numbers. I think this is a perhaps very recent social phenomenon, the absence of males particularly the rowdy groups of young men who used to dominate even these so called ‘trendy’ bars.
When talking about gender issues, it’s very easy for the conversation to veer into sensationalism, since the topic is so emotionally charged and deeply personal for many people. The Nuance Pill does an admirable job of cutting through some of that noise, especially in pushing back against the more exaggerated claims from the red-pill sphere about a supposed wholesale “collapse” of men. This Substack piece in particular is a strong example of how to re-anchor the debate in data rather than memes. Still, I think the very latest numbers suggest a shift may be underway: men really are beginning to drop out of society in more visible ways, especially over the past few years. In this sense, Drucker’s “vibes-based” observations about the absence of men in social and romantic spaces seems to line up with some emerging data. As I noted in my introduction, I don’t see this as an entirely new phenomenon , history shows us that male absence or exclusion has always been part of the social fabric. But before turning to that deeper historical context, I want to pause on a couple of the specific points Drucker raises in her article and maybe offer her some consolation as to why she seems so unlucky in love.
In addition to the physical absence of men from spaces once associated with dating and courtship, Drucker also laments that the men she does meet seem unwilling or perhaps unable to pursue real romantic commitment. I think there are a couple of key reasons for this. Firstly, while young men slightly outnumber young women in the population overall, in most big cities the situation flips: women actually outnumber men, and this skew is most pronounced in the younger age groups. This inversion of the usual ratios clearly doesn’t favour women looking for long-term partners in major urban centres by the basic laws of supply and demand in the sexual marketplace, it gives men more options and less incentive to commit. Secondly, cities themselves act almost like a kind of behavioural sink: the sheer density and the unnatural conditions of urban life can warp normal human behaviour, especially around sexuality( John Carter explores the topic of the behavioural sink well here). Of course, there are other factors in play too, but I think these two forces, the demographic skew and the distortions of city life go a long way to explaining why a thirty-something professional woman in New York (or Melbourne, or London) finds it so difficult to secure a man who’s both available and willing to commit.
The modern ‘bar scene.’
The State of Men:
Before proceeding further lets actually take stock of the state of men, particularly young men in society. There does seem to be in recent years, a decline in young men’s participation in society, let us look at some data:- Prime-age male labor force participation has collapsed over decades
- In the U.S., 97.1% of men aged 25–54 were in the workforce in 1960; by 2022, that had fallen to 88.6%.
- Source: Institute for Family Studies – Scarred Boys, Idle Men
- Young men increasingly not in education, employment, or training (NEET)
- In the U.S., about 12% of men aged 16–24 were NEET in 2024. Rates for women in this group have declined, while male rates have stayed flat or risen slightly.
- Source: American Institute for Boys and Men – A Generation of Lost Men?
- UK: Male NEET rates now exceed female rates
- Since 2021, NEET rates for UK men aged 16–24 have climbed sharply, surpassing those of young women for the first time.
- Source: Youth Futures Foundation / ONS – Trends in Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training
- Canada: Rising male NEETs, especially in their 20s
- Statistics Canada (2025) shows NEET rates increasing for men aged 20–29, while young women in the same cohort more often remain in or return to education.
- Source: Statistics Canada – Youth not in employment, education or training: Recent trends
- Millennial men far more likely to drop out of workforce than boomers
- About 14% of millennial men at age 25 were out of the labor force, compared to only 7% of baby boomers at that same age.
- Source: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco – Men’s Falling Labor Force Participation across Generations
On the political right, we often compare our generation unfavorably with the baby boomers, lamenting how much harder things seem now than they were for them. Yet it’s important to remember that the post–WWII generations were arguably the luckiest cohorts in history, at least economically. Never before, and perhaps never again, has broad-based prosperity surged so quickly. The combination of strong economic growth, cheap housing, expanding welfare states, and stable jobs created a uniquely favorable environment for ordinary men to integrate into family and community life. In hindsight, this looks more like a historical anomaly than a baseline. What we are witnessing today is not so much an unprecedented collapse, but a reversion to the mean: material conditions for the average person are receding, inequality is widening, and life is once again beginning to look like it did for most of human history. Within those harsher historical norms, the phenomenon of men “leaving society” whether through vagrancy, monastic withdrawal, other bachelor subcultures or simply failure to establish themselves, was well known. In that sense, today’s dropout crisis is not entirely new, but rather a resurfacing of an older pattern.
Before continuing, it’s worth pausing to address the deeper question of why, both historically and today, some men are more likely than women to end up excluded from, or to actively withdraw from society. The short answer is nature. As is well established in these circles, men tend to show far greater variance across a range of psychological and behavioral traits. Factors like IQ, aggression, impulsivity, and the so-called “dark triad” cluster of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are all more overrepresented among men, particularly at the extremes. Put simply, men are the more variable sex: the bell curve for women is tighter around the mean, while men are more scattered across the tails. The practical outcome of this is straightforward: there will always be more men than women whose traits render them unwilling or unable to function within the structures of organized society, especially in modern, bureaucratic, rule-bound systems that demand conformity and self-regulation.
This isn’t speculative or novel. We see the evidence all around us. Men are disproportionately found in both the highest and lowest echelons of achievement: overrepresented among geniuses, innovators, and entrepreneurs, but also among the homeless, the chronically unemployed, and the incarcerated. The prison population alone makes this imbalance impossible to ignore: across every society, men vastly outnumber women behind bars. In other words, male volatility is a structural fact of human populations, and the phenomenon of men “dropping out” is not an aberration of modernity but an enduring consequence of sexual dimorphism in psychology and behavior. As Camille Paglia famously remarked “There is no female Jack the Ripper, for the same reason there is no female Mozart.”
Related to this variability is the basic hormonal profile of men compared to women. Without going too deep into endocrinology, the higher prevalence of testosterone in men tends to promote behaviors that are often read as aggressive, impulsive, or anti-social in domesticated environments. This is not unique to humans, across the animal kingdom, sex-linked hormone ratios consistently produce males who are more difficult to socialize, regulate, or contain. In many species, males are the ones more prone to fighting, wandering off, or resisting hierarchies. Modern society, for all its comforts, functions in some sense like a vast system of captivity: an elaborate network of rules, constraints, and norms that require individuals to suppress instincts in order to fit into stable, predictable patterns of life. And, for better or worse, this artificial environment is one that women, hormonally and temperamentally, tend to adapt to more easily than men. There is a reason, after all, why male pets are almost universally desexed.
Thus, for all these reasons, there will always be a subsection of men at any given time who are fundamentally unsuited to structured society. Some are too low in IQ, others perhaps too high; some too impulsive, others too antisocial. In short, their psychological profiles make them maladapted to the kind of regulated, rule-bound existence that complex societies demand. In a state of nature, however, this very variability in male psychology was adaptive. It allowed the species to maintain resilience, flexibility, and a broader repertoire of survival strategies. The presence of outliers such as risk-takers, wanderers, fighters, eccentrics etc. conferred an advantage to the tribe as a whole, even if it came at the cost of stability for individuals. In modernity, by contrast, these same outlier traits tend to be maladaptive for the individuals who possess them, cutting them off from the pathways to stability, success, and belonging.
The proportion of men who end up “dropped out” at any given moment is not fixed; it fluctuates with broader social and economic conditions. In times of abundance and strong social cohesion, even marginal men can often limp along or find niches where they can survive and sometimes even thrive. This was especially true for the postwar generations, who came of age in perhaps the most prosperous economic window in history. Many men who, under harsher conditions, might have been cast adrift or gone their own way were instead buoyed along by cheap housing, plentiful jobs, and broad-based growth. But as conditions revert back to historical norms such as slower growth, rising inequality and weaker communal bonds, the proportion of unassimilable men grows. And unless something changes, it will likely continue to grow in the years ahead.
Men, Historically:
Who, then, were these men historically who found themselves unadapted, or even maladapted to structured society, and thus deemed “surplus” or of limited use? Across history, there were in fact many roles such men could fall into, depending largely on their particular psychological and temperamental traits. Some became vagrants or vagabonds, drifting aimlessly from place to place; others turned to violence and adventure as mercenaries, pirates, or bandits. More solitary or spiritually inclined men sometimes withdrew as hermits or monks, while restless types struck out as settlers, frontiersmen, or explorers on the margins of the known world. In more modern times, they appeared as tramps and hobos wandering industrial nations, or as bachelor subcultures in Victorian Britain and Qing China, forming male-only worlds of taverns, lodges, and secret societies.
Pulling up at the Qing dynasty bachelor club
These roles varied enormously in nature and in the kind of men they attracted, reflecting the broad “tails” of male psychology. Perhaps the more aggressive or impulsive gravitated toward soldiering, raiding, or piracy, while the more introspective, high-IQ outliers found meaning in monastic life. And while these men were often feared, pitied, or treated as social problems, their existence was not entirely useless. In fact, many societies found ways to harness these outlier male traits, whether channeling violence into military service, turning wanderlust into exploration and colonization, or transforming misfits into religious specialists. In this sense, the history of surplus men is not just one of exclusion, but also of societies improvising ways to make use of those who could not easily be domesticated.
You may have realised from that list that many of those roles no longer really exist in modern society, I will touch more upon that shortly, however I’d like to focus now on briefly exploring the Hobo subculture, as it is one of the most recent phenomena and gives a good insight into how and why many men decided to go down his path of living society.
Hobos:
The hobo is perhaps the clearest modern example of a surplus male subculture, and in many ways archetypal. Emerging in the late 19th century United States and flourishing into the early decades of the 20th, hobos were men who dropped out of settled life and took to the rails in search of work or simply a way to survive. At the height of the Great depression there was close to two million hobos, representing around 10% of the total young male population. Hobos carved out their own itinerant world: riding freight trains across the country, congregating in makeshift camps known as “hobo jungles,” and passing down a code of symbols etched on fences or buildings to signal danger, friendliness, or opportunity to others on the road. They lived precarious lives constantly at risk from brutal railroad police, hunger, or exposure, but it seemed that some men seemed to relish this and preferred this over trying to eek out a living in the economically depressed times.
There were even well-documented cases of young men from comfortable, even privileged backgrounds who voluntarily embraced the hobo life. Jefferson Davis, the son of a wealthy Ohio industrialist, famously abandoned his inheritance to become known as the “King of the Hobos,” while Jack London deliberately rode the rails in his youth and later immortalised the experience in his classic memoir The Road (1907). Some historians have suggested that the origins of the hobo subculture can be traced back to the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, when thousands of dislocated young soldiers, already accustomed to the camaraderie and mobility of camp life, found themselves unwilling, or unable to return to the routines of settled society. Whatever its roots, hobo culture developed into a fully fledged subculture with its own slang, songs, codes of conduct, and even a symbolic system of carved or chalked signs to help fellow travelers navigate danger or opportunity. In this sense, hobos fit neatly into the broader pattern of bachelor subcultures across history: self-contained male worlds, defined by mobility, codes, and rituals. I can think of modern parallels that are somewhat similar, though much less in scale?
To me, this points toward an enduring archetype of male bachelor societies, a primal pattern that can be traced deep into prehistory. One could imagine it harking back to the “wolf packs” often celebrated by the history nerds of the far right: surplus males, unable or unwilling to adapt to the constraints of settled life, banding together in rough brotherhoods on the margins. These groups lived hard, itinerant lives, but in many ways such conditions suited their temperaments better than domesticity. Their existence was always precarious and on the edge of survival, yet it also gave them freedom to carve out roles for themselves that mainstream society could not or would not provide. Some succeeded and even thrived by raiding, exploring, soldiering, or innovating; others simply perished. But the recurring theme is clear: whenever society produces men it cannot absorb, those men tend to regroup into bachelor bands, rough male-only societies that sit just outside the borders of civilization.
As I mentioned at the outset, this phenomenon should not be read purely as a negative, nor as an indictment of the men who cannot, or will not adapt to the structures of society. As mentioned many of the very traits that make some men unfit for settled life can, under different conditions, prove to be enormous advantages. Rome itself was founded by a band of outcasts, criminals, and adventurers who forged not only a city but eventually the greatest empire in history. Alexander the Great famously remarked, upon meeting Diogenes the Cynic living half-naked in a barrel, that if he were not Alexander he would wish to be Diogenes, a recognition that even radical rejection of society can embody a kind of strength. One could also point to the conquistadors like Hernán Cortés, reckless and often socially marginal men who went on to reshape entire continents. Again and again, history shows that the raw, difficult traits of men who fall outside the boundaries of polite society commonly through traits such as restlessness, aggression, eccentricity, defiance can, when harnessed, become a vital and even revitalising force.
At the same time, it must be remembered that these figures are the rare exceptions. For every Diogenes, there are countless men who retreat into obscurity; for every Cortés, far more vanish into poverty, addiction, or despair. The outliers who go on to remake the world are only a small fraction of the broader population of men who fail to integrate. Most remain: misfits at the margins, whose traits burn out in self-destruction rather than transforming into civilisation’s next engine of change. Nevertheless, it is vital for the species that such differentiation among men exists. Individually, to fall at the extreme tails of the psychological or behavioural spectrum may often be a personal tragedy: the man who is too reckless, too restless, or too eccentric to fit within the ordinary rhythms of society usually pays a heavy price for it. Yet when viewed in the aggregate, these very outliers serve a crucial evolutionary and civilisational function. They inject variability, unpredictability, and creative force into the human population. They are the ones who test limits, who explore new frontiers, who challenge stagnant norms. Even if most burn out or self-destruct, the small minority who succeed can shift the trajectory of entire cultures. In that sense, the existence of such men is not simply a social problem to be lamented, but a structural necessity for the resilience and progression of mankind.
Tying it Back and Concluding Thoughts:
We have come a long way from responding to the dating complaints of a thirty-something journalist in New York, but circling back, I hope Ms. Drucker can now see the bigger picture of why it is so difficult for her to find a man willing to commit!To recap, the latest data showing male disengagement is not the beginning of some unprecedented collapse, but a reversion to conditions that have always existed in one form or another. The tails of male psychology have always produced men who drop out of society. The only difference is that, in an unusually prosperous postwar window, these men could be absorbed, at least partially. That window is now closed.
If I were to hazard a prediction, I suspect we will see the revival of bachelor subcultures in new forms. At present, the outlets for surplus men are thin: crime or digital addiction. Yet subcultures are already germinating on the internet: MGTOW, incels etc. strange, digital-age analogues of the old bachelor brotherhoods. Whether these ever spill back into physical reality is unclear. Graffiti crews, for example, already show shades of a modern urban bachelor culture: young men, marginal, restless, bonded together through risk, code, and transgression. But there is a complicating factor. We live in one of the oldest, most bureaucratic societies in history, where rambunctiousness and risk-taking are on the decline. The world of the hobo or the mercenary band may not easily reappear under such conditions.
Still, history suggests that when society produces a surplus of men it cannot absorb, new outlets eventually form. Perhaps nothing will come of it, and today’s disconnected men will simply fade into private despair. Or perhaps, as in ages past, a fraction of them will find ways to redirect their volatility into something larger, a revitalising force that reshapes society itself. Only time will tell.
type thing. And that's without considering the laws in some insane states, like California or Massachusetts. 
