Yes, There’s a Male Loneliness Epidemic

Mass shootings point to the undeniable truth

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel it’s warmth.” — African proverb

These are dark times…

On Saturday, October 28th, 2023 a 20-year-old man was found dead in the women’s bathroom in a Colorado adventure park. He died by his a self-inflicted gun shot. The dude was armed to the teeth and ready to carry out a mass shooting and instead, he turned the gun on himself before the park even opened. His name was Diego Medina and before he ended it he scrawled something on the wall. “I am not a killer, I just wanted to get into the caves.” He had snuck into the park in the middle of the night and etched his internal struggle onto the wall before making his choice.

And thank God he didn’t, unlike the shooting in a movie theater in Aurora Colorado that many of us remember from 2012. This dude killed 12 people and injured 70 others in another horrific Colorado public shooting. Seriously Colorado, what is happening over there?

I remember where I was in April of 1999 when the news of Columbine high school dropped, that’s an entirely different story in my life of lost identity that I won’t tell here. The unthinkable happened in Colorado. Never had I imagined as a youngster that high school students would collect some guns and ammo and unload them on their peers and teachers. It didn’t seem real, honestly, it was too horrible to think of. That was nearly a quarter of a century ago and now it’s become a familiar part of this waking dystopia that we live in.

“We’re collectively suffering at the hands of separation”

Mentally disturbed men

There have always been guns in the United States and it’s only been in the last 25 years that guns were taken into schools and used on children. What changed? The guns didn’t change the people did. This isn’t a story that is advocating for gun rights or gun ownership, don’t start, I’m just pointing out an irrefutable fact. For centuries we had guns and no school shootings and then one day, they just started happening. Guns didn’t change in this country. People did. Our society changed and the individuals within that society changed.

I won’t try to skirt around the fact that mass shootings are almost universally, with a few exceptions, perpetrated by males. I also won’t try and make excuses for them. I’m just as hurt, horrified and angry, if not more so, than all of you about it but the conversation becomes even more frustrating when I hear people, especially women, say that men aren’t suffering from chronic loneliness and isolation or when men’s mental health becomes a joke or something to mock or laugh about. Because it is and to say otherwise is dishonest.

Even when we consider the hysterical and poorly thought out COVID measures that demanded or even required our isolation, we still sometimes refuse to acknowledge the loneliness and isolation problems. I’ve even heard people say that mass shooters don’t have mental health issues. Fucking what? Tell me you don’t know shit about mental illness without telling me you don’t know jack fucking shit about mental illness. Jesus.

Seriously, how is enacting a mass shooting not an obvious sign of a mentally disturbed mind?!

Men aren’t just physically isolated, they’re emotionally isolated. They tend to open up to the women in their lives which often proves to be a colossal mistake. They learn their lessons quickly to just keep things to themselves which is the worst thing they can do so they keep it all held in and all to themselves. They suffer in silence and they suffer alone while they continue to deteriorate.

This way of life isn’t normal…

We’re not supposed to live this way. We’re not built for it. Nobody really seems to know how long humans have actually been around but it’s been a long ass time. With the last count, we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years and as far as any of us know, this is the first time that humans have eaten highly processed foods produced in factories, drinking fluoridated water, spending most of our time sitting down, inside most of the time under artificial light. This is not how humans have lived, it’s neither natural nor normal.

We’re also not built to be this disconnected from each other. We’re collectively suffering at the hands of separation. Humans need each other. They need community, that’s how they thrive and survive and it’s how they experience love, connection, meaning and purpose. Most of us, myself included, are far too isolated. Meditation helps keep me sane, I’m just saying. Even when we’re in relationships, we’re far too focused on winning, being the one in control and keeping an upper hand in order to avoid vulnerability. We’re not built for that either, it’s killing us.

COVID isolated us. Our overlords in their infinite wisdom told us to wear two masks but didn’t tell us to take care of our mental health. They demanded our isolation and now we’re ripping ourselves and each other apart even more than we were before.

When we’re isolated and lonely, our destructive thoughts will start to implant themselves into us. An isolated mind is fertile ground for all kinds of crazy thoughts that tend to ruminate endlessly, making loops and circles, picking up momentum as they go around and around. Like an infection, the conditions are perfect when one is isolated to become ill and lose themselves to that illness.

Social media is more like a zoo habitat that’s there to simulate natural conditions but a zoo habitat is only good enough for the animals to stay alive. Social media only simulates life and relationships or, more appropriately, a bastardized version of it. Like a zoo, we’re audience to the neuroticism that people choose to put on display and, in turn, we project our own interpretation of that person based on tiny snapshots of them, pointing and judging as we go.

It’s not supposed to be this way, we’re not built for this so of course we’re seeing widespread breakdown of mental health.

Sitting alone in a mountain shack

The typical profile of a mass shooter is like a rubber stamp. Almost all of them are described in a way that is akin to the Unabomber. He’s a loner. People describe him as detached, isolated, withdrawn, aloof and creepy. This is how Diego Medina’s brother described him exactly. Isolated and reclusive. His brother also added that his family tried to reach him and connect with him, but they couldn’t. He pushed them away and shut them out. Same story, different dude. He was isolated and lonely. He shut the door on his human relationships.

Recently, a client told me about somebody he knew who gave off “mass shooter vibes” and when I asked what was meant by this statement, he mentioned these same factors. Withdrawn, isolated, aloof and with a big side serving an obvious eroding mental health situation. Others can see the signs, though he may not and even if he does see them, he doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know where to turn.

Again, this profile is universally reported by those who knew these guys before they carried out these atrocities. We hear it over and over and over again. Yes, males are isolated and lonely and if they’ve never been properly cared for or attended to they are going to be subjected to their own acute psychosis. And in case I haven’t laid it out properly, that’s a bad thing.

And yet, we are continually subjected to the individuals or the self-appointed “influencers” who want to make a joke of men’s mental health, insisting that men don’t have problems and that they aren’t suffering from chronic loneliness and isolation. Even with the blood-soaked evidence right in front of them, they double down on this bullshit narrative. There are some obvious mental health struggles here that need to be addressed, looked at and talked about with some radical honesty instead of mocked, minimized or outright denied. If all these mass shootings aren’t evidence enough that men’s mental health is in a bad state then I don’t what the fuck else to tell you. If you insist on a continuing denial of their mental health in the face of all of this horror then you may want to start asking yourself some tough questions about your own mental state.

What might trouble a lot of people, is the number of young males over the years who admitted directly to me that they had harbored fantasies of shooting up a public place including teenagers who wanted to shoot up their own school. I daresay that I may have averted one or two of them and given them some guidance on how to manage their mental health issues instead of doing the unthinkable. The mind and the ego play a lot of dirty tricks on us and without an outside perspective, we can fall prey to our own delusions.

Inner demons

The human mind is spooky. Sometimes, it seems as though there is an evil outside influence speaking to us like the classic trope of the angel and the devil sitting on opposite shoulders, whispering in our ears and tugging us back and forth. In all of my years working in mental health, I continue to find a haunting element to the human mind, thoughts and psychology. It seriously seems sometimes as though people are influenced by literally demons who poke, prod and manipulate them down the darkest of mental paths.

I realize how incredibly unscientific that sounds but I swear to God, there are times when this seems to be the most accurate and fitting way to explain certain human idiosyncrasies. Those of you who have struggled with some significant mental health issues and who have worked to recognize those mental health issues are likely to agree with me. Feel free to chime in here. We don’t provide nearly enough information and personal education on how to recognize these dark elements and how to successfully navigate them without acting out in some way. I think a likely explanation for this is that we are following some seriously sick and fucked up people who are suffering from these conditions.

Narcissistic personality disorder has been one of those particularly spooky sides of mental illness for me. Someone online once asked if narcissists were victims of demonic possession and while I honestly don’t know, I can’t rule it out. If demonic possession isn’t real, I can see why a lot of people would think that it is real. Between their behavior, their treatment of others, their inability to practice self-restraint, their duplicitousness, the emptiness behind their eyes and their ability to essentially suck people dry is… well… fucking spooky.

Putting out fires with gasoline

What’s interesting and important to know is how some of these boys have told me how they are embroiled in their inner war. A war that we’ve all experienced where, again, we have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Diego Medina scrawled that inner war on the wall of a public bathroom before he died alone and tortured by his own mind. “I’m not a killer,” leaving us to be haunted by what might have been bouncing around in that troubled mind of his. He was armed to the teeth with guns and bombs, he was ready to take a lot of people out and he arguably made a more honorable choice. I’m sad for him but infinitely grateful that innocent people didn’t become collateral damage to his secret war.

“Isolation is essentially gasoline for mental illness”

We’ve all experienced this inner conflict, we can all relate to it and we should arguably be able to provide some compassion and empathy for each other as we struggle with it. Nope. That’s not how it goes these days. We are in dire need of compassion and empathy and what we get is a ton of blaming, shaming, criticism and hatred. We’re failing each other because we’re refusing to remember that each human has an inner universe that is as deep and as complex as our own. The state of our young men is a reflection of our collective failure. We are failing ourselves and each other.

Loneliness and isolation are the most effective accelerant for mental illness. If you’re losing the inner war then God help you if you also experience excessive and prolonged isolation and loneliness. The worst thing you can do is pull yourself away from everyone else, especially those who care about you. That’s guaranteed to make it a whole hell of a lot worse and make it worse fast.

Psychologists have known this about humans for a long ass time, by the way, prolonged isolation can cause a lot of intense mind fuckery. We’re social creatures and our mental wellness requires supportive people in our immediate circles. That’s just how we’re built and the more we deny that need to ourselves or others, the more we’re begging for a total deterioration of mental health and then we’re forced to absorb the horrors that follow.

Young males are struggling with this exact issue en masse. Trust me, the number of males opening fire in public is a tiny percentage of those who seriously consider doing it. If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will but I’m also certain that the vast majority of them are working hard to talk themselves out of it and I’m also absolutely 100% certain that if we worked collectively to support them rather than hate them, we’d help them win those inner wars.

They don’t want to enact such violence but they also can’t explain why they feel compelled to carry this kind of violence out. Their minds are chaotic and broken. They need help but help has become extremely difficult to come by.

Doggy pile!

It’s now become cool and trendy to shit on men and there are more than enough women these days who are competing for these social media brownie points for how much they can shit on men and dogpile the bullshit narrative about men and how they don’t experience real problems. Some of them go so far as to say that men don’t have emotions or that they are incapable of feeling emotions, a despicable expression directed at a demographic that is obviously suffering and sadly, it takes a special kind of psychopathy to kick people when they’re already down. We don’t just do it individually, it’s like a cultural norm now to not only be shitty toward other people but always see it in other people and never ourselves. We’re all fucked up even under ideal conditions but our current conditions are less than ideal and so we live in this cesspool of hatred and this rot.

“Mass shootings are a very new phenomenon, they aren’t just a reflection of how boys are failing but it’s a reflection of how we’re failing our boys”

What boys need is support from people who genuinely care about them and want to help them with this inner war. The best way to approach the mass shooting issue is one of support. I know how much that statement will spark the venomous hatred and contempt people have for them. I don’t blame you for feeling that way but this is the truth I am asking you to accept. The only way out of this is to take a more supportive approach. If you’re incapable of doing so, that’s fine, completely, just keep your mouth shut and stop knocking them down.

We should be looking past their struggle and we should find the person caught in that storm so that we can pull them out of it. We struggle to care about others and see the value in others because we are failing to do that for ourselves. Instead of reaching these troubled boys, we scold them, blame them, yell at them, shame them, knock them down, label them and demoralize them. This is the absolute worst thing that we should be doing. All it does is plunge them deeper into the dark abysses of their minds, deeper into pain and anger and deeper into isolation. We shouldn’t be shoving them out, we should be embracing them and bringing them in. It’s the only way. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. It’s the only way.

Maybe he just needs a hug

In 2019, Coach Keanon Lowe was in the right place at the right time when he came around the corner and encountered 18-year-old student Angel Granados-Diaz in the hall of the high school where he worked as a coach and a security guard. He practically ran into Angel as he was entering the school with a rifle wrapped in a blanket. The whole incident was caught on the school’s security camera. Coach Lowe acted quickly, closing the distance on Angel, pulling the gun away from him and into the hands of another faculty member but it’s what happened next that caused the video to go viral. Coach Lowe pulled this kid in close and hugged him and to everyone’s surprise, the kid embraced him in return and hugged him back. Later, police discovered that there was only one round in the gun. Angel wasn’t there to kill anyone but himself though he apparently wanted to give a few people a lifetime's worth of nightmares in the process.

Coach Lowe was a big-time hero that day and he probably gave this kid the number one thing that he needed, more than anything. A hug and just a sprinkling of unconditional positive regard. Despite the horror that was likely to unfold, Coach Lowe looked past all of it and connected with the person who needed to be supported and needed to be cared about and that makes him a hero.

Shitting on men publicly constantly isn’t heroic or cool. It’s shitty. It doesn’t make you clever, unique or cool. There’s no way other way to put it. It’s just being shitty and it’s putting it on public display.

What we need, more than anything, is for people to look at these boys with compassion and to see the person in need and what we get is more and more hatred directed at them before they even have a chance to make sense of their own mind and their own emotions. Sadly, we’ve gotten to the point where it seems a lot to ask to just treat men with some decency and compassion.

What if I told you that greater care and support for your fellow humans was likely to contribute to less public violence, would that motivate you to just treat people better?

Women don’t know us

In case you haven’t noticed, there is a high percentage of males, especially the younger ones who are more than just a bit desperate for approval from women. There’s a long boring reason for this that I won’t get into here but it’s a troublesome dynamic because there aren’t enough of them who know how to be their own person. They only see worth in themselves as long as they are getting some kind of validation from women even if that validation comes in the form of being shit on.

Their sense of self and their identity is a tiny pinpoint of light in the absence of a female in their lives which is a problem. It’s a big problem. They don’t know who they are without women telling them. It’s a big problem because there is a virtual tsunami of women shitting on men these days. Their sense of identity hinges on what women have to say about them and women aren’t saying anything positive and if they do, it’s a rare pleasant exception.

Starting at very young ages, males are subjected to messages about men and masculinity hearing anything and everything about being evil, toxic, violent, worthless and unwanted but it doesn’t end there. We’re told that we don’t have emotions, don’t have feelings and that we’re stupid. All the fucking time. While I’ve personally learned to tune most of it out, it still troubles me that this giant hoard of women is telling us how to be men as though they are some kind of authority on the matter.

It’s devastating to these boys when women are dogging them and constantly reciting the same harmful rhetoric at them about how hated they are, how worthless they are and so on. It puts them in a dark place. If there’s one thing I’d like to put into their heads it’s that nobody is allowed to define them even though they might try. Nobody can truly define a person except that person.

Boys wouldn’t be enacting out these acts of violence if they had any sense of self-respect of self-love and how do we expect them to develop any of that when people are constantly hating on them?

I’m convinced that women know how badly these men want to be liked and it fuels their nasty behavior toward them. Women know that men want to be liked and they see an excellent opportunity to cut somebody down. It’s a powerful thing and we all crave power regardless of who we are. We all experience powerlessness in our lives and we all attempt to regain that power in some seriously fucked up ways. This is probably the simplest explanation as to why we have such a troubled history.

Women are relentless too. They don’t know when to take their foot off the gas, they don’t know when they’ve gone too far and they might not even care if they do realize it. If there’s one thing I learned about bullies from middle school it’s that the girls would never let up or give you a day off. Ever. They never missed an opportunity to cut you down when the male bullies would give you a break here and there. The other difference is that when you get sick of the male bully you can haul off and sock him in the mouth but society holds no space for a good enough reason to hit a woman.

What’s worse is that we absorb this miserable behavior from women while being gas-lit and constantly hearing about how great they are. When women act like sociopaths it’s because they’re brave and strong or something? That’s what they keep telling us anyway.

Do you know how to spot a strong independent woman? Oh don’t worry, she’ll tell you.

I recently saw a video of a woman acting out in public and the caption said that she was showing “toxic masculinity.” You seriously can’t make this shit up. When a woman is being harmful and destructive she’s acting like men? That’s where we’ve gotten to. If it’s bad, label it as masculine. Our boys are absorbing this shit every day. They are met, every fucking day, with the coldness and the hatred directed at them and then we wonder why they’re suffering mentally.

Here in 2023 the highest value women are the most predatory and narcissistic women. They’re not to blame for their poor choices. Their poor choices are glamorized and if we refuse to cater to destructive women it’s because we’re misogynistic or something. If they want to use people up and leave them for dead it’s great or if they want to shit on struggling men that’s fine too. In fact, some women are celebrated and elevated by other women for this despicable behavior.

If she makes everything about her it’s because of how strong and independent she is. We celebrate female narcissism these days and I’m honestly more sad for them than angry or hurt. They’re buried in the deception of their egos and nobody is coming for them because they are enabled in this way of living. Nobody is going to rescue them from this destructive spiral. We just stand by and record it with our phones.

We are constantly hearing from women about what it means to be a man or what it means to be a real man when nobody can ever know what another person's experience is like if they haven’t ever walked in their shoes and to believe otherwise is truly an act of narcissism.

Women can’t tell us how to be good men because they’ve never been one. Women don’t know our psychology. They don’t know our minds, they don’t know our emotions. They think they do because they’re subjected to their unchecked egos and an invisible accountability threshold.

Women have an amazing capacity for empathy and intuition but they don’t use it anymore. It’s a wasted gift. They would understand us if they stopped listening so much to their egos and listened to their hearts but again, dead are the days and dead are the arts of things like empathy and intuition. I know there are great women out there but goddammit, they can be hard to find sometimes.

The darkness of a man's mind

Women don’t understand how dark a man’s mind can be. We all have a capacity for evil and for men, it’s buried deep and can often remain hidden. The darkness of a man's mind can only be understood by other men.

Carl Jung, one of the OG’s of modern psychology referred to this as the shadow which is similar to Freud’s theory on the subconscious. I know from experience that the shadow runs deep and it gets extremely dark. Our inner violence can be intense. Mass shootings are an outward reflection of that inner darkness.

Oh, I can hear the feminists now. They will say that we should yell at them, hate them, punish them or even eliminate them. Some of them have even gone so far as to say that men should be rounded up into camps so we can control them. Sorry princess, that’s not going to happen. As the verbal beatings continued, boys pushed through the hurt, the fear and the shame and they turned to violence. Supporting them is the only answer but again, they need the kind of support that only a man can give them because men understand them.

It’s bad enough that women don’t understand this about us but it’s how they react to it when they see it. They often shy away and get upset. We need someone to see us for who we really are in order to successfully harness this inner darkness and women aren’t able to go there with us. Women are afraid of us in our darkness and for good reason. We can really hurt people. Women are afraid of the dudes who put off ‘mass shooter vibes’ as well as they should be. They’re scary. Men can be dangerous, really dangerous. I know, ‘no duh.’ They need guidance from good strong men who aren’t afraid of them. The type of men who are in extremely short supply these days.

It’s such a deeply complex problem and one that often fills me with hopelessness. I understand their struggle. I’ve worked with some really troubled boys in my time and I can say, honestly, I love these kids even though they are dark, angsty and hard to reach.

It’s hard to know where to go from here, it really is. It feels hopeless and futile but I know this and this alone. I can’t just sit by and say nothing. I’ll wrap this up with two simple suggestions for the guys…

1. Don’t isolate. You have to find some support. You’ll have to make yourself vulnerable but choose carefully. Look carefully for good men. Stop turning to women. I say again. You must not isolate.
2. Learn to support yourself by working on your issues. Learn to face them even if it’s hard and if it’s painful. Make it your identity, make it your purpose. Don’t trust every thought and feeling that floats through you. You have look past your own hurt, your own anger and your own darkness.

I believe in you. I honestly do. I’m not just saying that and no I don’t have to know you to believe in you but more than anything you must believe in yourself. Go get it worked out. Go win your inner way. It can be done. I know it can be done because I did it. Nobody can do it for you but you.

Your hero is looking back at you in the mirror. Be safe guys.