Digital isolation is crushing young men — fraternities hold a proven solution

Throughout recent decades, the gender conversation in the West has blamed one consistent villain: men. When times were good, masculinity was dismissed as an unearned privilege. When times turned darker, it was rebranded as toxic. Beneath every hashtag and viral moment, the same warning echoed: collectively and individually, men are an impediment to women’s safety, prosperity and fulfillment.

What surely started as a sincere attempt to encourage genuine equality among the sexes and correct course in places where injustice and cruelty occurred ended up veering far off-course, as these things often do. Suddenly, masculinity — a biological reality a male has no more say over than breathing — was qualified as either healthy or destructive, trapping men and boys in a cycle of constantly proving their harmlessness to females around them.

Now, splashy media headlines and bestselling books are sounding the alarm: young men are suffering. While there are some who foolishly insist that any attention paid to the plight of men overlooks the systemic inequalities facing women, there is a growing consensus across disciplines and the political spectrum that imparts long-overdue social permission for immediate concern for men and boys.

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The urgency is no hyperbole. In a recent poll conducted for the inaugural Symposium on Young American Men, Cygnal discovered that 57% of males 16 to 28 rate their mental health as “fair,” “poor” or “very poor.” Nearly half of the nationwide survey’s 1,000 respondents said they had two or fewer friends, while 11% have no friends at all.

Their loneliness is due in part to a pervasive trade of meaningful relationships for shallow digital engagement. Cygnal found that 50% were engrossed in online recreational activities for at least five hours daily, and 45% dedicated at least three hours per day exclusively to YouTube. Meanwhile, 48% of Gen Z males spend five or fewer hours per week interacting with others in-person or participating in social activities, and 4 in 10 don’t have a male mentor.

These data reveal a generation increasingly disconnected from the very fabric that has historically sustained young men through life’s trials: earnest human connection, multigenerational learning and community belonging. This epidemic of isolation doesn’t merely represent a social inconvenience. It is nothing short of a civilizational crisis whose most intimate burdens are felt in families, romantic relationships, workplaces and communities.

Yet amid this bleak landscape, there exists a proven model that consistently delivers the exact opposite outcomes — the ones our leaders should want for all young people. Fraternity men report dramatically different experiences than their non-affiliated peers, demonstrating that the right kind of structured community, when applied broadly, can reverse these troubling trends.

Those who belong to a fraternity on a college or university campus experience something remarkably absent in the wider youth population: balanced living grounded in relationships with others. Fraternity collegians and alumni are more likely to limit recreational online hours (36% spend more than six hours online daily, compared to 53% of non-affiliated men) and spend more time engaging in in-person activities (60% dedicate at least six hours each week socializing with others, compared to 49% of non-affiliated men).

They are also significantly more likely to say their lives are going the way they had envisioned they would (64% fraternity, 57% non-affiliated men). They’re very likely to have a male mentor (71% fraternity, 42% non-affiliated) and maintain close friendships (64% of fraternity men have three or more close friends, compared to 36% of non-affiliated men). And their mental health is leaps and bounds better than their peers, assessing their mental health more positively (53% positive, 14% negative) compared to young men overall (41% positive, 24% negative).

These aren’t merely marginal improvements from the general Gen Z population. The data demonstrate a fundamental difference in how young men experience their formative years and how joining a single-sex group catalyzes patently better social and emotional well-being for them.

Fraternities haven’t reinvented the wheel. They are simply creating the frameworks humans have always relied upon for personal fulfillment and growth. They promote structure, accountability, shared values, self-governance, mentorship and belonging for a lifetime. In an age when digital isolation has become the default mode of existence, fraternities insist on embodied presence, enduring ritual and communal responsibility.

The lesson here extends beyond fraternity life. All these results showcase how obvious the answer is to young men’s struggles: community. We can see clearly what becomes possible when we protect and expand institutions designed to meet young men where they are and guide them deliberately and responsibly.

As policymakers confront the crisis facing young American men, they must begin with solutions rooted in those real relationships. Hope can be found in rebuilding the kinds of communities, mentorships and brotherhoods that have always helped young men navigate the transition to adulthood and beyond.

The fraternity model proves that when we create spaces where young men can be themselves, both vulnerable and challenged within a context of true brotherhood, they thrive. It’s time we took that lesson seriously and extended it beyond campus gates to reach all young men searching for their place in an increasingly lonely and fragmented world — for their sake and for all of ours.