In Peter Pan, Wendy asks Peter:

“But where do you live mostly now?”

“With the lost boys.”

“Who are they?”

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I’m captain.”

“What fun it must be!”

“Yes,” said cunning Peter, “but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship.”

“Are none of the others girls?”

“Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”

The lost boys of Peter Pan are tween orphans who grow up without adult supervision in Neverland. They’re mostly lovable rapscallions, led by Peter through all sorts of adventures. They’re rough around the edges and rambunctious, but they eventually grow up to become judges and office workers.

America is becoming its own Neverland — an Island of Lost Boys of its own. Unfortunately, our lost boys are a little older, much more lost, and sometimes dangerous. Our lost boys all too frequently become angry men.

I was prompted to write about this by the fact that two 18-year-olds — men in the eyes of the law, but, let’s be honest, boys in every other way — decided to buy weapons of war and murder as many people as they could a little while ago. One attacked a supermarket, the other an elementary school. There are a lot of things that made these attacks so horrific — most significantly our country’s insane gun culture. But one factor, and I think it’s a significant one, is the fact that so many of our country’s young men are broken.

Trouble stemming from lost boys isn’t a new American phenomenon. It’s an established principle of political science — supported by studies that look back as far as the 1600s — that countries have higher chances of terrorism, civil war, rising crime, and political chaos if their populations contain lots of unmarried young men without clear economic prospects. Commonly, societies respond to this phenomenon with increasing authoritarianism, which is both fueled by and a reaction to the chaos caused by angry young men. Sound familiar?

When there’s a mass shooting — as I write this, there’s one happening in Tulsa; I’m sure there will be more before I publish — it goes without saying that the perpetrator is male. This is also the case in the smaller shooting incidents that kill tens of thousands of people a year. Boys are not just more likely to do the shooting, they’re more likely to be hurt by it. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, “Eighty-six percent of children and teens who died from gunfire in 2019 were boys. Boys were six times more likely than girls to die in gun homicides. Black boys were 18 times more likely to be killed in gun homicides than white boys.”

Boys aren’t just killing each other, they’re killing themselves. In 1960, 8.2 boys and men ages 15–24 out of every 100,000 killed themselves; in 2020, the number was 22.4 The equivalent number for girls — who in our culture are often seen as more vulnerable to mental instability in their teens — was 5.8 in 2020, a quarter of boys’ suicide rate.

Angry young men are at the center of our country’s rising crime rates, and they make up the vast majority of the country’s prisoners — 93.3% of all federal prisoners are men. The people committing these crimes are usually boys and young adults. The peak age for arrest on homicide or drug charges is 19; for rape, it’s 18. Most criminal careers, such as they are, are over by the time the young man hits age 25.

Boys are falling behind girls in their educational attainment, as well. Throughout their school careers, girls are just better at school than boys are. Girls get better grades than boys, and they get in trouble less often. While 88% of girls graduate from high school, only 82% of boys do. Nationally, out of every 10 college students, about six of them are girls. Colleges that, a few decades ago, barred girls from enrolling are now desperate to enroll as many boys as they can to maintain gender parity. All this comes at a time when a college education is more and more necessary for a “good” life.

Boys who miss out on college face bleaker economic prospects than ever before. Many jobs that might have once attracted young men without a college degree — factory work, farming, driving — are now more precarious than ever.

While a young man 50 years ago might have felt comfortable that he could make a comfortable living in a unionized or otherwise stable job, many young men now know that they could be laid off to protect stockholders’ quarterly earnings, or perhaps their job will be shipped overseas. Maybe somebody will train a robot or an algorithm to do what they do. They’re told that the answer is to hustle harder, but I don’t blame them for not believing it. Our economy insectifies workers, especially those who are (mistakenly) considered “unskilled.”

The social world of these young men is shrinking, as well. If they’re not in school and they don’t connect with people at work, young men have a really hard time finding social connections. The number of young men who say that they could “lean on their friends in tough times” was cut in half between 1990 and 2021. Now, young men are much more likely to see their parents as their primary social resource. Marriage and family — which might have once anchored a young man in his 20s— are more and more unlikely as men’s average age at marriage has pushed past 30. An app-based dating environment makes it very difficult for men without stunning looks or impressive jobs to get even a chance to talk to prospective partners.

It seems bad that many young men leave a stifling, frustrating educational system at or before age 18 only to find a lonely life with a precarious, disappointing job, few friends, and disappointing romantic prospects. What do many of them do to distract themselves from this reality?

Well, many of our boys escape. They use drugs and alcohol. The gender gap in drug overdoses increased over the last decade; men are now 2.5 times more likely to die from an overdose than women. They look at porn, which distorts their attitudes toward sex and relationships. And they disappear into the internet, where they find a facsimile of community. But in many cases, their internet communities lead them down dark rabbit holes full of misinformation, political radicalism, or economic scams.

When young men look for models of masculinity in our culture, they might have a hard time finding good models for how to be a man with a fulfilling life. A young man might fall for one of the following models for manhood on the internet:

• Gamer culture, which elevates entertaining distractions — which are great in moderation — way too much, and is often filled with vitriol toward women.
• Hustle-bro culture, which makes it seem like everybody else is winning the economic race, and that the only reason you’re not is that you’re not working hard enough.
• Performative right-wing masculinity, which is all guns and flags and trucks and anger. It’s a culture dedicated to stoking resentment and behaving belligerently to mask insecurity.

What boys seem not to be finding is a more old-fashioned type of masculinity. Sometimes I see people decrying some of today’s toxic masculinity as a continuation of the “patriarchy,” and I guess that’s true to an extent. But I sometimes think about what my grandfathers — who definitely lived in patriarchy — might have thought about some of today’s expressions of masculinity.

My grandfathers were both tough guys, self-sufficient men of few words. What would they have said about Donald Trump’s thin-skinned, needy pettiness, or Elon Musk’s, well, thin-skinned, needy pettiness? Honestly, they probably wouldn’t have said much. They wouldn’t have had time for the tinny, empty, performative version of manhood that is so common today.

It’s easy to resent the men in our society who cause so much harm. But we should remember that these angry young men start as lost boys. It’s not entirely their fault that they’re more likely to fall out of their prams than girls. Maybe we need better prams.

We need to start working to make ours a society where young men believe they’ll be able to build a life with meaning. This encompasses a wide range of possible solutions:

• A culture that celebrates manhood, especially the types of manhood we’d like to see. Let’s have fewer assholes with money and guns and more men who are good fathers, hard workers, and responsible members of society.
• An educational system that doesn’t just ask boys to be more like girls. How can we get boys to be more interested in school? Probably not by pumping them full of ADHD drugs and punishing them. Schools need to think about ways to meet boys halfway.
• Jobs that provide stability, dignity, and a living wage. Many people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder feel like they could enter free fall at any moment. We need corporations that commit to employing people in jobs with dignity and stability, and unions to hold them accountable.
• A politics that responds to people. A lot of young men feel they’re at the mercy of a system that doesn’t care what they want. And I can’t say they’re wrong. The less our politics seems in touch with the wishes of the people, the more likely those people are to become disaffected.

The young mass shooters in our society are just the most horrific consequence of the fact that we’ve become an island of lost boys. If we can reach them, we just might be able to solve a lot of our society’s most vexing problems.

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