23,000 survey results are in.
Men are lonely. Maybe it’s because they are marrying later and working harder. Maybe it’s because “women are outpacing them in school and at work.” Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to text or because they don’t have old boys’ clubs anymore.
We’ve read all sorts of takes on mental health over the last several years, but few of them are substantiated by hard data. That’s why we at The Argument decided to conduct a study over the last few months centered around mental health.
Over the course of three national surveys of registered voters conducted between August and December, we asked 15 questions — five per survey — centered around loneliness, mental health, anxiety, and socialization. Each response was mapped to a numerical value between -1 and 1, with -1 indicating the most antisocial and 1 indicating the most social response.
With nearly 23,000 responses to survey questions distributed over more than 4,500 individual survey respondents, our dataset is rich and lends itself well to subgroup analysis.
Here’s what we found.
This is the traditional story about the male loneliness crisis: Millions of young men are increasingly antisocial, fueled by unique and accelerating feelings of loneliness and isolation, along with toxic podcasters in the manosphere. In the process, they’re finding it harder to make friends, harder to trust others, and harder to interact with the rest of society.
A lot of people meet this with denial. For example, a study from the Young Men Research Initiative analyzed the top Bluesky posts on male loneliness and found that a large chunk of them either denied that the problem existed, blamed men for it, or simply belittled the crisis as overblown.
But there is a loneliness crisis in America, and the evidence in support is increasingly undeniable. What our polling reveals, though, is that it’s a youth loneliness crisis, rather than a male loneliness crisis. Age, not gender, shows far greater correlation with antisocial attitudes and beliefs. Younger voters — both male and female — are increasingly paralyzed by anxiety and fear, and they are finding it harder and harder to socialize.
In fact, when you look at the data, the “antisocial crisis,” as I like to call it, is actually most pronounced among young women, who experience the highest rates of social isolation.
Put another way, it’s true that young men are facing a loneliness crisis. But it’s part of a broader loneliness crisis that young voters are facing in general, and the numbers suggest that young women might actually be hit even harder, even though that story hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention.
Let’s dive in further by looking at the results from our study on the questions concerning emotional distress. To measure this, we presented respondents with a set of statements and asked them to mark whether they agreed or disagreed with each one as a description of themselves1:
The gender split is striking, and it is robustly substantiated by the existing medical research. But it is age, rather than gender, which marks the determining axis once again. Just take a look at how bad these numbers are among young people — both young men and young women were significantly more distressed than the country at large.
