A couple years ago, while teaching at my local high school, I asked my students why they talked in class rather than getting their work done so they would have more time to socialize after school. One girl responded, “Because we don’t hang out after school.” It was jarring to hear it put so bluntly, as if she, representing her entire generation with her words, lacked the agency to rectify the situation. 

Young people are a relatively rare sight in my small Indiana town of about fifteen thousand. They exist. You can see them driving their cars on the way to work and in line at the Starbucks drive-through. But they have largely disappeared from public view, their time now spent in isolation, in the digital world. Young girls, like my former student, are spending their time on apps like Snapchat or Instagram; the boys are on YouTube, online chat rooms, and first-person-shooter (FPS) games like Fortnite. Admittedly, I am not entirely immune myself. I have spent many hours playing Battlefield 1, a World War I FPS game that launched in 2016. Granted, many of these hours were during the Covid-19 pandemic, when gaming was my only social outlet. The bleakness of the period itself was undoubtedly a driving factor as well. 

The Roots of Social Isolation

Heavy gaming and social media use are not isolated to Generation Z and their successors; it is part of a wider trend, at least in areas like mine. In Rust Belt America, declining mental health for young working-class Americans, particularly white working-class Americans, began in the 1990s. Economic malaise and social normlessness were obvious causes, but more underlying, systemic factors went undetected. Many of the societal trends of the time, such as increasing inequality, social sorting along economic and educational lines, and demographic aging, damaged the social vitality of these places, leaving younger residents more vulnerable to social isolation. Having watched this play out in real time, I sense that many of my peers embraced virtual escapism as a response to pre-existing social isolation, rather than as its cause, thereby normalizing behaviours that Gen Z would later inherit. 

Social isolation was recognized as a leading cause of the “deaths of despair” that came to the forefront of American public discourse following the 2016 election. But examinations of social isolation were rarely critical. They came mostly from centre-left pundits who abused Hannah Arendt’s argument that mass loneliness could cause societies to spiral into authoritarianism to portray American men as harbouring latent support for fascism. Some outliers did account for the economic factors involved in social isolation, but underneath the discourse about job loss and opioid addiction was a reality much less often noticed, let alone acknowledged: Industrial flight triggered a mass intellectual exodus that deprived working-class towns not just of financial capital but of social capital. The civic, political, and religious leaders that had held communities together and safeguarded societal norms—the kind that fortified against the mass familial breakdown triggered by the social upheaval of the 1960s—increasingly flocked to metro areas and college towns where they could be among their own stock. And the ones who chose to remain increasingly segregated themselves in expensive subdivisions and gated communities. Rather than staying behind to tend to communities suffering under globalization, the knowledge economy “winners” made for the hills—literally. 

Of course, for many people, moving to a metro area or college town did not automatically result in their social flourishing. Gentrification in these upwardly mobile places produced a social architecture oriented toward the professional class. For the ordinary wage earner, the emerging social hubs of the 2010s—with their boutique cafés, microbreweries, and yoga studios—were hardly accommodating. Meanwhile, affluent conservatives increasingly withdrew to impenetrable spaces like fraternities and the broader athletics-centred social world of game-day traditions and alumni networks. Not only were working-class Americans becoming less likely to get married or go to church; they were also shut out of the culture-based networks affluent Americans were turning to as substitutes for traditional institutions. 

The move signalled to a generation of youth that life in the hubs was the way of the future, ensuring that those who left for college would never return. In the places they left behind—long before the mass uptick in youth mental-illness rates that accompanied the rise of smartphones—the combination of sustained low birth rates, social sorting, and out-migration were producing stale cultural landscapes determined by the preferences of the numerically (and financially) stronger elderly, societal conditions far from conducive to the social welfare of the teens and young adults who remained. 

The kinds of youth gathering places that thrived in knowledge-economy hubs proved unsustainable in left-behind America, where capital flight depressed consumption and aging demographic structures ossified local cultural ecosystems. In my hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, the unorthodox coffee shop that had become a haven for young people, workers, poets, musicians, and outcasts closed its doors, while the coffee shop across town that catered to affluent Rose-Hulman students thrived. Meanwhile, crackdowns on house shows and youth loitering were initiated by the ranks of the elderly, leaving young people feeling disheartened and rejected. My peers often cynically observed that the old people running our town consistently rejected efforts to stimulate youth social engagement and then wondered why so many of us were turning to drugs. 

Meanwhile, voids left by the disappearance of traditional youth socialization were being filled by new digital mediums as widespread access to high-speed internet facilitated the rise of social media and online multiplayer gaming. The young men who had spent their Friday evenings driving their cars up and down Wabash Avenue as part of an informal youth mixer known as “Cruise the Bash” presumably moved to Call of Duty when the city shut down the event in the 2000s. Young women moved to Facebook and Instagram. Both sexes, deprived of shared spaces, took to online dating. 

All this to say, for Americans who did not transition well into the new economy—particularly men, whose wages have been stagnant for half a century—escapism into the digital world can be a rational response. Indeed, research shows that gamers who turn to games to relieve or evade real-world distress are significantly more prone to developing what clinicians term “internet gaming disorder” than those motivated by other factors. Distant economists, academics, and pundits might be able to grasp why a man in his early twenties who was deemed “not college material” might choose unemployment over working in the low-wage service sector that offers no prospects of financial independence or upward mobility, but thus far they have failed to recognize how aging demographics and “brain drain” have contributed to mass social isolation. How could they, given that they cluster in areas rich in social capital and continually replenished by youth in-migration? 

Gaming as Symptom of Social Isolation

Given this context, gaming merits a more nuanced appraisal than it typically receives. Such discussions rarely account for the declining value of its opportunity costs. Again, the economic aspect is easy enough to grasp, but the social side is much more difficult to quantify. Too often the supposed social alternatives to gaming are presented in idealized or romanticized terms. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, for example, wrote for the Gospel Coalition, “The world you enter online can’t come close to the breathtaking, exhilarating world God has created for you to explore in real life.” She cites evidence that fewer Americans move today compared to past decades, in theory producing more opportunities for men to form lasting in-person friendships. But such statistics are irrelevant outside the hubs because of aging demographic structures that dilute the share of the youth population and ossify the cultural landscape. Even if these men were to form in-person relationships, there would be little for them to do together. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find out that men are opting to explore the vast virtual worlds of Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption over the abandoned buildings that permeate their towns. Gaming is not a root cause of male loneliness. It is a response to it. 

Of course, we must not take agency completely out of the equation, and we must grapple with the fact that problematic gaming afflicts even those who are ostensibly socially and economically equipped to withstand it. That compulsive gaming occurs to the degree that it does demonstrates how proficient companies have become at manipulating men into accepting the opportunity costs associated with heavy gaming. (The same is true of the companies that use similarly predatory tactics to hook masses of women on social media platforms they consistently report make them feel worthless, anxious, and depressed.) Though appeals to agency and character are important, as Matthew Loftus has argued in these pages, they can’t be the sole front in the battle against problematic online behaviours.  

The gaming environment has changed a great deal since I was growing up in the 2000s, when, lacking alternatives, boys would visit friends’ houses and virtually shoot at one another in prolonged split-screen sessions. Online gaming is now modelled to be addictive and exploitative—a collective-action problem, since any game-design firm, were it to take a more ethical approach, would be crushed by its competitors. The share of young people using these platforms has reached a critical mass, so that anyone who opts out risks being excluded from key aspects of youth social life, producing the dreaded fear of missing out, or FOMO. Gen Z is so online that status in the virtual world—associated with impressive performance or exotic avatars—corresponds to status in real life, blurring the distinction between the two. Video games are increasingly based on “pay to win” models (for example, by putting the best weapons behind paywalls). The industry’s widespread adoption of “loot boxes” embeds randomized reward mechanics that closely mirror the psychological dynamics of gambling. American youth are now spending incomprehensible amounts of money on in-game items, often in games that are advertised as “free to play.” In his 2003 book Urban Tribes, Ethan Watters speculated that advertisers in the 1990s were no longer capable of convincing Gen Xers they needed useless products. It appears that tech companies—by manufacturing digital status hierarchies and FOMO—have cracked the code. 

Finding Solutions to Social Isolation

The rise of problematic gaming and digital escapism stems from a combination of push-and-pull factors: declining social and economic opportunities on the one hand and the ever-increasing immersiveness of the virtual world on the other. Any serious effort to address this issue will need to consider how to rebalance the cost-benefit equation—in short, by making the virtual world less addictive and the real world more appealing. A top priority should be to increase economic opportunities for young men, particularly those who lack college degrees. 

Solutions for addressing social media abuse have been advanced by thinkers like Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and Clare Morell. Many of these ideas, such as introducing age restrictions and banning apps from curating feeds based on algorithms, are now being implemented by state governments, in both blue and red states. Addressing problematic gaming, which affects boys and young men at much higher rates than girls and young women, is trickier, since it is intertwined with many simultaneous societal trends. The fact that the societal harms of social media are now being addressed by various state governments, while those associated with gaming have thus far been ignored, suggests that men are held to a higher standard of impulse control. Noble perhaps, but it is worthy of reconsideration given that men are simultaneously struggling socially and economically. A few outliers do exist. Senate Bill 1629, introduced in 2019 by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, would have made it unlawful for game publishers to include microtransactions or loot boxes in games targeting players under eighteen years of age. Hawley’s proposal was ahead of its time and died in committee, but the logic behind it has only grown more obvious. With the gaming industry now deeply reliant on manipulative, casino-style monetization schemes, passing legislation of this kind should be a matter of common sense. 

Over the longer term, we must address the systemic issues that make withdrawal into gaming seem like a rational choice for many young men. Long-term low birth rates and sorting along socio-economic lines have killed youth socialization in most places aside from the few hubs where affluent, college-educated people congregate. The people who reside in those hubs naturally derided Vice President J.D. Vance’s calls to develop policies that would increase native birth rates, but his proposals resonated with people in areas like mine. Just as the addictive design models of gaming and social media are collective-action problems, so too is the vanishing presence of young people outside urban hubs: the more this group withdraws from public view, the more their peers take notice and follow suit. Rebalancing the ratio of young to old would rejuvenate younger generations fed up with the addictive digital mediums that serve as poor surrogates for real-world social interaction. 

Finally, we must reverse the social-sorting trends of the past several decades that have fuelled the rise of virtual escapism, especially among non-college-educated men. Doing so would be a social good in itself. The steady flight of social and economic capital from smaller towns toward coastal and urban hubs hollowed out the civic and commercial spaces where people once naturally mixed across class lines, weakening the everyday socialization that sustained a common culture. Just as this dilemma was first observed by politically heterodox intellectuals like Christopher Lasch, the calls to remedy it do not cut neatly along partisan lines. The idea to break up massive federal bureaucracies and scatter their workers across the country, for example, has been embraced by both left-wing think tanks like the Progressive Policy Institute and right-wing intellectuals like Patrick Deneen. 

In the 2020s and beyond, with remote work abundant and likely to expand further as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, elites can no longer rationalize class segregation based on a logistical need to live near their workplaces. Indeed, the reversal is already taking place as skyrocketing costs of living in the hubs are beginning to price out even some white-collar workers. In the not-too-distant past—at least in the Midwest, where national trends take longer to materialize—it was common for blue-collar and white-collar workers to share jokes over coffee. We should strive to make that the norm again. 

Gen Z—stuck in behaviour cycles they know make them unhappy but lacking the necessary social infrastructure to break them—would be the ones to embrace these ideas most ferociously. Americans should recognize that our current trajectory does not instill in young people a great sense of hopefulness for the future. Many of them, for example, view a future characterized by extreme stratification and mass virtual escapism subsidized by Universal Basic Income as utterly dystopian. Providing legitimate alternatives would itself serve as a bulwark against the nihilism that traps so many in cycles of non-productivity. 

Left unchecked, the long-term trends of demographic lethargy and capital migration will lead to further deterioration of rural and post-industrial America, accelerating the atomization of young people and entrenching reliance on unsatisfying, often exploitative, virtual means of socialization. Reversing this trajectory will require more than moral exhortation; it will demand deliberate policy choices that enable young people outside a small number of metropolitan centres to build meaningful lives.