Learning to Stand on Level Ground
Scott Galloway is one of those people who likes to say “studies have shown.” He speaks in charts and conclusions, the kind of language that lets him pretend he’s simply delivering the facts, even when he’s already decided what those facts should prove. For the past year, he has been telling audiences that men are in crisis. Now he’s written a book about it, Notes on Being a Man, as if the problem were so urgent it needed a permanent place on the shelf.
I don’t object to him having an opinion. People have opinions all the time—messy, contradictory, half-formed. What I object to is the part where opinion gets dressed up as science, especially by someone who doesn’t seem to understand the difference. The things Galloway calls data often feel more like longing in numerical form, a kind of nostalgia you can plot on a graph. A desire for the world he remembers, where men understood their place and weren’t asked to share it.
And maybe this is the point—that challenging his argument isn’t really about him. It’s about the way people cling to an old world even as it slips out from under them. This newsletter has always been about that problem: adaptation. The uncomfortable idea that equality isn’t decline, and fairness isn’t loss, except to those who benefitted from the imbalance.
Galloway’s version of events is simple. Boys are falling behind in school. Men are leaving the workforce. Marriages are ending. Suicides are rising. He describes these as signs of something specifically wrong with men, something unprecedented and alarming. A collapse. A crisis.
But none of this is new. None of it started with men. Certainly not white men. These patterns have been part of other people’s lives—women’s lives, Black men’s lives, the lives of poor families—for generations. Their pain never produced a crisis narrative. Their struggles were simply absorbed into the background of what society calls “normal.”
Men have long made up the majority of people in prisons, shelters, and obituaries. When those faces were Black, the story was about personal failure and responsibility. When they turned white, it became a crisis rushed into the spotlight. The suffering didn’t change. The lens did.
Even Galloway’s use of data obscures more than it clarifies. He points to suicide rates as proof that young white men are in unique danger. But girls and young women attempt suicide at roughly the same or higher rates. The difference is the method. Boys use more lethal means, which turn despair into death more often.
He also points to homelessness as evidence of male decline. It’s true that men make up the majority of the unhoused, but that statistic misses the hidden cost of survival. Many women avoid homelessness by staying in toxic or abusive homes. Safety traded for control. Their suffering doesn’t disappear; it just becomes harder to see. They trade one kind of risk for another: danger for a roof, silence for a small degree of control. Their endurance is invisible because we don’t count the people who suffer quietly, behind walls.
Galloway’s deeper argument is that men once held a natural place in the world, and that something essential has been taken from them. But that place wasn’t natural. It was constructed over centuries. The achievements of men have been held up as examples of hard work and personal responsibility; often ignoring the fact that much was underwritten by centuries of unpaid Black labor, the exploitation of the poor, and the constrained ambitions of women. What felt like order was simply power arranged to look inevitable.
From the moment they can walk, boys are taught the hierarchy. Don’t cry like a girl. Don’t run like a girl. Don’t throw like a girl. It sounds like advice about toughness, but it’s really about superiority. Don’t lessen yourself. Don’t lower yourself. Don’t be like them. A steady whisper that to be compared to a girl isn’t merely an insult to boys; it’s a warning. They learn early that tenderness is weakness, that emotion is danger, that power is safety. By the time they become men, inequality isn’t just a system, it’s an instinct. So when equality finally arrives, it doesn’t feel like justice; it feels like demotion.
What Galloway calls decline is just disorientation. Men trying to find a place in a world that no longer revolves around them. But discomfort isn’t oppression. It’s the beginning of evolution. The ground hasn’t vanished; it’s simply leveled (or, at least, trying to). The traits that once defined masculinity—control, dominance, emotional isolation—don’t function well in a world built on connection. The skills men were taught to avoid—empathy, collaboration, fairness—are suddenly the ones that matter.
Equality was never going to feel gentle. Change rarely does. Every species resists transformation until resisting becomes too costly. This supposed “crisis” is simply resistance in plain view. A refusal to adjust to a world that no longer hands out worth according to gender.
But adaptation offers something better than nostalgia. The world doesn’t need men to reclaim a place that was only ever available to them. It needs them to imagine a new one: defined not by possession, but by contribution; not by dominance, but by cooperation.
The directive is the same as it has always been: adapt or die. Not in the physical sense, but socially, relationally, culturally.
Some men can long for a past that only ever worked for them. Or they can step into a future where strength is measured by the willingness to change.
Scott Galloway and others have it wrong: the world isn’t conspiring against men. It’s simply continuing without those who refuse to move with it.