Four kinds of male loneliness

Chateau Heartiste has quite an interesting post about male loneliness.

Are men lonelier now than they have been in the past? What is the nature of male loneliness? Does it differ in quality from female loneliness? Is an epidemic of loneliness a harbinger of social collapse? Can loneliness be a force for good?

Someone named Zero HP Lovecraft posted this on Twitter:

I was thinking about loneliness, and the loneliness that a young man feels, and I think he feels lonely in three distinct ways.
1. He feels loneliness for a woman.
2. He feels loneliness for a brotherhood.
3. He feels loneliness for a lord, which we may think of as being for god

And these three types of loneliness are not commutative, and the satiation of one will amplify the emptiness from the others.

CH adds a fourth.

I’d add a fourth kind of male loneliness: the loneliness he feels for the man he has yet to become.

Thwarted passion, a decision to avoid a risky venture, procrastination…these things will deprive a man of the ideal he always strives toward, and in the depths of that deprivation he will feel lonely for the company, and the mentorship, of his idealized self.

Game — learned charisma — will help relieve at least three of the four kinds of male loneliness. A more charismatic man will attract women, will be admired by other men, and will advance towards his idealized self.

Only the loneliness for a lord, or a leader, resists the panacea of Game, because inherent in Game is pride, a necessary salve for a generation of men soaked in the soyjuice of toxic feminism, but nevertheless a salve that contraindicates the humility required to accept a lord in one’s life, and to follow him. However, this natural opposition is superficial and short-lived, because a newfound, deeper pride is summoned when a man has purpose, and a banner under which to fight.

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One more thing I’ll add. Men want to be part of something larger. Women don’t have that urge, at least not in the way it’s expressed and felt in men. If men are denied participation in a greater calling, they feel the loneliness for numbers 2, 3, and 4 (brotherhood, lord/leader, idealized self or, as a commenter pessimistically put it, the man he could have been). This is why vapid consumerism and obsession with the gossipy mundane doesn’t fulfill men like it does women. Men are outward-focused; women are inward-focused. Evolution has seen to it that women, as the generators and nurturers of family, direct their attention to close interpersonal relationships and are unmoved by the callings that speak to men.

Sure, you could say the pussyhatters — predominantly comprised of middle-aged catladies and bitter post-wall shrews with a smattering of quasi-female soyboy lackeys — are an example of women being part of something larger than themselves and their tiny fiefdoms, but you’ll notice how quickly the energy of that movement fizzled, and that’s because it wasn’t about working together to achieve a goal or realize a shared vision; it was about venting.

Women are unhappier than they have ever been, but the source of their loneliness is the severing of those family bonds and generational continuities that they are stewards over and which give women meaning in their lives.

Read more here.