In the second part of his examination of male social withdrawal, sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead argues that while it may create little direct harm, in the long term it affects families, employers and the stability of wider society. If those consequences are to be managed, we must first determine the value of preserving male participation

Collapsed masculinity is many men’s rational response to social change at a macro level, encompassing work, relationships, family formation, economics and social belonging. It describes what happens when the social structures through which masculinity has traditionally been performed weaken or disappear.

In my last piece, Why men are increasingly withdrawing from society, I examined those causes in depth, showing how, from the withdrawn man’s point of view, retreat can be a rational adaptation rather than evidence that he is broken.

That distinguishes collapsed masculinity from traditional, hegemonic or toxic forms of masculinity, which can cause direct harm throughout society. Male withdrawal may be awkward, non-productive and burdensome for families and society, but it’s not automatically pathological or a physical threat.

Instead, consequences arise largely from men withdrawing from work, relationships and public life, and those consequences still require recognition by governments and serious consideration of how they should be managed.

Politicians do not act on this form of withdrawal because politics responds to threat and noise while withdrawn men produce neither. They do not form an obvious movement around a shared grievance because the fully withdrawn man has largely stopped asking society for anything. The angry man online still wants to be heard but these men have given up on being heard at all.

Yet while their absence may create no immediate victim, it still has consequences. The cost begins inside families then reaches relationships and workplaces, and eventually becomes an unavoidable question for government.

Japan has a term for one version of the problem: the ‘8050 problem’, in which parents in their 80s continue supporting socially withdrawn children who are themselves in their 50s. Japan’s national surveys show withdrawal persisting into middle age. Long-term withdrawal can therefore leave elderly parents acting simultaneously as carers, financial providers and the withdrawn person’s principal connection with the outside world.

Comparable official statistics on severe social isolation are scarce beyond Japan. Much of the burden therefore remains private. A pension may quietly be supporting two adults. A mother in her 70s may spend years organising food, money and practical life for a middle-aged son who has little independent contact with public services.

And when that parent dies, an unemployed or unemployable man in middle age can arrive suddenly in a welfare system that has barely encountered him. Responsibility may instead pass to siblings, who only then discover the full extent of the problem – that the family has effectively been functioning as the welfare system.

There is a demographic cost too. Men who remain withdrawn for decades do not form partnerships or become fathers. Falling birth rates are therefore also shaped by this withdrawal. The question women increasingly ask me – Where have all the good men gone? – has a partly sociological answer: some of them are staying in their room.

One measure of the shift is partnership itself. In the United States, the share of 18-to-29-year-olds living with a partner fell from 42 per cent in 2014 to 32 per cent in 2024. Young adults also spent far less time with friends in 2024 than they did in 2010.

So, because of collapsed masculinity, fewer people are meeting, forming relationships and building lives together. This is the reordering of intimacy that researcher Constanza Fernández Arce and I examine in our forthcoming book, Where Have All the Good Men Gone? The Reordering of Intimacy. 

Instead, increasing numbers of men are turning to synthetic partners, while women, too, are increasingly meeting needs synthetically, through AI companions that neither disappoint nor depart.

In the Global AI Intimacy Study, which I lead, we are examining how artificial companions are reshaping intimacy and emotional dependence. Artificial intimacy will not be uninvented, and for a man who has not been touched or contradicted in five years it is not a gimmick but the most significant relationship in his life. That is why AI can accelerate withdrawal: it begins to meet emotional and intimate needs that would otherwise require physical human contact, reducing one of the remaining reasons to return to the outside world.

The wider industry thus faces a basic design question: are these systems built to help people reconnect with the world or to keep them engaged with the companion itself? Across the sector, the commercial incentive generally favours retention. That makes synthetic intimacy a regulatory matter, not merely one of goodwill.

Employers, meanwhile, will encounter this as a labour-supply problem before they recognise it as anything else: a cohort of young men who never enter the employment pipeline at all and who are missing from applications rather than failing at interview.

Britain’s number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) passed 1 million in the first quarter of 2026, including 553,000 young men. By midyear, the overall figure stood at 981,000.

Some young men are failing to establish a durable connection with working life at all, creating a longer-term organisational problem as well as an immediate employment one.

For much of the last century, the workplace was one of the principal places where men spent sustained time with other men outside the family. Men who would never have chosen one another socially were nevertheless required to spend 40 hours a week together.

Hybrid and remote working have brought genuine benefits but for a man at risk of withdrawal they can also remove one of the structures that would once have made his disappearance visible. Someone can remain fully responsive through Slack, email or video calls while becoming progressively detached from physical workplaces and relationships. A man who never comes in is a man nobody misses until the work stops arriving.

What employers can do is unfashionable and cheap. Insist on physical presence during the early-career years, when working habits and social relationships are still forming. Rebuild apprenticeships that confer status rather than simply minimum-wage employment. Train managers to notice the young man who remains fully responsive online but has scarcely been seen in person.

Organisations should also resist answering a withdrawal problem with another screen. A wellbeing app is unlikely to help a man whose life has already migrated almost entirely into a device.

Governments also have a role, but effective intervention starts by avoiding three responses that are likely to make withdrawal harder to reverse.

The first is to pathologise withdrawal. Hikikomori – the Japanese term for prolonged and extreme social withdrawal – is not itself a conventional clinical diagnosis. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the standard classification manual used by mental-health professionals in the United States, treats hikikomori as a cultural idiom of distress rather than an established psychiatric disorder that can simply be coded and treated in the same way.

While creating a clearer category for severe social withdrawal would certainly help governments collect badly needed data, automatically defining socially withdrawn people as patients would turn potentially rational adaptations into illness. Behavioural withdrawal and subjective distress cannot simply be treated as the same thing.

The second bad response is to compel. Japanese support practice emphasises gradual, low-pressure reintegration through online contact, face-to-face activity, training and eventually work. But simply placing withdrawn men into employment, national service or other compulsory activity ignores the conditions that led them to withdraw in the first place. You cannot instruct a man back into a performance whose props no longer exist.

The third is to moralise, which costs nothing and is therefore likely to be the most tempting response. Telling withdrawn men to get a job, get a grip or try harder assumes that shame will restore participation. But for some men, withdrawal is precisely a way of escaping repeated judgement and perceived failure.

By contrast, the first requirement of government is to count the phenomenon properly. As mentioned, comparable official statistics on severely socially isolated people remain scarce outside Japan. European states therefore sorely need comparable data.

It’s also important how withdrawal is counted. Prevalence estimates vary sharply depending on how hikikomori is measured, from 3.1 per cent in studies using representative probability sampling to 21.7 per cent in studies using the 25-item Hikikomori Questionnaire, a screening tool for severe social withdrawal. That is far too wide a range on which to base policy without better measurement.

The second priority is to support the families already carrying the burden. Parents are often functioning as the effective welfare system for a withdrawn adult child, but they are ageing out of that role. Supporting them is both more humane and potentially far less costly than waiting until an elderly parent dies and the state suddenly inherits responsibility. Respite support, an identified professional contact and a plan for what happens when the parent dies would at least prevent responsibility from transferring suddenly at the point of crisis.

Third, governments should protect forms of physical common ground. Libraries, parks and other ‘third places’ help facilitate social interaction and relationship-building without requiring people immediately to succeed at work, relationships or status competition.

There is evidence that some forms of this social infrastructure have declined in parts of Europe, including substantial library closures in the UK and the Netherlands. Yet the available evidence points towards patient, repeated, in-person contact over time, often working through families rather than around them.

Fourth, governments should regulate synthetic intimacy on the basis of re-entry. The relevant question is whether companion systems are designed to return users to human contact or increasingly substitute for it. That question should be asked while the market is still developing rather than a decade after patterns of use have become entrenched.

Finally, governments need to plan fiscally for a growing group of people who may remain outside paid work for the long term. Recognising prolonged absence from paid work as a demographic fact means planning for its consequences for welfare spending, tax revenues and the relatives who currently support withdrawn adults privately.

What I am describing is the management of a seismic shift so the wider social burden is minimised. None of these measures amounts to a cure, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. Most of these men are unlikely to return while life inside withdrawal continues to offer them more security, intimacy and control than the world outside. Inadequate services are part of the problem, but the deeper issue is that the incentives which led them to retreat remain in place.

The bigger question concerns the value a society places on male participation. How much is the presence of men in workplaces, families, friendships and public life worth to society?

If that participation is something we still value, then the cost of preserving it cannot simply be left to ageing parents, individual employers or the men themselves, some of whom have stopped asking to return. Rather, it becomes a collective question of how much social infrastructure, support and public money we are prepared to commit to keeping men connected to work, relationships and public life, and doing so before prolonged male withdrawal becomes a permanent social condition.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand, where he leads the Global AI Intimacy Study. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, is Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

READ MORE: Why men are increasingly withdrawing from society. Male social withdrawal is often labelled a ‘crisis of masculinity’. But for some men it may be a rational response to the erosion of work, status, relationships and other social structures through which masculinity has traditionally been performed, argues sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead.

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