Young men without purpose mean lethargy or rage across Europe

In 2002 Fox aired one season of a remarkably entertaining science fiction show created by Joss Whedon. The pop-culture versed reader will immediately realise that I am, of course, talking about Firefly, and the fictional exploits of the nine members who staffed a spaceship of said name. One of the more intriguing sub-plots of the show was the idea that the government of the future was trying to pacify its population by injecting a chemical named Pax (Latin for “Peace”) into the air, hoping it would make people easier to control. Unfortunately, the plan backfired and most of the individuals exposed to the agent became so lethargic that they lost any will to life, while a small percentage had the opposite reaction and turned into a group of self-mutilating cannibals.

While the storyline of Firefly is fictional, the idea that well intended but badly executed government policies can have a devastating effect on the psyche of people is not so far-fetched. Researchers have a term for this: Pathological altruism. This term describes behaviour motivated by the desire to help that ends up producing irrational, even harmful consequences for its intended beneficiaries. And nowhere has this dynamic played out more visibly than in Europe, where generous welfare states were supposed to guarantee security but have instead produced a generation of young men who are slowly checking out of life.

The numbers speak for themselves. Across the European Union, 11 per cent of young people aged 15 to 29 are neither in employment, nor in education or training, also known as the the so-called NEETs. In Southern Europe, the picture is far grimmer: in Italy, Greece, and Spain the NEET rate hovers well above 14 per cent, and in some regions of Southern Italy it exceeds 30 per cent. In Greece, nearly 15 per cent of young men have effectively dropped out of the economy. Even after a decade of recovery from the post-2008 crisis, millions of European men in their prime years are sitting at home. In Italy, the average young person does not leave their parents’ house until the age of 30. In Greece and Spain the numbers are similar. This is not the dolce vita but a continent producing young men without purpose.

This is not merely an economic phenomenon. It is a sociological one with deep roots. Robert Putnam documented the collapse of civic infrastructure in Bowling Alone, but the trend is just as visible across the Atlantic. Union membership has declined steeply across the EU. Church attendance has collapsed. Youth voter turnout fell again in the 2024 European Parliament elections – down six percentage points among under-25s – with 19 per cent of young non-voters citing sheer disinterest in politics and another 17 per cent expressing outright distrust in political institutions. Trust in national governments, according to Eurofound, continues to erode. The sociologist Emile Durkheim had a word for what happens when people are flung from tight communities into atomised individualism: Anomie. As the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, the shift from traditional community to impersonal, contractual society does not produce freedom but it produces a void that manifests as either lethargy or rage. These men did not just lose interest. They lost the entire organisational ecosystem that once gave working-class life its structure and meaning.

The crisis runs deeper than politics. Approximately 47,000 Europeans die by suicide each year, and the gender ratio is staggering: Across the EU, men are three to four times more likely to kill themselves than women. In Latvia and Poland, the ratio exceeds seven to one. Drug-induced mortality rates are three to four times higher among men, with opioid overdoses accounting for the majority of the more than 6,000 drug-related deaths recorded annually. And Europe may be on the cusp of something worse: The European Drug Agency warns that potent synthetic opioids like nitazenes are spreading, with poisoning outbreaks in Ireland, France, and Germany in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, 13 per cent of Europeans report feeling lonely most or all of the time, with loneliness increasing most sharply among those under 30. The EU’s Joint Research Centre now treats loneliness as a public health crisis.

Before one thinks this is some form of cosmic justice for centuries of male dominance, think again. Ambitionless men are not good for women either. Louise Perry, the British author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, makes the convincing case that the sexual revolution in its most contemporary form only seems liberating for women, when in fact it forces them to adapt to the preferred sexual behaviour of men. What are Europe’s idle young men doing with their time? A lot of them are watching porn, and the consequences are not merely cultural but neurological. The neuroscientist Bruce Wexler has shown that environmental inputs physically reshape the brain during critical developmental periods – meaning that hours of daily pornography consumption during adolescence rewires the neural architecture responsible for motivation, intimacy, and attachment. The side effects, from erectile dysfunction to distorted expectations of real partners, are well documented.

All of this is limiting the pool of suitable male partners, with a growing percentage of men either being mentally checked out or overperforming “Alpha males” who prefer multiple, always significantly younger partners. When 80 per cent of Italian men aged 20 to 29 still live with their parents, the marriage market does not exactly flourish.

Clearly this is a call to action – but not for more generous transfer payments, of which Europe already has plenty. The Nobel laureate Robert Solow argued decades ago that what people actually want is dignified work, not handouts, when adequate wages and conditions exist. The behavioural economist Dan Ariely has demonstrated what he calls the “IKEA Effect”: people assign greater value to things they have built with their own hands. Labour does not just produce income – it produces meaning. Remove the necessity of work, and you remove a primary psychological mechanism for self-worth. Meanwhile, the economists Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano have shown that cultural attitudes toward work and redistribution, once formed, persist across generations. This means that the dependency habits cultivated by decades of welfare expansion will not disappear with the next economic uptick.

The distorted view that work is only a means of income must be replaced by the realisation that work is also a means of dignity, and only a life that requires you to get up in the morning is a life worth living. It does not need a government conspiracy to break a civilisation like in a science fiction movie. Sometimes well intended but wrong-headed government programmes – what scholars politely call pathological altruism – can do the job just as well. Europe, with its lavish safety nets and idle young men, may be living proof.