Just thinking about the life trajectories of a lot of young men and women today. About how women seem to be thriving whereas more and more men seem to be failing to launch, falling behind in career and school, becoming isolated.

There are certainly some external factors that can be argued lead to these disparate outcomes. For example, how society invests more resources into empowering women and pushing them to succeed in ways that it just doesn't for men, maybe partly out of an assumption that men are already privileged and that men are already sufficiently motivated and ambitious.

But is this really true? I'm beginning to think that maybe men are much less success oriented than we assume they are, and that maybe women are the real go-getters.

Women are arguably more neurotic than men are, and seem to be more susceptible to a herd mentality, which would lead to a greater tendency to reach for things. Men seem to be perfectly comfortable with less. To paraphrase Chris Rock: "If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he'd do it."

And while men are often more overtly competitive than women are, it's very possible that this is often mistaken for actual ambition when it's just simply aggression. The fact that men are socially pushed to prove thier worth to society might also obfuscate the possibility that ambition and drive might not be something that comes as naturally to men as it does to women.

All of this to say that, with many of the incentives for male participation being diminished or abandoned in the modern day, maybe men are dropping out of society because otherwise, most simply men lack the internal drive to excel, that women seem to show in spades. Maybe it isn't women that need empowering. Maybe it's men.