IN THIS EPISODE

• What the Disconnected survey (2024) established about the college degree as the dividing line in American civic life
• Why the male loneliness narrative misreads the real crisis – and what “left alone by society” means instead
• The friendship cliff: why connections collapse after high school for men without degrees
• Tenuous ties and single points of failure in men’s relational lives
• The accompaniment framework: loss and transition as communal experiences, not individual problems
• Why the self-help ethos is the wrong prescription for structural disconnection
• What it means to “call men in” – and who is responsible for doing it

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Sam Pressler spent seven years building the Armed Services Arts Partnership, helping veterans find their footing in civilian life after service. He turned toward research and writing at the intersection of civic life, social connection, and class – and in 2024 co-produced Disconnected with the Survey Center on American Life, which established the college degree as the dividing line in American civic participation. He edits and writes the Connective Tissue newsletter on Substack, where these ideas have been taking shape for years. Sam approaches this work not as a detached researcher but as someone who has stood in the gap – and who understands that the data, when it gets flattened into a headline, stops being about people.

Soren Duggan spent nine years in human intelligence collection roles for U.S. Special Operations. He now researches and builds strategies for large-scale digital communication. He was the sole interviewer for all thirty conversations in Nobody to Call – which means he sat with these men, none of whom had any reason to trust a stranger on Zoom, and asked them about the hardest parts of their lives. The emotional weight of this report comes directly from his ability to hold that space without flinching.

FROM THE REPORT

“I feel lonely. I feel like I don’t have connections, and on a broader scope, that I don’t really matter.” – Jordan, 43

“If I was a part of something, I wouldn’t be looking for friends. I could find friends inside of the organization that I belong to… That’s the bottom line. I just want to be a part of a team. I feel like that’s therapeutic.” – Cedric, 31

“The younger generation coming up – they’re lost too. I want to try to give them an answer, but not in a toxic way.” – Deion, 29

RESOURCES

• Read the full Nobody to Call report: nobodytocall.org
• Connective Tissue newsletter: connectivetissue.substack.com
• Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life (Survey Center on American Life, 2024)

Transcript

Soren Duggan • 00:00
If you have friends and you’ve fallen hard times, you can go back and count on your friends to be able to help you. If you do have that, the guys that had that or anybody that has that rich tapestry, you are much more willing to take chances in your life and take risks and go for things when you know that you have something to fall back on. And whether or not that’s a supportive partner or a child or a great network of friends, if you don’t have that safety net, the ground seems very, very far away. You’re much less likely to take risks, especially if you don’t have much to gamble on and risk. And life ends up becoming much smaller and much more lonely.

Intro & Outro • 00:37
I’m Jeremy. And I’m Tyler. Welcome to GoodPain, where we talk about life’s true intensities without pretending they’re easy to solve. What if the things we’re told to fix, optimize, or get over are actually where the real wisdom lives? Each week we gather for the kind of honest conversations you desire to be a part of more often about the relentless demands, the unexpected grief, the quiet victories, and everything in between. Because maybe, just maybe, the answer isn’t to limit the hard stuff, it’s to find the good in it. Welcome to the conversation.

Tyler Adams • 01:09
Today we publish our conversation with Sam and Soren, authors of Nobody to Call, a report of a year-long qualitative study of men without college degrees. The college degree has become the sorting mechanism of American life, and has women have enrolled in and completed four-year degrees at rates that now outpace men. The population left on the wrong side of that sorting line skews mail. We talk about these men constantly. They populate op-eds and cable news panels and election postmortems. They are data points invoked as evidence for whatever argument needs making about men, about class, and about the country. As Sam and Soren put it, they are instrumentalized for clicks and flattened into abstract statistics. What they rarely are is heard. And that’s what this report set out to change, not with another survey or another set of figures to dispute. Sam and Soren talked to 30 men about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. What Sam and Soren found sitting across from these men is that they opened up about heartbreak, about fathers who were absent, about friends lost to overdose and to suicide, about the feeling that without close friends, you don’t really matter to anyone. These men are not closed off. They are waiting. And that’s a difference that invites us toward nuance and curiosity. The report carries two truths at once, and neither one cancels the other out. First, the despair is structural. When high school ends, the institution that held friendships together dissolves. College, the military, a trade apprenticeship, these are the on-ramps to new webs of association. And without them, the friendship cliffhits. Work provides structure but produces almost no lasting friendship. A move severs whatever remained. A death takes the last mentor, potentially. The men in this report are often one relationship from complete isolation. These men want connection, and most of them want it with an urgency that surprised our guests. These men know what’s missing. They just don’t know how to get there. And the culture surrounding them has communicated for years that getting there is their personal responsibility and that they must do it alone. Sam and Soren press hard on that framing in the report, and we go further during our conversation today. They name a dark irony that most of these men read their isolation as personal failure. They blame themselves for not having the confidence, the initiative, the social skills to build community. But community has never worked that way. Historically, the relationships that matter were inherited, not constructed. They were passed down through families, neighborhoods, religious institutions, and trade guilds, through the overlapping webs of association that made individual lives legible to something larger than ourselves. What this report argues, and what I find most worth sitting with, is not a program or a policy fix. It’s an orientation. Sam and Soren call it accompaniment. The recognition that loss and transition are meant to be held by community, not managed alone. That these men are not problems requiring solutions. They are people waiting to be called in. We have not just failed to build new structures for them and for us. We dismantled the old ones, then handed the people standing in the rubble a self-help book. And there’s one last thing before we start. This report carries no executive summary. Sam and Soren made that choice on purpose. They wanted as little distance as possible between the reader and the men they interviewed. The quotes run in full. The portraits hand drawn by E.J. Baker represent these men in age and ethnicity humanizing without exposing. So for the full texture of what we discussed today, head over to nobodytocall.org. Those will be in the show notes as well. The links will be. And that’s where you will find so much more to dig into. We briefly introduced Sam and Soren during the interview, but it bears a more formal introduction to the two men behind the report. Sam Pressler spent seven years building the Armed Services Arts Partnership, ASAP, as we call it in the interview, helping veterans find their footing in civilian life after service. He pivoted into research and writing at the intersection of civic life, social connection and class, and in 2024 co-produced Disconnected with the Service Center on American Life, which established the college degree as the dividing line in American civic participation. Soren writes the connective tissue newsletter on Substack, which is where these ideas have been taking shape for several years. Sam is a builder before he is a writer, and that comes through in how he frames the problem, not as a culture war artifact, but as a civic emergency with structural roots. Soren Dugan spent nine years in human intelligence collection roles for U.S. Special Operations. He now researches and builds strategies for large-scale digital communication. He was a sole interviewer for all 30 conversations in this report. And what that means in practice is that he sat with these men and asked them about the hardest parts of their lives. The emotional openness that came back across those calls is the engine of everything that follows in the report. And that’s where we get started.

Soren Duggan • 06:30
Sam founded ASAP, an organization getting veterans broadly into stand-up comedy. It’s a great organization, and so Sam had done years of work with veterans as a non-veteran himself, which is where we bonded originally over a lot of the shallow rhetoric and language that people use to talk about veterans. And particularly, I think about this victimization word that folks use, where a lot of veterans certainly are victims, but to be told that you are one, I think a lot of veterans were quite focused on that idea and didn’t appreciate that label. And so there was a lot of work that Sam and others have done to try to circumvent that and give those men and women some real help, but not from a place of victimhood, but rather from a place of empathy and sympathy for the human condition and what they went through. And so taking that and applying it to this population, we had the same talk. The media reports on the male loneliness epidemic, what’s going on with young men, what’s going on with radicalized young men was taking off. They’re all fine and great questions, but the discourse was so shallow, and it was missing, I think, a lot of the greater points about what these men were going through and particularly, I think what I saw and what Sam saw as well was, you know, you run around these higher brow academic institutions. It was pretty incredible as we were doing this report, as I told people what we were doing, how few folks we spoke to day to day in that academic world actually know any men without college degrees. So they were fascinated by us speaking to these guys as though they were some indigenous population on the other side of the world that we had made contact with when it’s the majority of the country. We really wanted to embark and set out on this goal of talking to them, providing texture to their lives, hearing from them to try to get those stories and that information into the eyes and ears of folks who could maybe make some decisions down the road to help them out.

Tyler Adams • 08:18
Why is it so important to get the depth? And why was it so important for you guys to choose this among all the topics you could potentially be pursuing to really say this deserves the attention so much so that you guys said you’ve been talking about it for five years?

Sam Pressler • 08:36
It’s the thing that we did with ASAP that really connects us through line here is like giving people the skills to then be on stage to share their stories, right? Whether it was comedy or storytelling, it was creative writing, whatever it may be. So you’re not defined by these narratives of hero or victim and recognizing that most of it is in the messy middle. The thing with this group that connected to that and felt really animating, at least for me, was this feeling of like just invisibility. The experience of having no friends, not being involved in community, not having mentors, is that like you were functionally invisible to everyone outside of your family. It felt really gross that there was all this discourse talking about guys and talking about things to either be done on their behalf or that they were undeserving of the things to be done on their behalf, but never hearing from them because of that invisibility, because of the piece that’s where I’m saying that, particularly among, for lack of better words, elites, there is no organic connection between the two. So much of this my work is like how do we see each other and see what it means to be human in each other’s eyes? And like there is this kind of in the invisibility, it’s just a complete overlooking of this group. Now go back to those interviews we did in 2024, there were three. There was so much pain in them and there was also so much yearning and it just felt so counter to the discourse that was going on and in having access to speak to these guys because of the partnership we had with the polling firm that we can go back and talk to it. It just seemed felt like a real opportunity not to have a so what or like an instrumentalized outcome, but really just to like let’s bring these guys to the fore, like let’s create as little distance between their words and the reader as possible.

Tyler Adams • 10:25
Their value is invisible in the construct of others who only want this population to be a part of their own narrative as at stake here, one of the aspects here that you’re fighting for.

Soren Duggan • 10:39
It’s a matter of platform as well, right? So folks who have the ability, the connections or the know how of social capital, whatever it might be to be able to tell their story and mass. And whether that’s an individual telling a story on a podcast like this or running an op-ed or something, we’re just a demographic that has influence or any sort of spotlight or showcase on them. There’s plenty of opportunity there for those demographics to tell their stories, but there’s countless examples of this throughout this country’s history of demographics who did not have that platform should have had it and didn’t get what they deserve for quite some time because they didn’t have it. And the same is true today, even if there are millions more platforms than there ever have been in the world. It’s still very much the case today. So being able to go in and give those folks an opportunity to share their stories, it equalizes the playing field to some degree and gives, I think, a little bit of justice to what it is these demographics deserve if they have been left behind, you know, systemically through a class angle or education, whatever it might be, or whether or not it’s just social. They deserve to have that platform and have those stories told. And there’s, I mean, as you’ve said before, there’s so much to learn from any one person’s story, no matter how reproducible it is or how, you know, maybe you’re not going to make a movie. You’re not going to make a movie about it, but there’s still so much to learn from those people.

Tyler Adams • 12:01
So let’s talk through what you guys did then. How did you guys go about doing this? How did you structure it and set out to discover?

Sam Pressler • 12:07
What we really wanted to learn about was their relational lives. We wanted to learn about friendship. We wanted to learn about community. We wanted to learn about mentorship and role models, and we wanted to learn about purpose, meaning, being needed. The idea was that we would, you know, ask fairly straightforward questions to get at that. So we essentially, we asked four categories of questions. And I think the remarkable thing as someone who was not in the interviews, but then read the transcripts now several, several times, the degree to which a, most people had thought about these things and we’re thinking about these things a lot. It completely, I think, bucked a predominant narrative that these guys are like, closed off and are, you know, in our kind of voluntary loners, which is a predominant narrative that we hope to say is untrue. B, and I think I’ll let Soren take it from here, but B, the degree to which they were open about some of the most personal questions in your life. Like, do you have close friends? Do you feel like you have a sense of purpose and meaning in life? And people shared the beautiful, like really beautiful reflections and really just heartbreaking reflections on it.

Soren Duggan • 13:18
From the onset, we had a small question set where we talked about, we asked them about their membership and community. We asked them about their close friendships. We asked them about their role models and mentors, and we asked them about senses of purpose and identity. All of them asked a pretty wide range of follow up questions. And we kicked it off. We used a data set that Sam had already used from his work before, from his previous survey, and scheduled them out. And from the onset, from the very first one all the way through the end, A, I think what I should lead with was how impressed and taken aback I was time and time again with how open and vulnerable these guys were willing to be with a guy they meet on Zoom for 45 minutes. In many cases, on the other side of the country, they never met before and probably won’t ever meet again. And they were willing to talk about some deeply emotional things. I and the interview, we were emotional many, many times throughout these interviews, and it was just, it was flooring how willing they were to open their lives to us. That became our top line finding was, you know, this narrative that these guys are closed off that they are resentful to the point that they don’t want any connection, that they don’t like other people, that they don’t want to be out there was just frankly not true. They yearn for, they all wanted it very, very badly. But they were, it was abundantly clear time and time again, they were very far from being able to achieve it. There are class issues there, there are barrier financial barriers, there’s time if you’re working a wage labor job for 60 hours a week, you just quite frankly don’t have the time or the energy to go out and meet people in a world where it is already quite difficult to do that even if you do have the time and energy. They wanted it. Adley, they just didn’t either didn’t know where to start, or even if they did they just couldn’t bring themselves to be able to do it over dozens of interviews we kept coming back to this to the same point and that’s where I think we started began to write the report from that.

Tyler Adams • 15:25
You guys chose between a quantitative versus a qualitative study. The way this group has been approached is by applying outside buckets and categories to them and asking them to self select you know which ones do you fit in part of the deference that I hear you guys saying is the importance of of the qualitative aspects of capturing their stories is leaving the nuance for them to define and that by doing that, they surprised you. There was no artificial constraints to say in order for us to for you to be seen put yourself into these predetermined buckets. Actually just tell us your story. You started mentioning some of the things that really surprised you how they were open about their private experiences and are there any that really stand out to you as being somewhere you said, wow, I got this wrong, like, or we’re really getting this wrong and it’s important for us to not tell people you should get this right, but at least just put this out there to potentially get some looseness in the in the thinking of the audience that you want to hear these stories and entice them to be more curious about this population.

Sam Pressler • 16:41
I was left at the end feeling both more despairing and more hopeful at the same time. And that’s a interesting place to be so more despairing I would say because the what sort of just a little into the gap between their yearning for connection and our perception of their ability to realize that connection was too big to bridge alone. It’s just, it was people, we had some reviewers on the report, I call ended on a more hopeful note and as like we don’t believe in the hopeful note because they were taking what in our view were compounding series of structural problems challenges in addition to personal issues with structural challenges, and then putting the blame and the responsibility on themselves to hold themselves up by the their bootstraps and realize that and like and fix their own lives and like there was a, you know, there’s we can get into this at some point but there was an interesting thread of like the degree to which therapy talk and therapy language has permeated to everything and it’s like I need to fix myself first before I can go and do this. And that’s completely, for lack of better words, asked backwards with how relationships are formed and how skills are developed, they’re built in relationships and in community. So, so I think that may be more despairing because that that gap was was significant and it felt like they had to do that alone. What made me very hopeful was the fact that most of these guys really did want to connect, they wanted to contribute they and they all wanted to contribute and it communally is part of something bigger than themselves. And so they were, for the most part, again, there were some guys who didn’t, and I think we shouldn’t under, we shouldn’t under emphasize that. But for the most part, these guys were waiting to be called in. And so that then and begs the question, who does the calling in right. The one point that we saw as a bright spot was family. Family was a sole source of purpose of the sole source of being needed. It’s sometimes was a double edged sword because they were also overburdened by that purpose and being needed through caregiving. But the family has has a role to play, but also community. Mostly does wanted to be part of something in their community. And so it’s like, you’re like, huh, like, what’s the role of the neighborhood, what’s the role of the local YMCA, what’s the role of the church or religious organization to call people in. So it’s not their own responsibility. But it’s the responsibility of their family, their neighbors, and the broader public. And so to me, those are the two like those are the dots, the twin sides of surprise, both more despair, frankly, and more hope.

Soren Duggan • 19:20
Yeah, I to echo Sam’s point of the family thing, you know, that that came up a lot when we talked about purpose and identity, which really was devoid from a lot of these guys’s life. A lot of the men had, you know, typically the age was late, late 20s to early 30s. You know, a lot of these guys have just had kids, kids, infant kids or toddlers. The way that they spoke about their children being born was, I mean, it was it was profound. They talked as if they, I mean, it was it was religious almost they talked as if they were lost and somebody had saved them. And they were these were guys who were talking about their kids and the purpose to their children not in the stereotypical 50s, Eskway that a father talks about on providing for these kids. Oh, this is what I’m doing. The way they talked about their purpose to their children was in a very caretaking fashion that I think a few decades ago, a lot of people would have called more of a maternal caretaking role to these kids. They loved it. It was their single source of identity and their purpose. They were all for it. I my wife and I are trying for a first kid right now. I told them that they lit up and they, you know, they’re like greatest decision you’re ever going to make. Definitely do it. That was so encouraging for us to hear and also flew in the face. I think of a lot of assumptions that these guys, that’s something like that wouldn’t provide purpose to their lives. You know, there’s all this talk about, you know, digital media content about rugged individualism and this grind set stuff where it’s all about this individual, you know, you can have kids but it’s all about making money and, you know, don’t want that slow yourself down. They did not have time for any of that. They loved this. They wanted to give back and then that having the child, being able to connect to that child in the caregiving role, forming the identity and the purpose. That then turned a mirror, I think, to the rest of the world and said, what else can I do for the community out there now that I have this fire inside of me from taking care of this child? Can I go out in my community and give back? Can I be a bigger member of my church or my YMCA or my basketball club I used to go to but I don’t do it anymore? Yeah, it was, it was, it was transformational.

Tyler Adams • 21:37
You guys started out saying that you found the general discourse about these men to be shallow and what I just heard you just say is that that just, it blows up that discourse from go. There is so much more depth here, so much more nuance and missed opportunity for the community to rely on that depth and the leadership potential that is there for inviting others into a deeper experience, which is, is what is necessary.

Sam Pressler • 22:14

Yeah, gender talk in particular gets very zero sum. And I think we just need to name like how, especially the last part that someone just said how non zero sum that is, right, like a household with two active parents is a better household overall and a better household for those children. A community with more fathers is a community not only with more fathers for kids but more male role models and mentors, people looking to be involved in contributing to community and like, not just in this provider sense but in this caring sense lifts the burden off of women to be the ones who have historically shouldered that care, that care responsibility right so like, I think what we’re pointing to is not something of like, there’s often this nostalgia element here of like, oh well like men getting back to their rightful place like, and I think there is even a little bit of that within this group of guys about in talking about the guys without degrees like if only we bring back manufacturing jobs or whatever and like bring back like a stable middle class life which is like, I’m supportive of that, but I don’t think that life if that were to ever be realized, it would not be one that looks like the 1950s like it would be one that looks like more people in families and communities being able to share both the burdens and the responsibilities and commitments and joys of being in those relationships and so I think that to me is like hopefully there’s a take on this that is not seeing this as like, as a either or but like actually a path towards more wholeness, particularly among folks without degrees.

Tyler Adams • 23:56

What you guys are discovering and what these men are advocating for is, is at the very least more expansive boxes or at most saying like, let’s stop putting things in boxes and start anchoring more towards what you talked about the meaning and purpose that I want to express but also that’s complimentary to what we want to build together.

Sam Pressler • 24:23
I think the boxes that we’re referring to are externally imposed, particularly when we’re talking about a kind of a more elite discourse. My interpretation of the conversations was not that these guys were sharing that they felt like they were putting in boxes there were a few who did talk about like traditional manhood and how traditional manhood was limiting and that those were really powerful quotes basically saying like, I don’t want to be this man that’s just a tough guy like no one was no one was saying any of those like Stoic manosphere archetype like everyone was like I don’t want to be put in that everyone who talked about it said they don’t want to be put in that box. And I think most people were not expressing like they were felt that they were put in a box for the most part I think what they were more expressing was this recognition of isolation on one side and disconnection on one side and a yearning to live a different life on the other. Then, for the most part, like, it’s my fault that I’m not living a different life because I don’t have the confidence I don’t have the skills I don’t have the self esteem. I mean it’s my fault for being here, but never was it like very rarely was it like I’m put in this box. And when it was was really this like looking at kind of the traditional definitions of manhood. But we didn’t. I’ll just say and so maybe you could speak to this like we were very intentional in the interview design in not asking guys for like what’s your take like we really centered it on like what’s your life experience that we don’t want to know what you think about masculinity or like whatever issue. So I think when those responses did emerge around manhood it was it was drawing on Frank most often it was like role models and mentor questions of like it was drawing on this like question like in my own life what does it mean to be a man.

Soren Duggan • 26:15I certainly wanted to stray away from, you know, like Sam said, asking them their their takes on this everyone has a take on it. It’s fruity available there’s a lot of platforms in which you can you can say your take I can go grab it online. But, you know, it’s when it did come up, it came up very naturally and it came as Sam said typically in role models and it came up through lessons that they learned from their, if they had fathers at home, or they had a grandfather that raised them, or typically what it was was for mothers. I also grew up in large part without a dad and had a single mother and so that relationship you have with a single mom is a very, very unique one and you learn quite a lot of lessons through there and so maybe there was a bit of over selection on men who have been raised by single moms where you get taught somewhat of a different life story and background there but it came up a lot about this. They discovered on their own that this traditional trope of masculinity where you don’t talk about your feelings you move through it you’re stoic you don’t you know it’s your hard charging just move through it that that was bullshit that it wasn’t helpful for them and that not only was it not helpful but it was damaging and limiting to their ability to move through life and deal with those hardships and challenges. Yeah, that came up time and time again and it was. Yeah, it was very powerful.

Tyler Adams • 27:35
You’ve used the phrase moving through life and we oftentimes use all right your period of time was in the military. Now you come out now you’re expected to go into whatever is the next thing providing for your family building a family. There’s also liminal spaces these transition spaces between those and that’s where a lot of people get lost. What’s the nature of kind of the ebb and flow of this moving through life that you guys discovered with them.

Soren Duggan • 28:06
It’s actually the one of the foundational pieces of why we did this and why we focused on men without degrees right we’re saying brought it up in the beginning that for those who go to college. There is a cohort experience in college and you end up meeting a lot of your lifelong friends either there at college or from those friends or from the job you get from college right but in high school. If you don’t go to college you typically stay where you are, but the friends who you met at 16 and the person you were at 16 right you’re not going to be the same person at 19 or 20 and certainly won’t be at 30 or 40 right so over time. Those friendships from high school typically we saw this with a lot of the men we talked to typically those relationships atrophy and they grow further away from them either they get in fights with them. As we all do with our friends or they just grow into different people and you move away, but for others if you have college you have that transition period into adulthood, whatever right of passage that that still is. They have a way to backfill those friendships and those relationships but these men do not if you don’t go to college. Third spaces are declining precipitously. That’s harder to meet people it’s harder to be a member in community. There’s no way to backfill those friendships so you find yourself at 18 graduating high school and by 25 or by 30 your relational life has deteriorated. And so you talk about a liminal space it’s actually a good way to put it it seems like they never really got out of that liminal space. Right there was no right of passage into the next chapter of their lives it was into a job that they typically didn’t like and then the relational life that they have on the other side that gives you the strength and the ability to move through. You know the world that you exist in at that point, just quite frankly isn’t there. And so that’s why we took that it’s not just a class angle of you know the time and the money to be able to do those things but also just from a structural standpoint. How are we giving these guys the ability to build robust resilient relational lives it just doesn’t exist.

Sam Pressler • 30:12
Our second chapter in the project is called tenuous or tenuous ties and what we really are one of the sections within that we call the friendship cliff in the slow drift. And I think the structural piece there is it’s it’s like leaving high school is a structural friendship cliff. It’s an innate describe it in those terms terms right so it’s like I think a lot of it about is like you lose the structure. While your peers if they’re going to college continue with the structure or the 1% who joins the military continues with the structure. And then what do you have you’re entering the community that is we’re kind of at the like we’re kind of at a low point in decline of religious life decline of community life decline of unions decline of like family and neighborhood groups. And so you’re entering a community with the like actually like the social safety net not like bureaucratic but the actual social safety net that’s become deteriorated. And so we end up seeing is this kind of slow drift that you have a cliff right after high school and you have the slow drift right in it’s just like it’s this thing like it slowly fades away over the life course. And so friends become harder to exist you don’t you don’t make new friends through college friends become harder to sustain. Because you’re just drifting away and then work is for most of these guys work is so is oftentimes so precarious that the relationships you make and work. They don’t stick right like so many guys are like yeah like I don’t even make work friends anymore because someone moves I move and then you lose that friend and it was like a feeling of a real lot it wasn’t just like an acquaintance it was like a feeling above real loss of a friend right so that you’re not building relationships in the workplace. So what do you have left right so if you have any relationships they become these tenuous ties which become single points of failure and these relationships are like genuine single points of failure we have one friend or you have one mentor or you have one community attachment and then what we saw happen three different things would happen there. When you have this point where you have these tenuous ties one is someone passes away so it could be a mother it could be a father that oftentimes we saw mothers who were the ones who were taking their kids to church and when the mother died like they just stopped going to church fathers were oftentimes the only mentors when the father died they lost my tour. The other thing that was a big thing was moving so you move a friend moves and you may have one relationship left when that move happens it’s done right and we see we heard that time and again. In the final piece and this is somewhat about like the age range so we didn’t specifically say the age range at the start but we basically talked to men 25 to 45 right so we it’s tight enough age range but we got to see a little bit of the life course within it. So you guys 25 were like early stages and maybe trying to find their their part their life partners you guys 45 or you know some of them have adult children and teenagers and adulthood. We saw there was that there was the classic thing you see with parents but fathers whose kids lives were their whole lives when their kids aged out of like elementary school in particular that became the single point of failure they lost the connection to community lost the connection to like any relationships tied to their kids. The reason I just wanted to go deep on this first second is because it just I want to like emphasize the degree to which this is structural when you leave high school there are no structured points of interaction to sustain relationships and work is the one thing left and work has become significantly more precarious particularly for anyone without degrees men without degrees that we spoke with and so we can’t bank on work being this stable lifelong career that you maybe you have a union to do it’s just this thing that is very fluid and makes relationship formation quite difficult so that to me was like the line with a hypothesis that I had going in I’ve been talking about this adult transition moment. As this point of like this great breaking point and bother me so much that people weren’t talking as much about it so it aligned with hypothesis but then it actually turned out to be worse than what we thought it would be.

Soren Duggan • 34:21
The study we did was specifically on men at Sam and I are two men I don’t really know what it is like to grow up as a as a woman without a degree or a woman broadly in the world and so that’s we focus particularly on that from Sam’s previous research and just piggybacking I think off a lot of the media attention on this question of what’s going on with young men. But to say that this isn’t also true of women without degrees I mean this is a widespread societal issue right this is not like. That there is some sort of relational or community issue squarely affecting this 50% of the population this is broad for everybody and as a class issue probably we just chose to focus particularly on the men here.

Tyler Adams • 34:59
Our conceit for season two of good pain is mature and immature masculinity and almost every single episode we have to give that same disclaimer it’s like the conceit gets us moving in kind of defining where we’re going to start the conversation but but. We cannot in good conscience say like yeah this is relegated to this specific pop we’re talking about things that define us as a species much more broadly. And the ways that we coordinate the ways that we come together and one thing that I think I heard with what you just were talking about is. That structural component and the failure to recognize these are very real limitations it sounds like to me that’s the more unpacking of that. The biggest dilemma between the despair and the hope is that so what the hell do we do about this is kind of the because we don’t have those structural components and there’s this. This single point of failure even more beyond that that support that’s around you we have even created a language that says oh no you you as yourself are the actual single point of failure so let me give you this resiliency. And you continue turning yourself into a project that now it’s your responsibility regardless of the actual structural considerations if you’re sad if you’re depressed if you’re not getting what you want that’s on you. And that in and of itself is is this burden on the shoulders that that we were never meant to carry on our own.

Soren Duggan • 36:40
One of the case studies we ended up writing is on a man named Roger who was one of the examples of a guy who does have a very robust and resilient and quite developed relational life. And to talk about that those tenuous ties for the guys that did not have it. His social life you know consisted of these overlapping webs of over 20 year membership in the same church in his hometown to his job as a construction foreman in the town that he had for for over a decade. And the friends that he had there the friends that we met through his wife the friends we met through his church. It was an unbelievably resilient and it was also built before he was born his parents went to that church got him into it I mean this is a this is a 50 year operation to get Roger a sturdy and well developed relational life. And so we looked at that as a success story and said well there is hope out there. But it is would be pretty absurd of us to sit here and say that we have an easy answer of how to reproduce that at scale for all these men in the world. And so I think there is hope to some degree because there are solutions out there I’m sure there’s things that we can do but to treat this problem. I mean especially as you know our attention span today in 2026 is quite short to say that we can treat this problem in the short term and fix it. Frankly it’s just not true it’s going to take quite a lot of investment time to be able to do so.

Sam Pressler • 38:09
I love that you started with Roger story because it also tees up this takeaway from this is that it’s a lot easier to break things and just put things back together right and what Roger is showing, Roger is benefiting from a gift of generational inheritance. And so many of the men who are in this like self blame self help category are trying to treat their relational lives as like and improving their relational lives as like kind of entrepreneurial rewards to gain. And that’s just not how it works. And so I think this is the like this is going to be a generational project. It’s going to start at the scale of the relationship. I think where we want to leave people is with a sense of responsibility of calling in at the approximate scale of relationship of block of neighborhood and not solely thinking of this as something that could be a magic one that’s way with a set of policy solutions to fix these things because we’ve we’ve taken the hammer to do to these institutions and. You know, look like some institutions deserve to have fallen apart. I’m not saying that they don’t but we are now dealing with the consequences that and I think Roger presented this really powerful alternative. It was like I read it, and I was like this is like a Robert Putnam case study of like mid 20th century civic life. It was just like everyone had either no ties or tenures ties and then Roger had all these overlapping webs of association and it was so clear to Soren’s point. He received them as a gift rather than and he and he steward them as responsibility to pass on to the next generation. It’s this generational connection. It’s the interconnection of ties across these associations that could not have been a starker difference than what almost every other guy we talked to his life look like.

Tyler Adams • 40:08
You painted out a picture between what really is kind of one of the contributing factors with the isolation. You talked about the single point of failure. It’s it’s everything’s on me rather than this tapestry or fabric that’s woven together that should some threads break the tapestry still intact and and by virtue of the tapestry being intact. The individual is also more intact and more prepared to continue on this journey of living. You take those away and you start asking almost these existential questions like what am I doing here like what what what is what is my legacy what is my purpose what or why am I just being coached to survive and equate survival with living.

Soren Duggan • 40:59
Yeah, that’s great. I love that. Yeah, I totally agree. It was, you know, it to kind of bring the example of fatherhood back into it. A lot of these guys, as we all have done many times in our lives, really lamented the job that they had at that point. They worked too hard for someone they didn’t care about or didn’t make enough for whatever it might be. And then they had a kid and they said, well, I still hate my job and I still don’t get paid enough. But but there’s at least a reason for me to be there doing it. I’m working 60 hours a week, not just to give my landlord a bunch of my money, but I’m working 60 hours a week to buy clothes for my kid or buy form of the for my kid or whatever it might be gave them a reason to go do that and it made the mundane or difficult parts of life. It gave it some sort of reason and purpose to be able to do so which everybody on earth has done hard things in their lives and without that underlying purpose those things get a lot harder to do. And we saw that time and time again. So when you look at the guys who did not have those concentric circles of relations of relational lives, those those webs of association that rich tapestry, as you had said, they both felt a lack of purpose but also a bit of fear of taking chance and taking risk, right? And so we were we talked Sam talked about a social safety net not in a bureaucratic sense or a, you know, an entitlement sense but in a true social way. If you have friends and you’ve fallen hard times you can go back and count on your friends to be able to help you which is the definition we use for close friends as somebody who you would feel comfortable with and would expect to be able to go to in a time of need. So if you do have that the guys that had that or or anybody that has that rich tapestry you are much more willing to take chances in your life and take risks and go for things when you know that you have something to fall back on. And whether or not that’s a supportive partner or a child or a great network of friends. If you don’t have that safety net, the ground seems very, very far away you’re much less likely to take risks, especially if you don’t have much to gamble on and risk. And life ends up becoming much smaller and much more lonely, for lack of a better word.

Tyler Adams • 43:26
And without getting too far afield from what we’re talking about in the presentation, you guys, you know, this interview, what I do here is what you just described, Soren, somewhat flies in the face of at least in the western American mentality of taking risk of that entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, all of the things that we would qualify as some of our values. And the structures don’t exist to actually reinforce those values that it’s almost in spite of that that the incentives are actually to move away from those values.

Soren Duggan • 44:08
We purposely didn’t in our interview set ask about consumption of online content. That’s a bit of the world that I came from prior to this. I’ve had a lot of experience in doing some focus groups and doing a lot of the stuff about digital content. It requires its own very dedicated time to be able to talk about it’s a very sticky very complex issue so we didn’t touch on it. But knowing a lot about it, you know, there’s there’s so much about you see content over and over and over again of very wealthy guys telling people to take risks to take those risks. It’s very easy when you have quite a lot to tell people to take risks when taking a risk doesn’t cost you everything that you have, right. And so I agree there is an ethos in America to take those risks, and taking risks is the way to achieve great things you have to do not everything is is a safe way. But if we want to empower folks to be able to take those risks to better their life to create great things to do great things. I mean we have to give them the safety and the security from a social standpoint to be able to do those things and these guys wanted to do it. They very much wanted to put themselves out there. And you know a lot of guys had business ideas that they had a lot of guys wanted to start community groups. They would love to do it, but they just quite frankly didn’t have the capital either financial social or, you know, the capital time to be able to put themselves out there, take the risk and do it and I mean it’s absolutely something that we should be promoting and I think that being able to have that rich tapestry of social connection is first and foremost the way to to give these guys the capacity to do so.

Sam Pressler • 45:52
There’s virtuous cycles and there’s vicious cycles. And there’s a virtuous cycle of being in relationship and being in community and being in relationship and being in community. That is the thing that produces more relationship and more community because the number one thing that’s going to refer you to other relationships and other involvement in community is going to be those very relationships themselves. And so when you’re in a place that has a rich relational tapestry when you’re when you yourself are embedded in many overlapping relationships and webs of association, you can find yourself in those situations where to to Soren’s point, you have the strong ties and the weak ties that could help you not only take risks, but also help you like if you want to start we had multiple guys say they want to do big brothers, big sisters by create their own big brothers, big sisters groups right like mentoring groups. But like, if you’re not in a relational ecosystem where you have people who’ve done that before and like that’s a lot harder to do. Right. And that is like the other side, which is the vicious cycle, like the guys who aren’t in relationship. How do you find your way into relationship? Right. Not only like do you know you have to take a bigger risk to go somewhere alone, but because you’re isolated, you’re losing the confidence and you actually are somewhat losing the skills of being in relationship. I like when I spend two days on zoom, I don’t talk to people in person, I feel less effective at talking to people in person, take that and that’s like a very trite example would take that and magnify that to experience of isolation like being in isolation for that long time like disconnects you from like the realness of the human existence. And so I think we what we see here is like Roger inherited a virtuous cycle that he is now committed to stewarding and sustaining. Most of these other guys inherited some version of a vicious cycle, and they are putting the responsibility to take the risk to get out of the vicious cycle. While being punished through being in that vicious cycle themselves, it’s like multiple layers of compounding challenge. You hear this kind of talk in economic terms, but I think we should also need to talk about this in like social and relational terms.

Tyler Adams • 47:50
Your guys’s piece is not going to kind of step into providing solutions. Like you said, we left this a little bit open, not necessarily on a massively hopeful note or that massively despairing note kind of in that middle space. What for you guys in our conversation now, what have we been remiss in talking about or exploring that that if we were to stop this conversation now, we kick ourselves. Why didn’t we we talk about this?

Sam Pressler • 48:34
I think we’ve been talking a lot about the what I would say is the dominant, the dominant thrust of our interviews which is the guy who is lacking connection but is aware of lacking that connection anddeeply wants to connect wants to contribute but doesn’t know where to begin doesn’t believe in himself to begin facing material issues right and we feel that gap is too big to bridge. There is a subset of guys who don’t fit into that at all. So this subset of guys I would say they’re for the most part isolated and they’re aware of that isolation, but they don’t want to reconnect. And the reason they don’t want to reconnect is because they’ve been hurt. And, and in many times the hurt is pretty significant. And that hurt now is getting in the way of them wanting to build relationships in you. The shadow of, for instance, deaths of despair loomed pretty large over our conversation over this subset, losing friends to suicide, losing friends to drug overdose, but also outside of just a spare losing friends to prison losing friends to to to murder. The pain from that loss was so significant that many men were like, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it to put myself out there again. And for a few of the guys, I mean, I think so we’re and I were like, believe them we’re like, yeah, like, that makes sense. Like we had one guy who we did a case study on for this his name is Douglas. And Douglas lost his two best friends to suicide and prison. And he talked beautifully about the power and potential of friendship. And then he talked about it as if someone like, as someone who had a broken heart from a lost romantic partner would talk about would talk about that loss like it is it basically worth it to love someone get hurt or never love at all essentially and that was how he was talking about his his close friendships that he lost and not wanting to make a new friend. So, so that I just want to say like that is a subset. And that is very real. There is another part of that subset who I would say maybe didn’t lose friends to death or prison but lost friends to frankly like this idea of like being burned, being betrayed, being let down this feeling of you and that feeling of being burned, betrayed let down led them to trust new people much less to trust friends much less. And then that became a protection on face somewhere like don’t make yourself vulnerable to being used being let down being betrayed. And so that also means, you know what, I don’t need new friends, right, because the pain of that experience from past friends was too significant. And so I just wanted to name that as like, it wasn’t the dominant thread but it was a sub thread and if we didn’t speak to that I think we would not be fully like the reason it got a full chapter in the report is because it was a important enough sub thread to speak to.

Soren Duggan • 51:42
Sam clarified it perfectly I think the just the one thing I’ll add was that as the interviewer hearing the guys who did express that right. I mean, one, it’s also an example of why we did this report on men specifically without degrees because those deaths of despair are so high risk taking behavior for men is a lot higher than it is for women. And so we have, you know, drug use prison and now very unfortunately the the widespread advent of online gambling is really just streaking through these these these demographics, you’re going to see it more and more, unfortunately, but what I heard from them was very similar to what I heard a lot and saw a lot in the military from the military who had quite a bit of trauma from deployments and typically, not guys who had quite a lot of trauma from combat but from trauma from seeing things overseas. And I saw these that others had committed or seeing, you know, I think what they would call out of the pit of humanity and some pretty dark places of the world and this creates this coldness, I think to human connection that is a trauma response. I saw it’s a it’s a different strain of it’s a different color of it but I saw it, the similar language the similar mindset in these men who talked about losing friends or being betrayed by somebody that they were very very close to it hurt so bad it colored their picture of humanity in such a way that they just frankly didn’t find it worth it to continue to invest in those relationships and they end up closing themselves off. And as Sam said, it’s it’s obviously not what I would want for these guys, but it’s also, I can’t sit there and say that I don’t understand why that they why they got there. Why they reached that position, why they close themselves off. It’s quite understandable. I don’t know how to fix that problem. There’s nothing that I can say to these guys or anybody else in a short conversation to get them to grow out of that. But, you know, to link it all the way back before to talking about that rich tapestry of social connection. I’ve lost friends, many people have lost friends. And when you have other friends to sit around and more than that lost friend with it makes it a lot easier to go through. Same thing is true family or losing anybody that you love. But when you lose the one person you have morning alone is is a very, very difficult thing to do and we all we all deal with it. Any of us would deal with it. I’m not sure there is a healthy way to deal with it frankly but we all deal with it differently. And so, yeah, as Sam said, it’s an important archetype I think to lift up as a lot of these communities are pretty ravaged by drugs prison or, you know, the other types of behaviors that have actually lead to drugs in prison.

Tyler Adams • 54:41
One of the constructs we have tried to kind of pepper in through this season is the notion of the transformation of pain, suffering of wounding versus the continued transmission of it. And that that oftentimes what happens is that we try to transform we try to get back. I heard you say with Douglas, he knows what he yearns for you this beautiful picture of the friendship that he would like to have he experienced that the costs of it though have been so great to him that he has essentially become hopeless about what can I experience life without that depth of tragedy of pain of suffering. And his answer is no therefore I will withdraw, whether that is through through suicide whether that is through the numbing and abuse of substances whether that is, you know, making decisions that I basically go back to you know, a cage and incarceration. What you both acknowledged is addressing that issue is differential than that dominant that we talked to is they know what they want. They’re they’re ready to activate. We have different structural problems there but we have an entire structural problem with the dealing of loss of grief of of all of the tragedy and hurt and coming to this reconciliation with life is intense life is hard. That’s a very real population that what do we do?

Sam Pressler • 56:22
That point you made Tyler and I think Soren’s last point, which I think is threaded throughout this entire conversation is that loss in grief are meant to be a loss. Are meant to be experienced communally, right when you encounter when you’re in a community or you’re in a kind of relational ecosystem where you already have tenuous ties and a dearth of relationship when the small number of relationships you have are lost. And I think I’m speaking most directly to death. But I think grieving can also happen through loss and other ways going to prison, just losing a friend because of betrayal. You then are not able to be caught in the way that I think you know soren I know we’ve talked about like, you know, veterans who do have that community are able to be caught by one another and be able to have that tribe that they can fall back on. And so it’s it’s the absence of that tribe, right? It’s the absence of I’m alone and I have to I have to move through this this pain and loss alone. For lack of better words, like it’s inhuman. Like, we’re not meant, we’re not meant to live this way and we’re not meant to die this way. And I’ll maybe bring this back to the beginning and I didn’t share this in my intro, but I think the thing that haunts me most is this experience in the void of this isolation of people dying alone. I’ll just this story I shared with my dad. He, one of the best friends from high school didn’t go to college and my state stayed friends with him throughout high school and after but they kind of faded this guy ended up working for working for the township that we grew up in. And in my dad would always talk about it would seem every year, or then it was like every few years and it was like every five years. And I remember it was Christmas time about five years ago. I was I was home in New Jersey. My dad comes in after he was out from something and he had found out that his friend had died on around Thanksgiving, and he was not found until Christmas. And the look of like like like I had not seen my dad and my dad is a very like, so like a guido bravado New Jersey guy like always joking around like I’ve never seen the like whiteness come over his face like that. I have this feeling of, you know, one of your friends for life, kind of dying alone and being in such isolation that he wasn’t found for a month later. I think that’s the consequences of what we’re talking about here. Right. We’re talking about subset of the population who are losing it like I had a friend through our race app who who died alone and then that that shadow hangs over me to this day. And the and the fear that many of these guys as they become more isolated will will experience that same fate. And for me, that’s an implication on all of us.

Tyler Adams • 59:08
That inherent belief of that hopelessness is in my work with with my clients as well as is that we forget that we have we actually have the capacity for witnessing loss because it is uncomfortable and unhuman to let someone be alone at those moments and and and us choosing to withdraw because of the weight of that which is very real. It is heavy. It is it is tragic. But for us to withdraw is a violation of ourselves with that missed opportunity and I hear with you the honor of that story. It sounds like to me as your your dad just inherently knew that that that regardless of the cost to myself, the cost is greater to know that somebody was alone at that moment and and that’s unconscionable to us. It’s just it doesn’t reflect actually what we’re able to the capacity we have to transcend even our greatest fears of losing friends. The loss of the friend pales in comparison to the opportunity that’s lost for us to let them know to let ourselves know that you matter, even if if that means me carrying the burden of of the loss for the rest of my time. And we don’t know that

Sam Pressler • 01:00:29
It’s not a crisis of loneliness. It’s a it’s a crisis of collective accompaniment. And I think my I’ll speak in personal terms like my greatest spiritual want is to be accompanied and to accompany and to fail like to fail to accompany others in in in these. I mean, talk about a moment of transition in those moments of transition is is perhaps, you know, when those failures that weighs on us most and so I do think about this as kind of leaving people alone and then leaving people unaccompanied throughout the hardest times.

Soren Duggan • 01:01:10
And I think those those instances in which people you love or complete strangers do accompany you in those times, even if you don’t necessarily need it, but just reach that handout to help. I mean, it’s I think it’s a very memorable time. There’s a woman Elizabeth Laird, who’s passed away now from breast cancer in 2015. She was very famous in the army. She lived in Texas and for years from 2001 on would stand on the flight line and hug every soldier that flew out of Fort Hood and flew back from deployment. Anybody that I I didn’t have the pleasure of doing it but a lot of my friends did deploy out of there. She did so I think in large part because she wanted to give those soldiers hugs who maybe didn’t have anybody to hug when they did get home, or when they or before that they left. And that type of accompaniment I have soldiers who have robust families and a lot of loved ones who light up when people mention who’s known locally as the hug lady from Fort from Fort Hood. They light up. It’s a memory that they have that they will have for years and years and years is that small token of accompaniment and appreciation and love from a total stranger. Really, I mean, they started a very, very difficult time in their life and ended a very difficult time in their life with her and that I’ve taken a lot of lessons away from that. And yeah, it’s it’s a fulfilling thing, I think for her and others to do and incredibly fulfilling to receive as well.

Intro & Outro • 01:02:39
Thank you for sitting with us in this conversation for bringing your own story, your own questions and your own hard won wisdom to what we’re building together. If you want to keep this going, subscribe to GoodPain on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, where you can also leave us a review that helps others find their way to these conversations. And for weekly doses of conversations that go beyond quick fixes or service level advice, subscribe to our Kindling newsletter at goodpainco.com. GoodPain is recorded in Colorado on the Rappahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne ancestral lands. And let’s remember, we are not alone in this. Our struggle is not our shame. Whatever we are carrying today, we don’t have to carry it alone. We will see you next time.