Dane Jensen

New newsletter: THE MONKS IN THE CASINO In the last few decades, the pro-social life script for many young people—date, marry, buy a house, have a kid—has become more expensive. Meanwhile, the anti-social life script—e.g., posting, porn, parlays—has become easier, cheaper, frictionless. This has created an unusual inversion of risk. Today's young people—and young men, in particular—have become more risk averse in the physical world and more risk-seeking in the digital world. They date less, and gamble more. They find intimacy scary and betting exciting. They furnish their rooms like high-tech monasteries and gravitate toward media that works like a slot machine. I don't think young men suffer from a "loneliness crisis." I think the problem is bigger and stranger than that. They are choosing to be alone, because economics and technology have made aloneness feel easy and togetherness feels anxious. The result: A generation of monks in a casino. derekthompson.org/p/the-monk…