I am talking about men who fail and who, precisely because they are men, have often been taught to regard failure as something to hide, to grit their teeth, keep going, avoid complaining, and never show too much vulnerability. Perhaps this is where we should begin, because suicide may be only the tip of the iceberg, the most visible expression of a much deeper and more widespread form of male distress than we are willing to acknowledge.
For generations, men were taught a simple rule: they had to be strong. They had to work, provide for their families, protect, compete, achieve, become financially independent, be confident, and be sexually capable. They were expected to endure hardship without complaining and, above all, not to reveal too clearly how difficult any of it could be.
That model certainly had its darker side; it produced men who were unable to recognize their emotions, unable to ask for help, and sometimes unable even to understand what they were feeling. Yet while we have rightly challenged many of the rigid assumptions of that model, we have made a subtler mistake: we have dismantled some old certainties without always giving men something meaningful to replace them with.
The modern man finds himself in the middle of a historical transformation that is far from over. He is no longer necessarily the head of the household, no longer necessarily the sole breadwinner, and no longer entitled to demand obedience from a woman simply because of his role. He has to learn to build relationships based on reciprocity, autonomy, and consent. None of this is a problem; in itself, it is progress. But social progress is not simply about telling people what they are no longer allowed to be. It is also about showing them what they can become.
And here, perhaps, we have left a void.
We have told men not to be possessive, aggressive, sexist, controlling, or toxic; often, rightly so, we have explained which behaviors they need to abandon. But far less often have we explained what kind of man they should strive to become instead. A man can be strong without being violent, authoritative without being authoritarian, competitive without despising others. He can love without possessing, and he can be vulnerable without feeling less like a man.
The problem, therefore, is not masculinity itself, but the failure to teach men how to govern it; the answer is not to strip men of their strength, but to teach them what their strength is for.
The deeper problem is that a significant part of male distress remains invisible until it takes an extreme form. When a man dies by suicide, everyone suddenly asks why he did not talk, why he did not seek help, why nobody noticed what he was going through. But perhaps we should be asking a different question: how long had that man been disappearing from society before he disappeared for good?
Before the final act there may have been years of loneliness, professional failure, separation, financial hardship, an inability to form intimate relationships, the loss of social status, the feeling of becoming useless, the shame of not living up to expectations, and, perhaps most painfully, the belief that nobody was truly interested in hearing his story.
Suicide, then, is not necessarily the beginning of the tragedy; it may be the moment when a private tragedy finally becomes impossible to ignore.
But male distress does not always end in suicide. Sometimes it becomes addiction, isolation, compulsive behavior, rage, aggression, an inability to form relationships, hatred toward oneself or toward others; in the most extreme cases, it can become violence.
And this is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable, because talking about male distress does not mean excusing male violence. A man who assaults or kills a woman must take full responsibility for his actions; personal suffering cannot become an excuse for turning another human being into a victim.
But responsibility and understanding are not mutually exclusive.
We can condemn an act and, at the same time, try to understand the psychological, family, and social path that helped produce it. In fact, if we genuinely want to prevent violence, we have to be willing to examine what happens before the violence occurs.
It is much easier to call a violent man a monster than to ask how he arrived at that point. Calling someone a monster reassures us because it allows us to place evil outside the boundaries of ordinary human experience, as though it belonged to a completely different category of person. But prevention cannot operate only through condemnation at the end of the process; it has to recognize the transformations that take place much earlier, when loneliness becomes resentment, resentment becomes obsession, obsession becomes possessiveness, and possessiveness can eventually become violence.
Sexuality, too, deserves a less ideological and more human approach. Fortunately, we have learned that sexual orientation is not a disease and that homosexuality cannot be treated as a pathology that needs to be explained through trauma. But that does not mean every sexual behavior necessarily has a single origin, nor does it mean that trauma, abuse, loneliness, relational experiences, compulsions, or psychological suffering cannot influence the way an individual experiences and expresses sexuality.
We simply need to stop confusing different things: sexual orientation, sexual behavior, fantasy, identity, and the psychological consequences of personal experiences are not interchangeable concepts. Human beings are far more complicated than the categories we use to describe them.
Perhaps, however, the deepest problem lies somewhere else. The modern man has lost many of his old forms of belonging without necessarily finding new ones. For centuries, a man belonged to a family, a trade, a community, a country, a generation; his personal value was often connected to a concrete and recognizable role.
Today, we can live surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people and still have no one to call when we are in pain. We can have hundreds of contacts on social media and no one who would actually knock on our door when we need help. We are permanently connected and, at the same time, capable of being profoundly alone.
This contradiction can be particularly painful for men because many of them were raised to build their identity around what they did, produced, achieved, and protected. When those coordinates disappear, a question remains—one that not everyone has been prepared to answer:
Who am I if I am no longer what I do?
Who am I if I do not earn enough, if I do not have a partner, if I do not have a family, if I have no prestige, if nobody needs me anymore? And, perhaps most frightening of all, what remains of me when the world no longer seems to need what I know how to do?
That is a brutal question, especially in a society that constantly talks about self-fulfillment while simultaneously measuring people's worth through success, money, appearance, desirability, and their ability to project happiness. A man who has none of these things may begin to feel not merely that he is struggling, but that he has been pushed outside the game.
And once someone becomes convinced that he is outside the game, it can become very difficult to persuade him that the game is still worth playing.
This is why male distress should be addressed before it becomes news. We should notice the young man who has stopped going out, the man who loses his job and experiences it as a source of shame, the man who cannot build meaningful relationships, the father who no longer knows where he belongs after a separation, the person who spends years behind a screen without building a real life, the man who gradually transforms loneliness into resentment.
This does not mean that every lonely man is destined to become violent or suicidal; that would be absurd. It means that a society that recognizes distress only when it becomes pathological or criminal is a society that is always arriving too late.
We do not need weaker men. We need more conscious men.
Men who can ask for help without feeling humiliated, accept rejection without turning it into hatred, love without possessing, lose without destroying, be strong without becoming violent, and be vulnerable without feeling less like men.
Most of all, we need to stop telling men only what they must not become and start giving them a positive idea of what they can become.
Because perhaps this is the greatest contradiction of our time: we have invested enormous energy in explaining to men what kind of men they should not be, while spending far less time explaining what kind of men they could become.
So the original question remains, and perhaps it is even more disturbing now:
What is happening to men?
Maybe they are not simply becoming worse, weaker, or more confused. Maybe some of them are simply trying, often unsuccessfully, to find a place in a society that has changed the rules of the game faster than many people have been able to adapt to them.
Some will adapt. Others will discover new forms of identity and belonging. Others will be left behind. And those who are left behind may be the hardest to see, because our culture seems primarily interested in those who win, those who are visible, those who produce, those who function.
The rest can quietly disappear into the shadows.
Until their suffering becomes a suicide statistic, a crime story, an act of violence, or another form of social deviance.
Only then do we notice the man we stopped listening to.
But by then, it may already be too late.
