Seven Dudes Could Take Over Any Small Town in America

Where all the lonely young men should go.

In 2024, a friend of my dad’s tied an election, each man with only 149 votes. Instead of going into runoffs, he surrendered his seat, saying, “You know what? I’m just going to enjoy my retirement. I think it’s time for a younger person to have a chance to serve.” The only problem with that is there’s almost no young people around here.

I moved back to my hometown just a year or so after that. In the short time since moving back, I’ve had about five older men jokingly (but maybe not so jokingly) suggest that I should run for mayor. Maybe in ten years. Still, it struck me as remarkable, especially coming from LA where despite working my ass off for seven years, no one gave a damn what I had to say.

You could say I was part of that male loneliness epidemic. I was hardworking, reasonably bright, followed all the rules, and yet there was no real foothold for me in society. If I had kept on that trajectory, I would have no house, no kids, and not even any real friends. This is despite having a reasonably good career in tech, too. Just an endless grind toward delayed promises: intermittent bouts of extreme discipline in my small apartment fueled by grindslop YouTube, followed by seasons of sad Spotify walks. I can only get away with saying that this is a real problem because I am not personally complaining anymore.

This is their double bind: historically failing on all fronts of measurable success and meaning, but also not allowed to raise these issues in polite mainstream company without being called a chud and warned to check their privilege, and so they spawn manospheric underbellies and thus all that cultural turmoil on the right. The situation is worse than you probably think. Older people seem to have no idea how disillusioned most young men are, how little they feel that there’s any heroic pathway for them.

As far as I ever found, there’s not a lot of very helpful outlooks or prognosis for that situation, from within its own rules. The dissident right believes the pro-social options are hopeless, encourages men to become psychopathic defectors and effectively work to undermine the entire project of civilisation for immediate gains of status, looks, and wealth. The mainstream just says it’s not happening, and if it is happening, it’s not that bad, and if it is that bad, then that’s actually good.

When I first moved back here, we set up a meeting with the mayor in Town Hall to discuss the possibility of adding park benches where we envisioned maybe young couples like us would hang out. When we walked through the door, there was a putrid stench, something like saltwater taffy dipped in sewage. The lady at the front desk explained that they were having problems with squirrels scrounging around the walls, and so they sealed them off, but had accidentally trapped one sleeping squirrel. The only thing to do, she said, is just wait it out for a couple weeks for it to rot away.

So we sat there, doors open, box fans blowing, discussing our ideas with the mayor, who was amenable, excited even, that a young couple would want to be involved. This has been our reception in general: there is leverage to do things here. There is even a budget to do them, and so a way to make a name for yourself by investing in whatever you think might help: agriculture, classical schools, local art, tourism marketing, beauty resortation, etc. The problem is that Town Hall stinks, as it were.

Young men chase after those few coveted seats as displayed in the attention economy, to their great despair. Those don’t necessarily contain commensurate power or influence or meaning, but importantly, attention. They are legible on social media, and so they are coveted. Like apes after a painting of a prime female in estrus, we rip and tear our way toward an apparently scarce resource, not realizing that there is a panoply of more real, and because they’re ignored, higher-leverage opportunities.

You can argue about the historical uniqueness of the situation for modern young men all you want, the simple facts remain: The way out (if not for Young Men™, then for any particular young man who’s asking) is to model a desire for a new object before he can even feel the desire himself. To notice the temptation to imitate those who want the “scarce” resources, to accept that it is a powerful feeling to want what everyone else wants, and yet still to sacrifice it anyway.

There, the rewards abound. I already, practically against my will, am a chair of the beautification committee. My wife is the president of the Feliciana Theatre Project, voted unanimously on the first meeting. She’s a newcomer, but that doesn’t matter: Human beings not only have a delicate and keen sense for what object is the most desired among people, they also have a near-perfect sense, in aggregate and over time, for who is genuinely sacrificing a chance at those coveted objects and who is only pretending to do that. You can tell the difference, for example, between someone who is kissing up to someone who might give them an email job and someone who is fascinated by people who have nothing to offer but the story of a life spent thinking about the philosophy of turkey hunting.

Young men are strung along with the promise of one in a million odds, failing to notice that most exceptionalness isn’t gained, by and large, by slaving away towards an idol that is shared by everyone, but instead naming what hasn’t been named yet, which if done with love unintentionally becomes an idol to others, no matter what you may later say to dissuade them. Marketers make millions working 60 hour weeks so you covet a thing it’s too late to win. There is no other way to put this more helpfully to young men: this problem is entirely your fault, and that’s good news.

With historically overwhelming access to envy, always on our phones, and historically little power toward satisfying usurpation by violence, we can only desperately pine to be part of the tiny elite that gets all the attention. Yeah, so does everyone else, man. Your chances are astronomically slim and only getting slimmer and lots of people are making money on your bad bets in the meantime.

What young men need to do is take all that piss and vinegar they have for bodybuilding and making money and channel that into a slightly smaller subsidiarity. Feel into a better trade-off structure, where your reputation is remembered and grows over the course of a few years of public moral decisions, which both gives you something to do and other people to keep you sane. Pick something somewhere between your own lonely and atomized individual self and these global-scale attention egregores. There’s little chance that you will have meaningful influence on Instagram, and if you do, you’ll hate who you become in the process of getting it. There is, however, a strong chance that you can go to a small town and foster your ability to pay attention to people and make incremental progress there.

That will be your proving ground, if you are even still ambitious after you’ve made a few real friends. Anything great has to work on the communal level first. From this simple observation, we get a hint of what’s deeply wrong with Silicon Valley. Their scale too easily makes their projects inhuman. They don’t think on a scale that’s close to Dunbar’s number or even the Platonic city-state, which is something like 5,000 families, where repeated human interactions can guide the sanity of both the project and the people. You need to know people before you know demographics, to make things that aren’t disgusting.

Complaining about young men not getting hired into as many pointless corporate jobs as their unimpressed female peers is never going to work because the men don’t even want the damn email jobs, and besides that, unless the failures of men are incumbent on those men, they are unhappy. Any man who is rescued from without will always eventually rebel from his shelterer. No matter what brave new world we’re in, or what maladaptive thing we’ve been told to think by boomers, it’s still on us to navigate the landscape of possibility as it actually presents itself today. If we can’t make the proper sacrifices to get a better thing, then we die in the war of our age, en masse. Is now and always has been. Meaning or bullets, we all fight our wars.

If the landscape of possibility that is presenting itself to you seems hopeless, it is only because your hope is set too firmly on an idol: attention, clout, status. You’ve trained yourself with daily devotions to the phone to love that idol more than you love life itself. If you can recognize that about yourself, and then decide that you would be willing to do what it takes to free yourself of the mimesis, then you begin to see the landscape of possibility as it actually is.

Now, I understand that in order for something to be a true sacrifice, you can’t think you’ll just get something better. This should look like an unfolding process where your heart opens, you fall in love with the slow and overlooked. You’ll already have some dream in you, you’ll notice. You just need to populate it with real people. Go to your version of a small town to do that. It doesn’t have to be a literal small town, but it will likely be a place that seems ugly and forsaken to the untrained eye. That’s to say, you did not come out of a desire to optimize for visible markers of status. However, I also can’t help but notice that what I’ve gotten out of my little town is much more, even on a brute material level, than whatever I was grinding towards within the consensus mimetic desire of mass media in Los Angeles.

If you sacrifice Isaac, you get to keep him, and also become the father of generations. But you cannot know beforehand that it is going to pay you. Otherwise, it is not truly a sacrifice. This is the paradox. Kierkegaard says that Abraham fully gives up Isaac and yet fully expects him back, by virtue of the absurd. In other words, you are allowed to know that true sacrifices tend to afford you the most over the longest period of time. You’re just not allowed to know when and how and what the hell.

And don’t pretend like you don’t have a dream: that you don’t want to go to the Adirondacks to build an a-frame or make a violent graphic novel about Mesopotamian myths. Without a real dream driving you there, the people in the places you go will smell on you that you don’t love them. Little by little, you will be excommunicated. If, however, you decide to genuinely sacrifice scale and attention and global recognition, be provincial, come here and be here (wherever that is for you) and love it, they will smell that on you as well. Suddenly, you’ll find, everyone wants what you’re cooking.

I went to a town council meeting last week. One of my friends from high school was there. He’s a great musician and produces music festivals, including in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. He was invited there by a man who’s running for mayor to explain how our town could start putting on music festivals monthly or quarterly. The boomers listened enraptured as this young guy explained how it all might work.

After the meeting, as a part of shooting the breeze, we agreed that seven dudes like him and me, a number I pulled out of my ass, could easily take over a town like this. Reflecting on it now, I have to make an amendment. When you come to a place like this and start pouring yourself into it, you don’t actually take over the town. The town takes over you. You wake up from a bad dream where everything was about you.

The Myth of Getting Out of the Small Town