We hear it almost every week on social media and in the press: if only men talked more. As if silence were the root cause of everything.
But men do talk. We’ve never had more campaigns, workshops, football-ground ads, celebrity confessions, podcasts, or workplace check-ins. Awareness is not the bottleneck. You can’t fling a flat white in Shoreditch without hitting someone making a documentary or orchestrating a campaign about “men opening up”.
And yet, the suicide rate for men peaks not in youth, but in midlife, forty-five to fifty-four. These are the supposedly settled years, when family and career should provide sufficient ballast. Instead, it’s the cliff edge.
The parallel with childhood in the smartphone era is hard to miss. Just as children have lost the structures of boredom, awkwardness, and unmediated friendship, adults are losing the structures of duty, craft, and continuity. Those same forces, phones, performative identity, secular drift – are hollowing both ends of life. Middle-aged despair and nostalgia for a lost childhood are two sides of the same cultural erosion.
Part of it is the work itself. Men who once called themselves carpenters, miners, or postmen now call themselves contractors on three apps. This loss isn’t simply one of continuity or economics, it’s ontological. When the trades and institutions that once anchored male identity dissolved, nothing replaced them. Progress rightly broadened women’s roles but left men’s scaffolding to rust.
What I think is missing isn’t another awareness week or a better hashtag, it’s structure. That reliable, unglamorous web of roles and obligations that demand consistent presence and usefulness. Structure, I truly believe, creates the conditions for grit, stoicism, resilience; the quality required to face life’s chaos without disintegrating.
Four Pillars
- Stable roles: work or duties that confer identity beyond the next contract.
- Shared obligations: being the one who brings the kit, runs the line, sets out the chairs.
- Continuity: clubs of all kinds, parishes, allotments, institutions that outlast individual seasons.
- Recognition in absence: places where you’re noticed if you don’t show up.
Now, these aren’t nostalgic tokens. They’re the mechanisms of accountability and friction. Friction builds strength. It stops people flapping when real adversity hits. Talking helps, but talk without structure is vapour: empathy without scaffolding.
Having purpose then is not an insight, it’s an act. A sequence of embodied, useful gestures that prove one’s value to others. It’s a personal responsibility, not something to be delegated to an app, a therapist, or a men’s shed. Those are just the supports, not substitutes. They matter most and are useful augmentations only when attached to the rhythm of an ordinary, useful life.
Because purpose lives in function, not in show. So, until we rebuild those structures of continuity and obligation, the well-meaning chorus of “men just need to talk more” will keep echoing across empty ground, like a gossamer-thin corporate wellness seminar where everyone nods sagely at the flipchart, fills out a feedback form, and goes straight back to crying in the gents.
AI and disclosures: This piece used AI to surface relevant psychology references to support my personal thesis. I also used it for the tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The writing, and personal reflections were all mine and informed in part through close personal experience with these matters.
John Gibbard 
Absent Dads, Absent Truth
The Mayor of London has been urged to “champion relatable, positive male role models” to stop boys being radicalised online, which is exactly the sort of thing you suggest when you’ve already decided not to talk about the real problem.
Instead of facing the collapse of family structures and the chronic absence of fathers in too many boys’ lives, we get a proposal for an information campaign. A Toolkit. A few posters. Maybe Southgate can record a reassuring YouTube video.
Apparently, the hope is that if we churn out enough branded content about ‘healthy masculinity,’ it will somehow fill the gaping hole left by Dad never being there at all. As if boys are just a design challenge, a user group to be nudged away from extremism by better comms.
Of course, and I can’t stress this enough, some fathers should not be in their children’s lives at all. Where there is violence, cruelty or fear, absence is protection. A boy and their mum are better off fatherless than poisoned by a man who teaches him that domination is love. No argument there. None.
But that’s not the majority story.
The real crisis is the steady normalisation of fathers absenting themselves, through neglect, indifference, casual abandonment, and the refusal of politicians to say so, for fear of sounding judgmental.
You don’t fix fatherlessness with a toolkit.
But modern politics is allergic to root causes. Safer to pretend it’s a branding issue. Safer to talk about awareness, feelings, “positive role models.” Anything except the one thing that actually matters: Dads. Ordinary, everyday Dads, who stay, love, protect, and teach, often imperfectly, but crucially.
Until then, you can print all the Toolkits you like and put out the PowerPoints in a special school asssembly. The boys will still go looking for their fathers, and if they don’t find them at home, they’ll find them online.
And that won’t be Gareth Southgate.