The Quiet Rebellion of Young Men
Understanding the vibe shift
“Why are boys falling down the ‘alt-right’ pipeline?”
“Why are young men abandoning progressive values?”
“Why do they trust Joe Rogan over the news?”
“Why are they listening to Andrew Tate?”
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a moral panic across the West regarding boys and young men. You hear these questions everywhere now — in headlines, on panels, in the anxious voices of people who can’t understand what this demographic is doing, and what it means for polite society.
Up to now, the diagnosis offered up by the mainstream commentariat has been the buzzword bingo of incels, misogyny, the far-right, and, of course, toxic masculinity.
Worse still, they insist this young male dissent is the outcome of bad ‘influence’, a corruption of the youth orchestrated by shadowy figures from a dark corner of the internet called the ‘manosphere’. The implication being the formation of a future cohort of rabid men who will regress the West and plunge us into a warlord’s wet dream, or as Reddit likes to imagine, a world straight out of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Naturally, with this picture in mind, a landscape of moral panic has formed; papers on how to ‘de-radicalise’ boys, endless exposés on the pervasiveness of misogyny and incels, and calls to erase the complete online presence of figures such as Tate. Even fitness and wellbeing are being questioned as potential far-right pipelines. The panic reached farcical levels in the UK when the fictional Netflix drama, Adolescence, was treated as though it were a documentary by the mainstream, with the government going so far as to make it available across all British schools.
But the panic doesn’t just miss the point. It proves the point.
If you stop listening to the chattering classes and start watching what young men are actually doing, a different picture emerges. They’re flocking to the gym, attending church again, choosing stoicism over therapy, ditching conventional paths for entrepreneurship, and abandoning establishment media for alternative voices. They’re even rallying around the mantra that “you can just do things”, a strangely simple ethos.
Young men are up to something. Some sort of divergence is occurring. But it’s not toxicity or radicalisation.
It’s best understood as a vibe shift.
As historian Niall Ferguson put it, to understand politics you have to understand culture, and to understand culture you have to understand vibes.
Especially, vibe shifts. They mark the point when a culture’s intuition – its ‘mood music’ – alters because people start sensing, often without knowing why, that certain values and behaviours no longer ‘fit’ the moment, and new ones start to feel right.
I know this because I feel it, as part of this young male cohort. We were raised on a vibe of safety, softness, and ‘correctness’. A vibe that obsessed over what could go wrong, but rarely pointed to what might be worth striving for.
As boys, we were told to talk through our problems instead of taking action to solve them. To defer to the group instead of trusting our instincts. To suppress the joke, the impulse, the competitive edge — basically anything that might ‘unsettle’ the atmosphere.
We were told to be allies, to check our privilege, to use the right language. Even humour had rules. If we joked the wrong way, we’d get a warning.
We watched as female peers were empowered, uplifted and championed. And rightly so. But when it came to us, we were treated as if we were knuckle-dragging, nose-picking, ‘too loud’, liabilities. As though we were this odd fixture in an already harmonised room.
Our reluctance to sit still in class or our disinterest in a subject was treated as a behavioural issue or disorder. It couldn’t be the education system that was misaligned, it had to be us.
By the time we left school, the message was clear: a ‘good boy’ is sensitive, careful and soft-spoken. One who is defanged. One who distances himself from anything too masculine.
It wasn’t forced on us. It was just the default settings of our environment.
But something about it never sat right. It felt like we were slowly shutting down parts of our true nature — our energy, our edge, our agency. We didn’t know what was missing, only that something was. So, we learned to live with the vague itch we couldn’t scratch.
Until something cut through the fog.
We weren’t looking for a counterculture, but it found us anyway. Nothing grand. For me, it started with a Jordan Peterson clip on YouTube saying something no-one else would – “make your bed”, “take responsibility”. That clip led to a podcast. Then to others. Then to a whole constellation of podcasts, books, and other forbidden material that exposed me to ideas we’d never been taught, and principles we should’ve been equipped with earlier. And somehow, these strange voices from the internet made more sense than the adults in the room ever did.
And we responded. Not with protest signs or manifestos, but with choices. With action.
We started lifting to suffer on purpose, to feel friction and earn strength.
We picked up the ancient Stoicism handbook because it flipped what we were taught; not to prioritise how we felt, but to do what needed to be done, especially when we didn’t feel like it. It taught us that virtue lives in action, not in affirmations and performative virtue.
We began side hustles, learnt skills, made things — just to see what we could do when there’s no script. Just to test if the world would move when we pushed with our own hands.
It wasn’t all of us, and we weren’t all doing the same thing. But we were all moving in the same direction: away from helplessness, away from coping, away from apathy. Toward responsibility, toward capability, toward living life by design, rather than default.
But this vibe shift wasn’t just about us. When we zoomed out, we saw that the same stifling vibe was everywhere.
A society afraid of offence, allergic to conviction and obsessed with managing risks. Where we all put on the mask of niceties and politeness to the point where authentic conversations happen only behind closed doors, if we dare to have them at all.
A society run by a bureaucracy that expands endlessly to meet the needs of its own expansion. Delivering managed decline, then gaslighting us into thinking this is as good as it gets. Convincing us that instead of addressing housing shortages or inflation, we should spend time debating pronouns. Instead of securing our borders, we shoulder the world’s burdens, and call anyone who disagrees with this slow suicide a racist. That we should even sacrifice truth itself, if it means no-one is offended.
We’d grown up in this vibe, but now we could see it.
That’s when the quiet, personal discontent that young men felt, tipped over to something more outward.
We voted with our feet wherever we could, away from everything the old guard insists is true. Because whatever it is they’re selling, it just doesn’t ring true anymore.
Young men feel the failure of the dominant sensibility acutely. Not just because masculinity is pathologised and smeared, but because the masculine condition is wired to seek challenge, direction and truth. Wired, in at least some of us, to seek greatness, to take up the hero’s journey. When these things go missing, we’re the first to feel restless and adrift. Society kept telling us everything was fine, but our instincts said otherwise.
The manosphere, or bro-podcasts, or whatever you wish to call it, offers refuge for those not yet hollowed out or defanged by the dominant sensibility. These domains aren’t perfect — god no. But they’re among the few places left that still speak the lost language of glory, honour, excellence and beauty. In these corners, such words needn’t be whispered.
Yes, some corners of the manosphere are crude. Some are even dangerous. Yes, this vibe risks animating actual incels, mysogynists, far-rightists and textbook toxic masculinity. Some will twist the mantra that you can just do things to permit terrible behaviour. We may even overcorrect and regress the West.
But the mainstream can moralise, pathologise, and panic all it likes. Young men have already left the building. It’s only a matter of time before everyone else does too.
It’s true that much of this vibe shift is unfolding online, which is why so few outside it can see this emerging worldview. That’s why it’s easily misunderstood – when you see only the outliers, the loudest voices, the easiest caricatures, and the media smears.
But it is coming, whether we’re ready for it or not. The West today has made the return of masculine-coded virtues not just desirable, but necessary.
You can’t convince us that the best we can aspire to is to become our weakest selves. You can’t convince us to play the conventional game when it no longer delivers on its promises. You can't convince us that fragility is a virtue, or that weakness yields a better society.
The West’s future won’t be male in the tribal sense. But it will be male-coded.
As Mary Harrington remarks:
“You can’t re-enchant the world without re-enchanting men, and you can’t re-enchant men without re-activating masculine archetypes”.
The vibe shift, then, is about reviving the spiritedness and vitality that made the West great. Not just what it built, but what it believed in. The will to strive. To dare against the odds. To build with meaning. To love fully. To live with consequence.
To pass on something great, as our forebears once strove to.
So. Which way, Western man?