Jonas Leddington — Self and Society

A short note on freedom & excellence

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

In a recent NY Times op-ed, “There’s something better than happiness”, Mark Edmundson, a UVA professor, argues that students should devote themselves to a life of freedom through the pursuit of self-creation: determine your own values and make them manifest in the world. Pursue your own uniquely determined excellence.

It sounds good, but, taken as stated, it’s pure folly.

How is a university student, still unformed, still unshaped, supposed to “determine their own values?” A self that hasn’t been shaped will only have the ambient values of the culture to draw upon.

Students who follow his counsel will find themselves over-determined by two far more powerful mechanisms — the market and technology — and will live lives of corrosive consumerist individualism, always seeking affirmation for their choices in the mirror of the market and the screen.

The only real path to excellence -- and, freedom, it turns out -- is submission to a rule.

After a long period of apprenticeship comes mastery and with mastery, the first glimpses of freedom. Someone who is only a year or two into playing piano cannot improvise. They need to master all the scales and chord progressions. They need to learn to really hear and anticipate what others are doing. Only after building such a durable base, trained into the fingers and beyond the mind, does play become possible.

We’ve lost the instinct for “formation”: the slow and durable process of shaping ourselves in community, devoted to a corpus of knowledge or practices, and with obligation to one another and to someone who knows more.

We see this in all spheres of life: love, ethics, and work.

If you want the deep experience of love, submit yourself willingly to a vow — marriage or committed partnership of some sort — and stay devoted to the other over the long haul. There’s no shortcuts there.
If you want to become truly good and ethical, submit yourself to diligently following an ethical code and your habitual violations and attempts at rationalization will teach you.
If you want excellence and freedom in your job, pick a sphere and submit to it. Follow your betters day after day. Soon enough, you’ll find new and spacious paths in front of you.

The critical move here is vow. *A vow is freely made once; its power comes not from reshaping the vow daily in response to market feedback but in staying, submitting, and staying, again and again.

A vow is freedom spent versus freedom hoarded.

Spending your freedom requires submission to something outside yourself, because otherwise you will follow your whims, always unsteady and always shaped by the forces around you. (And, not incidentally, this is also the path to meaning, contra Edmundson.)

I’ve recently started studying the coding author and teacher, Kent Beck. He did this work as a coder. He submitted himself to the form of the code in a long practice of mastery. (His book, Tidy First, is on its way and I’m excited.) And here it gets really interesting: in April of 2023, after seeing ChatGPT, he wrote “**90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $0.” **In this quote, he was talking about his writing, but the machine would come for his coding too, soon enough.

So, what did he do? He started submitting himself to learning the workflow of the agents, as a beginner. Here we see a master opening himself to beginner’s mind — and seeking a new rule.

In my own 6-month old immersion into building software products, I’m very early days on the same path, but my submission now is to the path of agentic engineering, rather than to coding. This is a new discipline and the workflows suited to agents are not the same as the workflows suited to humans. And, given there isn’t an established body of authoritative practice and experts, the rule I submit to is the evidence: the instruments, the record, the outcomes.

I’ll write on this next in the context of Kent Beck’s corpus.

Performance & Health Require Other People

2026-04-09T00:00:00.000Z

Solitary vs. group performance outcomes are measurably worse across every dimension that matters: follow-through, engagement, work performance, health, longevity, mental health, SUD recovery.

The best intervention, when you strip it down, is (i) time together, (ii) a shared standard and individual accountability to others, and (iii) group perseverance through hardship in a culture that affirms.

I wrote a short synopsis of this research here:

*Setting up camp on a medical mission, Nepal, 2017.

1. Groups Outperform Individuals at Changing Behavior

When identical health interventions are delivered to groups versus individuals, groups produce better adherence and better outcomes.

A meta-analysis of physical activity interventions (Burke, Carron et al., 2006) found this pattern across adherence, social interaction, quality of life, and physiological outcomes.

Exercising in a “true group,” one designed with group-dynamics principles to increase cohesion, was superior to exercising in a standard exercise class. Standard classes and home-based exercise with regular contact from researchers performed similarly, while home-based exercise without contact was significantly inferior to both. *The distinction that mattered was whether the program was designed to build group cohesion, not simply whether people were in the same room. *This distinction is confirmed by more recent work. A 2025 meta-analysis (71 studies, 523 effect sizes, preprint, not yet peer-reviewed) found that true groups, those designed with deliberate cohesion-building, showed larger effects on health outcomes than all other group types.

Self-paced digital health programs confirm the cost of isolation from the other direction. Apps, courses, and online challenges consistently show low completion rates for the general population, often in the single digits for MOOCs and self-guided health programs (rates vary by platform and population, but the direction is consistent across the literature).

*The content in the online programs is often sound. Without social accountability—without other people who notice whether you showed up—the vast majority of people stop.

2. Workplace Teams: High Performance Is Relational

The workplace is where the relationship between group dynamics and performance has been measured most extensively.

*The single most important drivers of excellence at work? Friendship and psychological safety.

Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement research, based on tens of millions of survey responses across industries and decades, identified a finding that still surprises people: the single question most strongly linked to high-performing teams is: “I have a best friend at work.” People on the most productive teams consistently answer this favorably. People on average teams do not. Gallup tested alternative wordings and found that no other phrasing predicted team performance as well.

Friendship correlates with creativity, client partnership metrics, financial responsibility, safety outcomes, and retention.

(An important caveat: Gallup’s research is proprietary and correlational. High-performing teams may produce close friendships as much as close friendships produce high performance. The Q12 data establishes a strong association, not a clean causal arrow. But the association is consistent across industries, geographies, and decades of measurement.)

Google’s Project Aristotle, led by Abeer Dubey and Julia Rozovsky, studied 180 teams and arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle. The strongest predictor of team effectiveness was psychological safety, a construct developed by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson: the belief that you can be vulnerable and take interpersonal risks without being punished. *Teams where people felt safe to admit mistakes and challenge each other outperformed teams staffed with individually brilliant people who didn’t trust each other.

Jehn and Shah (1997) tested this experimentally. Groups of friends consistently outperformed groups of acquaintances on collaborative tasks. Stronger collaboration, more open communication, shared commitment to group goals. The relationship preceded the performance.

*Even in the domain most explicitly organized around output, the quality of the relationships between people is the variable that matters most for results.

3. Being Alone Will Kill You

The performance gap between solo and group extends to whether you live or die.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s 2015 meta-analysis at Brigham Young University aggregated 70 studies and found that social isolation increases the likelihood of premature death by 26-32%, depending on how isolation is measured. Her earlier 2010 meta-analysis, covering 148 studies and over 300,000 participants, found that the mortality impact of weak social relationships is comparable to smoking and exceeds the risk from obesity and physical inactivity. These findings are replicated, controlled for confounds, and published in top-tier journals.

The risk is higher for people under 65 than over 65. This is counterintuitive. We associate isolation with the elderly. The data shows that social deficits are more predictive of death in younger and middle-aged samples.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. The 82-page advisory reported that roughly half of American adults experienced measurable loneliness even before COVID. The downstream consequences: 29% increased risk of coronary heart disease, 32% increased risk of stroke, approximately 50% increased risk of dementia among older adults with chronic loneliness.

*The loneliness studies have the same evidentiary weight as the research on smoking.

The longest confirmation comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked the same individuals and their families since 1938. After more than 85 years of data collection, the study’s clearest finding is that relationship quality at age 50 is a better predictor of physical health at age 80 than cholesterol levels. The people most satisfied in their relationships in middle age were the healthiest three decades later, across both the Harvard-educated cohort and the inner-city Boston cohort. The finding held regardless of social class, IQ, or genetic background. Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, summarizes the mechanism: chronic loneliness is a stressor, and chronic stress breaks the body down over time. (Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M., The Good Life, 2023; Harvard Study of Adult Development, ongoing since 1938.)

4. The Pattern Across Health Conditions

The group advantage is not confined to exercise or workplace performance. Researchers have studied group-based versus individual interventions across a range of chronic conditions. The same pattern appears in every one.

Weight Loss: A 2022 systematic review (Street & Avenell, 10 RCTs, 2,169 participants) directly compared group versus individual delivery of the same weight loss intervention. Group participants lost significantly more weight at every time point, 1.33 kg more at final follow-up, and were 36% more likely to achieve clinically meaningful weight loss of 5% or more of body weight. Attrition rates were similar, meaning the group advantage was not explained by differential dropout.
Type 2 diabetes: Group-based self-management education significantly reduced HbA1c compared to routine care: by 0.44 percentage points at 6 months and 0.46 points at 12 months, across 21 studies and 2,833 participants (Steinsbekk et al., BMC Health Services Research, 2012). A separate meta-analysis of group medical visits for diabetes, covering 13 RCTs, found HbA1c reductions of 0.46 percentage points versus usual individual care (Housden, Wong & Dawes, CMAJ, 2013). The clinical content in these comparisons was equivalent. The delivery format was the differentiator. (The impact is comparable to adding a second med.)
Cardiac rehabilitation: Group-based exercise programs for coronary heart disease patients reduce cardiovascular mortality, recurrent cardiac events, and hospitalizations while improving quality of life. A 2023 meta-analysis in the European Heart Journal covering 85 RCTs and 23,430 participants confirmed the benefit (Taylor et al., 2023). The meta-analysis attributes these outcomes to exercise-based rehabilitation broadly, not specifically to the group social dynamic. That said, adherence to cardiac rehab programs is consistently higher in structured group settings than in home-based individual programs, and patient-reported research identifies the peer support of exercising alongside others with similar conditions as a significant factor in sustained participation.
Gestational diabetes prevention: A 2024 meta-analysis in Communications Medicine (Takele et al., 116 studies, 40,940 participants) found that group-based physical activity interventions reduced gestational diabetes incidence by 34% compared to individual or mixed delivery formats (RR 0.66, 95% CI 0.46-0.95, subgroup p = 0.04). The confidence interval is wide and barely crosses significance, so this finding should be treated as suggestive rather than definitive. Worth noting: the individual-only delivery arm showed essentially no reduction in gestational diabetes risk (RR 1.03), which strengthens the case that format matters.
Depression: Group CBT performs comparably to individual CBT for depression in adults, with the added benefit of reduced isolation and normalized experience. The evidence base is large enough that most clinical guidelines list group therapy as a first-line option alongside individual therapy.

5. Three Mechanisms, Not One

Research points to three distinct mechanisms through which groups improve individual outcomes: accountability, community identity, and cohesion. They overlap, but they work at different levels of human functioning, and that distinction matters for designing interventions.

Accountability

Making a commitment visible converts a private intention into a social contract. Dean Karlan and colleagues showed that people who made public savings pledges deposited more than those who committed privately, with similar effects in smoking cessation and other behavior change domains. Robert Cialdini’s social norms work explains why: what predicts behavior is not what people say they value, but what they see peers actually doing. When you can see that others in your group are following through, your own follow‑through increases; the essential ingredient is visibility, not format. This is why digital accountability groups, cohort courses, and workplace challenges can rival in‑person ones when they make progress and lapses observable.

Community identity

Accountability shapes behavior; identity shapes who you think you are. When “I’m someone who shows up” becomes a group identity rather than a private aspiration, the behavior sticks differently. Social identity research, and Alcoholics Anonymous in particular, show that durable change often requires stepping into a different social world, not just making better choices in the old one. AA’s sponsor, home group, and fellowship re-anchor identity around sobriety; individual therapy typically cannot, because it returns a person to the same drinking‑centered networks. This mechanism depends on sustained membership in a specific community over time, where others know your story and expect your presence.

Cohesion

Cohesion is the mechanism that depends most on physical co‑presence and shared experience. James Coan’s Social Baseline Theory shows that the brain treats nearby, trusted others as part of its resource environment, reducing perceived effort and threat. Hills literally appear less steep when a person stands next to a friend, socially isolated individuals consume more sugar even after controlling for other factors, and simply holding a partner’s hand dampens neural responses to threat. In other words, being with others lowers the metabolic cost of self‑regulation; some of the burden is offloaded to the relationship.

Cohesion arises when this load‑sharing is repeated under shared difficulty. Studies of shared pain and adversity show that groups who undergo painful or stressful tasks together report greater solidarity and cooperate more, even when cooperation is personally costly. Military research finds that units exposed to stressful events as a group often report higher social cohesion, and that cohesion buffers some of the impact of combat stressors on performance and adjustment. The “military model” works not just because it is hard, but because hard things are done together, in person, with mutual dependence. The toughness is a byproduct; the product is a tightly bonded unit whose members literally experience the world as less demanding when they are side by side.

Taken together, the three mechanisms form a stack. Accountability makes follow‑through visible, identity makes follow‑through self‑defining, and cohesion makes effort less costly by distributing it across bodies and brains. Well‑designed groups deliberately layer all three.

Why the distinction matters: Accountability can be delivered digitally. Community identity requires sustained membership in a specific group. Cohesion requires shared physical experience. The research suggests that interventions producing all three mechanisms simultaneously will outperform those producing only one or two. This is consistent with the Burke and Carron finding that “true groups” with deliberate cohesion-building outperform standard groups, which outperform individual approaches.

Self-determination theory offers a unifying frame: relatedness, the need to feel connected to and cared about by others, is one of three basic psychological needs alongside autonomy and competence. When this need is unmet, motivation and wellbeing degrade regardless of how well the other two are satisfied. The three mechanisms described above are three ways of meeting the relatedness need at increasing depth.

6. Recovery Proves the Model

The clearest proof that the container matters more than the content comes from addiction recovery research.

The 2020 Cochrane Review of Alcoholics Anonymous examined 27 studies covering 10,565 participants. AA and 12-Step Facilitation programs produced outcomes equal to or better than CBT and motivational enhancement therapy on every measure. On sustained abstinence specifically, AA showed a significant advantage: 42% of AA participants maintained continuous abstinence at one year, compared to 35% in other evidence-based treatments. AA also produced substantial healthcare cost savings.

This research has important limitations: the Cochrane reviewers flagged high risk of selection bias in 11 of the 27 studies. Nine studies carried high risk of attrition bias, meaning dropout rates exceeded 20%. Participants cannot be blinded to whether they’re attending AA, which introduces performance bias that is impossible to fully control. And there is a contamination problem: participants randomized to comparison treatments like CBT cannot realistically be prevented from attending AA on their own, which dilutes any measured differences between groups. The 42% versus 35% finding is real and clinically meaningful. It should be understood within these constraints.

What matters most for the argument here is the proposed mechanism.

The reviewers noted that AA’s advantage in sustained abstinence was achieved largely by fostering continued AA participation beyond the end of formal treatment.

In other words, by keeping people connected to a community over time. AA works because it replaces a person’s drinking-centered social world with a sober one. The sponsor relationship, the home group, the fellowship: these create a community that expects sobriety and notices when someone is struggling. Individual therapy, however skilled, sends a person back into the same social environment that supported their addiction.

7. The Military Cohesion Data

Peer-reviewed research on military unit cohesion consistently identifies the bonds between soldiers as a significant predictor of combat performance, morale, and post-deployment psychological health. Prospective studies show that higher unit cohesion is associated with lower risk of PTSD, depression, generalized anxiety, and suicidal ideation after deployment (Anderson, Campbell-Sills, Ursano et al., Depression & Anxiety, 2019, 4,645 soldiers deployed to Afghanistan). A separate analysis found that cohesion buffers the dose-response relationship between combat exposure and PTSD symptoms at both the individual and unit level (Campbell-Sills, Ursano et al., Psychological Medicine, 2022). This is produced by the shared training and mutual dependence, not by selecting for toughness.

The PTSD data is more nuanced than popular accounts suggest. Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe (2016) popularized the idea that reintegration difficulty is primarily about losing the unit bond rather than combat exposure itself. The peer-reviewed evidence supports cohesion as a significant moderator of combat exposure effects on PTSD, but does not establish that cohesion loss outweighs combat exposure as a standalone predictor. Both matter. What the research does show clearly is that soldiers embedded in strong units fare better psychologically than soldiers with equivalent combat exposure in weaker units. The container shapes the outcome.

Every discipline story that dominates popular culture right now, BUD/S, Ranger School, Special Forces selection, is a story about collective formation. The individual toughness that emerges is real. It is a byproduct of the relational container. The container came first.

What This Adds Up To

The convergence across these domains is not subtle. Mortality research, recovery science, behavioral interventions, workplace performance, military psychology, sports outcomes, chronic disease management: they all arrive at the same conclusion.

People who lack structured social connection perform worse, follow through less, get sicker, and die sooner.

The self-improvement industry sells individual optimization because individual products scale and group programs don’t. The result is strong revenue and poor sustained outcomes for most participants.

The healthcare system treats individuals, prescribing medications and recommending lifestyle changes delivered to a person sitting alone in a room. The social determinants of health framework acknowledges the importance of community, but the actual delivery model remains stubbornly individual.

To be fair, it’s hard to address social structure using market or medical mechanisms.

The institutions that once provided group infrastructure are disappearing. Robert Putnam documented this decline exhaustively in Bowling Alone (2000): civic associations, unions, fraternal orders, churches, and social clubs have all contracted dramatically since the 1960s. His 2020 follow-up, The Upswing, confirmed the trend has continued.

What has replaced them is content. Podcasts. Apps. Online communities that can provide accountability but struggle to produce community identity and rarely produce cohesion.

Supplemental Point: The Friendship Recession

Roughly one in five adults have no close friends?

The American Perspectives Survey (2021), run by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, documents a friendship decline that is staggering in scale. Over the past three decades, the number of close friends Americans have has plummeted. In 2021, 12% of Americans reported having no close friends, up from roughly 3% in 1990. A 2024 follow-up found the figure had risen to 17%.

The class dimension is as significant as any other factor. The AEI Survey Center data shows that education level predicts friendship networks more strongly than gender. Americans without a college degree are roughly twice as likely as college graduates to have no close friends (24% versus 10% in 2024 data). Working and middle-class adults are disproportionately affected.

Time tells the rest of the story. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the American Time Use Survey shows that time spent with friends peaks in late adolescence and drops steeply through the 30s and 40s. By middle age, Americans spend roughly 30 minutes a day with friends, down from over two hours at age 18. Friendships require time, and the structure of modern adult life, long commutes, shift work, dual-income households, screen time, systematically eliminates it.

Sources

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). “Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227-237.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B., & Layton, J.B. (2010). “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk.” PLoS Medicine, 7(7).
U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. (2023). “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Cox, Daniel A. (2021). “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss.” Survey Center on American Life, American Enterprise Institute.
Kelly, J.F., Humphreys, K., & Ferri, M. (2020). “Alcoholics Anonymous and Other 12-Step Programs for Alcohol Use Disorder.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 3.
Kelly, J.F., Humphreys, K., & Ferri, M. (2020). “Distillation of a 2020 Cochrane Review for Clinicians and Policy Makers.” Alcohol and Alcoholism, 55(6), 641-651.
Burke, S.M., Carron, A.V., Eys, M.A., Ntoumanis, N., & Estabrooks, P.A. (2006). “Group versus Individual Approach? A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Interventions to Promote Physical Activity.” Sport & Exercise Psychology Review, 2(1).
Street, A. & Avenell, A. (2022). “Are Individual or Group Interventions More Effective for Long-Term Weight Loss in Adults with Obesity?” Clinical Obesity, 12:e12539.
Steinsbekk, A., Rygg, L., Lisulo, M., Rise, M.B., & Fretheim, A. (2012). “Group Based Diabetes Self-Management Education Compared to Routine Treatment.” BMC Health Services Research, 12, 213.
Housden, L., Wong, S.T., & Dawes, M. (2013). “Effectiveness of Group Medical Visits for Improving Diabetes Care.” CMAJ, 185(13).
Taylor, R.S., et al. (2023). “Exercise-Based Cardiac Rehabilitation for Coronary Heart Disease.” European Heart Journal, 44(6), 452-469.
Takele, W.W., et al. (2024). “Effective Interventions in Preventing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus.” Communications Medicine, 4(67).
DorÃ©, I., et al. (2023). “The Impact of Sports Participation on Mental Health and Social Outcomes in Adults.” Systematic Reviews, 12(1).
Reardon, C.L. & Hitchcock, M. (2024). “Mental Health in Individual Versus Team Sports.” International Review of Psychiatry, 36(3), 284-295.
Sabiston, C.M., et al. (2016). “Number of Years of Team and Individual Sport Participation During Adolescence and Depressive Symptoms in Early Adulthood.” Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 38(1), 105-110.
Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Research. Harter, J.K., Schmidt, F.L., et al. Gallup, Inc. (Proprietary; correlational.)
Google Project Aristotle. Led by Abeer Dubey and Julia Rozovsky. Psychological safety construct developed by Edmondson, A., Harvard Business School.
Jehn, K.A. & Shah, P.P. (1997). “Interpersonal Relationships and Task Performance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(4), 775-790.
Karlan, D., et al. Commitment device research (savings, smoking cessation). Yale University.
Junger, Sebastian. (2016). *Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. New York: Twelve. (Popular synthesis; not primary research.)
Campbell-Sills, L., Ursano, R.J., et al. (2022). “Unit Cohesion as Individual- and Unit-Level Buffer.” Psychological Medicine, 52(1), 121-131. (Online 2020, print 2022.) See also: Anderson, G.S., Campbell-Sills, L., Ursano, R.J., et al. (2019). “Prospective Associations of Perceived Unit Cohesion with Postdeployment Mental Health Outcomes.” Depression & Anxiety, 36(6), 511-521. (Stronger prospective citation; 4,645 soldiers.)
Pew Research Center. (2025). “Men, Women and Social Connections.”
Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M. (2023). *The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster. Harvard Study of Adult Development, ongoing since 1938.
Coan, J.A. & Sbarra, D.A. (2015). “Social Baseline Theory: The Social Regulation of Risk and Effort.” Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 87-91. See also: Beckes, L. & Coan, J.A. (2011). Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5, 976-988.
Putnam, R.D. (2000). *Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster. See also: Putnam, R.D. (2020). *The Upswing.
Cialdini, R.B. & Goldstein, N.J. (2004). “Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity.” Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591-621.
Karlan, D. & Appel, J. (2011). *More Than Good Intentions. Commitment savings: Ashraf, N., Karlan, D. & Yin, W. (2006). “Tying Odysseus to the Mast.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2), 635-672.

Made with Others

2026-04-06T00:00:00.000Z

The people pushing individual discipline the hardest built that discipline inside something special: a powerful formative unit.

Jocko Willink built his inside SEAL Team Three, Task Unit Bruiser. David Goggins built his inside BUD/S.

To be fair to Willink — he knows this. His actual business is organizational culture; he sells unit cohesion to corporations, and Extreme Ownership is explicitly a book about how leaders serve teams. If you pushed him on what follows, he probably wouldn’t disagree with much of it.

**But the Jocko consumer brand sells something different. **The podcast, the 4:30 AM watch post, the morning routine content: *wake up early, do hard things, embrace the suck. Alone. With your phone as your accountability partner.

He pushes the individual part, stripped of the container that produced it.

This is a pattern, not an accident specific to those two men.

Every system that reliably transforms people does so by forging cohesive social units

The military puts you in a platoon. You train together, suffer together, eat and sleep on the same schedule. The structure isn’t optional. The other people aren’t optional. Peer-reviewed research following 4,645 soldiers through deployment found that unit cohesion independently predicts psychological outcomes after combat — independent of what soldiers experienced in the field. Same exposure, different unit, different men came home. The container shapes the result.

Monastic orders across traditions operate on identical logic. You don’t become a monk by reading about it. You show up, follow a rule, sit in silence with others at 4 AM not because you feel like it, but because that’s what everyone does, and if you don’t show up, someone comes looking for you.

Martial arts. Trade apprenticeships. AA. Team sports. Every one of them: a room, a shared standard, commitment visible to others, people who notice whether you showed up.

One of the best-designed studies on addiction recovery — a 2020 Cochrane Review examining 27 studies covering 10,565 participants — compared AA directly against CBT and motivational enhancement therapy, the best clinical treatments available. AA matched or beat professional treatment on every measure. On sustained sobriety at one year: 42% for AA, 35% for clinical alternatives. The content was roughly equivalent. The community was not.

The identity formation, cohesion, and accountability of the room won.

Consider: what is the single question most strongly linked to high performing teams in the workplace?

*It’s unexpected: do you have a close friend at work?

Gallup’s workplace research — tens of millions of survey responses across industries and decades — found that this single question was the single strongly-linked variable — not compensation or management structure.

*Think about that for your company: do you have a close friend at work?

Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 internal teams and arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle: the strongest predictor of team effectiveness wasn’t individual talent. It was whether people felt safe being vulnerable with each other. Teams with that quality outperformed teams staffed with smarter individuals who didn’t trust each other.

Group relationship precedes performance. Every time, across every domain we’ve studied.

Group-based programs designed with deliberate cohesion — true groups where members are accountable to each other — outperform standard group classes, which outperform solo programs.

The completion rate for self-guided digital health programs sits consistently in the single digits. The content in those programs is often sound, but without other people watching, almost everyone stops.

Weight loss: participants in group-based interventions were 36% more likely to hit clinically meaningful targets than participants completing identical programs individually. Same content, different container.

On mortality: a meta-analysis aggregating 148 studies and over 300,000 participants found that social isolation carries the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. The Harvard Study of Adult Development — 85 years of data on the same families — found that relationship quality at age 50 predicts physical health at age 80 better than cholesterol, blood pressure, or genetics.

*This finding has the evidentiary weight of the research on smoking.

The infrastructure that once made belonging automatic is gone.

Civic associations, unions, fraternal orders, churches — all contracted dramatically over the past 60 years, a decline Robert Putnam documented exhaustively and that has continued since.

In 1990, 3% of Americans reported having no close friends. By 2024, 17%. For working-age adults without college degrees, 24% — one in four.

By middle age, Americans spend roughly 30 minutes a day with friends, down from over two hours at age 18. The structure of modern life — commutes, shift work, dual-income households, screens — systematically eliminates the time that belonging requires.

Content replaced institutions.

Podcasts. Apps. The self-improvement industry makes billions selling individual solutions to a structurally collective problem. The completion rate tells you everything about how that model performs.

The research points to three mechanisms through which groups produce better outcomes:

Accountability — visible commitment increases follow-through
Community identity — changing inside a group makes the change part of who you are
Cohesion — shared physical experience creates the mutual dependence the brain actually runs on

An app can provide the first. A well-designed cohort can provide the first and second.

A physical community built around shared challenge can provide all three simultaneously — and interventions that do so outperform those that provide only one or two.

I’ll publish the full evidence base here in coming days, for anyone who wants to go deep.

The answer isn’t better content.

It’s a room, a standard, and other people who give a damn whether you show up.

*Start with the person next to you.

What Future for Men?

2026-03-23T00:00:00.000Z

*What future for men?

The education gap never went away, it just flipped: for every 100 women who graduate with 4-year degrees, only 74 men do.

Men account for 4 out of 5 suicides.

*To be clear, the extraordinary gains made by women since Title IX passed in 1972 should be celebrated and defended without hesitation. They are just, overdue, and essential.

But it is possible to say two things at once: women’s progress is a triumph, and many boys and men are in serious trouble.

This is not a zero-sum game. No society remains healthy when a large share of its men begins to detach from school, work, and meaning.

American men are now less likely than women to graduate high school, less likely to enroll in four-year college, and less likely to finish once enrolled. Among young adults, the college attainment gap is now roughly as large as it was in 1970, only reversed. More than one in ten prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work. The wages of the typical high-school-educated man are lower than they were four decades ago. Men die by suicide at roughly four times the female rate. And perhaps most unsettling of all, a striking number of interventions, from college-support programs to wage subsidies, seem to produce large gains for women and little or none for men*.

First, the data.

Male mental health cannot be understood in isolation. We need to see the broader pattern of educational, economic, and social disengagement.

Education Data

In 1970, among Americans ages 25 to 34, 20% of men had a bachelor’s degree versus 12% of women. By 2020, that had reversed to 32% of men versus 41% of women. The gap is now at least as large as it was fifty years ago, but in the opposite direction.
By 2019, for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, only 74 were awarded to men. Richard Reeves notes that this higher-education gap is now wider than it was when Title IX passed in 1972, only reversed.
Men also lag after they enroll. Among students entering four-year college in 2013, men were 10 percentage points less likely than women to graduate within four years, and still 6 points less likely within six years.
The gap opens earlier: in the states Brookings assembled, 88.4% of girls graduated high school on time versus 81.9% of boys. Boys are about 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be “school ready” at age five.

Labor Market Data

The labor-market picture is just as stark. In early 2022, more than one in ten prime-age men ages 25 to 54 were neither working nor looking for work.
By late 2023, about 6.9 million working-age men were not working or seeking work.
For men with only a high school diploma, the wage story is worse: the wages of a typical such man were 14% lower in 2019 than in 1979.

Mental Health Data

Men are not merely struggling; they are dying. Men account for 80% of suicides. In 2023, the male suicide rate was roughly 23 per 100,000, versus about 6 per 100,000 for women.
NIMH reports a male suicide rate of 22.8 per 100,000 versus 5.9 for females in 2023, and CDC says men accounted for nearly 80% of suicides.
The increase has been especially sharp among younger men. Between 2010 and 2023, the suicide rate rose 26% for males ages 15 to 24, 31% for ages 25 to 34, and 23% for ages 35 to 44.
In SAMHSA’s 2023 NSDUH tables, 17.1% of adult men received mental-health treatment in the past year, versus 28.5% of adult women.
Social disconnection is part of the picture: 15% of young men now say they do not have a close friend, a five-fold increase since 1990.

Mental Health Supports

In AIBM’s analysis: Men were 18% of social workers and 20% of psychologists in 2023, down from 38% and 68% in 1968.
The pipeline is also male-thin. AIBM reports that the male share of advanced degrees fell to 20% in psychology and 12% in social work.
The shortage is especially acute in youth-facing and family-facing segments. AIBM reports that only 10% of master’s recipients in developmental and child psychology were male in 2021.
The American School Counselor Association’s member demographics show only 13% of school counselors were male.
Access: HRSA’s shortage-area data, current as of January 1, 2026, show 137.1 million people living in designated mental-health HPSAs, with 6,800 practitioners needed to remove those designations.
Meanwhile BLS projects strong demand: about 48,300 annual openings for mental-health counselors, 74,000 for social workers, and 12,900 for psychologist.

Interventions Aren’t Working

The most unsettling fact in Reeves’ work may be this: even many well-regarded interventions seem to help women much more than men.

In the Kalamazoo Promise, women’s BA attainment rose by 13.3 percentage points, about a 45% gain, *while men showed essentially no measurable benefit.
In Stay the Course at Tarrant County College, Reeves reports that the program tripled associate-degree completion for women but had no impact on college completion for men.
In Project STAR, extra academic support and financial assistance boosted women’s grades, credits, and academic standing, but Reeves summarizes the result bluntly: no effect on men.
In New York City’s Paycheck Plus pilot, MDRC found a relatively large positive employment effect for women, but no detectable effect for men.

For Richard Reeves, this data tells a story of structural disengagement that is downstream of deep cultural issues: what are men for?

For now, I want to look narrowly at male mental health, though the deeper issue is larger: too many men are arriving at adulthood with weakened attachment to school, work, friendship, and purpose, then meeting a care system built for downstream repair rather than upstream formation. There is an education problem, a workforce problem, an access problem, a cultural problem, and a product-design problem all at once.

Diagnosis - What is probably causing it

The strongest explanation: there’s a mismatch between the way many men experience distress and the way our culture, institutions, and care pathways have learned to name and respond to it.

Part of the problem is occupational coding. The mental-health professions now sit inside a broader set of “HEED” fields — health care, early education, and domestic and care work — that are widely perceived as female-coded. That affects who enters them. Pay matters, but so do status, social meaning, and the kinds of roles some men believe they are permitted to occupy without sacrificing dignity. For many men, these professions appear culturally misaligned.

Masculinity norms are another major factor. Many men are socialized to value self-command, competence, usefulness, and endurance, and they may therefore experience both entering therapy and entering the helping professions as a threat to identity rather than an extension of responsibility. That raises the threshold for seeking care. It may also narrow the pipeline into the field itself.

There is also a genuine presentation mismatch. Male distress often appears less as sadness and explicit emotional disclosure and more as irritability, anger, numbing, substance misuse, withdrawal, compulsive behavior, risk-taking, and collapse in work or relationships. Men may not say, “I am depressed.” They may say they cannot sleep, cannot focus, are drinking too much, are exploding at home, or feel that life has become mechanical and pointless. When the public language of therapy is too narrow, too affective, or too detached from function, many men experience it as something not made for them.

That mismatch begins early. Boys often first encounter mental-health support through schools, counseling systems, and family-service environments that are already overwhelmingly female. The emotional language, role models, and assumptions built into those settings may already feel foreign to boys who are struggling. The first point of contact can therefore become the first point of disengagement.

Training design matters too. Counseling, social work, and therapy require expensive credentials, long supervised pathways, and often modest early-career pay. Those barriers affect everyone, but they may fall especially hard on men who feel pressure to establish earnings earlier, who are considering the field later in life, or who want clearer links between effort, status, and advancement. In practice, the pipeline into the profession is narrow at exactly the moment the need is growing.

But the deepest problem is upstream of therapy altogether.

Therapy is increasingly being asked to repair injuries that begin well before the clinic: detachment from school, weak labor-market prospects, the loss of friendship, the collapse of community institutions, confusion about purpose, and the disappearance of ordinary structures that once helped men mature into responsibility.

In that sense, the decline of male therapists and therapeutic engagement is one symptom of a larger civilizational problem: we have dismantled many of the settings in which boys and men once developed meaning, discipline, solidarity, and role. The remaining therapeutic system cannot absorb the fallout.

That is also why so many interventions seem to help women more than men. Too many programs assume that if access is expanded and stigma reduced, outcomes will follow. Often they do for women. But many men appear to need something more than permission and more basic than therapy: structure, challenge, belonging, skill, and a credible path toward usefulness.

*Until that layer is rebuilt in new ways, clinical reform alone will remain necessary but insufficient.

Recommendations - What solutions make sense

Any serious response must begin by separating two tasks that are often collapsed into one:

*Make therapy more accessible and better fitted to men.
*Rebuild forms of formation that come before therapy, sit alongside it, and in some cases reduce the need for it.

The first matters. The second may matter more.

**Start with the front door. **Many men will not enter care through the language that currently dominates mental-health marketing. The offer must connect to problems men already recognize: sleep, anger, addiction, stress, focus, work performance, fatherhood, conflict, relationships, and the sense that life is slipping out of control. Emotion belongs inside that work. For many men, the right entry point is not “talk about your feelings,” but “get your life working again.”

That implies a different service architecture. Instead of assuming that weekly therapy is the default product, the system should offer multiple on-ramps: anonymous screening, brief assessment, tele-triage, skills-based groups, coaching, peer support, and only then escalation to licensed therapy when indicated. This recognizes that people enter care in different ways, and that the current all-or-nothing model is poorly designed for many men.

The next move is segmentation. “Men’s mental health” is too broad to build around. The more promising path is to design for specific populations whose needs, identities, and points of friction are clearer: boys and adolescents, fathers, men in recovery, veterans, men in high-risk occupations, and men at moments of rupture such as divorce, job loss, or reentry after incarceration. *These are settings in which need, language, and distribution can be aligned.

Workplaces should also be treated as a major channel, not just a payer. For many men, work remains the most legitimate and consistent institutional touchpoint in adult life. That makes employers, unions, trade associations, and apprenticeship systems especially important. The right model includes protected time, confidential access, practical tools, and services embedded into the rhythms of real working life.

Provider choice matters too, but it should be handled carefully. The goal is not to romanticize male therapists or pretend that gender matching is a cure. It is simply to acknowledge that shame, identification, and perceived fit matter, especially for men who are already ambivalent about care. More choice is good. Essentializing either sex is not.

On the supply side, the profession itself needs redesign. If the field wants more men, it has to speak in the language of role, status, competence, and viable adulthood. That means presenting counseling and therapy not as soft or vaguely altruistic work, but as difficult, skilled, socially important, and worthy of respect. It also means lowering unnecessary barriers through paid practicums, employer-sponsored degrees, stronger second-career pathways, and training models that do not assume years of low-paid limbo.

But even if all of that happened, it would still not be enough.

The more foundational need is to rebuild spaces and institutions that develop men before they fail. What many boys and men lack is access to purpose, connection, obligation, guidance, and the slow acquisition of competence. We have become accustomed to thinking of this as outside the scope of care, but that may be precisely the mistake. There is a layer before therapy and beneath therapy: formation.

That layer includes mentorship, peer groups, skill-building, rites of passage, fatherhood support, group physical training, recovery communities, civic and service structures, and other forms of embodied, social participation that make men feel claimed by life rather than detached from it. These are not nostalgic accessories. They may be among the only settings capable of addressing the conditions from which male mental-health problems often emerge.

*In the absence of these solutions, men are turning to online influencers and self-help, but those solutions, even the best among them, leave everyone isolated and reinforce the falsity that “you should do this alone.”

So, the right answer is not therapy or formation. It is a new ecosystem in which therapy becomes one part of a broader response. Some men need clinical care urgently. Many more need earlier intervention, stronger institutions, and a more credible path into adult responsibility before pathology hardens. If we continue to ask therapy to solve the entire problem, we will keep mistaking downstream treatment for upstream repair.

Where this has to go next

*Therapy does need to change. It should be easier to access, more practically framed, less dependent on stylized emotional fluency, and more open to the ways men present distress.

But therapy cannot bear the full weight of male breakdown. Many men do not merely lack treatment. They lack structure, purpose, connection, skill, and places where they are known, expected, and needed.

Before men need therapists, they may need a gym, social connections, a church, a trade, a coach, a recovery community, a fatherhood group, a mentor, or some other institution that asks something of him. He may need a reason to get up, a role to play, people who would notice if he disappeared, and a path by which competence becomes dignity.

That points to a larger opportunity than men’s mental-health apps. The next wave of solutions may look like structured communities, skill-building cohorts, employer-embedded programs, and purpose-oriented third places rather than conventional care delivery.

In other words, we may need not only better therapy for men, but earlier forms of formation.

That is the larger argument, and a harder one. It is also, I think, where this conversation has to go next.

Sources:

Men in Social Work and Psychology are in Decline - American Institute for Boys and Men

State of Behavioral Health Workforce 2025 - https://bhw.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/bureau-health-workforce/data-research/Behavioral-Health-Workforce-Brief-2025.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Brookings - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/boys-left-behind-education-gender-gaps-across-the-us/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-male-college-crisis-is-not-just-in-enrollment-but-completion/

https://aibm.org/research/male-suicide/

https://aibm.org/why-we-exist/focus-areas/education-skills/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-case-for-a-commission-on-boys-and-men-will-washington-state-lead-the-way/

https://www.luminafoundation.org/files/resources/the-effects-of-the-kalamazoo-promise.pdf

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/why-men-are-hard-to-help

SAMHSA

https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/male-therapists-psychology-representation-a1650f62

INFORMS

PubMed

National Institute of Mental Health

Rebecca E. Michel - A Mixed Methods Study of Male Recruitment in the Counseling Profession

PMC