Millennials’ Nonparticipation Trophy

The unemployable Millennial male has become a stock antagonist of Gen X managers and regime journos alike. While the former trade workplace horror stories of helpless yet self-entitled snowflakes who balk at face-to-face interaction, the latter whine about basement-dwelling incel NEETs failing to provide strong, independent women the lifestyle they deserve. A question too few stop to ask is why men in their prime earning years are embracing nonparticipation.

This piece in Fortune claims to have cracked the workforce avoidance code. They posit the simple explanation that Millennial men are absent from the office because they’re in the classroom. Labor participation rates for members all past generations rise when they get out of college. Millennials are pursuing post-secondary degrees more than any previous cohort. So the logic goes that their workforce participation rates will catch up as they graduate.

The glut of otherwise working-age people attending college on the six or eight-year plan seems to support the employment-delayed-for-education theory. This study cited by the Fortune reporter indicates that the labor participation gap is closing among adults nearing age 40.

So much for the grievances lodged by undesirable types that the Current Year workplace is a misanthropic Kafka trap designed to emasculate workers. The establishment has investigated itself and concluded that Millennial men are not yet earning enough to be attractive to women because they’re still attaining sufficient education to be minimally attractive.

A couple of problems pop up when you scrutinize these findings. One, as author Alexander Hellene points out in his Substack publication, is that younger men are falling behind in terms of educational attainment, too. With the population split pretty much evenly between the sexes, ascribing the rise in male labor nonparticipation to education makes no sense when more women than men attend college.

Then we have the elephant in the room, which frequent readers will have spotted by now. The group that ran the study cited by Fortune defines Millennials as those born from 1981 to 1996. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know we’ve exploded that zombie meme time and again. If you’re looking for useful demographic data, lumping people who grew up pre-internet together with those who had smart phones in grade school won’t yield helpful models.

A key tell is the study’s reference to 40-year-old Millennials. When your model relies on an unintentional Rick and Morty joke, you should rethink your process. The age group these researchers gave the Millennial label average out to 30 years old. Actual Millennials are now aged 24-34 so their real median age of 29 does jibe with the study. However, the classic blunder of not accounting for accelerating cultural shifts gave the researchers too large an age range.

The result: Their sample has a significant overlap with Generation Y.

Corrected along accurate generational lines, what the study really shows is that Millennial men are dropping out of the workforce while Gen Y’s nonparticipation rates are declining as more of them approach 40. Assuming that the same will happen for Millennial men amounts to wishful thinking.

As usual, regime media dispensed with the principle of parsimony to avoid the most obvious answer. The truth is that prime-age men are shunning the workplace for the same reason they’re avoiding college in droves. Anytime an organization sees an influx of women, men will make themselves scarce. Because aside from the perennial exception of romantic involvement, men vastly prefer the company of other men in goal-oriented settings. You can see the same pattern everywhere from hobbies to religious institutions to social clubs.

The reason why presents itself in men’s and women’s fundamentally different motives for interacting with any organization. Men’s primary interest is the organization’s goals. Women’s primary interest is the people in the organization. Aside from some limited-applicability internal policing that boils down to doing the right thing for the wrong reason – which is worse than just doing the wrong thing – the two approaches are more or less mutually exclusive.

That motive misalignment would work itself out if not for ruling Cult dogma preventing self-correction. The sexes’ innate aptitude for differing spheres is instead seen as an artificial tyranny imposed from without. Achieving the stated outcome of equal participation requires drastically modifying structures and rules to incentivize the female modus operandi. Contrary to the managerial cult’s magical thinking, that cannot be done without disincentivizing male participation. Men’s stronger need to feel useful and wanted is especially transgressed by this state of affairs. Result: Men check out.

Another result is that every institution from mid-to-mega corporations to academia to government is increasingly staffed by workers who care less and less about what the organization is supposed to produce. It turns out that feminism is an accelerant to Pournelle’s Iron Law. Like gasoline sprayed on burning trash, managerial cargo cultism is stoking our social dumpster fire into an inferno. You cold do worse than making it a habit to avoid office buildings, bridges, and airplane flight paths for the duration.

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