“Saint Jerome in His Study,” Albrecht Dürer German 1514
I. Spishak and Kyle
I want to tell you about two young men.
First, there is “Spishak,” the online pseudonym of a 28-year-old living at his parents’ home in Los Angeles. Spishak considers himself a pornosexual, which is exactly what it sounds like. He is a virgin whose carnal relations involve thousands of videos and no carbon-based life forms. As the journalist Daniel Kolitz describes in a Harper’s Magazine essay, Spishak’s room is a shrine to erotica, where 27 separate pornographic videos play simultaneously on eight tablets and three monitors. Asked about his relationships, Spishak tells Kolitz that he’s never been “good with talking to women,” and the pandemic arrested any development on that front. What most frightens Spishak about sex between two people “is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s head.” “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” Spishak says, “for both parties.”
Second, there is Kyle, a 26-year-old who lived in Denver in 2020 when legal sports gambling arrived in Colorado. Kyle immediately opened an account with nearly every sportsbook. Then, as Jonathan Cohen writes in his book Losing Big, Kyle went on a hot streak. In one month, he gambled more than $95,000 on a salary of $65,000. He spent so much time betting on sports that he lost his job. When the unemployment checks came, he gambled those, too. When the hot streak chilled and Kyle couldn’t pay his rent, he moved back home to live with his parents in Wichita. Cut off from his friends in Denver, he gambled even more—all day and night, without sleeping, subsisting on cigarettes and beer in his bedroom. At 3 a.m. in the morning, he would look up any games that might be happening on the other end of the world: Malaysia, India, wherever. He’d bet on those, too.
Spishak and Kyle are extraordinary cases. Not every young man is addicted to pornography or gambling. But look deeper at their stories. Waylaid by the pandemic, two young men work from home and spend much of their lives alone; remaining inside, they surround themselves with computer monitors—“in many ways, [Kyle’s] life had two monitors, one for gambling and one for everything else,” Cohen writes—where they stream entertainment that allows them to avoid the messy frictions and complications of life. This is a profoundly ordinary description of being a young man in America today. When the sociologist Liana Sayer led a group of researchers to analyze leisure time in 2024, she found that one group had, by far, the most “sedentary leisure time alone”—that is, time spent sitting in a room by themselves, typically in the company of screens. It was young, unmarried men.
Source: Sayer et al
I’ve been thinking recently about these guys who are dating less, socializing less, and leaving their home less, while filling their media with more porn and betting parlays. They seem to prefer the financial discomfort of losing a bet to the social anxiety of being rejected on a date. They find intimacy scary and gambling exciting. They furnish their rooms like high-tech monasteries and gravitate toward media that works like a slot machine.
These young men seem to me like modern ascetics who find themselves somehow trapped on the betting floor of the economy. They are like monks, yes. But more than that: They are monks in a casino. Risk-aversion in the social sphere has combined with their risk-chasing in the market, and it’s created a genuinely berserk modern life script.
II. The American Monk
... continue reading