Nobody to Call: “I wouldn’t say, at this point in my life, I have any more close friends.”
A Q&A with Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan, co-authors of “Nobody to Call: An exploration of friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees.”
Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan are friends of More in Common. Their recent report, Nobody to Call, for which they interviewed thirty working-class men (defined as men without college degrees) about their relationships and connections, is the most interesting thing we’ve ever read about male loneliness.
In their words, “the story that emerged is at once more despairing and more hopeful than what we expected at the start of this research. More despairing because the men we spoke to are even more disconnected than we anticipated, and a life of renewed connection is seemingly out of reach for many. But more hopeful because the current cultural narrative about these men—that they are nihilistic, resentful, closed-up loners—is almost entirely wrong. Most of these guys want to open up, connect, and contribute, but they need to be called in.”
If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I’d strongly encourage you to hop to the bottom and read the section about the “friendship cliff.” As they write in the report: “Many of the men we interviewed experienced a friendship dropoff after high school. For some, it was a friendship cliff: These men described having friends through high school, but their relationships atrophied after they left the structure of school.”
What follows is an interview that our Executive Director, Jason Mangone, conducted with Sam and Soren. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
TRANSCRIPT
Jason: What about your backgrounds and bios brought you to this work?
Soren: I was a member of this demographic, men without degrees, for a long time. I dropped out of college and enlisted in the Army. I was in for 10 years, did a lot of stuff with special operations, went to Afghanistan and Syria, and then got out when I was 29 to finish my degree. And now here I am. I’ve been focusing the last few years on research methodologies and strategies for large scale strategic communications, and now trying to dig into the qualitative world and exploring social and political issues through there.
Sam: Soren and I met during a period of transition for us both. He had left the military, had graduated from college. I had left this organization I started—the Armed Services Arts Partnership, or ASAP—which is the largest community arts organization in the country for veterans and their families. That’s my entry point into this.
I was building a community largely for people who were enlisted veterans and didn’t have degrees or didn’t have degrees until later in life. If not for the fact that they have this special identity as veterans, they would not have benefited from these types of community supports. I saw the potential of finding your tribe and having a place not only to connect with people, but to share your story and be seen and be heard. But I also saw the peril of what it looks like when that type of support is not there.
My life since leaving ASAP has been this deepening of questions around community, around connection, and around class—and all of that came together in this report.
Jason: As a starting point, would one of you guys mind explaining who Boromir is?
Soren: Boromir has become the unofficial mascot of this report, which I love. Boromir is a character in Lord of the Rings, son of Denethor, steward of Gondor, brother of Faramir. Spoiler alert—he dies in the first movie. Essentially, he’s the first one of the fellowship to succumb to the power of the ring: he gave in at a moment of weakness and tried to take the ring from Frodo. So there’s this preponderance of people that view him as a sign of weakness in men. But in one of the interviews, I ask this guy about role models and he mentions out of nowhere that his role model was Boromir, which took our interview on a left turn. We had a long conversation about what Boromir represents as far as what the journey of a man is, particularly what it means to be brave and what it means to be weak. It was one of the more beautiful conversations that I had in these interviews.
Jason: How did you guys come into this project? Sam, in particular, you have an intellectual project that’s a bit more broad than just the relational lives of men. How did your overall work bring you to focus on this specific project?
Sam: The origins of this were from the “Disconnected” report, which was a survey report I published with Dan Cox at the Survey Center on American Life in 2024. That survey report found a significant class divide in everything from access to places in your neighborhood to gather with neighbors—whether they be commercial third places or public third places like parks—membership in non-religious communities, religious communities, and unions, as well as friendship. We saw that a quarter of people without degrees had no close friends compared to just 10 percent of people with degrees, and that was up from approximately 3 percent among both groups in 1990. We saw significant divides in social support for people to turn to, not only for things like having someone to watch your kids, but also someone to listen to you when you needed it. In doing that report, we did not see any gender divide—men and women looked similar in the data. Instead, it was a class thing. But then we did a set of qualitative interviews as part of that project and we interviewed about 20 people: men and women with degrees and without degrees. It was the three men we interviewed who didn’t have college degrees who stood out for being almost completely untethered.
And reading through the transcripts, these guys were sharing heartfelt, raw things about their experience of disconnection. But, because it was mostly a survey report, what we put out were these data points. And these data points became fodder for hot takes on Twitter. They became fodder for op-eds in mainstream media outlets. Soren and I were messaging at the time—as we often are—and we were sharing our disillusionment. The life experiences of these guys, who were functionally invisible to the outside world, were being turned into sterile data points, which were then instrumentalized for the sake of engagement and clicks.
One of the reasons we took on this project was to take that experience of invisibility that comes with being disconnected and isolated and make it visible. We wanted to humanize and provide texture to the lives of these guys who are often talked about, but are rarely heard from directly.
“We wanted to humanize and provide texture to the lives of these guys who are often talked about, but are rarely heard from directly.”
Jason: The survey data said it was about a quarter of working-class men who reported not having a single friend. But am I correct in saying that it might actually be a bit worse than that? You interviewed 30 people. It’s not statistically significant, but it might be worse?
Soren: Upfront, we should have the disclaimer that this isn’t generalizable—it’s 30 interviews. These are our observations and findings from those interviews. But we did use the same dataset that Sam used for that original survey to source the men we interviewed and, outright, more men said that they didn’t have close friends than what the survey had revealed.
In the interviews, we were able to define close friendships and dig into the guys who said they did have one or two close friends. This is very subjective, but many of them, despite saying that they did have close friends, many others would not consider the friendships that they had to be close friendships. Some of the guys who said they did have friends hadn’t spoken to these folks in months, in one case a year. They don’t live near them. They rarely talk: once every few months, mostly over text messages. It’s hard to consider those close friendships, especially when you think of it through the emotional support lens of what we’re talking about.
Sam: It was a quarter who said they had no close friends in the survey, and then 16 of the 30 guys we interviewed we categorized as having no close friends. That’s double. And that is not even the gray area guys that Soren is talking about. One of the things we felt early on was like, “Oh shit, we may have actually underestimated how disconnected these guys were in the survey.” We definitely left this project believing that we underestimated the disconnection among this group.
Jason: One of the places where that dynamic was particularly striking is that, of the men you interviewed, just over half said they had no role models and about another quarter or so said they only had one. That was more striking to me than even the friendship dynamic that you just mentioned. Can you walk me through what you learned about role models?
Sam: We used “role models” and “mentors” interchangeably as someone you could look up to, emulate, or turn to for guidance. First, most guys didn’t have a mentor or role model. A lot of guys didn’t have one currently and never had one. It was not like they were saying, “Oh, I used to have mentors growing up, but now I’m in my 20s or 30s and I don’t.” They didn’t have it in childhood, they didn’t have it during any transition into adulthood, and they don’t have it now. If I compare that to my own life, it’s been the opposite, right? I’ve had mentors at every stage, and I feel quite fortunate for that.
Second, many said “I didn’t have a man in the house.” The only person they could turn to is their mom. It was really interesting the degree to which mothers and grandmothers—and to some extent, grandfathers—filled the void of any other male mentor figure, whether that be a father or an uncle or a coach or a guy in the neighborhood. The men we interviewed would say things like, “My mom is the only person I can look to as a role model because of the strength that she showed as a single mother.”
The third thing we learned about mentors and role models was more hopeful. A small slice of guys who didn’t have fathers around were able to benefit from male role models as pre-teens and teens through organizations like the YMCA and Big Brothers Big Sisters. And that very experience of benefiting from these types of role models makes them want to pay it forward and be role models themselves. That has become their driving source of purpose in life: to pay it forward and be a role model in the community.
Soren: The guys who did have mentors when they were kids, they were very appreciative of the roles that those men played in their lives. They saw it as life-changing. And I didn’t try to intentionally extract any sort of real emotional stance about their mentors, but they explained what it meant to them, how it changed their lives, and how it formulated their mindset and this idea of service leadership and service-focused work later on in life.
After the interviews, Sam and I had a lot of conversations about the benefits that mentorship and role models could have for a lot of these young men, especially since the prevalence of absent fathers was so high. It was a role that a lot of these guys were missing in their lives.
Jason: This is the point at which you can imagine an op-ed using your report as a starting point to say, “Since these men have no role models, they’re turning to Andrew Tate.” Can you address the manosphere discourse for a second? There’s a tendency to say these guys are spending all day watching Nick Fuentes or Hasan Piker.
You released an interview where you said that a big surprise to you was that politics and digital media never really came up in your interviews. What is filling this mind space that we imagine is just filled up with Twitch?
Soren: I certainly was surprised. I should preface all this by saying we purposefully avoided asking questions about online digital consumption. In my previous work, I’ve done a lot of focus groups about this kind of stuff. It’s very difficult to get accurate information on, especially if somebody is spending 12 to 14 hours a day scrolling. It’s not necessarily something that they want to lead with and admit. It’s embarrassing. It’s personal. So it’s hard to get at. But I did expect it to come up a lot more, especially when asking about role models and mentorship.
A few guys mentioned some online influencers that they did view as role models. They were fairly benign ones, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Wilson. There was no mention of the so-called “manosphere.” I don’t necessarily think the manosphere’s viewership and especially their influence—their true influence over these men—is as widespread as a lot of folks think.
Jason: One of the things that gave me hope is how much these men talk about work, and also the absence of politics. First: a lot of the guys talked about how much they’re working. That doesn’t mean that they’re finding community in their work, but it’s not like they’re filling up all of their time with pointless endeavors. A lot of them are working, taking care of kids and family. Second, given the space to talk about anything, almost no one chooses to talk about politics.
Sam: Our interviews run completely counter to the predominant narrative around younger men, particularly men without college degrees. The men we interviewed were not on the verge of radicalization. They were not willful loners or, as Derek Thompson wrote, voluntary “monks.” For the most part, they were not resentful or nihilistic. And most expressed a deep yearning to connect with others and to contribute to something bigger than themselves.
The narrative that’s predominantly in elite discourse around these guys is flat out wrong. I think that is one, due to a desire to get clicks and engagement. And two, I think it reflects the actual level of disconnection that people who are writing these pieces have with the actual men they’re writing about. I genuinely don’t believe that Scott Galloway is connected to that many of these young men that he’s writing about. I think he’s writing about it as a disconnected Boomer dad, and so the stuff he writes ends up showing up as disconnected. That’s your Scott Galloway critique for the day.
And, to build on what Soren was saying, these guys weren’t just not turning to the manosphere, some were explicitly rejecting the manosphere ethos. I’m thinking of Deion, who we featured in our case studies. He wasn’t just like, “I’m not drawn to the manosphere.” He was like, “Oh, that stuff’s gross.” The people that he found as role models online were actually people who were giving him an expanded definition of what it means to be a man. And he explicitly identified these role models as informing how he would pay it forward to be the role model he never had. As he put it:
“I hope I can show my … nephews or some other generation … community matters, your family matters, the people around you matter. Treat them with respect … The younger generation coming up — they’re lost too. I want to try to give them an answer, but not in a toxic way, you know what I mean? Like ‘It’s okay to cry. That doesn’t make you less of a man.’”
This predominant narrative that’s being offered in elite discourse is not only off base, but because it is off base, it is obscuring a genuine understanding of this group of guys, which, in turn, is obscuring our collective ability to realize genuine solutions for these guys.
Jason: To go back to previous moral panics for a moment, one of the things that kept popping up throughout the report was video games. Video games come up a lot. I’m guessing that’s because you interviewed guys between their mid-20s and mid-40s, and playing video games is a thing that dudes do together.
In what was maybe the most touching moment of the report, for me at least, there was a guy whose friend had been murdered and he bought a Mega Man game pack for PS2 because that’s what he and his friend had done together.
What I want to ask the question about, though: there are plenty of cases where men describe endlessly scrolling. There are also a lot of stories out there about how technology is at the root of our disconnection. Any sense from these interviews about how technology can be integrated into a more connected life?
Soren: Like all things, there are positives and negatives. Jorge’s life is an example of how technology can play a positive role. He didn’t have any friends in close proximity to him and hadn’t had one for quite a while. He moved from New York City to Rhode Island, where he didn’t know anybody, and was isolated. His only close friend he met online through playing video games a couple of years ago, and that friendship blossomed into a deep and emotional one. They spoke on the phone multiple times a week. They confided in each other. The other guy was a veteran with bad PTSD and confided in Jorge about how hard that was. Jorge was confiding in him about how lonely he had been, how the divorce from his wife was affecting him. It was a very real relationship.
So that is certainly better than nothing, but I don’t think it is enough. If online connections are the only option you have, I think, over time, you will start to starve for some real in-person human connection. Then you add on top of it the addictive qualities of online life—scrolling and video games, now app-based sports gambling and online casinos—it sucks up your free time and it sucks up your attention and keeps you at home.
All in all, this is probably a net negative for these men. But I don’t think we should lose sight that it is a way for some of these guys—especially the more introverted ones that find it hard to put themselves out there—to meet people and have what can be meaningful, close friendships.
Sam: One of the things we saw in the reflections on the online “communities” or affiliations is that very rarely did they extend from online to in person. There were many quotes like, “Oh, we do this Dungeons and Dragons thing online, but we don’t do it in person.” Or, “Oh, I’m active in this locksmithing forum but it doesn’t extend beyond the forum.”
The class dimension is especially important to consider when it comes to translating from online to in-real-life connections. Oftentimes, you hear people talk about how we should not diminish online communities because now people from marginalized groups can find each other and they couldn’t find each other before. I don’t want to minimize that. But think about the situation where you’re someone who probably doesn’t have material resources and your only connections are mostly thin online ones. Even if you wanted to meet in person, but you’re in Ohio and your friend is in California, how are you going to muster the time and the resources to actually do that in-person meetup?
Online “community” is good when considered in a vacuum, but our time is zero-sum. If your only outlet is online life, well, that’s competing with your in-person life. And that in-person life is going to provide the deeper, more robust relationships that we aspirationally want these guys (and everyone) to have.
Jason: Let’s get back to Boromir for a second. In some of the more despairing stories in your study, there’s loss. There’s a lot of men who were betrayed or who themselves fell into things like addiction, who had friends die, and they’re hesitant to take the leap of faith it requires to build friendships anew.
Did you hear any stories of resilience? Loss and tragedy—they come for all of us at some point. Were any of the men you interviewed able to overcome that? And if not, why not?
Soren: Considering the suicide statistics of men without degrees—the cause of a lot of the loss that showed up in these interviews—it is its own version of success that these guys continue to press on. They’re still dealing with a lot and they don’t want to give up and that is a success on its own. But there were a few stories in there, Douglas specifically, who suffered such an intense loss of his two closest friends—one killed himself, the other one went to prison—that he decided it was not worth it anymore to continue to try to make friends. Losing those friends hurt more than it did to be alone.
That said, there are quite a lot of stories from our interviews about guys who go through a lot and still try to put themselves out there and forge meaningful connections.
The breakthrough that a lot of these guys have was meeting a partner that they loved and then having a child. They were really struggling in their lives. They felt alone. They felt isolated. But they eventually met a partner, and they eventually had a child with that partner. And many of the men expressed to us that that saved them.They talked about it in almost a religious sense. They still might not be much closer to forming a deep relational life outside of their marriage and fatherhood, but it was giving them hope that it can be done, and they were searching for a way to do it.
Jason: It is very clear from your report that to the extent that these men did have connections, they were from family. Could you spend a minute or two talking about how family fits into all this?
Sam: Family was the sole bright spot in the interviews. It was the core source of purpose, meaning, and feeling needed in life, and the shining example of that was fatherhood. Fatherhood was a moment of transcendence. I’m thinking about this one guy, Beto, he had just had a baby the week Soren interviewed him. And he goes, “That’s my f-ing purpose right there, that little bundle of joy.” Before that, he’s like, “I was lost, I was adrift. But that kid right there, that changed me.” We had the fortune of being able to talk to him in that moment of transition and transcendence.
We also interviewed multiple guys who were uncles—not fathers themselves—and they talked about being uncles in a similar way that guys talked about being fathers. I’m thinking about this guy, Josiah, whose nephews and nieces have parents who are going through a divorce. His core purpose right now is being there to support his nephews and nieces during this difficult time, and he talked about how, if he didn’t have that outlet to provide support, he feels like his identity as Josiah wouldn’t be stable. He wouldn’t have something to hold on to.
But even people who didn’t have kids or didn’t have nephews and nieces talked about the mutuality of being needed by and needing family. Douglas talked about how, in the wake of the losses he experienced—not only of his two best friends, but also of his mother, father, and grandmother in close succession—it was his brother and his wife that became this core group of mutual support.
One of my views is that family is at the center of our relational lives. Family is one of the pillars of civil society. What this familial connection and purpose shows me is that, for most of these guys, we still have at least that foundation there, and that foundation provides something off of which we can build.
Jason: Your report has an old soul to it. And I mean that in a positive way. One of the ways that I felt this “old soul,” was that a lot of bright spots came from men feeling needed as opposed to being needy. Men want to be necessary and that sung through in your report.
Soren: I’m going to take this back to Boromir. After his moment of weakness and his failure to uphold what was supposed to be his oath, Boromir fell back on his original purpose—the reason he was there and why he was fighting in the first place—which was to protect these two people so they can go on to destroy this evil artifact. And he died doing that. So even in his moment of weakness where he didn’t know what to do—where he felt like he had violated his oath and failed as a man—he still had his original purpose, and that’s what he returned to.
For a lot of the guys that I talked to, that purpose, when it was absent, made them feel rudderless in the world. They didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. And if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you’re working wage labor jobs that don’t pay you enough and you work way too much, that is a tough position to be in. Why struggle just to struggle? But for the guys who were able to find a purpose, which often involved having a kid, it made it a lot easier to live life where they previously felt rudderless because they were now living for something.
For example, one of the guys, Juan, recently became a father figure in his girlfriend’s daughter’s life. He said he hated his job before he assumed this role. He still hates his job now and he still works too much and doesn’t get paid enough. But at least now there’s a reason why he’s working. He goes to work so he can buy diapers and formula and pay rent, not just for him, but for his girlfriend and kid. And it makes it all much more palatable in the end to be able to do that. One of the big things that is missing for men today is that identity and purpose as a part of something bigger than themselves.
“One of the big things that is missing for men today is that identity and purpose as a part of something bigger than themselves.”
Jason, you know this as well as I do. The military is a big source of purpose for a lot of guys. It’s a way to feel needed, a way to feel important, a way to feel part of something larger than themselves. If you’re going to boil anything down to a big thing missing from men’s lives, I think it’s that.
Sam: This gets at the non-zero sum nature of this research. Everyone wants to feel like their life is meaningful and that they are needed. No one wants to feel like life is “just passing them by,” as one guy put it. A society where everyone feels like they’re needed and they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves is a better society for both men and women. What we’re shining a light on is that the way that we’ve designed our society, particularly over the last 50 to 75 years, has inadvertently made a group of people feel like they are useless and feel like their lives don’t matter.
So, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a man? It’s to be a part of and to contribute to something bigger than ourselves.
“A society where everyone feels like they’re needed and they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves is a better society for both men and women.”
Jason: You say it pretty explicitly at the very end of the report. There’s a line where you say, “Many of these men view purpose and meaning as something that could only be experienced communally.”
Sam: No one was talking in terms of self-actualization as it came to purpose. They were talking about self-actualization as it came to making friends. They were saying that they needed to fix themselves before they could make friends. But in terms of purpose, it always involved turning outward, not inward.
Jason: A lot of these guys talk about high school as the last place that they had structure to help shape community. In the report, you talk about the end of high school using a term called “the friendship cliff.” Tell me a little bit about the friendship cliff and what that means.
Sam: What we heard consistently is that the guys we interviewed had friends in high school, and underlying that was the structure of school that provided repeated, day-to-day interactions. But after high school, that disappeared. Some of their friends went off to college. Some joined the military. But the men we interviewed often had nothing. We called this the friendship cliff: After you leave high school, there’s no structure to catch you, and you almost immediately lose friends.
We also heard several men describe friendship in adulthood as a “slow drifting away” or a “slow fading away.” They lost the consistent structure of school. Work proved to be a structured form of human interaction that didn’t produce lasting friendships. Few of the men were involved in the religious and non-religious communities that once served as relational safety nets. And so, with the structure of school gone and nothing to take its place, friendships just gradually disappeared.
Now, 10 to 20 years after high school, a lot of these guys had what we would call tenuous ties—one friendship, one community attachment, one mentor. And these tenuous ties often created single points of failure for their relational lives. If that friend moved or if you moved, if you changed jobs, if a loved one passed away, it often made the difference between having some connection or being almost completely disconnected.
The idea of the friendship cliff makes you think, what have we done to this period of the adult transition to create this friendship cliff? What does it mean for us to reweave the social fabric such that people have relational safety nets that extend beyond precarious work? What does it look like to make work less precarious and more stable for people? That’s where you start to think about potential solutions.
Jason: This leads me to my last question. I’m going to quote from your report from the very beginning. You write: “The story that emerged is one that is both more despairing and more hopeful than what we expected at the beginning. More despairing because the men we spoke to are even more disconnected than we anticipated and a life of renewed connection is seemingly out of reach for many. But more hopeful, because the current cultural narrative about these men, that they’re nihilistic, resentful, closed-up loners, is almost entirely wrong. Most of these guys want to open up, connect, and contribute, but they need to be called in.”
So the last question for each of you, and then we’ll wrap up, is how do we call these men in?
Sam: Where we landed was if the challenges these men face are first and foremost relational, the solutions should begin relationally. The dark irony of this research was that many of the men we interviewed felt like it was their personal responsibility to solve their relational challenges themselves. But it’s not their responsibility, it’s ours. It’s on the relationships that exist around these men to call them in.
This needs to happen at every layer of a community. It needs to happen within families. How do we encourage and enable family members to get their men involved—be it sons, nephews, fathers, uncles, or grandpas? It needs to happen at the associational level, too. Community groups—both religious and non-religious—have a role to play in supporting these families to get their boys and men involved and connected. It’s also on community and religious groups, in the same way that I did with ASAP, to actually approach the isolation of men without degrees as a core challenge and an area to focus on.
The story of the YMCA is really useful here. We have this period of great disruption around the Industrial Revolution where men left agrarian and village life. They came to cities. They were going to brothels. They were doing drugs. They were drinking. They were also isolated and alienated. And in comes the YMCA, which was explicitly founded for the spiritual, physical, and social formation of these adrift young men. We need a similar set of institutions now.
I’ll say one more thing, which we didn’t include in the report. Because these guys are mostly still working, I do wonder if there is an opportunity to activate these workplaces. Yes, they are often precarious workplaces. Yes, we should pursue policy changes to make these workplaces more stable. But, in the meantime, can these workplaces be seen as entry points for bringing people into other webs of association that are not so precarious? So, when their tether to these precarious, unstable workplaces break—which is the rule, not the exception at this point—these men can have other things to fall back on.
Soren: To call these men in, I also think that they need to feel as though the society outside their home cares about them and their condition.
What men without degrees are facing, in particular, is twofold. First, there is a public discourse about men and what’s going on with men—their lack of enrollment in college, their anger, their political leanings, this and that—that problematizes them and doesn’t paint them in the most positive light. Second, there is an explicit class angle. These guys work very hard. They work long hours and many of them are not making it. And I think that because nobody is coming to tell them that they are valued, that the world cares about their struggles—in some cases, it’s quite the opposite—they can feel very mistrustful. It’s difficult to call somebody in when they don’t trust the people trying to call them in.
That is obviously a very hard thing to solve. A bill in Congress isn’t going to fix that and no one person is going to fix that. That’s a societal level change in how we interact. We spoke about online versus offline life earlier. For the guys that are consuming a lot of content online, I think the biggest effect is not necessarily political or social, it’s the negative worldview that the internet gives them and a lack of trust in others. If we’re going to solve that, we need to meet them with a bit more kindness and empathy to be able to call them in.
Read the report in full: “Nobody to Call: An exploration of friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees.”
Note: More in Common acted as the fiscal sponsor for this project.
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"And that in-person life is going to provide the deeper, more robust relationships that we aspirationally want these guys (and everyone) to have."
Says who? Who's to say an online relationship can't be more socially beneficial than an in-person one? You've cited many examples of how online relationships can actually fulfill men's social lives - video games, bonding over trauma ... those things are more accessible online because there's no in-person pressure to perform.
I also find the lack of political discourse odd. I find there's a clear divide in politics - the right focus on self service, the left focuses on social gaps. So I would think that politics needs to play a part in the discussion.