> The preamble is straightforward: “How comfortable would you be talking about your mental health and emotional well-being with each of the following?"
Seems like a pretty broken premise, ranking comfort instead of what you expected to help most. Also related, people are typically more comfortable confessing to strangers or under circumstances that won't endanger an existing relationship, which seems like a big part of why confession is anonymous. Self-reporting here is probably basically the same as asking "according to your community norms, how are you supposed to answer a question like this?" without much real reveal
Do you go home and talk to your spouse? Do you go to church and talk with your pastor? Do you go to your therapist or to the local bar?
> Comfort with mental health care has become another facet of political sorting in the U.S.
I'm skeptical. Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states. It's hard enough to get poorer, less educated men comfortable going to the doctor, let alone a therapist.
Community, in whatever form that is. And community has broken down in the US, and has been for decades. It is a social system, lumbering towards failure (as many systems are).
> Differences by religion also emerge. Religiously unaffiliated Americans are much less likely than those who are religiously affiliated to feel connected to others in their local community (43% vs. 60%). This pattern aligns with previous research on interpersonal connectedness and philanthropy among religious people. Religious people tend to be more likely than nonreligious people to volunteer and give to charity – though they prefer these activities benefit others within their own religious groups. [My note: Religion->Shared belief tribalism, observation, not intended to be derogatory]
> Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
> Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states.
Just as a curiosity, as I don't have any experience of red states myself, how easy would it be for a closet homosexual to come out and get support from their bar, churches and friends in a red state, typically?
Much lower odds of default support on average, but not zero, and the odds are not uniform throughout all the red states or any given one.
For example, my small town in a red state was not accepting of homosexuality in general, but my church was tolerant, and my church youth group was affirming and supportive.
Less hard than for a straight white Christian to out himself in California, thank you. And the problem is so egregerious that there's an entire episode of Silicon Valley, the series about the startup culture that we all swim in, about it.
I empathize with the straight white Christian as a fellow human, and wish them support (I donate to organizations that provide crisis support, but this does not scale, we need more scale [community building via robust government support imho]), but also recognize that religious belief is rapidly declining in the US [1], ~100k churches are anticipated to close over the next 5-10 years [2], and so while this support should be provided to the religious folks who need it, it is not a growing or long term support need [3] (imho, specifically in the context of a religious leader providing said support) from a systems thinking perspective. Citations below for this area of the knowledge graph.
TLDR This is a human support capacity and capability issue. We should fix it, to the best of our ability, imho.
> The means are denoted in red, and you can see that most of the numbers are at least 55 years old. For instance, the average adult member of an Episcopal church is 61 years old. For Southern Baptists, it’s 58. The Assemblies of God are doing a bit better on this metric at 54. But look at the modal age for a lot of these groups—this is probably the most important metric when it comes to understanding the future of American Protestant Christianity. For many, the modal age is significantly higher than the mean. In a bunch of mainline Protestant denominations, it’s between 67 and 69 years old. For the Assemblies of God, the modal age is 69, which is 15 years older than the mean. What does this mean? Well, the mean can be pulled down by a decent chunk of younger folks. If you have a good core of 30-year-olds, they can counterbalance those 60-year-olds in that calculation. That’s not true for the mode. It gives you a much better sense of when “the tipping point” is going to come.
[4] The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026 ("So why do overall levels of attendance decline? Well, because each successive birth cohort is less religiously active than the previous one. That’s the main driver of religious decline—it’s a decay function across cohorts.")
As an atheist, this topic is one of many that stays on my mind and keeps me awake sometimes.
I don't think this is an unreasonable view, but it does seem to me that the declining Christianity rates aren't super useful on their own for determining actions from a systems thinking perspective.
Maybe rates are declining because the religion is legitimately not appealing, in which case your action is right. An opponent would say that it's declining because it's culturally discouraged (since even religious pockets are exposed to the national zeitgeist), in which case ignoring it would be the exact opposite of what we'd want to do.
Friend, priest, acquittance at the bar and mental health professional are 4 different roles. Your therapist is not your friend, will refuse to play that role. Your therapist is also not your religious leader and wont speak into those considerations.
And conversely, neither priest nor friend will be able to deal with actual mental health issue you have.
This whole blog is fascinating, assuming that you're interested in the intersection between (recent) history, demographics, politics, and religion in the US.
Is the true in America? I’m in the UK, and while social isolation, particularly for men is probably worse than it was, I think many, myself included, have at least one person we can turn to in times of crisis. Or am I in a bubble?
The author of this piece, Ryan Burge, typically relies data that is scoped to the US for his pieces (to the best of my knowledge). You would have to reach out to him to inquire about the UK, if any similar data is available for analysis, etc. With that said, the ARDA appears to have global data available at https://thearda.com/
> This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.
(Ryan also wrote "The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us," which I highly recommend; he is exceptionally data driven within this domain, no affiliation besides subscribing to his Substack)
Precovid social isolation was the same in US and UK. [0] This investigation have numbers that say that Brits are experiencing more social isolation than untitedstateians. [1]
This is absolutely true in america. My partner left me and my social life has completely collapsed. I have nobody to talk to when things get difficult. I am estranged from my father, my mother is disabled and requires increasing medical support. I'm an only child, I have no local family.
Once the floor drops out from under you there is nothing to stop the rapid decent to nothingness. There is a generation of discarded people who have nobody left. When we lose our last threads of social connection there's no way back. Beyond hopeless.
I think it helps to live in a city. The cities have their problems, they're expensive and dirty, but there are loads of older single adults, and even an introvert can sit at the same bar once a week and meet people, or go to meetups or a weekly class and slowly meet people. Hell, in bad times even chatting with a bartender was nice.
Being in your shoes in a suburban setting surrounded by families and neat little houses (or huge fields in a country setting) I imagine is hard. I'm only making assumptions.
Have you thought about traveling long weekends or abroad longer? Perfectly doable solo.
"There's no way back"? Only if you cannot ever form new relationships.
Look, I'm not saying it's easy. And when you're in despair, the despair makes it harder. But "impossible" and "beyond hopeless" are lies. Stop believing them. Start trying to find ways to build new relationships, even if it's slow and hard.
Learning how to develop a social network independently is a skill. If your partner leaving you collapses your social life, do you live in a small town where the narrative has turned against you, or did you simply rely on them to be the adult in the room and set up playdates for you like you're a child?
Go to bookclubs.com and start a book club, or join a book club, or go to a local library and do any of the social stuff. Go to a crochet club, even empty-handed, chances are the fiber arts people will have plenty to spare. These are friendships that have to be forged and worked on day in and day out to strengthen them, like a sword.
>> My partner left me and my social life has completely collapsed. I have nobody to talk to when things get difficult. I am estranged from my father, my mother is disabled and requires increasing medical support. I'm an only child, I have no local family.
> Learning how to develop a social network independently is a skill. If your partner leaving you collapses your social life, do you live in a small town where the narrative has turned against you, or did you simply rely on them to be the adult in the room and set up playdates for you like you're a child?
Oh fuck your attitude and grow some empathy. Someone confesses a serious personal problem and you start lecturing them, implying they are incompetent and/or are a man-child?
Some of your advice isn't bad, but your delivery is terrible, and life is more complicated than you imply (e.g. what if he's depressed, what if his partner was controlling and didn't allow him to have an independent social life, what if he has no interest in "fiber arts", etc)?
The plight can be quite real but when people say they have no social life what they're not saying is what sort of social life do they want? What do they want to do while being social with people?
If you have the money, you could always hire escorts. Eventually you'll find one you click with and you can develop a friendly working relationship with a beautiful woman who will listen to all your problems and if she's smart, even maybe give you a valuable outside perspective on what you're experiencing.
I'm part of Freemasonry. All members are at least vested for criminal conducts, my lodge at least is very strict on background investigation, so it's easier to pick trustworthy brothers to talk to. I'm probably one the youngest members and benefitted from wisdom and patience from older brothers. I'm not a church member but that would be a good alternative.
I had a great experience when I was part of a lodge. I'm atheist and so could join a Droit Humain lodge in France (which does not require belief in a Great Architect of the Universe and is mixed). I'm now in Hong Kong but unfortunately have failed to find a lodge that doesn't require a belief in God and that is mixed (I refuse to go to a male only lodge).
It's a pity because I found freemasonry to be hugely beneficial in terms of friendship, interesting discussions and support.
I'd be curious about the results in the main graph if it included no one. That would be much more telling, because right now it appears that most people talk to at least someone.
Right before COVID I stumbled across mens groups, they were a way I first learned I could get my underlying needs for getting seen met in a way no other mechanism in society offered.
Society was trying actually to meet this need in so many other pseudo forms, but where it fell short and what I needed was:
- a safe space to share what my experience without needing to be fixed or someone giving me unsolicited feedback
- place where competition was turned off (sports groups, board game nights, video games etc had previously been this but since they were competitive they met a different need)
- a cadence that met regularly and where space for me to speak with structure was a requirement
I liked this so much I even formed one in DC before I was pushed away for work to an abusive Dallas Capital One environment (which my men helped me navigate while my coworkers accepted the abuse being blind to it). I Highly recommend trying a mens groups, find one on Facebook or Google, or try the project mankind groups or No Mr Nice Guy’s Dr Glover runs one online. The one I was a part of longest is also open: embodied masculine (more extreme embodiment based group) but starting off get your toes wet first.
Seems like a pretty broken premise, ranking comfort instead of what you expected to help most. Also related, people are typically more comfortable confessing to strangers or under circumstances that won't endanger an existing relationship, which seems like a big part of why confession is anonymous. Self-reporting here is probably basically the same as asking "according to your community norms, how are you supposed to answer a question like this?" without much real reveal
How much does the author owe you? My guess is zero.
If he didn't measure what you wanted to be measured ... that's your problem.
Do you go home and talk to your spouse? Do you go to church and talk with your pastor? Do you go to your therapist or to the local bar?
> Comfort with mental health care has become another facet of political sorting in the U.S.
I'm skeptical. Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states. It's hard enough to get poorer, less educated men comfortable going to the doctor, let alone a therapist.
Also missing from this perspective. What do people who are not from western countries do?
Pew Research: Americans are less likely than others around the world to feel close to people in their country or community - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/05/08/americans... - May 8th, 2024
> Differences by religion also emerge. Religiously unaffiliated Americans are much less likely than those who are religiously affiliated to feel connected to others in their local community (43% vs. 60%). This pattern aligns with previous research on interpersonal connectedness and philanthropy among religious people. Religious people tend to be more likely than nonreligious people to volunteer and give to charity – though they prefer these activities benefit others within their own religious groups. [My note: Religion->Shared belief tribalism, observation, not intended to be derogatory]
Pew Research: Connectedness to community, country and the world - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/12/06/connectedness-... - December 6th, 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
> Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
Just as a curiosity, as I don't have any experience of red states myself, how easy would it be for a closet homosexual to come out and get support from their bar, churches and friends in a red state, typically?
For example, my small town in a red state was not accepting of homosexuality in general, but my church was tolerant, and my church youth group was affirming and supportive.
TLDR This is a human support capacity and capability issue. We should fix it, to the best of our ability, imho.
[1] Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916273 - November 2025 (1 comment)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484284 (citations)
[3] When Are Half Your Members Going to be Dead? - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-mem... - January 29th, 2026
> The means are denoted in red, and you can see that most of the numbers are at least 55 years old. For instance, the average adult member of an Episcopal church is 61 years old. For Southern Baptists, it’s 58. The Assemblies of God are doing a bit better on this metric at 54. But look at the modal age for a lot of these groups—this is probably the most important metric when it comes to understanding the future of American Protestant Christianity. For many, the modal age is significantly higher than the mean. In a bunch of mainline Protestant denominations, it’s between 67 and 69 years old. For the Assemblies of God, the modal age is 69, which is 15 years older than the mean. What does this mean? Well, the mean can be pulled down by a decent chunk of younger folks. If you have a good core of 30-year-olds, they can counterbalance those 60-year-olds in that calculation. That’s not true for the mode. It gives you a much better sense of when “the tipping point” is going to come.
[4] The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026 ("So why do overall levels of attendance decline? Well, because each successive birth cohort is less religiously active than the previous one. That’s the main driver of religious decline—it’s a decay function across cohorts.")
As an atheist, this topic is one of many that stays on my mind and keeps me awake sometimes.
How A Decline In Churchgoing Led To A Rise In ‘Deaths Of Despair’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408406 - December 2025 (2 comments)
Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments)
Maybe rates are declining because the religion is legitimately not appealing, in which case your action is right. An opponent would say that it's declining because it's culturally discouraged (since even religious pockets are exposed to the national zeitgeist), in which case ignoring it would be the exact opposite of what we'd want to do.
And conversely, neither priest nor friend will be able to deal with actual mental health issue you have.
Is it that or is it the cost and availability?
For example - this one about generations and trust was surprising to me: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/gen-z-doesnt-trust-any...
or this on perception of the religiosity of holidays: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/is-christmas-a-religio...
> This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.
Code for this post can be found at https://gist.github.com/ryanburge/0895d855fdc93c3ce26b034349...
(Ryan also wrote "The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us," which I highly recommend; he is exceptionally data driven within this domain, no affiliation besides subscribing to his Substack)
https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587436697_the-...
[0] https://publica.org.au/wp-content/uploads/DiJulio-et-al.-Lon...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Once the floor drops out from under you there is nothing to stop the rapid decent to nothingness. There is a generation of discarded people who have nobody left. When we lose our last threads of social connection there's no way back. Beyond hopeless.
Enjoy your bubble. america is completely fucked.
Being in your shoes in a suburban setting surrounded by families and neat little houses (or huge fields in a country setting) I imagine is hard. I'm only making assumptions.
Have you thought about traveling long weekends or abroad longer? Perfectly doable solo.
Look, I'm not saying it's easy. And when you're in despair, the despair makes it harder. But "impossible" and "beyond hopeless" are lies. Stop believing them. Start trying to find ways to build new relationships, even if it's slow and hard.
Sorry for you situation and stay strong.
Go to bookclubs.com and start a book club, or join a book club, or go to a local library and do any of the social stuff. Go to a crochet club, even empty-handed, chances are the fiber arts people will have plenty to spare. These are friendships that have to be forged and worked on day in and day out to strengthen them, like a sword.
> Learning how to develop a social network independently is a skill. If your partner leaving you collapses your social life, do you live in a small town where the narrative has turned against you, or did you simply rely on them to be the adult in the room and set up playdates for you like you're a child?
Oh fuck your attitude and grow some empathy. Someone confesses a serious personal problem and you start lecturing them, implying they are incompetent and/or are a man-child?
Some of your advice isn't bad, but your delivery is terrible, and life is more complicated than you imply (e.g. what if he's depressed, what if his partner was controlling and didn't allow him to have an independent social life, what if he has no interest in "fiber arts", etc)?
It's a pity because I found freemasonry to be hugely beneficial in terms of friendship, interesting discussions and support.
Society was trying actually to meet this need in so many other pseudo forms, but where it fell short and what I needed was:
- a safe space to share what my experience without needing to be fixed or someone giving me unsolicited feedback
- place where competition was turned off (sports groups, board game nights, video games etc had previously been this but since they were competitive they met a different need)
- a cadence that met regularly and where space for me to speak with structure was a requirement
I liked this so much I even formed one in DC before I was pushed away for work to an abusive Dallas Capital One environment (which my men helped me navigate while my coworkers accepted the abuse being blind to it). I Highly recommend trying a mens groups, find one on Facebook or Google, or try the project mankind groups or No Mr Nice Guy’s Dr Glover runs one online. The one I was a part of longest is also open: embodied masculine (more extreme embodiment based group) but starting off get your toes wet first.