The costs are piling up

A new survey from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) examines the habits of young men and invites us to consider the implications. The survey asked 2,000 men ages 18 to 29 whether they had ever played video games, watched pornography, or gambled. Ninety-five percent said they’ve gamed, 70% said they have watched porn, and 57% admitted to gambling. A headline of the survey was that only 2% have done none of those things, and it got a reaction. Maybe an overreaction.

Of course, frequency matters. Someone who once paid $10 to play fantasy football is in a different category than someone who spends six hours a day on DraftKings. Unfortunately, the same survey found clear evidence of overuse. Forty-four percent of young men say they play video games many times a day, 43% watch porn daily or several times a week, and 23% gamble every day.

A separate IFS study titled “Young Men and Society, Part 2” notes that the average young man will log 10,000 hours of gaming by age 21 and “one in three boys is now considered a ‘heavy’ porn user.” Notably, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is often cited as the threshold for real expertise in a skill, and it’s roughly double the time it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree.

NBC News reported that gambling disorder diagnoses have risen more than 60% in states that legalized sports betting since 2018, with polling since suggesting more than half of men under 50 now hold a betting account, a category that essentially didn’t exist for most of these men’s lives.

What’s the impact?

Regular pornography viewing doesn’t just shape what a man thinks about; it rewires his brain and changes what he needs to feel satisfied. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge notes that the industry keeps introducing “harder themes” because its customers build a tolerance to pornography, exactly like a drug. As a result, pornography trains a man to exploit women rather than protect them.

It also correlates with a weakened prefrontal cortex, which impairs impulse control and judgment, with higher rates of depression and lower relationship quality. People in addiction recovery have told me that porn is harder to walk away from than drugs.

Video games are a lower-stakes problem, but not a small one. Habitual gaming offers the feeling of accomplishment without the substance of it. Men were built to take on real challenges, persevere through difficulty, and enjoy the fruit of our labor. But doing all that in a fake world gives us the dopamine hit associated with accomplishing something without anything to show for it. The real world needs our attention, persistence, and skill, so we should take real risks and win real prizes.

Habitual gambling rewires the brain in the same way drugs do. Sports betting apps, the most common form of gambling among young men, run on a variable-ratio reward schedule, which is the single most addictive reinforcement structure known to psychology—precisely why the DSM-5 places gambling disorder in the same chapter as drug and alcohol addiction. The stakes are more than financial; roughly one in five problem gamblers attempts suicide.

Sadly, the social costs may be just as high as the personal costs. Researchers Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo found a measurable link between how fast an area adopted high-speed internet and how sharply marriage rates fell among non-college-educated men who live there. In the mid-2000s, roughly 32% of non-college men were married by their late twenties. By the late 2010s, that number had fallen to 21%.

That’s not proof that Xbox and DraftKings are single-handedly ending marriage in America, but it points to the opportunity cost of life. Every hour spent chasing a fake win is an hour not spent pursuing a real one. The CDC reported this year that the U.S. general fertility rate has fallen to a fresh record low, down nearly 23% since 2007. Reversing this requires us to renew our investment in the real world.

None of this gets solved by simply quitting Fortnite or deleting a betting app. It starts to be solved when generations of young men invest their time, emotions, energy, and money in the things that actually matter: marriage, children, service, church, and community. If we do that consistently, we’ll find ourselves with less time for the trivial stuff, and less time for the sinful stuff as well.