Men Are Chasing Validation Through Addiction And Vice

Men don’t actually want pleasure. They want what they think pleasure proves: that they’re desired, admired, successful, or in control.

That’s why a man can pay for attention on OnlyFans, lose hours to a video game, or bet money he can’t afford—and still feel like he’s gaining something.

He’s not just chasing dopamine. He’s chasing validation.

And incels are the clearest case study, because their problem isn’t simply a lack of sex. It’s deciding that unless the sex comes with certain conditions met, they’d rather remain celibate.

There’s no such thing as an incel. At least not in the purest, most technical definition of the word.

In case you’re unaware, the word “Incel” is a portmanteau of the words “involuntary” and “celibate.” These are the guys who—even if you put a gun to their head—couldn’t get laid to save their life.

This isn’t an essay about incels, but I have to start out talking about them because if you understand why their celibacy isn’t some unbreakable curse besmirched upon them from the sexual marketplace gods, then you gain a valuable insight into the modern addictions of young men.

Guys who don the incel label—or who have it put on them as an insult—can’t get laid despite giving it their best effort. Or, so they think, is their best effort.

I’ve seen a few pictures of the guys who consider themselves incels. You would think that given the involuntary hiatus their sex life is on, they’d all be hideous Quasimodo, Elephant Man-looking dudes.

But most aren’t bad-looking at all.

Their looks, height, and physique aren’t giving them an unfair advantage, but they aren’t a handicap either. But let’s play the Devil’s Advocate for a moment and pretend that a guy’s incel status was the result of some hideous birth defect or genetic deformity.

He could always just pay for it.

Labeling the celibacy as involuntary is inaccurate because they could just break the curse by blessing the CashApp of a girl nearby.

If I was dying of thirst, there are at least two girls I’m Facebook friends with in my city who are—how should I say this respectfully—ladies of the night (or morning, middle of the day, or whatever works with your schedule) who have entrepreneurially, and without shame, used their local digital networks for leads.

And, from what I’ve heard—not personal experiences or anything—there are an assortment of sugar baby sites with ladies more than willing to do a little something strange for change.

And if an incel’s pride or bank account prohibited him from purchasing the goods, there is always someone of lesser attractiveness who would be happy for any male attention—the infamous “Slumpbuster”, but these guys ain’t really trying to hear all that.

What’s really going on with incels is that it’s not really about the sex.

It’s about feeling desired, admired, and validated by someone who is attractive. Incels want to feel like they matter to people who they think matter. They want to get the “choosing signals” as much as they want to be chosen.

In the world of an incel, paying for it or lowering their standards to someone more attainable is an option so repulsive that it’s not even considered a last resort. It is not even on the menu.

Their entire approach reminds me of my cat.

My cat will die of starvation before it eats even a bit of a food it doesn’t like, even if that food satisfies all their nutritional needs and doesn’t even taste that bad. Any cat owners who have tried to change their cat’s food are all too familiar with this ridiculously bougie nature of felines in this regard.

But at least with a cat, they’re just resisting change.

All you gotta do is give the cat his old food back, and he stops acting like you’re trying to poison him. But an incel needs to feel the girl actually likes him and meets his standards before he beds her—which I suppose is, in quite an unexpected twist of logic—kind of sweet and surprisingly old school.

However, this behavior isn’t driven by concern for the woman’s emotional well-being. Incels aren’t celibate because they refuse to hook up with ready and willing women. They’re celibate because they seek that which can’t be bartered, bought, forced, or traded for:

Validation.

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Incels Build The Foundation

I opened with incels because, while all the things I’ll cover in this essay come back to the desire for validation, I wanted to lay the logical foundation with an obvious example to build the rest of this very important argument on.

That argument being that all of the modern ills of young men—and by young men, I mean anyone under 30, although certainly these afflictions can affect any man at any age—are all driven, not by being a slave to dopamine or being stuck on the hedonistic treadmill, but by the quest for the validation of their existence.

More precisely, I want to show you that in a world without difficulty or purpose, and with incredibly permissive attitudes towards vice and, for lack of a more secular term, sin, men have taken the paths of least resistance in an attempt to maximize agency. And taking shortcuts always ends badly.

Before we go any further, I have to issue a caveat.

Women have their own issues as well, but I don’t know a thing about being a woman. I’m also a huge proponent of the idea of “policing my own,” so it’s not even in my nature to write an essay breaking down the ills of modern women. There’s plenty of content on the internet if that’s your flavor.

Feeling Desired Is Better Than Just Looking At What You Desire

When I was in my 20s, I remember having a debate with a bunch of girls about whether most men would rather dance with a girl at a club or go to a strip joint.

Economic reasons aside, I had to explain to them that getting close to a girl who decides to get close to you is infinitely more enjoyable than watching a girl gyrate naked on stage.

The only guys who will disagree that touching the goods is better than just staring at them—even in their fully exposed glory—are the ones who don’t get the chance to touch anything.

Now whether you agree with me or not, you at least follow my reasoning.

The enjoyment isn’t just physical. It’s also psychological and emotional.

Any guy who doubts that only needs to remember how bad he felt when he got turned down and likewise, how the victory theme from Final Fantasy 7 played in his head whenever a girl he fancied didn’t retreat like he had leprosy.

This need to feel desired has fueled an addiction to something that didn’t even exist 10 years ago: OnlyFans.

Officially, OnlyFans is a platform where people can make money by selling exclusive content to their audience. Officially, you can think of this like YouTube memberships or Patreon.

Unofficially, it’s where girls—and sometimes guys—go to post nude or erotic photos, and you pay a membership to see them. And anyone can set up an OnlyFans.

Now, I personally didn’t get the appeal of OnlyFans.

You can watch all the erotic content you want to for free on any number of streaming sites. Sure, there’s a novelty aspect of seeing someone you know in compromising positions, so I guess I could see a one-off purchase to satisfy curiosity, but I couldn’t imagine someone dropping large sums of money on this, let alone becoming addicted.

But that’s exactly what’s happening, because guys aren’t just paying for pictures. They’re paying for conversation and validation.

They’re paying to feel like those women see them.

Traditional adult content is completely one-directional. You watch a woman on a screen, but she has no idea you exist. On OnlyFans, you can subscribe to a specific woman, send her a message, tip her, request personalized content, and potentially get a response addressed specifically to you.

The Cut interviewed one man who had spent over $10,000 on OF. At one point, he was spending between $300 and $600 every month on what are called “Girlfriend Experiences”—which boils down to paying women to talk to him, check in on him, and simulate some of the attention you would normally receive in a relationship.

The man described the experience as “like pure heroin.” Now I’ve never done heroin, nor have I engaged in OF, but I know a few things about the intersection of neuroscience and psychology.

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If you’re digging this topic, I’d check out The Status Game by Will Storr. It’s one of the best books I’ve read on why human beings crave status, belonging, and validation—and why those needs can drive us toward some surprisingly self-destructive behaviors.

Then I’d check out The Molecule of More by Daniel Lieberman and Michael Long, which does an excellent job explaining dopamine, motivation, and why uncertainty is so addictive. And finally, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, because understanding why our brains chase validation is only half the battle. The bigger question is what actually gives life purpose.

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You Literally Become Addicted To Validation

While OnlyFans doesn’t affect the brain with anything close to the pharmacological force of heroin, his comparison isn’t that far-fetched.

Heroin and sexual or romantic attention ultimately stimulate some of the same reward circuitry in the brain. The difference is how they get there.

Heroin takes the superhighway chemical route, while romance takes the slow natural scenic path.

Feeling desired by an attractive person is rewarding. And the girlfriend experience bundles all those things together and adds anticipation and uncertainty. That combination of feelings is why you can’t get someone out of your head and ultimately leads to falling in love—or crushing rejection.

By itself, there’s no danger in that feeling. However, when delivered via a route like OnlyFans, it extracts a massive financial toll.

In that same article from The Cut, there’s a story of another man who spent $46,000 on a single woman. According to his wife, he genuinely seemed to believe the girl was interested in him.

The fact that this man was married with children opens a can of worms for all types of criticism beyond the scope of this essay, but the idea is crystal clear:

A man’s desire for validation is so great that he will destroy his family and future over it, and it alone.

The Need For Validation Leads To Extremism

My negative thoughts and feelings about the Red Pill and The Manosphere are no secret.

I’ve written three articles and penned an Op-Ed about their insidious influence on young men. However, I also completely understand why they exist and why they remain so popular.

Tony McAleer is a former Neo-Nazi and author of The Cure for Hate—a book where he details his indoctrination into the white supremacist culture and what made him not only leave it behind, but devote his life to helping people leave gangs and extreme organizations behind.

At a meeting for Builders—an organization with some great people who are devoted to depolarizing the world—he told a story of a mom who came to him when she discovered that her 12-year-old son had been spending a lot of time on the white supremacist site Stormfront and was communicating with people he met from there.

The mother was obviously disturbed, but she told Tony that she looked at the conversation and immediately noticed that they made her son feel more accepted than any of his classmates. She recounted a painful incident in which he invited his classmates to his birthday party, but none of them showed up.

I tell this story—not to compare the Red Pill or Manosphere to the supremacist movements (although in my op-ed I do argue they are like street gangs) but to highlight another destructive aspect of a man’s need for validation:

People want to be wanted.

We need to feel like there is at least one person who gets us, and that desire is so powerful that we will even pursue self-destructive means to feel the validation.

It’s a Faustian Bargain, where a man will trade the things he values and holds sacred to achieve a temporary feeling.

Street gangs—your bloods, crips, GDs, or whatever your local flavor is—primarily exist in the poorest neighborhoods.

But poverty, by itself, is not the single biggest determiner in whether a boy joins a gang. If it were, all the boys in the hood would rep a set or fly a flag.

Boys who feel socially ostracized and come from broken homes—even by ghetto standards—are the ones most likely to join. And they are not only searching for validation, but also for validation’s half-brother, purpose.

Validation In A Fantasy World Is Easier To Obtain Than In The Real World

Life is wonderfully easy, and that comes with drawbacks.

In my essay about Rites of Passage, I talked about the problem of removing the difficult challenges boys need to face to become men, and how many men in their 20s and 30s today are still effectively teenagers.

For example, take the number of men still living with their parents.

In 2023, 51% of men aged 18-24, 21% of men aged 25-28, and 8% of men aged 30-34 still lived at home with their parents. That’s 1 in 2, 1 in 5, and nearly 1 in 10.

Many things contribute to that, including the current economic climate, but I’m not arguing about the causes.

My essay on the loss of rites of passage and their effect on men does that. I want to talk about what that does to men and why it makes them particularly susceptible to the destructive addiction of validation.

Only this time, that addiction comes dressed as purpose.

I personally have nothing against video games. I just haven’t had time to play video games in 20 years.

And they do take a lot of time. So much time that there isn’t much room for anything else if it becomes even a slightly serious hobby.

Now obviously, casual gamers exist. I don’t know what the kids are playing today, but I’d imagine that there’s some game out there that guys only whip out when friends are over, like Madden and Super Smash Brothers were in my day. But I’m not talking about those guys.

I’m talking about the guys who spend an average of 10 hours a week playing. That’s the average, mind you, with 8% of guys in their 20s playing for an average of 20 hours a week. That’s the average, and I have a suspicion that number is significantly skewed to the left.

Even if you hate video games, think about what you get from a video game.

You get a mission, rewards, a story, and a purpose. You even find yourself in a community of people who are like you.

It becomes incredibly easy to take time you would otherwise use to improve your employment prospects or meet a girl in real life, and instead invest it in a place where you feel you have a purpose and are validated by a community of like-minded peers.

This becomes a vicious self-reinforcing cycle.

A guy doesn’t feel like he has a place in the world, so he retreats to playing video games.

Video games and the community around them give him a sense of belonging, but the time investment and addiction to the validation and purpose he receives make it more difficult to do anything that will actually earn him the validation and purpose he seeks.

So he retreats further into video games and, before you know it, he’s one of the 26% of men between the ages of 18 and 34 who aren’t able to function in the real world by at least paying their own bills.

Obviously video games and OnlyFans aren’t the only reason for this, but it’s impossible that they, along with the general culture of instant gratification and aversion to difficulty, have contributed nothing to this crisis among men.

Legal Sports Betting Combines Convenience And Vice

And if video games offer men the feeling of accomplishment without accomplishing anything, gambling offers something even more seductive: the feeling that you can change your position in the real world without taking the long route to get there.

Gambling is an unexpected path to addiction to validation and purpose, but it’s a significant one, both in terms of power and price. Let me walk you through it.

In 2018, the Supreme Court opened the door for states to legalize sports betting. Since then, what used to require a trip to Vegas, a casino, or a shady bookie who’d take it out your ass if you got behind has been reduced to the ease of downloading an app.

In 2021, Americans legally wagered about $58 billion on sports. By 2025, that number had nearly tripled to $167 billion. Sports-betting operators like DraftKings and FanDuel generated almost $17 billion in revenue that year alone, an increase of more than 22% from the previous year..

And their biggest customer—by far—were young men.

A 2024 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that one-quarter of men under 30 were betting on sports online. More disturbing, 10% of men between 18 and 30 showed signs of problem gambling—more than three times the rate of the general population.

It’s not a coincidence that the gambling explosion is happening among the same generation of men struggling to establish themselves financially and find a meaningful path in life.

If you’re a 24-year-old, living with your parents, making $40,000 a year, watching houses and everything else you associate with adulthood get further out of reach, you’re looking for a quick come-up.

In this have-everything-now world of instant gratification, where you’re bombarded constantly with images of people showing highlight reels of life, you’re not trying to give up your video games and hustle hard.

Yes, you could learn a valuable skill, get a better job, and save some money for 5 to 10 years. Or you can put $50 on a six-leg parlay tonight.

This doesn’t mean every guy gambling is desperately trying to escape poverty or find meaning. Most people who gamble probably just think it’s fun. A few of them are hardcore addicts with a problem.

But gambling offers something uniquely powerful to a man who feels like he has very little control over his life and is looking for meaning.

It gives him the possibility that everything could change immediately. And your brain really loves that possibility.

People often describe dopamine as the pleasure chemical, but that’s such an oversimplification that its imprecision renders it functionally incorrect. Dopamine is heavily involved in motivation, learning, anticipation, and figuring out which behaviors are worth repeating.

When you know exactly what reward you’re going to get every time you do something, your brain learns the pattern. But when the reward is unpredictable, every attempt carries the possibility of surprise.

And one of the most powerful ways to engage that system is uncertainty. Video games take advantage of this through intermittent rewards. The OnlyFans girls take advantage of this by keeping you off balance, never knowing what her response will be.

And gambling takes this to its most addictive maximum.

Sometimes you win. Usually you lose. Sometimes you almost win. It’s the “almost wins” that are the most addictive.

Brain research on gambling has found that near misses can have reinforcing properties even though, financially speaking, a near miss is exactly the same thing as getting your ass kicked.

If five legs of your six-leg parlay hit, you didn’t almost make money.

You lost all of it.

But it doesn’t feel like a normal loss. It feels like evidence that you were this close to being right.

So you try again.

And sports betting adds another psychological ingredient that slot machines don’t have:

It lets you believe you’re good at it.

Let’s say you know ball. In this case, football, to be exact.

You know Mahomes plays better against this defense. You know that receiver has been getting more targets. You know the Steelers can’t cover a goddamn spread to save their lives.

So when you win, you don’t necessarily attribute it to chance. You think you knew something that everyone else didn’t.

You beat Vegas or that dude who mumbled something threatening to you in a language you didn’t understand when you told him you were good for it.

And now gambling has managed to combine money, competition, knowledge, risk, status, and uncertainty into one experience you can access while you’re on the toilet.

That’s an incredibly powerful product. And once again, take notice of what’s happening.

We’re taking something men traditionally had to acquire through years of difficult, uncertain work—economic agency—and creating a shortcut to the feeling of having it.

The problem is that the shortcut usually takes you farther from what you’re actually looking for. Like J-Cole once said, “The good news is nigga you came a long way. The bad news is nigga you went the wrong way.”

If you’re poor and gamble because you desperately want money, losing makes you poorer. Now you need money even more, which makes the fantasy of winning it back even more attractive.

The solution creates more of the problem it was supposed to solve.

It’s the same feedback loop we saw with video games.

A man feels powerless, so he finds something that makes him feel powerful. But the more time and money he invests in the simulation of power, the less he has available to build the real thing.

OnlyFans lets you purchase the feeling of being desired.

Video games let you experience the feeling of achievement.

Gambling lets you experience the possibility of economic power.

Different products. Different addictions.

Same customer. Disproportionately, young men.