Several years ago, I was at a bar in New York City at 103rd Street and Broadway. There were three of us sitting at a mahogany-stained wooden bar, enjoying dinner and wine at the end of a workday: me, another young man, and a stunning young woman.
It’s pretty common in New York, unlike other places where I’ve lived, to strike up a long conversation with strangers at a bar. At one point, the young woman turned to me and the other man and asked, “So, what are you all reading these days?”
I was taken aback by the question at first, but then I remembered where we were: New York City—a city where you’ll find professionals reading books and magazines on the subway all the time. It’s not uncommon to see people reading Atlas Shrugged, The Economist, or a novel.
Thankfully, because I’m a nerd, I had something to say, as did the other gentleman. As we discussed the books we were reading, it greatly enriched our conversation. Afterward, I thought, “What would she have thought of me if I had no book to mention? Is that what attractive women are looking for—men who read?”
Nurtured For Boredom?
About twenty years ago, psychologist Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege, was interviewed about the teens from middle-class homes whom she saw in her practice—households with incomes equivalent to about $200,000 or more today. Levine noted that these teen clients had one thing in common: they were boring.
Raised to perform in school and sports, these teens could not hold interesting conversations about anything. Their entire lives had been about résumé building and micro-managed by their parents. Doing something interesting simply for its own sake was a foreign idea. Reading was about improving test scores, not learning. Community service was performed for college applications, not out of love for one’s neighbor. Sports were played for college scholarships and “discipline,” not for exercise and fun.
Levine noted that outside of a life filled with performative activities, middle-class teens could not hold a conversation about life, cultural trends, society, philosophy, or much of anything else. They were simply boring to talk to: no personality and poor conversational skills, but strong grades and high test scores.
They were not only boring, they were also not curious about anything.
Young Christian and Middle-Class Men Are Boring
There is currently a lively discussion about the dating crisis amongst younger adults, especially young men. We’ve been trying to figure out the causes. Some say it’s cell phones. Some say it’s video games and pornography. Others blame feminism. But what if one of the other reasons women don’t seem to be interested in GenZ and Gen Alpha men is that they are simply boring. Young men today are not well-rounded. Sports families raise sons that can’t talk about anything outside of sports. Gamers can’t talk about anything outside of video games. Boys from classical schools can talk about Aristotle but can’t apply it to anything in the 21st-century. Boring. Maybe young women aren’t dating because they are surrounded by boring young men.
I’ve actually had female college students complain to me about this about Christian guys. “They are really nice, but incredibly boring. They’re simply uninteresting.” I had one young women explain this to me in terms of why she and many of her Christian friends, were inadvertenly drawn to “bad boys.” “They’re just more fun,” she exclaimed.
I was brain rot scrolling on Instagram the other day—Instagram must know that I’m into live music—and I ran across the profile of Louis Martins. He’s a recent high school soccer “jock” who is also a pianist & a committed Christian. He was an elite high school soccer player but I imagine can hold conversation about sports, jazz, classical music, and so on because of his deep exposure to these spaces. If a young women asked him what he was reading, I’m sure he’d have much talk about. After watching one of his music clips it hit me that of the young men I’ve taught over years, few if any know anything about music or can play an instrument.
I’m a GenXer and when I was growing in Atlanta, all of the teen boys in my neighborhood played a sport and an instrument. I played soccer, ran track (I wasn’t very fast), and I played alto and baritone saxophone. It was simply normal back then but it’s not normal today. School districts across the country have reduced or eliminate arts education and have focussed instead on resume building and careerism—that is, take courses that will one day get you into a good college or will get you a job. Learning how to play the piano or the trumpet isn’t on that list.
WASP Culture Is Dead
In the 1991 book, Way of the Wasp: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It, So to Speak. Richard Brookhiser, laments the death of WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture. In Commentary Magazine, Michael Novak, reflected on this book this way,
Brookhiser lists six “traits” that define the essential WASP character: conscience, industry, success, civic-mindedness, use, antisensuality. How conscience leads to industry, industry to success, success to civic-mindedness, and how all of these require and issue in a sense of practicality, are matters familiar enough. . . [C]ivic-mindedness broadens conscience and incidentally gives the lie to the common accusation that the American conscience is radically individualistic. Antisensuality helps to modify industry and vice versa, as use (or, better, utility or practicality) illuminates success. More than many other cultures, WASP culture insists on a certain inner self-government; it construes freedom to mean doing not what one wishes but what one ought; it insists upon unbroken attention to the bite of guilt.
With the rise in a new class of technocrats, public-sector professionals, and progressivism, the American middle-class shifted from raising civic-minded, bourgeois kids, to children characterized by self-preservation, personal comfort, narcissism, personal success, selfish ambition, instant gratification, an eroding self-confidence, identity politics, and individualistic, non-virtue driven self-expression.
In bourgeois culture, raising a child meant more than preparing him or her to earn a living, which is the focus today when the ask the question to kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” An educated person was expected not merely to possess an impressive resume, but also to develop cultivated tastes, disciplined habits, social confidence, and enough familiarity with music, literature, and art to participate intelligently in civilized life. That is, they were raised to be interesting people, not boring. Parents therefore exposed their children to books, the arts, music, sports, and social training. Learning an instrument—especially the piano—became one of the most recognizable signs of a properly educated middle-class child.
In a truly fantastic article, Annette Lareau explains that middle-class families used to raise their children through what she calls “concerted cultivation.” In one family Lareau observed, the parents “fostered their son’s growth through involvement in music, church, athletics, and academics. They talked with him at length, seeking his opinions and encouraging his ideas.”
Middle-class families focused on “developing their children’s opinions, judgments, and powers of observation.” Again, in the past, the goal was not to give children safe, comfortable, and easy lives free from struggle. It was to cultivate well-rounded minds intentionally. WASP children were being raised to be able to walk into any room and hold a conservation with anyone about a wide array of topics. What I’ve seen over the years, however, is that with the rise of technocratic parenting and the norming of progressive ideology, middle-class parents have become increasingly involved in micromanaging their children’s lives to produce “successful outcomes.” As a result, middle-class children have become less likely, as Lareau explains, “to learn how to fill ‘empty time’ with their own creative play, leading them to depend on their parents to solve the problem of boredom.” That is, they were never bored, lack imagination, and are, therefore, very boring people themselves as teens and young adults.
Boring people can’t communicate well with others. They don’t have anything to talk about. They are’t curious so they don’t know how to ask people questions. Smart phones and middle-calls safetyism poured gasoline in this fire. Rachel Konrad and Matt Abrahams give helpful context in a 2025 article for Time Magazine: face-to-face platforms where younger generations developed their social skills are failing. They’ve grown up with fewer experiences that help people become interesting. We’ve pushed books aside in favor of screens, lost hours of casual conversation, minimized in-person interactions, and overloaded on ultra-short, algorithmically selected content. As a result, many young people have intense knowledge about narrow online pursuits or sports, for example, but lack the broad cultural knowledge, focus, social skills, and practice to navigate through conversations about books, art, history, politics, faith, work, and day-to-day life.
This creates boring people.
How to Raise a Son to Be Boring and Unattractive to Women
If you’re a parent and want to make sure your son becomes one of the uninteresting and boring young men women complain about—and don’t want to date—here’s what you need to do. By the way, if you succeed at these things, your son may never launch properly into adulthood and may live with you forever! Here’s the list.
(1) Organize His Life Around Résumé Building—Make sure that everything he does in life is justified by how good it will look on his college or job applications.
(2) Let One Activity Define Who He Is—The best way to do this is through sports—especially travel sports—video gaming, hunting, social-media content creation, going to the gym, etc. A year-round focus on one activity will almost certainly produce a boring young man. Make sure specializes in one thing and early as you can and don’t let him deviate from it.
If he’s a “gamer,” make sure he has everything he needs to spend countless hours gaming, and justify it by saying, “This is where he hangs out with his friends.” If he attends a classical school or is home-schooled, make sure he becomes arrogant about his educational exposure and can’t talk about anything beyond the 16th-century. Do whatever you can to keep him from interacting with low-income kids who attend public schools since he’s “advanced” because he attends a classical school or is homeschooled.
(3) Cut Music and the Fine Arts Out of His Life Entirely—Make sure he can’t sing, dance, or play a musical instrument. Never take him to a play or classical music concert, especially in high school. Make sure he’s never exposed to a wide range of musical or arts genres in your home. When you travel, don’t ever visit a museum as a family vacation.
(4) Make Sure He Knows That Reading Is for School, Not Pleasure—Don’t ever let him see you reading simply for the joy of it. Don’t encourage him to read books for enjoyment or learning. Make sure he knows that reading exists to improve test scores. Keep him away from biographies, history, poetry, essays, and anything else that might enlarge his imagination.
(5) Give Him a Smartphone as Early as Possible—Instead of placing him in face-to-face situations where he might learn eye contact, humor, and storytelling, give him a smartphone so he can perfect communicating through social-media direct messages, memes, reaction videos, and disappearing messages on platforms such as Snapchat. He will need this skill if he is to survive the real world.
(6) Keep Him Away From Adults—Parents, make sure he is never forced to engage in mature conversations about life and the world with people your age or older. Do whatever you can to keep him with his peers as much as possible. If you attend church, for example, make sure he is deeply involved in youth ministry, but never allow him to participate in the men’s ministry in any way.
Fathers, don’t ever bring him along when you spend time with your friends. He never needs to hear adults discussing marriage, work, faith, politics, failure, sacrifice, or responsibility. Again, if you’re in a church, do not ever bring the teenage boys on any men’s treats. Ever.
(7) Make Sure Public Service Is Just Another Box to Check—Teach him that sacrificing his time, talent, or treasure to serve people who are less fortunate is something he does for a scholarship or college application—not because giving back is the civic duty of people who have been given advantages.
After all, he gets bitten by the service bug, he may choose a career that doesn’t earn much money. You certainly can’t have your son failing to maintain your family’s class status. Avoid this at all costs.
(8) Make Safety, Security, Material Comfort, Social-Status Maintenance, and Ease His Goals in Life—Make sure his childhood is completely bubble-wrapped. Never allow him to do anything that might be physically dangerous or harmful. Never put him in situations where he could fail, get rejected, sit with disappointment, or recover from embarrassment. Make sure he only attempts things he already knows he can do well. If something is hard, rescue him from it.
Teach him that the only goal of getting a job after high school is to “earn enough money to raise a family.” That way, he will choose a college major or trade solely according to its income and success potential. He’ll never be tempted to do anything crazy, such as becoming an overseas Christian missionary.
(9) Never Ask for His Opinions—Tell Him What to Think Instead—Make sure he never learns how to think on his feet. Tell him what to believe about every issue, but don’t ask what he is observing in the world, what patterns he sees, or why he believes something. Simply tell him he is wrong about Subject X, and never require him to defend his views. Make sure he parrots whatever his parents, teachers, pastors, and your favorite online personalities believe, think, and say.
(10) Confuse Not Getting in Trouble With Having Character—Make sure he believes he has excellent character simply because he has avoided activities that might jeopardize his future success. This way, he will pursue self-improvement not because moral excellence is worth pursuing as an end in itself, but because he fears doing something that might look bad on his résumé. Like an absolute fool, he’ll believe that he’s a “good person” because he as good grades, for example. And parents will reinforce this confusion by never probing his values as long as his grades are good.
When asked about their sons, parents who reinforce this confusion will talk about performance outcomes (how well their sons are doing in sports, academics, or their careers) instead of describing their character: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
He will avoid adventure and any fight against injustice on behalf of others. He will measure his character against the debauchery of others and congratulate himself for being slightly better. In the end, he will be encouraged to remain publicly polite while living a privately debauched life.
Conclusion
I’m sure I could continue, but if you want to make sure you raise a boring son that no woman in her right mind would want to marry, follow these ten steps.
It should go without saying that your goal here isn’t just to make your son more appealing to women. You want to raise a man. Form his character. Instill curiosity. Give him courage. Teach him skills that are both marketable and practical. Cultivate his tastes. Help him to build an inner life.
You’ll know you’ve succeeded when your son can walk into any room and converse with any group of people. He’ll ask questions that aren’t rhetorical and he’ll have something worthwhile to add to the conversation. He’ll have convictions but won’t become closed-minded. He’ll know things but still strive to learn more. He’ll be a good talker, but also a good listener.
Raise your son using the ten steps above and he won’t be able to tell a woman at the bar what he’s reading right now. But he’ll be able to explain to her the ins and outs of Manchester United’s season and tell her every detail of his soccer career as a child as she asks for her check.
If this matters, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with a man or leader who needs to read it. Subscribe for more writing on fatherhood. Also, if you want to go deeper on what dad-deprived culture is doing to the formation of children, my new book The Fatherhood Effect is available for pre-order. You can find all of the information on the website for the book.
The "boring" complaint is often code for other things.Something you didn't mention: we tend to raise boys to be nice and undemanding. Don't make waves, be a good, quiet worker. That was fine when women needed men to survive, but we live in the age of extreme female independence and no-fault divorce. She wants more than a quiet, happy life. She wants some excitement. She demands to be entertained.
Women want (and society needs) good men who are dangerous. Assertive and confident. That will push to get what they want or to make things the way they want it.
Churches aren't raising these kind of boys.
AB hits it outta the park again, I am a musician and ex public school teacher. Personally, The saddest cultural trend is, at least in coastal urban areas, is when I play a outdoor street festival.
I literally observe 1000 poeple walking by in the coutse of 3 hours. The teens walk by the band without even looking up, and its not just because of phones because I observe kids without phones doing the same thing. They dont look up even for a moment and acknowlege that something is happening. Its incredible. In my day no matter what kind of music was playing or how bad the band was, we would of paused to take in the scene for a few minutes. Coming from a childhood of the 1960's; a gen that placed music with a very high cultural value, this is a shocking harbringer for our future.