Therapy Culture Failed Young Men; Sports Didn’t | Jonathan Alpert
Young men do not only need language for their feelings. They need direction.
Even in defeat Monday night, UConn coach Dan Hurley offered a lesson American culture increasingly avoids: growth requires standards, correction, and the ability to absorb hard truths without collapsing into grievance.
At a moment when so much of the culture teaches young men to interpret discomfort as damage, sports may be the last institution still willing to tell them the truth about maturity.
Watch Hurley pace the sideline, jaw clenched, barking orders before the ball is even inbounded, and you’re watching something increasingly rare in American life: visible standards, public accountability, and the expectation that constructive criticism is the path to growth.
Connecticut men's basketball coach Dan Hurley. Photo: Bob Donnan-Imagn Images
That is the central warning of my forthcoming book, Therapy Nation, and one I see every week in my work as a psychotherapist. A culture that pathologizes discomfort eventually loses the very conditions that lead to growth. Once friction is treated as injury and standards as oppression, people become fluent in explanation but detached from aim. They can describe themselves in detail but grow less certain about what they are supposed to become.
No group feels that loss more strongly than young men.
They are coming of age in a culture saturated with emotional vocabulary but afraid to tell them what adulthood actually demands. They are taught to narrate insecurities, monitor feelings, and talk about themselves with remarkable precision. Some of that matters. But what’s too often missing is a clear standard: discipline, responsibility, competence, resilience, and something worth striving toward.
That’s also why so many young men are drifting toward the manosphere and other blunt male voices. These spaces often prey on male confusion by turning disappointment into grievance, resentment into identity, and cruelty into a false form of strength. They reward suspicion, reduce relationships to power struggles, and sell domination as if it were discipline. Much of it is psychologically toxic. But its appeal points to a failure in mainstream culture: too many young men are still hungry for standards, consequences, and a path toward earned competence, and too few healthy institutions are willing to offer it.
Sports offers the healthier answer to that same hunger. It gives young men something many other institutions no longer reliably provide: a hierarchy they can trust. Effort matters. Results matter. Respect is earned, not granted. In a culture that has grown uncomfortable with rankings, winners and losers, and visible differences in competence, sports still tells the truth that performance has consequences.
Michigan’s Final Four title win sends a message: The Big Ten owns this era of college athletics (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
In my practice, I often see young men who can describe their feelings in exquisite detail but struggle to name a goal. One college-aged patient came to me after months with another therapist. By then, he had been given a polished vocabulary for every emotion. He could label his anxiety, identify his fear of judgment, and narrate every bit of self-doubt after minor setbacks. What he hadn’t been given was a way forward. The therapy had equipped him with language but no strategy, insight but no direction, a sophisticated way to describe why he felt stuck without any real path out of it. Then he joined a serious boxing gym.
Within weeks, the entire texture of our sessions changed. He stopped obsessing over what every feeling "meant" and started talking about rounds, discipline, showing up on time, and improving. The anxiety didn’t disappear, but it no longer dominated his life. For the first time, he was doing more than monitoring emotion. He was moving forward.
That’s what sports still offers millions of boys and young men: a legitimate path from immaturity to competence.
The weight room, the hours of practice, the endless repetition of drills, and the reality that some players earn the coach’s trust more than others teach what much of the culture now resists: frustration is not trauma, criticism is not rejection, and losing is not a wound to identity.
It gives boys and young men a cleaner script: take the hit, absorb the correction, get better, repeat. The best coaches do what too much of modern culture no longer does: they turn discomfort into growth and discipline into self-respect.
That’s why sports now matters far beyond the field. In a broader culture that now rewards grievance, self-description, and the social reward for displaying injury, sports remains one of the last places where reality pushes back. The pass was either completed or it wasn’t. The lift either went up or it didn’t. You either got stronger or you didn’t.
Young men do not only need language for their feelings. They need direction. Sports may be the one place in American life still willing to give them one.