Is The Cure To Male Loneliness...Ed Sheeran's Autumn Variations?
A pop star might have just created the soundtrack to our desperate times
Much has been made of “The Male Loneliness Epidemic.” There have been Think Pieces and memes and pundits arguing with each other across very large tables, all intent on figuring out one thing: What is wrong with young men these days? Apparently, they’re not up to much. They don’t hang out with each other. They don’t have meaningful jobs. They don’t go on dates or have sex. The only things they seem to be doing with any regularity are gambling, watching porn, and abusing drugs.
Once the chattering class is done wringing their hands about the state of young men, they try and figure out why this is happening. Maybe it’s atomization as a result of technology. Maybe it’s the destruction of social bonds brought about by the 21st century neo-liberal order. Maybe it’s late capitalism. Whatever these people say about young men, and whatever causes they ascribe to their issues, they usually come across like someone who doesn’t know any young men in real life and has only read about them in a New Yorker article. Their opinions have a detached, clinical point of view. In fact, the only voice I’ve heard discussing the state of young men with anything resembling clarity and empathy is Ed Sheeran.
Like the Real Housewives franchises, male fashion, and what qualifies as a “good” table at a restaurant, I did not know anything about Ed Sheeran until I met my wife. To me, he was just a guy that made songs I usually heard at the grocery store or in an Uber. But my wife loved his music, so we listened to him a lot during car rides. Over time, I stopped seeing him as a British pop star who inexplicably rapped on occasion and came to see him for what he truly was: A singular singer/songwriter. The song that really did it for me was “Castle On The Hill.” It’s an emotional tune about looking back on your youth that isn’t overly sentimental or nostalgic. The reason it works is because Sheeran has an uncanny ability to evoke time and place in his lyrics through the power of specificity. He’s not writing vague words about emotional longing that are trying to trick you into developing an attachment to the song. He’s writing about very specific things that happened to him, which invites you to remember very specific things that happened to you. His ability to make the personal feel universal really comes to the forefront on his most recent album, Autumn Variations.
You can call Autumn Variations a lot of things, but “A big hit” is not one of them. If you look at the Spotify streaming stats, you’ll see numbers far below what Sheeran typically puts up. Every song on his 2017 album Divide has at least 200 million streams, and five of them have over a billion. The song with the most streams on Autumn Variations is “American Town” with only 41 million streams. Most don’t even crack 10 million. Luckily, art is not an IPO or an app launch. It’s not judged by objective performance metrics. And while this album hasn’t really landed from a commercial perspective, I personally believe it’s the deepest and most engaging album in his entire catalog. If other people don’t recognize that, it’s their loss.
Autumn Variations was released in September 2023 and relies on a very clear theme. Sheeran puts it this way:
"Last autumn, I found that my friends and I were going through so many life changes. After the heat of the summer, everything either calmed, settled, fell apart, came to a head or imploded. My dad and brother told me about a composer called Elgar, who composed Enigma Variations, where each of the 14 compositions were about a different one of his friends. This is what inspired me to make this album."
Each song on this album is sung from a definitive first-person point of view. They’re about one individual, their experiences, and the way they see the world. And while there are a few upbeat songs about being in love (“Magical”, “Midnight”, the aforementioned “American Town”), most of the songs on this album are downright bummers. They’re about being lonely, isolated, depressed, broken-hearted, and strung out. You’d be forgiven if your first thought after listening to this album was “What the hell is wrong with Ed Sheeran’s friends?” But in reality, what’s wrong with Ed Sheeran’s friends is also what’s wrong with a lot of young men in this country, and these songs perfectly describe their perils. They’re imbued with a type of despair that feels decidedly modern.
One of the first tracks that really jumped out to me was “Blue”, which takes a well worn idiom and flips it on its head to say “Silence ain’t golden, you know that it’s only blue.” It’s a mournful song about the special type of despondency that comes when you’re futilely waiting for someone you care about to text you back. You desperately want to hear from them, and the silence that’s coming from their end starts to dominate your thinking and color your mood. It’s a phenomenal example of Sheeran’s ability to take powerful, universal feelings and describe them with a cutting level of clarity.
The hits keep on coming after that. “That’s On Me” is about someone whose life is not what they want it to be, and they know they have no one to blame but themselves.
I can't help myself but cry
Every time that I realize
Maybe I'll never find my smile
But who's to blame? Well, that's on me
There’s an honesty in this song coupled with a real powerful self-loathing, something that recurs throughout the rest of the album. Each narrator in these songs knows that there’s something wrong with the way they’re living, but they don’t know how to fix it. It’s not that they feel powerless or incapable, they just don’t know where to begin to improve themselves. This causes them to freeze up and spiral further.
Take a look at track 8, “Page”.
Head spin, maybe I'm destined to be
Always lonely, alone, a loser, pathetic
Maybe tomorrow all will be better
But I’m stuck on the page
Or the late-in-the-album standout, “When Will I Be Alright?”
God is not on my side
But God knows I'm trying
I need to redefine
When will I be alright?
Or “Punchline”, which has one of the most sonically powerful bridges I’ve heard in a long time.
I might seem too distracted right now
It's been so long I've been the punchline
I stand naked while these clothes dry out
Leave me drowning to edit the runtime
I could keep listing examples, but they wouldn’t really do the album justice. You should just go listen to it yourself. Hearing the lyrics and melodies and instrumentation (All produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, the kings of Sad Guy Indie Rock) come together drives the point home far better than my words ever could.
There is one last lyric I wanted to highlight though, and it comes from track 4, “Plastic Bag.” It’s important because it reminds me of a particular time in my life, back when I was a confused young man myself, and it helps put me in the headspace to try and understand what young men might be going through today.
The second stanza of “Plastic Bag” begins with this couplet:
Took a job for dad, I think just to please him
So when I quit, I just kept it secret
This is something I literally did when I was 22 years old. When I graduated college in 2008, I had a hard time finding a job. My dad worked in sales his entire career, so he helped me get an entry-level inside sales position at a staffing company. Inside sales means cold calling, dialing 100 numbers every day. I didn’t really want this job, but I knew I needed one, and my dad did me a favor by setting it up, so I took it.
I lasted two weeks.
It’s almost comical looking back on it, but I can’t think of a worse job for me than cold calling. I absolutely do not have the personality required to initiate over 100 conversations every day where the person on the other end does not want to speak to me. I remember sitting at my desk, struggling to pick up the phone and panicking because everyone around me could see I wasn’t making any calls. I was trapped on both ends, caught between my fear of the phone and the stress of my immediate environment. I knew I wasn’t going to last, so I quit before I even got my first paycheck. I was still living at home at the time, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to break this news to my parents, especially my dad.
Luckily, the day after I quit, they were leaving to take my brother to a baseball tournament and would be gone for a week. So the next morning I got dressed like I was going to work, walked out of the house in my suit, stopped off at a gym to change in the locker room, drove to a movie theater, and caught an early morning showing of Edward Norton’s The Incredible Hulk. By the time the movie was over, my family was gone and it was safe for me to head home.
I then spent the rest of that week smoking pot, playing video games, and lying to my parents on the phone every night. How was work today? “Oh, it was good, it was good.” Are you enjoying it? “Yeah, yeah, I’m learning a lot.” That’s good, keep it up. Of course, I had to tell them the truth when they got back. I would have run out of movies to go see before the week was done.
We laugh about this story in my family now, but I still get this overwhelming sense of shame whenever I think about it. The fact that I could be so comfortable not doing what I was supposed to be doing bothers me. I don’t blame myself for quitting, that job was definitely not right for me. It’s the lying and the cartoonish indolence that really gets to me. Even worse, I knew in the moment that it was the wrong thing to do, but I carried on regardless. I have this pointed emotional memory of sitting on the floor in my parent’s living room, playing Metal Gear Solid 4, being way too fucking high, and feeling overcome by a deep sense of dread brought on by the utter emptiness of that moment. I knew I should have been doing something better with my time. And yet, and yet, I refused to put down the controller, empty the bowl and go apply for a job. But what jobs could I even apply for? And what if they ended up being just as bad as that first one? What if this is what all of adult life was like? Instead of facing down those extremely difficult questions, I ignored my feelings, simply because I didn’t know what else I could do. But, of course, ignoring something doesn’t make it go away. It only festers, gets worse, and comes back stronger.
This is the state of mind that Ed Sheeran is writing about on Autumn Variations.
People are always worried about teenagers making some kind of cataclysmic mistake and ruining their lives, but the post-grad years of your early twenties are when the real chasm appears. A fuck-up you make in high school doesn’t typically manifest itself as a gap in your resume that you have to explain during every job interview afterwards. Your early twenties are especially precarious because, for the first time in your life, you have no structure around you whatsoever. Sure, in college you’re “on your own” for the first time, but you still follow a familiar pattern of waking up, going to class, and doing your assignments. After college, you have to invent your structure from the ground up. Where are you going to live? What job are you going to take? How committed are you going to be to it? What routine and lifestyle do you have to build for yourself to make that happen? It’s an incredibly heavy lift, and it’s not something you can typically take on yourself. You need support and advice from family, friends, and others that you trust. Without them, the entire process feels too overwhelming.
The challenges young men face these days are not new. What is new is the lack of support structures to help them through it. As numerous articles about “The Male Loneliness Epidemic” have stated, social bonds have been fraying for a long time. Young men are isolated. They’re not spending enough real-world time with the important people in their lives, and that makes carving a path forward difficult. And absent the stimulation and fulfillment generated by becoming who they’re supposed to be, they turn to cheaper forms of stimulation (Gambling, porn, drugs) that reinforce their isolation and make them feel worse in the long run.
While difficult, there is something that can pull you out of this kind of downward spiral, and it’s highlighted on Autumn Variations closing track “Head > Heels.” It’s about the redemptive power of falling in love. What’s great about “Head > Heels” is that it could be a sequel to any of the earlier sad songs on the album, where the protagonist has moved on from what was plaguing them before. There’s hope, with a tinge of lingering pain, in these lyrics, seen below:
Unrequited love songs
Longing words we used to sing
Faith was in the first one
We opened up our hearts to let them in
Now all these scars are keloid
Reminding us and cautioning
Rebuild what was destroyed
Turn it, then the chapter can begin
Now, this isn’t me telling all troubled young men to “go out and get a girlfriend.” I’m sure most of them have tried that. But it is a reminder that you’re not going to get better on your own. You have to seek the solution outside of yourself. You need to have someone around you, in the real world, face to face, that you can talk to and be honest with. Maybe that’s a family member. Maybe it’s a friend who’s going through something similar. Maybe it's a priest. And if you're lucky enough, maybe it’s a lover. When I proposed to my wife in Washington Square Park five years ago, the first thing I said to her after I got down on one knee was “My life is trash without you.”
But before you can find someone to share your problems with, you first have to know that other people out there understand what’s going on with you, that you’re not the only one who’s feeling the way that you’re feeling. That’s one of the redemptive powers of art, maybe the most redemptive. And if I’m a young man in America right now who is struggling to get it going, I would hear my life reflected in Autumn Variations, and I would know I’m not the only one that has these problems. That doesn’t solve everything, but it's a step in the right direction.
Things eventually got better for me after college. I lived with my parents for another year, working part time jobs until I found something more permanent. (2008-2009 was not a great time to enter the job market). Eventually, I started working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and moved out of my parents house. It wasn’t a great job, but I took it due to an outside motivating factor: I had just begun pursuing a career in stand-up comedy.
At this point, I was willing to take any work that would get me out of my parents house and closer to Washington, D.C. so I could perform on more shows. That’s what made that Summer different from the previous one. I finally had a “Why”, a deeply personal reason to strike out into the world. The uncertainty and resulting hesitancy I had experienced sitting in my parents’ living room a year ago was gone, replaced by a sense of passion and drive. That’s why stand-up comedy meant so much to me for so long. It gave me the opportunity to lead a more fulfilling life, and prevented me from turning into a character in an Ed Sheeran song.
