This Meme Is the Cure to Male Loneliness

Thanks to the New York Times, a new meme has emerged, and it involves a search for the cure to male loneliness. The original article, published earlier this month and written by Michelle Cottle, is titled, “Is The Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court?,” which is, frankly, an absurd collection of words, although the thesis is understandable: Men can combat loneliness by spending quality time together doing an activity, sporty or otherwise.

Being the internet, users saw the headline and immediately identified an opportunity for meme merriment. According to Know Your Meme, the first variation of the meme came from Elijah the Middleborne on Twitter, who tweeted an edited version of the article’s header image with the headline altered to read, “Is The Cure to Male Loneliness Retaking Constantinople?”

Other examples include “a third computer monitor,” “having 3 beers and acting strange at the dive bar” and “becoming a Roller Coaster Tycoon.” Other suggestions for curing male loneliness seem slightly more extreme, however, like “getting really into raving and taking pills that chemically castrate you.” Hmm.

It wasn’t long, of course, before the people pivoted back to genuine discourse on the issue of male loneliness, with one Twitter user taking issue with a girl on TikTok talking openly about the fact that she has reached the age of 23 and hasn’t had her first kiss yet, because according to him, “It’s going to be depressing how much more sympathy and support this infinitely more self-imposed problem is going to get than the male loneliness issue.”

If you ignore the fact that this entire male-loneliness conversation was kickstarted by an article in the paper of record acknowledging the issue and seeking to address it and that girl’s TikTok not getting anywhere near that level of attention, sure, okay.

The cure to male loneliness is surely not boring Twitter discourse anyway. Bring on the memes instead, we say.