by Allysia Finley Wall Street Journal Sept. 14, 2025
What causes a young man to spiral from success toward loneliness, self-destruction and violence?
A police officer guards Tyler Robinson’s apartment complex in Washington, Utah, Sept. 12. Photo: andrew hay/Reuters
The descent of Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man suspected of murdering Charlie Kirk, is itself a tragedy worth mourning. How did a high-school whiz kid devolve into an assassin?
Such spirals aren’t so uncommon among young men, even if Mr. Robinson’s played out in a more calamitous and public way than most. Political violence is a problem. But so is the atomized culture in which young men retreat into confused inner worlds and virtual realities, which can be as addictive and destructive as any drug.
Mr. Robinson’s relatively normal background makes his actions jarring. He came from a good middle-class family. Having excelled in high school, he was awarded a scholarship to Utah State University, though he dropped out after one semester.
At some point, he appears to have become steeped in a dark digital world and videogames. He inscribed ammunition with obscure online memes (“Notices bulges OwO what’s this?”), lyrics to an anti-Fascist Italian song, and an apparent reference to the videogame “Helldivers 2,” a satire of a fascist interstellar empire inspired by the 1997 movie “Starship Troopers.”
Marinating in an internet cesspool can’t be good for the young and malleable male mind. Might killing villains in videogames desensitize the conscience? Studies have found an association between playing violent videogames and aggressive behavior, though most people who assume online avatars and fight monsters don’t become violent.
A broader problem, as Jonathan Haidt explains in his book “The Anxious Generation,” is that videogames cause boys to get lost in cyberspace. They have “put some users into a vicious cycle because they used gaming to distract themselves from feelings of loneliness,” Mr. Haidt notes. “Over time they developed a reliance on the games instead of forming long-term friendships.” They “retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world.”
The same is true of social-media platforms like Discord and Reddit, where young men often seek fraternity under pseudonyms. The platforms become substitutes for real-world camaraderie and can lead men down dark holes. Frequent social-media use has been found to rewire neurological pathways in young brains and compromise judgment.
Mr. Robinson’s spiral recalls Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate who allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City street. Attractive and athletic, Mr. Mangione developed an obsession with self-improvement even as he suffered bouts of excruciating back pain. He was also an avid videogame player and active on Reddit.
Prior to the shooting, he cut off communications with family and friends. Men in their late teens and 20s sometimes experience psychotic breaks. Mr. Mangione’s apparent mental-health struggles, however, seem to have gone unnoticed as he got lost in a digital wilderness.
Or consider Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate President Trump at a rally last summer. Crooks graduated high school with high honors and scored 1530 on the SAT, then enrolled in an engineering program at a community college. His father said his mental health began declining in the year before the shooting.
Crooks lost social connections as he started spending more time online, visiting news sites, gaming platforms, Reddit and weapons blogs. He at one point searched for information on “major depressive disorder” and “depression crisis,” suggesting he suspected he had a mental illness. Instead of psychiatric treatment, he turned to the internet.
Like drugs, the internet can fuel delusions. Patrick Joseph White, 30, last month opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, then fatally shot himself. He was apparently exercising his rage against Covid shots, which he wrote were “always meant to indiscriminately murder as many as possible” and believed had caused his depression.
He had threatened self-harm numerous times in the previous year. In April police officers came to his home after he called a veterans’ crisis line and said he had been drinking and taking medication. White told officers he had called the crisis line “just to talk to someone.”
Videogames and the digital world may not cause mental illness, but they can be a form of self-medication that provides illusory relief from emotional troubles even as they propel antisocial behavior. The solution isn’t to ban them, but to create social structures that prevent young men from falling through the cracks.
Lost boys pose a broader cultural problem. The share of men 20 to 34 who work has been declining over the past 30 years, even as employment among young women has increased. Too many young men spend their days playing videogames, watching porn, smoking pot and trolling the internet rather than engaging with the real world.
Mr. Kirk sought to bring young people like Mr. Robinson out of their virtual caves. It’s harder to hate someone you meet in the flesh than an avatar in a digital dystopia.
Source: Drug Watch International – www.drugwatch.org