Second, on video games and pain medication:

Justin Fox: Not Working Makes People Sick: "Overall, men are less likely to be taking pain medication than women...

...But men who have dropped out of the labor force are much more likely to be taking pain meds than either other men or the women who've dropped out.... Most women who aren't in the labor force are still working, just not for pay. Most men... simply aren't working.... Half of the men not in the labor force... reporting that they were ill.... The ill-or-disabled percentage of the overall prime-age population wasn't all that much higher for men (5.6 percent) than for women (5.4 percent).

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, about 97 percent of prime-age men either had jobs or were actively looking for them. Work has gotten less hazardous and physically demanding since then, not more. So how can it be that 5.6 percent of prime-age men report being out of the labor force now because of illness or disability, while only 3 percent were out of the labor force for any reason in the early 1960s?... A lot of it... is because long-term unemployment and inactivity make people sick.... Men who aren't in the labor force spent an average of five and a half hours a day watching television and movies in 2014, compared with about two hours a day for working men and three and a half for unemployed men. That's not exactly healthy.

It seems like vicious cycle. Men who drop out of the labor force--maybe initially for health reasons, maybe not--fall into lifestyles that render them ever less capable of rejoining it. (This may be true of a lot of women, too, but their characteristics are harder to nail down because of the split between those who are truly out of work and those with home responsibilities.) Getting them back into the labor force seems like it ought to be a national priority. But it's not going to be easy.