Individual tweets rarely deserve article-length analyses. In our social media–addled age, blithely drafted tweets too often lead to unforgiving shaming campaigns, which result, not infrequently, in ruined careers.

But, once in a while, a 280-character-or-fewer remark actually accomplishes the Pollyannaish wishes of Silicon Valley techies: it provokes thought, sparks debate, inspires afflatus, and makes us consider the important things in life.

A tweet from a cryptocurrency enthusiast named Ryan Selkis was roundly reviled by critics who are almost certainly leftists by persuasion. "If you don't work nights and weekends in your 20s, you're not going to have a successful career. Sorry," Selkis wrote in response to Jason Fried, CEO of the business management platform Basecamp, who called weekend work a sign of brokenness within a company.

Selkis's sentiment was not taken constructively, to put it mildly, by the young Twitterariat, who were quick to contemn him as a tool of capitalist exploitation. More than a few detractors posted memes calling Selkis a bootlicker, as if he were the class's brown-nosing star pupil. One respondent was Carlos Maza, the Vox journalist who notoriously demanded that YouTube censor right-wing satirists.

The frustration is easy to grok. As a Millennial a couple years removed from his 20s, I get why my coevals cringe at the notion that our first decade of salaried work should be Hobbesian: poor; nasty; brutish; not short, but painfully long in hours. That was my working life before and after college. Ten-plus-hour days, weekends never free, forever ready to take a phone call and put out a fire or, when working on behalf of pugnacious political candidates, set one.

Then again, my professional career, like many Millennials', began in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. Getting a job so shortly out of the gate of college graduation was a blessing. I all too easily could have become what the Japanese call a hikikomori, or what we, across the Pacific, crudely label a basement-dweller.

America is not immune to the epidemic of listlessness that infects young, working-age men in the West. In a new comprehensive analysis in National Affairs, economist Nicholas Eberstadt traces a disturbing trend among American males: a lack of economic engagement. He writes: "Between 1965 and 2015, the percentage of prime-age U.S. men not in the labor force shot up from 3.3% to 11.7%." Over the course of the last half-century, labor force participation plummeted. "By 2015, nearly one in six prime-age men with just a high-school degree was neither working nor looking for work, and for those without a high-school diploma, the ratio was worse than one in five," Eberstadt calculates.

The cause is threefold: familial culture degradation, welfare dependency, and felonization. The latter two are straightforward. Government subsidizing unemployment, through food stamps, medical care, or direct payments, prolongs joblessness. Why work when there are digits in your bank account? As for felonization, America's carceral trend is often overstated. Just so, the best réumé in the world loses its luster when paired with checking "yes" on an application's "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" query box.

Only public policy can wean people off welfare — a drunk won't put down the bottle until the bartender locks it away. The stigma that criminalization carries is an issue that's solved either through desperation — businessmen willing to take a risk to attract workers — or through an applicant's ingenuity and determination.

Cultural irreverence toward work is more complicated. The unraveling of the traditional nuclear family has occurred not coincidentally since the '60s, when Eberstadt estimates that the drop-off in labor participation started. The one-two punch of the mass welfare state — concretized in Johnson's Great Society — and ascendance of anti-bourgeois lifestyle encouraged the lower and working classes' aversion to family formation. Elites maintained the two-parent household while decrying it as a paternalistic scheme of control.

What followed was a conservative's collectanea of required elements for societal decay: cultural contempt for conservative morality, rising divorce rates, a disregard for marriage's material and spiritual value, decreasing natality, failure to buy permanent homes and set down roots, an overall failure to launch.

The result is half the country is starved of the fruits produced by the connubial vow. Around 40% of adult males lack children. The marriage rate has tumbled to 50%. Without spouse or dependents, without the need to provide or be a role model, men need no longer work. There's no real reason to. Why moil when you can fudge your income level and live off an EBT card?

The upshot of this convergence of disincentives is a generation of videogame-addicted layabouts languishing in a fog of flâneurie and bright flashes from their television sets, sitting in their undershorts, necking cherry Mountain Dew and bolting Flamin' Hot Cheetos, smearing artificial cheese dust on their peach-fuzzed cupid's bow.

Failsons living in their mothers' basements and spending 12 hours a day gunning down human avatars in "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" don't make for good marriage material. They don't make for good employment material, either. They don't make for much good of anything other than easily cozened conduits to their parents' charge card.

America used to be the land of opportunity, of pluck, of grit, of small-business success stories, of vulpine entrepreneurs licking monolithic corporations, of computer whizzes creating Willy Wonka–like dreamscapes in garages, of Horatio Alger tales of triumph over indigence, of picaresque striving like Augie March, of reaching for the brass ring and coming up, not always empty, but farther ahead than before.

Now a self-described democratic socialist has a real chance of winning the presidential nomination of one of our two major political parties. Young people loathe anything that forces them to get off the couch, stretch their muscles, and turn off Netflix. Is it any wonder, then, that the U.S. is forfeiting its economic top-dog status to the likes of China?