Where have all the young men gone? Abroad

The 2001 census attracted controversy with the same ease that John Major attracts women. There were the acidulous yellow forms that one and a half million people hadn't received in time, even though they were threatened with jail if they didn't return them before they'd arrived. Then there was the hotline set up to deal with the occasional query, but actually overwhelmed by calls from one and a half million people neurotically keen to stay out of prison.

There were the nosy details that seemed like no one's business and that irritated the hell out of almost everyone. In Scotland and Northern Ireland people felt got at because they had to reveal whether their brand of Christianity was left-footed or right-footed.

In England and Wales they felt discriminated against because they could not reveal the same details. In fact, they could not even reveal whether or not they were English or Welsh, even though the Scots and Irish could tick boxes stating their sub-nationalities.

Above all, there were those who felt that with a spend of almost a quarter of a billion pounds, the whole thing could have been done a little bit more efficiently. Quite a few of those people, one suspects, showed their disgust and defiance by failing to co-operate.

This explains why the census results showed a deficit of one million citizens, although it doesn't explain why civil servants solved the problem by inventing a million "imaginary people".

Some of these imaginary people, presumably enlisted in order to simulate a perfect response of the kind that will emerge when we've all been schooled in citizenship, are "men in their twenties". But even such blatantly obvious regrading of the results boundaries cannot hide the fact that the results of the census are actually quite interesting. The results of the census tell us that 600,000 young men have gone missing from Britain since the last time all our heads were counted.

Which is rather comforting, in a way. For some years now, young women have appeared to be more than a bit pathetic. Led by that giant among made-up role-models, Bridget Jones, an absolute plethora of lovely young girls, fictional and real, have been bleating about how they cannot find men. Finally, just as the entire industry built around this sense of failure – chick-lit publishing – is beginning run into the buffers, it turns out that there was a perfectly sensible reason for this. An enormous chunk of young men has left the country. No wonder they cannot be found.

Why have they left the country? Reasons so far put forward do not seem hugely convincing. Higher education, apparently, could be to blame, as young men drift off for gap years and never come back. And rave culture could be having a similar effect.Young men apparently go to Ibiza looking for a good time, then, brain-damaged by Ecstasy, emigrate to Australia.

Whatever the triggers are, the results seem the same. Once young men get out of Britain, they're not at all keen to come back. This form of escape is far better news than the one that has been troubling experts for years, and that concerns the endless rise in the number of young male suicides. This phenomenon is sometimes put down to a feeling that there is no distinctive place for men in society in the wake of the feminisation of the workforce, the breakdown of the family and creeping misanthropy in popular culture.

This argument is backed up by the fact that male suicide is more prevalent among unemployed youths and older teenage boys from disturbed families, who have a real problem working out exactly what life in this country has to offer.

But while such observations surely offer true reflections of how some young men perceive themselves in relation to wider society, it clearly isn't all about being male. Sadly, among otherwise declining suicide rates, this year's figures show that the rate among 15- to 19-year-olds is up, as has become usual. What is unusual though – in fact, for the first time ever – there is a bigger increase in suicide rates among teenage girls than among teenage boys.

It is being suggested that the increase, of about 20 per cent, is largely attributable to an increase in female adoption of male high-risk behaviour, including drinking and drug-taking. The theory is that the loss of inhibition prompted by intoxicants is encouraging young women to behave more impulsively. While in the past young girls might have taken their troubles to someone else for advice – or opted for eating disorders or self-mutilation, instead of the finality of suicide – they are now more likely to do something impulsive and decisive.

It is quite a leap to suggest that, in not too many years, many more young females could be doing the something impulsive and decisive that young men are already doing in such numbers, and simply heading overseas. But as equality becomes the norm, and women become less beholden to the idea that, whether they like it or not, equality is something that they must be grateful for, we may be seeing a similar exodus among young women as we are seeing among young men.

Which pushes the already scary demographics that are being predicted to an even further extreme. The census confirms that we are a growing, ageing population, already tipping over the 60 million-mark, with a peak of 76 million expected by the middle of the century. That isn't news, any more than is the fact that we're completely unprepared to cope with it.

What is news, though, is that as we age, there's every reason to expect that our children will be off abroad contributing nothing to our twilight years but the occasional e-mail. What will become of us?

Ideas for dealing with the coming of ancient Britain are constantly floated, the latest having been the sensible but unattractive notion that we all work until we're 70 years old. That one came hot on the heels of the revelation that lots of bewildered old dears were getting pennies in their pensions because they had signed up, years ago when they got married, for a reduced payment.

Dodgy preparations for the ageing of the baby boomers have been continuing for very many years. It's becoming increasingly apparent though, with the collapse of the company pensions that everyone was exhorted to sign up to, that we're all just going to have to work until we drop dead over our keyboards.

Now we have reason to suspect that there will be no alternative anyway, since the young folks will all be gadding about in nicer, hotter places. That was certainly worth spending £250m on ascertaining. But what the £250m didn't tell us was why this might be so. What is it about Britain that makes young people so eager to reject it?

My own belief is that it is the predominance of work in the culture, as something to be educated for, to do and to be planned for, as the calamitous end of work stands sentinel, marking the point at which we become useless.

It is not that nobody is aware of British society being dominated more than virtually anywhere else by the need for paid work, and failing to value any other sort of contribution people can make. Yet even in the much-discussed term "work-life balance", life is still referred to as something we should expect to be having when work is over. I think young men are leaving this country for one simple reason: they can see no life here at all. It is time that this country got one.

d.orr@independent.co.uk