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Notes -
Hasn't it always been this way. Taxi Driver is already almost 45 years old. It's not so much indicative of a male crisis but that socially maladjusted protagonists make for a more interesting story/plot. As for the rest, this sort of male fatalism gets tiring. Life does not have to suck or be directionless . Even in spite of biology, humans are still endowed with some capacity for reason and decision making abilities.
Tyler Durden is in the archetype of the Redditor (consuming and browsing and collecting, in Tyler's case Ikea magazines, vicarious enjoyment of life mediated through magazines), with a nice loft and stable career, but he felt unfulfilled from this. First he became addicted to the emotional catharses from feminine-coded support groups, which helped but lead to craving more and more. He found greater relief and enjoyment from participating in a risky thrill-seeking masculine community, which was fight club. There's nothing fatalistic about Tyler Durden until toward the middle-end, with villain Tyler Durden going overboard trying to destroy consumer-capitalist society (which I think is a silly plot tie in which isn't really why people are watching the movie or reading the book). Per the author, "bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives."
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