This is why young men are so lost

It’s September of 2023 and I’m in a packed car driving on the motorway.

The sun is shining outside and I’m with my two cousins and two best friends. We’ve just been hiking in the Welsh countryside, swimming in waterfalls and trekking across hills whilst sharing the carry of a 10kg plate, huge backpacks and food supplies.

We’re singing, rapping, talking and laughing as we make out way back to Bristol.

We drop our friend Joe off at his house and the rest of us head back to my flat in Bristol where we unpack our things and stay for the night. We get showered and head into the living room to watch band of brothers. A true masculine day; mission, celebration and bonding.

But I’ve never been good at watching films. If I’m not interested within the first 10 minutes I’ll stop watching. So we’re all in the living room, watching band of brothers and I feel bored. So I go to the toilet and think about how to break it to the boys that I can’t be bothered to watch the film anymore. I know my cousin would be mad.

But as I walk out of the bathroom to deliver the bad news, I hear a soldier on the episode talk about how 3 men in his town killed themselves because they couldn’t join the army when WW2 broke out.

And although this experience happened 6 months ago, I’ve been thinking about it every day since.

Men kill themselves unless they go to war.

(Lewis 2 enters, pretends to be a babushka saying “that’s the problem with your generation, they need to go to war.” - confused look “get out! I didn’t know I had a babushka”)

The crisis of masculinity:

We can all agree masculinity is in crisis.

It seems us men don’t know whether we should become hyper masculine, embrace our feminine side, join an online community, conquer a village or curl up into a ball and eat Cheetos all day.

And it seems all the influencers who try to remedy a solution to this problem by giving advice to us young men seem to further fan the flames of our confusion. Because everyone says something different. (*guilty)

And while these influencers flash their cars, women and flamboyant lifestyle, promising these things are easy to achieve and will make us feel more manly, they often fail to mention two key pieces to the manhood puzzle.

Initiation and purpose.

The word initiation comes from the latin word initiare which means to begin.

But the problem nowadays is the map of manhood has got lost so no one has a bloody clue where the beginning is. And this is exactly why us young men feel so lost. We’ve lost all sense of orientation to our masculinity, or worse yet, we’ve never realised there was something to orient to in the first place.

And this problem stems from a lack of meaningful challenge.

Lack of meaningful challenge & responsibility:

Whereas men of old would’ve faced physical challenges such as charging into a battlefield, carrying their wounded brothers back to camp or waking up on a Sunday morning to see their crops gone to pot because the neighbours sheep decided to go on a hike during the night, the trials us young men face nowadays don’t challenge us in a way which initiates our masculinity and brings meaning to our lives.

Instead, our modern challenges are internet addiction, loneliness and fatherlessness. All things which send us into a hazy despair.

Modern society seeks to drain us of our mental facilities and lure us into a false sense of comfort, which seems appealing in the short term but is exactly what contributes to a futile, docile and sterile existence devoid of meaning, responsibility and purposeful challenge, full of late nights, questions thrown at the meaning of existence and lonely weekends.

But these things would cease to be problems if we had something meaningful to focus on instead. All the influencers we watch would disappear from view if we gave ourselves a chance to think for ourselves, and to discover our definitions of what it means to be a man.

This is why I said “men kill themselves unless they go to war” which up until now would’ve seemed like the vague muttering of a sunstroked young man.

So allow me to explain exactly what I mean by this.

War as a figure of speech:

When I use the word ‘war’ I’m using it as a synonym for the word ‘purpose’. Because most of us, god willing, will likely never go to war in our life time.

Simply, war provides you with an enemy to fight, a cause to serve, a team to operate in, fire in your belly and a target to aim at. All things which contribute to feeling a sense of purpose.

And it’s crucial we understand this because purpose is a genuine psychological need. Don’t believe me? Ok. How well is your purposeless existence going so far? Because for me when I was 21 and didn’t have a clue why I was on this earth, it wasn’t going so well. Not for me, my ex girlfriend, my family or friends.

You’re lost because you don’t feel purpose in life.

You don’t feel useful, valuable or helpful.

So you binge watch YouTube, play video games and retreat from the real world into the online world in an attempt to fulfil your psychological needs and distract yourself from the harsh reality that you’re not currently meeting these needs.

And worse yet, when you’re online, you’re prey to content from insecure men flashing their fast cars and damaged egos, convincing you that’s the key to the good life.

But short term fixes to unmet psychological needs instead of fixing the root cause is like trying to fix the water leak in your ceiling by continuously putting buckets underneath the drip. The bucket will overflow until you address the root cause of the drip.

Although I don’t want to glamorise war in anyway, the inherent nature of war for men primes their mind to fight, hunt and serve a calling bigger than themselves whilst defeating an enemy. When on the battlefield, men have fire in their belly, people to protect and a sense of companionship shared by other men on the same mission as them.

So if you’re with me so far, the next step is to pick your battlefield.

Pick your battlefield:

The harsh truth of being a man is that we’re born valueless. And we will continue to be valueless until we figure out how we can be helpful to the world and use that as the reference point for creating our own value.

It’s only by figuring out how you’re not contributing to the world that you can figure out how to contribute.

But this needn’t be a pessimistic message. It can be a source of optimism.

Because through focus, patience and diligence you get to pick the battles you fight in your life. And ultimately, you create the map of manhood for yourself by picking your battlefield.

Forget the idea of someone magically appearing in your life to hand you the map of manhood. You need to channel your self-reliance into positive introspection on what it means to be a man. Because you already know. The answers exist inside you, you just need to fish them from the depths.

Problems will always exist in your life. Growth is merely improving the quality of your problems.

So right now your problems are meaninglessness and lack of purpose. Once you solve them problems, new problems will arise, but those problems, hopefully, will be better.

But first, you must forget about the battles you’ve fought or the battles you want to fight, and instead focus your attention on the truth of your current battlefield. No matter how ugly it is.

Changes must be made that you don’t feel like making:

Imagine you’re hiking with friends in the mountains and you’re lost. Your only means of navigation is a paper map. But you have no idea where you are on the map. So the map becomes useless. You will continue being lost until you find your point of orientation (from French s'orienter ‘to place or arrange in any definite position with reference’).

So it is in life.

In order to know where you want to go, you must first face and get bearings on where you are.

If you feel lost as a man, you must approach your life like a curious scientist and uncover the practical needs you need to fulfil which currently aren’t being fulfilled.

And you might not feel motivated to make these changes because you’ve been conditioned for (insert number of years) to live a comfortable and docile existence.

You’ve been asleep, but it’s time to wake up.

The warrior thinks: ‘changes must be made that I do not feel like making.’

The warrior of light is now waking from his dream.

He thinks: ‘I do not know how to deal with this light that is making me grow.’ The light, however, does not disappear.

The warrior thinks: ‘Changes must be made that I do not feel like making.’

The light remains, because ‘feel’ is a word full of traps.

Then the eyes and heart of the warrior begins to grow accustomed to the light. It no longer frightens him and he finally accepts his own Legend, even if this means running risks.

The warrior has been asleep for a long time. It is only natural that he should wake up very gradually.

Practical tips for creating your own value:

1.) Declare war on your enemies

• What’s a problem in the world that annoys you?
• What could you work on changing?
• What ideas, states of being, ideologies, types of people do you hate? Why?
  

2.) Reflect on responsibility

• What areas of your life are stale, dry and dull?
• How responsible are you for these non-flourishing areas (or regardless, take responsibility for them)
• What could happen if you took more responsibility for them?
• How often do you hand responsibility for your actions onto other people?

3.) Become an instrument of the light

• You need something bigger than you to serve
• Not just your ego
• You need a higher power to consult and have faith in for when your back is against the wall
• Selfless-service = you dissolve in the gift of your giving
• It’s no longer about you, it’s about furthering the mission, the infinite game
• A warrior of light accepts his personal legend completely:
• “A warrior of light accepts his personal legend completely.
• His companions say: ‘he has remarkable faith!’
• For a moment, the warrior feels proud, then immediately feels ashamed of what he has heard because he does not have as much faith as he appears to have.
• At that moment, his angel whispers: ‘You are only an instrument of the light. There is no reason to feel proud or to feel guilty. There are only reasons to feel happy.’
• And the warrior of light, aware now that he is but an instrument, feels calmer and more secure.

4.) Practical resources:

• Jordan Peterson’s self-authoring programme

5.) Book recommendations:

• Psychitecture (for radical life change)
• 12 Rules for life Jordan Peterson
• The 33 strategies of war (Robert Greene)