Men need something they can devote their life to, possibly something to die for. Without this, they either become bastards, egotistical men who use their power just to further their own needs, with Andrew Tate being the most obvious contemporary example. Or they become domesticated by the modern world, which has no need for the courage that men embody, or their mastery of tools—modernity is a world of machines which master us—or their thirst for freedom.
As a result we have two main types of pseudo-men in the modern world: the cucks who slot well into the institutions, and the bastards who are good at finding personal success but who are utterly loveless. For the first one, think of the guys who did the best in school. They might not have been particularly effeminate, but it's unlikely that they were the type of guys that anyone respected. The same is true in hospitals, in the lower ranks of companies, in administration, and much more. The need to perform a bunch of meaningless tasks just to uphold some inane institution is not what men want to do with their life. Neither do women just to be clear, but their tendency to prefer stability and their overall agreeableness means that, more often than not, institutions tend to favor them, though then again the modern world has no need for the empathy, softness, embodiment and other feminine qualities.
For the second type, the successful bastards, think of the people at the top of companies, the psychopaths at the top, the politicians pushing for far-right ideologies, the military leaders, and all of those abusing the racket of social media to garner an audience for themselves. Those are the monsters of our world, and while they are the most visible and the easiest to point to, ultimately they are only the visible face of a much deeper technological system which allows unconscious people to rise in the first place.
The masculinity crisis is thus just one facet of an atomizing world which has no need for consciousness and all of its resulting qualities: devotion, love, community, freedom, embodiment, peace, courage, etc. But it is note worthy because the specific nature of the problem is more subtle than what popular discourse can capture. Whereas feminism is understood as "women don't have as much outwardly privileged as men, let's fix that", the idea of a "masculinity crisis" just seems to most people as ... wrong? What exactly is there to fix? Men have been in charge for thousands of years, in what way exactly is there a crisis?
Yes, if you only focus on worldly appearances, then there is no reason why men should struggle so much in our time. But the essence of a well lived life doesn't lie in external circumstances. Just because you get everything furnished to you doesn't mean that you are happy, the same way that a wild animal will be utterly depressed living in a zoo, and such is the case for men at large.
Men are not made to live in the modern zoo 1. They want to strive for something because they can be said to be "incomplete", striving for wholeness through mastery, something which doesn't exist as much for women who are by default more whole. This is why teenage girls are quite mature already, whereas teenage boys are utter morons, and quite monstrously selfish at that. This is also why men make art of women, or what stands for the feminine, such as nature, or the ineffable of Reality itself, whereas women don't necessarily feel the need to express something outside of them as much. They don't need to because they are the art. 2
This is also why we have the Hero's Journey in storytelling, a structure very much focused on the journey of self-mastery of man, and the way that he becomes one through hardship and struggles, and finds the ineffable which woman was in touch with to begin with, which is why so many stories are about "getting the girl" at the end.
What disrupts the Hero's Journey is several things in the modern world. For one, as hinted at above, we are not allowed to master anything important in the world. You can become excellent at the surrogate activity known as sports, but you cannot through your hard work and intelligence build the house that you and your family will live in, or directly provide for the food that you eat, or anything important in that regard. People are forced to live through the technological system, meaning that they can only earn money by doing activities which benefit it, and not human beings directly. In other words, we have to serve machines, instead of tools serving us. This is why someone who is great at playing the guitar can be very attractive to women, but not so much someone who is great at playing Starcraft.
Speaking of video games, the lack of any task to master then leads men to look for surrogates for those. Sports as mentioned above is a common activity, but nowadays men, because they are constantly plugged into the screen due to their addictive nature, and the fact that our information comes to us through the internet, turn to video games. The guys who spend thousands of hours on the same game (not an exaggeration) report that they love the feeling of getting constantly better at it. The problem is that such a learning is entirely disconnected from the real world.
Some games might make you better at thinking about abstract realities (often they don't), and develop your ability to face failure, which are good of course, but video games deal with an entirely virtual "reality", which means that nothing you experience or do there carry out into the real world. Talking about the time you spent playing video games basically always feels like a sad waste of time to outsiders, because it essentially is.
Contrast that with the time reading great novels, and there is a depth of experience which is unparalleled here, which is why people who not only read but are touched by great literature feel more grateful for their life, are more at peace with their own death, and ultimately wish to express what they've read in their own relationships and their own work. Playing thousands of hours of Slay the Spire on the other hand doesn't inspire such a change in one's character, rather it just prompts people to play it even more, and think and discuss about it, which is the hallmark of an addiction.
Video games can perhaps teach you some form of information which might be useful to you, such as aspects of economics through MMORPGs, or of programming/mathematics through puzzle games, or of History through the game's lore, but they will never teach you anything that has to do with reaching beyond your self, 3 unlike great art.
Great art is about going beyond the self, which is why so many stories are about love, or sacrifice, or humor (Reality is hilarious if I stop taking my self so seriously) or the tragedy that occurs when I am unable to let go of my self, and die from its own limitations. With video games we constantly want more and more, whereas art is about stilling the wanter and perceiving a deeper Reality than our mere likes and dislikes.
This is why the Hero's Journey is so significant. It's not merely about "becoming powerful", like what so many sub-standard (and pornographic, see the rest of this essay) stories boil down to, the ones that appeal to the bastard inside us (men), such as Breaking Bad, Peaky Blinders and the Penguin. It's much more than that, it's about struggling in the name of self-overcoming, because the Reality which is beyond the self is beautiful beyond description. It's what is known in the broader world as 'God', but that word has been so utterly corrupted over the centuries that perhaps we should stay away from it.
This leads to the second crucial element of the Hero's Journey which is missing in the modern world. The first one was self-mastery, and the second is one something worth struggling for to begin with. In the modern world, what fulfills this? Nothing. This is why most people merely fill their time with inane distractions, because there is nothing to live for besides the self, which is also why people keep clinging onto their life for as long as they can, the same way that zombies do, in denial of their own death, trying to push it out of sight for as long as possible.
So-called modern 'entertainment' is really a rotten apple of apathy coated with a thin layer of short-term pleasure, which makes it taste sweet, but slowly destroys your soul over time. There is nothing wrong with entertainment or pleasure, but when it is the only thing you have in your life, then you become more and more like the living dead, because you lose the ability to tolerate any discomfort and instinctively reach for your "entertainment", at the very least to drown out silence.
Silence and lack of activity are disturbing to the self-informed self because for one, it forces it to feel what it tends to run away for, which is why chronic busy-ness is an escape mechanism for personal problems, albeit a socially acceptable one. Secondly, silence allows the voice of your conscience to rise up to your awareness, and since most people live a life of constant self-betrayal, their conscience is the last thing they want to hear from, which is why it is painful to hear the Truth for them. Thirdly, a self conditioned to constant pleasure finds the lack of stimulation from silence and any lack of activity to be unbearable, the same way that someone used to air conditioning cannot bear the heat.
Nothing makes this deadening quality of unconscious pleasure more obvious than pornography. Porn is pleasurable to the self but slowly kills your ability to be sensitive, experience intimacy with someone else, feel confidence in your natural sexuality, and feel the (soft) joy of being alive and experiencing simple pleasures.
Pornography is especially damaging to men because they are more easily addicted to it. Men tend to be more narrow in their attention than women, which is why they can get lost in the rabbit holes of their own mind more often than women do, or why they can't seem to find their belongings in the house whereas their wife does, and why they enjoy the narrow focus of video games, and the narrow pleasure of porn, in a way that women don't.
Porn is narrow because it is all about the self, it's jerking off to an image, an idea that you hold in your mind, about the type of women you'd like to fuck, and the fact that you are in total control of the situation. This is one of the most appealing aspects of porn which might not be so obvious at first, the fact that the person watching it is shielded from any uncertainty, any potential rejection from women, and can experience sexual pleasure in whatever way they want. 4
There is much more to the story than that, because blaming men for not being willing to engage in the insane racket of dating is not entirely due to them fearing rejection (although it is certainly a notable factor), but the point remains that pornography is incredibly destructive for love, the gold at the end of the rainbow of so many stories, the reason why men are willing to strive for greatness and even die.
Porn is a parasite on intimacy, one that latches on the self-informed self and gradually makes it more and more narrow, numb to only the stimulus of pornography rather than the joy of real activity and conscious living. It's particularly pernicious in our times because it is so readily accessible, with only a few keystrokes while you are browsing from any device with an internet connection (the vast majority nowadays), it's unlikely that there are many teenage guys who haven't watched porn at least once in their life, and whose view of romance and sexuality hasn't been heavily distorted by it.
I have talked about the bastards and the cowards as two different types of men, but ultimately they are one and the same when it comes to their lovelessness, which is why they might share a surprising amount of similar tendencies when you get to know them. A coward might appear like a "nice", sweet guy on the outside, but then harbors a fantasy for dominating women, or for becoming incredibly wealthy and getting people to obey him, just for the thrill of it. Cowards often are bastards who haven't found the same worldly success, and have learned how to rationalize it as virtuous (for instance: "I respect women but I've never been in a position where I could attract them to begin with").
Thus, being a good man isn't just a matter of being kind to people, or being fine with crying in public, it's a matter of holding two important qualities together. Firstly, the courage and drive to pursue self-mastery, to not let other people tell you how to live, to seek to be excellent in things and be someone of integrity, and to not let fear run your life. And secondly, the ability to love of course. People, art, nature, small things, big things, your entire life, we can always love more, more broadly, more deeply.
Ambition without love is like having a sword but no one or nothing to fight for, the two must always come together. This is why the etymology for 'courage' is the Latin 'cor', meaning 'heart'. To be willing to face your fears, you must also love someone or something, which is why cowards are often so loveless when you get to know them. They have nothing worth dying for in their life, so they crumble under fear, but the greater man finds inspiration from Christ, who came to bring a sword onto the world, but also a message of love to mankind at large, something he was willing to be killed for.
1 And neither are conscious women again, but the pain is felt much deeper by men.
2 These reflections and more are taken from Darren Allen's series on Love and Gender which he starts on the essay I link here, and continues in his book titled The Book of Love.
3 Darren Allen's usage of the world 'self', such as he uses in his book Self and Unself. See also my piece about the self-informed self for a very light overview of this.
4 Granted, porn will never be as great as real sex, because obviously you are just jerking off to images and not making love to a real person, but it's an appealing option to someone who struggles to attract women.
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Masculinity Gender Modernity Cuck Subtledistinction Videogames Porn Herosjourney
2026-03-22