I’ve been waiting to feature this one for a while.
is a consistently insightful and astute observer of people and the world, as those who remember his years-ahead-of-the-curve twitter account back in the day can attest. And now he’s here with what may well be my personal favourite thing I have ever read for him. Maybe it’s these alienating and alienated post-Covid times but this one spoke to me.This is truly wonderful work and deserves to be read. Make sure you check out Adam’s
Substack too.Enjoy.
TJB.
I spend a lot of time alone. When I was a kid, and friends would knock on the door to ask if I wanted to play football or go for a bike ride, half of the time I would make up an excuse or get my mum to talk to them instead. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in doing those things, I liked them, but there were some times where it didn’t feel right, and explaining that to querulous lads is no small feat. It was an infringement on my peace perhaps, or it disturbed something. I was at my most introverted then. Or perhaps I just didn’t like my friends, and I didn’t know it at the time. I like to be in my own space, that much is true. I like the silence and the immersion in my inner world. I have an enduring requirement to return ‘home’. And home as far as I can reach it, is found in the deep quiet.
There is a comfort to solitude. Some of you will understand I am sure; some of you might even have more profound and salient rituals than I do. It is often said of course that humans are social animals; and this is true to a point; equally true however is the unmistakable downside of being around the wrong people and wasting your energy on those who are detrimental in some capacity. People who just for whatever reason, aren’t for you. There’s a stigma around that at times due to the aforementioned social instinct, but it’s perfectly normal. I’ve long favoured the sanctity of the individual, so I champion both the transience and profundity of connection, but I often see the opposite in those looking for more involvement with others. It’s understudied but runs through culture like an invisible thread.
Men, particularly in their mid-to-late twenties, struggle with loneliness.
At least, that is the reigning supposition, downstream of the social contract. People often think they are lonely and so it might as well be so. On the surface there might be a reason to justify it, but who supplied that basis in the first place? Such things can go woefully unexamined across the breadth of life. So in simple, rational delineation they have no or few friends, a lack of social circles, and a lack of a meaningful relationship in their lives, but is this a failing of them or the society that binds them? This is an overall sense of confusion and displacement. It’s an aspect of modern life that is alienating, for which I suspect that is more a reflection of a failing model.
What hits these men the most it seems, is that they don’t understand why they are in this predicament. They aren’t guilty of major mistakes or significant slip-ups. They try to understand because that is what men of a certain ilk do. They did everything right. They were decent, well-mannered; they worked hard, they got the car, shaved their beard, and behaved themselves. They know a bit of game, and don’t look too bad. The axioms they stick to on paper make sense, and yet they are adrift in a sea of changing rules. Nobody seems to care much for that, and I like to at least examine the perspective of the misrepresented.
Extremes are popular. There’s no flag in the bio for the average man.
This notion of neglect isn’t new of course, but in the past it has been framed as a utilitarian problem in outmoded ‘red pill’ rhetoric, as if the product is questioning the maker, but tackling an emotional issue requires emotional sensitivity. For example, it is well known in accompanying dialogues that men aren’t asked how they are feeling much, and men are not paid compliments. It doesn’t happen very often, to the point men cherish these moments. It’s not de rigeur. Men are expected however because of the concomitant idea of competence that belies their nature, assumed or otherwise, to be more empathetic to match the mainstream, while still being treated as a machine. It’s a double-bind that requires a bit of finesse.
The solution to this? It’s the same as it has always been. Be a man.
Speaking as such, there is an aspect to it that might elude some quarters. We as men are expected to just ‘get it’, and if you don’t then it is a perceived deficiency, a natural response. It will be exposed because it fails the test of implicit competence. It’s easy to rally against a behemoth in concept such as the patriarchy because a big, cumbersome target doesn’t put up much of a fight and doesn’t even see where the bullets are hailing from, but a priori knowing, that’s a different kettle of fish. That is the problem with the development of adjusted social norms, and in a short space of time. If you break down every gender role, then you are still left with an asymmetric trend that has nowhere to go; the problem of freedom is choice.
I’d argue that men that are traditional in nature are among the loneliest, because of their adherence to a role-based paradigm. Now these types of men are picking between being a tank or DPS or refining their speed runs, and regarded as a manchild for it. They’re just looking for the rug that was snatched under them. They want to provide and work to support a family, only to look over their shoulder to see the spectre of a life, turning to sour grape individuals that tell them to filter based on fear and exploit the dating market, because that’s what women will do to you, so you might as well. These men aren’t imbibing a social construct, they aren’t performing. It’s inherent, which is something constructivists struggle with. And if they haven’t succeeded at that early on in life, then they aren’t a man. At least to themselves.
Circular reasoning meet my friend, the orbicular worldview.
One of my friends once said "the sexes win and lose together", and he could not have been more correct, and right now, both are unwittingly haemorrhaging. As it happens, women are often the transceivers for the collective consciousness and the energetic quotient that belies it, and men either struggle to be the provider, or are demonised for daring to be as independent as a radfem. Things have progressed from the manosphere though; I see women turning on other women on second-wave red pill podcasts because they’ve seen the forest for the trees, but men, well they keep being men. They size up the situation and they check out, incidentally or otherwise. One group remains a capitalist cash-cow and the other turns indifferent.
These men, they’re not lonely. They’re displaced. They belong to another time, a time of chivalry and role structure; they lack purpose to a degree, but with a greater principle I offer to you, they lack a mode for that purpose. They are disconnected from the legacy of their nature, they cannot apprehend it under modern culture and custom. To illustrate, most men have a knack for understanding the world on a practical scale. They realise that having no friends is a stone’s throw from being defenceless when the wolves come, and that’s about as masculine a principle as it gets. That knowledge is baked in, but it’s obscured, so some men don’t know how to be alone.
Some people get left behind as we get older, but there’s nothing to catch these individuals, they occupy the middle ground. They’re capable enough to be useful and amenable enough not to be ostracised. They’re reduced to impromptu vlogs in their car as they commute to a job that has no end product in their emotional life. Nobody told them a thing about their intersection with the new world, that their anxieties aren’t necessarily their own, that their value is inherent, and that they have a right to be on their own. They’re in survival mode, batting away social pressures like flies, and they don’t even know it. Why? Because they’re men. Trying to understand from a paradigm that simply isn’t fit for purpose. It’s all they have.
It’s all a lot of men have.
This is a failing of modern life, it’s a bug that the developers now believe is part of the game’s charm, kicking the can down the road. We are no longer hunter-gatherers and nor do we have a great war to unify us a la Fight Club, a reference that continues to grow in relevance. The war of spirit has reached the front door, and even those who recognise the battle are easily misled. Men are lonely because men feel like they cannot be men, and that’s a lot to unpack, and the first response is often a needless territorial or zero-sum retort. There’s little space for that conversation because we have always been in power, and so being a man is taken to mean a foothold for autocracy. The great lie of the ‘patriarchy’ demonising the power of the feminine since, well a land before time. Take my word on it.
The bottom line is every man is a person, and every person is an individual; full of unique facets, ideas and a constellation of memories and personal experiences. We are not itemised, component parts. We are not homogenous and interchangeable, but that is where the ideological agenda shoots itself in the foot, through the petard of corporate responsibility. In our time, diversity is the overlord of the superficial, and true diversity is across the mind and spirit, and ennobling and accepting that is a way to connect with the world beyond this. It gives you the freedom and licence to reach out to others. To make an effort. That is the most prized thing in this world. Making an effort.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes the start of being less alone is realising how much the world insists on you feeling like it. On pushing you down so you start to believe the things it tells you.
Gender roles are in fact quaint, moribund encapsulations. Fisher-Price descriptors for the brainless, imitating classical derivations of the masculine and feminine. They stand on the shoulders of giants, with a sort of smug insistence, resting on myth, archetype and enduring symbols that are virtually talismanic, but productionised through the rhetoric we see promulgated in the back and forth. They attempt to reduce us, forgoing what we once knew. In that loss is the premise of being a man, of what it entails. In respect to loneliness it is chiefly the acceptance of being where the hell you are. It’s the ethos of sovereignty, of self-governance, of the higher octaves of self-control extolled by the great men of history.
It is radical acceptance.
This is what I say to the man beset with loneliness. You are in the best possible position. You are a fool on the cusp of being a magician. You are the potential before it is manifested. There is nobody in your path, and nothing stands in your way. No fake friends, no suffocating guilds or groups. You sit with the greatest prize of all, the complete absence of an imposition. Loneliness feels like an absence, but it is not one-directional. It is also the world feeling the absence of you. You’re not aware of it, because you sit in the emotion of without, but in the great Hermetic tradition as within, so without. Sometimes being in the cold, is away from the fire. Sometimes a man needs to revisit himself. He needs to go deep within. Where his purpose might lie in wait.
The once-pivotal societal markers and evolutionary considerations of what befits the tribe or not are moot. This is the era of the enlightened individual, it is the permeating quest that gnaws at you. You can join the others if you wish for attention, for popularity, but you will find an even greater loneliness waiting for you. Do not concede to the home that is just a house. The spouse that is a secret aggressor, or the friend that hopes you do not rise above them. This, is loneliness. When you are shutting yourself out of your own inner knowing and not realising it. It is a slow burn, but will earn more than the fleeting pangs of being on the outside. The work on yourself, and the things that you can build or create, and the relationships that can spawn as a result, are like a warm, nurturing fire that burns bright over the long term.
Then they will find you and ask, how did you do it?
I think a couple of metaphors might be useful. Someone once remarked that a woman's friendships are face to face, while a man's friendships are shoulder to shoulder. In other words, women will confer and talk and share directly with each other while men will bond while pursuing a common purpose or task. Two men can go fishing together, barely say a word the whole time, and become fast friends. This is not likely a scenario that would play out between women.
These are average tendencies, of course, but fairly built in to what makes men and women different. What this means for the current crisis in gender relations is a recognition of this difference and attention paid to opportunities in the social sphere for men and boys to find each other, a challenge since many of the traditional male spaces have been dismantled in order to achieve equality between the sexes. This has expanded opportunities for women, but narrowed them for men. One solution that popped up in Australia and has since spread to North America is the concept of 'men's sheds', where men in local communities gather regularly at a volunteer's garage or workshop or 'shed' to work on projects of one sort or another and make friends in the process. This to me is men being resourceful about the isolation or disconnection they are feeling.
Great post.