A Man In Modern Times…
I have a question for you today. Say you wake up in 2017 and you are a grown, human man. You walk outside and realize that there is nothing for you to kill, and there is plenty of food in your fridge. There is nobody that needs you to defend them right in the moment either. Everything seems to be going ok.
You go to work, you come home, you go through all the same stuff you normally do in the course of a day. Again, you didn’t get in any fights for territory or possessions, you didn’t have to spill blood of any kind. At the end of the day you didn’t have to do anything that was necessarily ‘male’, you just lived your life like you do every day.
My question is really a question someone asked me the other day. If you go through life without having to engage in traditional male activities…then what is it, exactly that defines you as a man?
What if you are a stay at home dad? Your wife has a sweet job and it makes sense for you to stay home and take care of the kids, should that challenge your masculinity at all?
I think a lot of guys get confused around these questions. That’s why so many guys act out with too much bravado and machismo because they are over compensating for a perceived lack of masculinity in other areas of their life.
Other guys just become raging douche bag control freaks in their relationships because they need to feel in charge of something to validate their manhood. Then there are some guys that try to convince themselves they are a man by having sex as much as humanly possible with as many partners as they can find.
It’s a problem, because a lot of guys nowadays are drifting into adulthood without having the slightest clue what being a man means. They have no example, no guidance, and the messages society is sending them is very confusing at times.
The real question then, is what does define a modern human man? Even though most days we don’t have to fight or kill or defend our tribe, what is it in this modern life that makes us a man?
The answer is surprisingly simple in my opinion, and it applies to every man wether he is a stay at home dad, or an Alaskan fisherman, or a pharmacist or a construction worker.
The fact that we don’t have to kill things to live every day and defend our loved ones against threats is a huge advantage. Our ancestors couldn’t even dream of a life as easy as the ones we have. It’s easy to get confused by how easy it is…at times it might seem as though life takes very little effort at all and that is where a lot of guys tend to get off track because the rules about manhood seem gray, instead of black and white.
Here is my answer to this question. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living....
