Why Young Men Need... Something

If not Stoicism, fine, but maybe Stoicism is a good fit?

For a long-time (and that’s an understatement) men have defined what it means to be a man near-completely based on what it meant to be a woman. This made some sort of sense for some sort of time because women couldn’t (or weren’t allowed) to do a lot. Men hunted, women cooked. Men worked, women kept house. Men did Y, women did X.

It should go without saying, as a point of fact, that women did X because, frequently, they were not allowed to do Y. If you were a woman who wanted to be a President, a CEO, a Pilot, a writer (or a reader), or any other number of things, it is the case, for most of humanity’s timeline, that you simply did not have the option to pursue these things and that is mostly because society was, not-arguably, run by men and gender roles were a very real (and, for a long time, very seemingly useful and practical) thing.

But times change, whether you want them to or not, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better, and they did change. Women, for the last 50-years especially, have been on a bullet train of liberation. And this, one should not contest because one would be wrong to do so, is a terrific thing. No one’s roles should be limited by artificial means; if a woman wants to become a CEO, nothing but her own inabilities and dumb luck should stop her from becoming a CEO.

Men have been having a less liberating time. Though we certainly haven’t had anything taken from us, it can feel like we’re losing something — and that’s because we are. Men, who for centuries have defined themselves based on the definition of a woman, have been experiencing an identity crisis.

If we are not to go hunt, if we are not to do the things we don’t let women do, then what are we supposed to do exactly?

You can feel how you want about men feeling that way (“Oh, boohoo! Men are experiencing an identity crisis, who cares! Guess its their turn to suffer”; which I think is an incredibly unjust view but I understand people have it) but many do feel that way.

This crisis of identity (which exists, I think, mostly, among white men) is real, and it has existed, for the last two generation as least, within a kind of “solutions gap” that has made doing anything about it functionally impossible.

Why?

Because if my father and grandfather grew up before that bullet train of Women’s Liberation, how could they possibly teach me (born in 1983) how to be a man any longer? Sure, there are some things that still crossover, but the stuff that relates to family? To certain aspects of society? A lot less so! Women have been preparing for a better world forever, dreaming of how much better things might get! But we men? Outside of wars and general hardships that effect everyone regardless of their gender (sickness, poverty, conflict, etc.)… not hardly.

My grandfather and father stepped off the train and didn’t recognize the place. I was born in the place they didn’t recognize. How could they possibly set me up for success as “a man” when “being a man”, now, necessarily, has to mean something they could have never known?

So GenX and Millennial men were (relevant to the focus of what we’re discussing) like pioneers with no leadership into this strange new world and we made a bunch of goofy ass mistakes.

But we did learn; Millennials especially.

The current generation of men (Gen Z), for the very first time, has a generation capable of teaching them what it means to be a man in this no-longer-new world where being a man isn’t defined by what women cannot (or are not allowed to) do.

But there’s a problem…

Gen X-ers and Millennials are pretty sorted at this point, we figured it out, but goddamn did we make a lot of silly mistakes along the way. And these mistakes, some pretty impactful and long-lasting, though they were due to a lack of guidance and sprinkled in good intentions, serve to all too easily paint us as a disenchanted, Nihilistic, and anarchistic group (in general). We are not a strong generation in comparison to the Boomer, Silent, and Best generations; not by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, the financial crash and COVID were hard, but they weren’t WWI, The Great Depression, WW2, or Vietnam.

Life has gotten easier, and when that happens people get softer.

And in poor service to this truth are people like Andrew Tate who say things like (and I’m amalgamating and paraphrasing here):

“Look at these pussies! They don’t know what it’s about! You need to smoke cigars, treat women like objects, drink whiskey, and mock intellectuals! We need to return to the days when men were men!”

And these people might say they’re Stoics, but they’re not; they don’t understand the first thing about Stoicism. As evidence, they think “the first thing about Stoicism” is mental toughness… but we know better, don’t we? We know that the first thing about Stoicism is Virtue and a good character.

So GenZ and Gen Alpha have options, clearly, but they aren’t terrific ones. And since these generations are prone to both an Absurdist philosophical position and a contradictory anxiety around feeling that “all this” is some kind of sick joke, they might seem like they don’t care but they’re desparate to latch onto something with meaning and structure; they want to be moored*.

But the people offering the moorings are people like I mentioned, and we don’t want to anchor people to that sort of bro-philosophy or way of thinking do we? I should hope not!

What can Stoicism offer GenZ and Alpha?

In a word: structure, but also meaning and purpose. We know Stoicism is the pursuit of a good character, and we know all the beneficial side effects of that pursuit, but we need to communicate it well to a generation looking to us for instruction and guidance. If we don’t, it is certainly the case that others will — and those others are, frequently, not desirable alternatives to Stoicism or Virtue ethics in general.

---

Photo by Zyanya BMO on Unsplash

---

* Consequently, this is why they’re so easily turned towards activism — they need and want to care about something.