The man is dead.
We found him about 2:15 pm in his office, hands still on the keyboard, eyes glazed over and glued to his computer screen. The autopsy report indicated the cause of death as “fear, lack of courage, absence of adventure.” A tragedy.
Look, the obituary is being printed right now:
The Man was born a happy, healthy boy who loved to ride his bike fast down the big hill out front, wrestle with his dad, and play in the dirt. As he grew up his society told him to work hard in order to get a good job, go to church to look like a ‘good person,’ and save his money so he could retire to a good house on a good beach in a good sunny state far away. He believed these things would make him happy so he lived a safe life: he tried hard, pleased his boss, and never, ever took a risk. He went to his kids’ baseball games because that’s what he was supposed to do, but his kids found something lacking in him. He didn’t have a spark – he kissed his wife but he wasn’t pursuing her, he went on vacation but he wasn’t living an adventure, he talked about sports but he wasn’t fighting for anything. His death was slow – as his climate-controlled, automatic windshield wiper-ed, clean-shaven, insured, triple-A-rated life took off, his heart slowly died. And one day, while staring at some Excel sheet for some quarterly report for some faceless corporation, he died.
Did you know that there are only 6 men on my squad of 45 total people? SIX! And the numbers are even worse on other World Race squads. Many families and churches are conspicuously absent of men as well.
Where did the men go?
This question has been confounding me for some time – I don’t have an answer but I do have some possibilities:
- Societal Norms: society teaches us that men should get a good, safe job and look out for our company, our sports team, ourselves before anyone else
- Pride: as men we are too proud to concede that we need anything
- Distraction: we become so enveloped in our tiny universe of girls, Xbox live, bars, Netflix, and work that we forget it’s not about us (none of those things are bad in and of themselves, it’s just what they keep us from that matters)
- Immaturity: boys in men’s bodies
- Fear: fear of the unknown, fear of relinquishing control, fear of actually trying hard for something, fear of failure, fear of what others will think if we stand for something
- Apathy: In a supposedly meaningless universe, the only thing we care about is gaining as much pleasure and security for ourselves in our short and pointless life until we die and go back to nothing
- Lack of knowledge: we don’t know how to be men because we’ve never been taught. We learn the above things from our fathers and it’s all we know, so we continue it and pass it onto our sons
Adventure, Love, Fight
But screw all that. We’ve got a handful of decades to live before we’re dead. Instead of living like we’re dead already – paralyzed by our fears and insecurities – let’s actually stand for something worth fighting for. Let’s actually enjoy the adventure of life and take some risks. Let’s actually treat women with respect instead of as objects of pleasure. I’m tired of seeing men die in their hearts long before they’re actually dead.
This doesn’t mean you have to sell everything and become a professional wingsuit stuntman. It’s the smaller moments of life – refusing to go along with an unethical proposition in front of a couple coworkers, fighting for your marriage instead of giving up, taking a trip to visit an old friend instead of burning out at the office – where men live instead of die.
Let’s be counter-cultural. Let’s be willing to do the hard things – the right things. Where manliness isn’t measured by output at the gym or the number of girls we’ve slept with or how much money it looks like we have, but by how much we care, how much we fight for what’s right, and how much we love.
This is your invitation.
Revive the man.
*Some ideas were inspired by John Eldridge’s book Wild At Heart
