My life has been changing a lot lately and I think that’s a good thing, a great thing in many respects. If one does not grow then one stagnates and starts to decline. Things are happening in my life that I thought never would, going places, doing certain things, and entering different chapters to use a cliche. And with this comes changing perspective on things and changing what is important and what is not. I’ve talked a lot about wants vs needs and how you have to give a man what he wants before you can give him what he needs.
For example with wants most guys want money, power, and women and there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a healthy and natural desire though can lead to unhealthy and unnatural things and can be accomplished without truly fulfilling one’s life or masculinity. Actors, athletes, and slimy politicians acquire all of these things in large amounts and yet are hardly examples of true masculinity. There’s more to it. Then you have those that say settling down and having a kid and being a “productive member of society” and perhaps living in the suburbs is what makes a “real man”, though this isn’t true either.
But anyways I’ve been moving from the want stages to the need stages. I think every male should do this and when they jump through stages or never understand them I think that leads to frustration and regret later in life. But growth and development is still needed. What I’m getting at is that the more you grow the more you perspective on things change. On a microlevel in your day to day life but also at a macrolevel and how you see the things happening around you.
Called To Fight
For example when you start a family and bring kids into this world, things change. No longer can you be a passive observer just watching “the decline” or whatever you want to call it. You can’t just retreat and let the world be the world. You have to fight for it because things you love and care about are going to be a part of it. Suddenly things like culture take on a whole new importance. It’s one thing to understand the many pitfalls and traps of the modern world and another to communicate those things to another human being on a deep level.
Especially if they’re a different sex then you. You have to fight against the rot you see around you, you just can’t help it. It’s not fun and games anymore. Even before you may have disliked some things but kept quiet about them or talked about them in the background but there comes a time when you may have to be a leader and stand by your convictions and the things that you believe in, even when they go against the grain. And the most important place to do this would be with family and loved ones.
Sure parrot the party line at work but explain to your children, wives, etc. how things really work as much as possible. With children understand that the media, school systems, and mainstream capitalist modernist culture as a whole is going to be against you. You have to be ready for this. You have a fight coming up (or maybe already here) and if you’re not ready for it…well we all know what happens when one person’s ready for a fight and the other is not.
No Running Away
In life options expand and contract in different ways. My life is different then it once was. In some ways I have more freedoms and other ways I have less, but I have the ones I care about and enjoy and that’s what matters to me. I’m realizing that simply fading away and not fighting (not talking physically here but more through letters, arts, and example) against that what I see around me is impossible not to do anymore. It was hard before even when I was blowing in the wind.
But add family, community, and a good culture to that and it becomes all but impossible. You have to fight, for those you love, for your true tribe, for things that are good. Not in an abstract sense but in the real, visceral sense. In the primal and cosmic sense. Again I’m not talking about physically fighting anything, but mentally and spiritually. Drawing a line in the sand, saying what is right even if it’s considered “wrong” by the mainstream culture as a whole. A culture which is in my opinion toxic in so many ways.
But there’s no running away, no full retreat, no curling up in a ball, no hiding in some hole somewhere. Only standing on your own two feet and calling a spade a spade and being strong about it. Striving to serve as an example of what is needed and what you wish for others to be. Serving as an embodiment of the ideals that you believe in. Anything less than that is failing to be true to yourself. And why would you ever not be true to yourself?
