Why Being a Man Today Feels Impossible (And How to Survive It)

In this episode, we explore the increasing complexity of manhood in modern society. We discuss traditional expectations of men, the confusion these expectations cause today, and the resulting feelings of hopelessness. 

We provide actionable steps to navigate these challenges, including naming struggles without shame, seeking mentorship, defining personal allegiances, and building quality male friendships.

00:00 Introduction: The Struggles of Modern Manhood
01:12 Welcome to Manhood Tribes
01:52 Traditional Roles and Modern Confusion
03:43 The Pressure to Be Perfect
04:56 Coping Mechanisms and Shame
08:35 Steps to Reclaiming Manhood
12:57 Conclusion: Join the Conversation

💪 Want to know how you measure up as a man? Take our free quiz, called How Manly Are You? and learn how you can get better at being a man. Download for free at manhoodtribes.com/manly. 💪

Transcript

Don Ross: 0:00

All right, man. Let me ask you a question. Is it feeling to you like the world has just gotten harder than it really should be? That being a man has somehow become more difficult and more confusing than ever? That whatever it is meant to be for us to show up in the world is absolutely not clear. And even when we try to, we seem unwanted. The world seems uninterested and whatever it is that we have to offer is just unwelcome. If it's feeling anything like that to you, you're probably feeling a little bit hopeless in despair. Just kinda wanting to not keep trying, wanting to give up, and yet at the same time, knowing that if you do everything around you is gonna feel like it falls apart and you just have to keep going, but you're not really sure why it matters. If that's anything, like what your reality feels like at the moment, I just wanna say to you, you are not crazy. Life really is this hard for us as men at the moment, but it is time that we start talking about what we're going to do about it. That's why this channel exists. Welcome to the Manhood Tribes Channel, and whether you're here for the first time, or you're picking up with us from where we left off last, I'm really glad that you're here. My name is Don Ross. My job here at Manhood Tribes is to give you a clear vision of what it means to be a man, a clear challenge, to build strong male friendships, and a clear path for how to do both. And so that's what we're gonna try to do here on this channel. But today I want to just take some time to acknowledge that for us as guys, it has gotten really, really difficult. And we need a path to help us figure out how we're going to survive life as it is because it's not super friendly to us as men at the moment. Now you might be experiencing that from just the simple realization that whatever it means to be a man has gotten really confusing. For the, for the most part, men in our culture have typically been expected to fulfill some pretty common roles, right? We've been expected to be providers. Uh, we're expected to be the breadwinners for our families. We're expected to be able to hold down a job. We're expected to be able to have a skillset that actually matters to the world and contributes in some kind of meaningful way and earns a paycheck that our family can be supported off of. We're expected to be protectors, right? We're expected to be this sense of strength and courage for our families, for our communities, and that when danger or fear is present, we are meant to be the sense of calm. That can bring in sort of a peace to the things around us, and yet the more and more. We seem to show up in those ways in our culture, the more that we're kind of getting told, Hey, that's not really needed of you anymore. We don't actually want you to be those things. And in fact you trying to show up in those ways is, is kind of like not only no longer needed, but actually really like problematic. In fact, it's kind of bad that you're trying to do those things In our culture these days, men shouldn't have to be that and so. Please stop offering that to the world because it's honestly kind of offensive that you would try to show up in that way. Where's all this coming from? Why is this happening? And for us as guys, all it's doing is just creating confusion. Like if we're not supposed to be that who, who changed the rules? Like why are we no longer needed to be those things and what are we supposed to be instead of that? No one's really providing any kind of clear answers or at least the answers that some are trying to provide. I think most of us as guys kind of go, Hmm, I don't know that I'm really interested in that. There's this social pressure these days that we are just kind of expected to be both strong and sensitive. We need to be courageous and at the same time vulnerable. We need to be in touch with not only our physical strength, but also our emotional and mental strength, and we need to be able to. Be fully formed in all of those areas and offer all of them in just the right ways, at just the right time. We need to know when it's okay to be strong and we need to know when it's right to be sensitive and we don't need to get the two mixed up.'cause if we offer the wrong one at the wrong time, then we're being toxic or we're being woke, or we're being something wrong. And it can just kind of feel like that no matter how we show up, we're not gonna show up in the right way. We're just kind of like walking through this minefield of whatever the culture expects us to be as men, and we're more than likely gonna step on something that we didn't know was there and blow ourselves and everybody else up around us to Smither Marines. It's exhausting. It's tiring, and. It just takes its toll on us. After a while, it makes us feel like we're not gonna be able to do anything but fail. So why do we even want to keep trying? And frankly, a lot of us aren't anymore. There's a lot of us that are checked out. There's a lot of us that are just playing video games or watching porn or drinking ourselves to oblivion because it's just too hard to keep showing up and look, I get it. But I think at the heart of it, we all know that that's not really okay. That's not what we're meant for. We just don't really know what we are meant for and how to be able to do those things well. I. But because of that, we've developed sort of this sense of shame and weakness around what it means to be a man. We're not really sure how to show up, and in the ways that we do show up, we feel like we're doing it wrong, we're failing. We we're being criticized for it one way or another. But where do we have to go to talk about that? Let me pose this to you. Let's save it. In a moment of just sheer weakness and despair, you decide that you're just gonna spend most of your weekend high and watching porn because there's just nothing better to do. You don't talk to a soul all weekend long, but then you have to show up to work on Monday morning, greet your coworkers, be around, you know, real people, and everybody's asking, Hey, how was your weekend? What was going on? What did you do? Are you gonna be honest about the fact that you spent the whole weekend high and watching porn? Probably not. But where would you be honest about that? Who would you actually talk to those things about? For most of us as men, we don't have any place to be able to do that, and because of that, we're living with this just unbelievable sense of shame. Who we are has become something that is really not good, and we know it, and we know that there's something not only wrong within us, but wrong about the way that we're making choices in life. Or we know that what we're doing is actually right and we're trying to make all of the right choices and it doesn't seem to amount to anything. We're showing up for our family. We're showing up for our kids. We're doing everything we can to hold down the job that's gonna help provide for our family. And to carry some load around the house. We're doing what we can to love our wives well, to be supportive in her endeavors and the things that she's trying to do in life. We're emotionally and relationally present to our kids, and yet at the same time, it feels like it's never enough. We can't seem to do enough, right? There's still all kinds of problems in our home life. Our kids are going crazy. Our wives are not satisfied, they're not happy, they're not fulfilled. Why isn't what We're doing enough to be able to make all of that better, and yet it isn't. We continue to show up in all the ways that we've been told that we should, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. We're tired. We're beat down. We feel like we're failing or we're just completely ashamed of the life that we're living. Whatever end of that extreme, you might happen to fall closest to. The reality is still the same as men. We don't know how to show up in the world around us. It has gotten so difficult to figure out what is it that is expected of us? What are we supposed to be doing, and how do we begin to make some actual progress towards a life that is meaningful? Fulfilling and just has some peace to it that feels like, oh, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and I actually feel effective at it. I feel like I'm accomplishing something in life. I'm moving in a direction that feels positive and is actually making a difference, not only in my world, but in the world of those around me and in the people that I care about the most. Where is that? How do we get to that place in our world and in our lives? I want to give you just kind of a few quick steps today to be able to help you think about how to move in that direction. We're gonna spend a lot of time on this channel talking about all of these things. So just because I'm offering them quickly today doesn't mean that these are quick fixes. They aren't. They're gonna take time and they're gonna take effort, but we're gonna spend the time to talk about how to be able to do those things. So hit that subscribe button, join in with this content, and be a part of this conversation, and stick with us as we figure these things out as men. But today, here's some of the quick steps that I do want to be able to offer to you. First things first. You've got to name what you're dealing with without shame. You need to be able to talk about it, even if at the moment you're only talking to yourself about it. You need to name how you're honestly doing. Go back and re-watch the last few minutes of this video and figure out what about those things that I said actually resonates with your experience. Where are you in those things? Are you exhausted? Are you ashamed? Are you beat down? Are you despairing? Are you hopeless? Are you angry? What is it? Talk about it. Why is that the case? What's going on? You feel like you have something to offer and no one wants it. You feel like you have nothing to offer and no idea how to get something that you could offer. What is your life feel like? You gotta be honest about it. Number two. You need to get some mentors. And I know that means like, uh, where in the world am I gonna find those people in my life? Well, let me encourage you to start with actually some people who wouldn't be in your life. Get some mentors who are no longer living, but have actually written down some thoughts that could be really good for you to read. Start with some wise men who have offered thoughts about being a man throughout the ages, and figure out how you can learn from them. Go on Amazon and just look up books about manhood. You'll start to see the ones that are really popular and that have stood the test of time. Buy a couple of them. Start reading. Find some men through across the ages who can mentor you and what it looks like to be a man. And then you're gonna start to realize what kind of men you're looking for, who could actually be mentors in your life that are alive and present today, but you're not gonna know how to find them and to know what they possess until you start seeing it in other men who have come before us. Third thing, I want you to define your allegiance. Allegiance is something that I've talked about on this channel, on this channel before. It's one of the five marks of manhood, and it has to do with the way that you relate to authority, and in this case in particular, it's about ultimate authority. Define the thing that you most want to follow. What really holds the cards in your life? What do you want to build your life around? Maybe that's your God that you're trying to serve and you're trying to follow. Maybe it's an ideal that you want to accomplish. Maybe it's some code that you feel like you need to try to live by in order to be able to be the kind of man that you want to be. Whatever it is. You need to define it because you need some sense of direction in which you're gonna go. You need a north star that's gonna help point you in a, in a direction that's gonna be helpful for you. So you've got to define your allegiance, even at the moment. If you're not sure what that is, just pick something. Pick something that you think is gonna be helpful and that you're probably familiar with, has been around for a while. You didn't just pick it out of the air, but you know that other men have followed that kind of path and have been successful on it. Try that and just aim for doing what you can to get familiar with that allegiance and starting to follow it. And then lastly, but certainly not least, you've got to get out of isolation. The biggest thing that's gonna help you the most as a man growing into a man who feels like he has a life of meaning and purpose is you have to have other men around you who are helping you. It's time for you to start building quality friendships with other men. Again, we're gonna talk a lot about what that looks like and how to do that here on this channel, but for now, you've got to commit to yourself that that's something that you're gonna do, that you're gonna make quality friendships with other men. A key component of your life and you're gonna move towards that regardless of the cost and whatever it's gonna take, because you won't get to be the man that you need to be without those men in your life. I. This is gonna be a fight, guys. It's gonna take every bit of effort that you've got because the culture is stacked against us at the moment. But it doesn't mean that you can't succeed and that you can't win. And here on this channel, I wanna do what I can to be able to help you in that process. So click that like button, hit subscribe. Stay with us here through this content. I want you to be around for what we have to say and for you to be a part of this conversation. And if you're with me here at the end, I want you to just comment below and just mention what is it about being a man that feels most difficult for you right now? All right, leave your comments below and I look forward to engaging with them later. We'll see you next time.