I ask every single man that I work with a similar question, “what would be your greatest regret if you died tomorrow?”
The answer is always a version of, “not having a legacy.”
Legacy is interesting, I’ve thought about why this is and it seems to me that legacy is the visible fruits of a life lived on purpose and with purpose. What I’ve learned about men thus far in my life is that the opposite of life isn’t death for them, it’s actually meaninglessness.
A meaningless life is the ultimate tragedy. When men feel useless or purposeless, they are already dead inside. Men today feel more meaningless than ever and our culture’s inability to get this and do anything about it continues to have huge consequences.
Like the shooting in Allen, TX last week. This one hit me deeply because I live just a few minutes from where it happened (and luckily was out of town) but it was the second deadliest shooting this year. So far… (I hate to say that).
A few days after the shooting headlines, I was served up with two pieces of media that I just couldn’t get out of my head. The first one was this woman sadly sharing this video showing herself completely overwhelmed with her tiny baby while her significant other is fully immersed in his game.
Now the truth is that we don’t know the nature of this situation. This could be his ‘play time’ that was previously agreed upon or a number of other plausible reasons why in this moment dad isn’t helping but otherwise does. But, if that’s not true and this is how it always is, let’s ask why?
If you think about the distribution of roles between men and women pre-feminism, they were pretty clear. Women focused on relationships, children, and the home while men provided for what their families needed. This gave them great meaning, meaning worth living for. After WWII, as women started entering the workforce in bigger numbers you actually start to see men retreating from society.
The world of business, money, and work is one that is competitive and men are competitive by nature. Healthy competition drives their pursuit of purpose, this is the mentality of the hunter.
Who does the hunter hunt for? Ultimately it’s not for himself, but it’s for the gatherer of course. So when the gatherer joins the hunt, his entire world is turned upside down. Now he has to compete with the very person he’s doing all this for? If there’s another thing I know about men, they will fight with each other to the death but with a woman they will back down. Men treasure women at a deep level and they want to serve women in a way that only they can.
Fast forward, lots of men have adjusted pretty well and women are crushing it at the hunt (corporate life, business, etc) so you’d imagine that as women pick up more responsibility out of the home, men will pick up more responsibility in the home right?
Well you’d think so, that’s what some predicted would happen but it hasn’t. Men don’t find purpose in being at home. For thousands of years they have found their purpose in high pressure situations, competition, challenge, and in the pursuit of honor - that hasn’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is those high pressure situations have translated from real life to a simulation.
Media piece number two:
This next version of GTA cost a billion dollars to make. A billion, movies don’t have budgets that high and they are certain that they will make that money back in the first weekend of release alone.
In a recent PEW statistic, there are currently 7 million American men age 24-54 that are not working.
We have more unemployed men now than ever before and then you put in front of them a game where you hunt, race cars, compete for money, acquire real estate, impress women…it’s a no brainer.
Do you see it yet? Their sense of meaning has been taken without giving them anything in exchange for it? So they are trying to cope by immersing themselves in these games where they find “fake meaning.”
When men don’t feel like they matter or have a worthwhile purpose in life, they flounder. They enter the state of nihilism. Nihilism has a cycle that is actually very clearly laid out.
The Nihilist Cycle:
Think I don’t matter
Contemplate or Commit Suicide
Realize then I really Won’t Matter
Do Something Extreme to be Remembered
Number 4 is essentially create a legacy (even if it’s a horrendous one). This brings us back to the shooting, and all the shootings for that matter. I’m not here to talk about guns or gun laws (I’m no expert in that) but what I do know is that guns are the tool/ the symptom and not the root cause. There are men in the UK stabbing children and committing arson when no guns are present. I say this just to separate the gun conversation from the psychological one I’m having here.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I say that because say we tighten gun laws? We think we’ve done it then, hooray. I’m afraid that people will see it as a victory and then be confused and shocked when reports of stabbings and arson and a plethora of other horrific occurrences start making headlines in the states.
This is just what I see and feel.
Why is this all related? Reports show that people with nihilist tendencies struggle with rage, they oscillate between the two (I want to kill myself and I wan’t to commit violence). In the current cultural landscape, the separation between digital and actual life is getting smaller and smaller. I mean, it’s kind of hard to even tell whose a real influencer or who is an AI on instagram. And that’s me talking, someone who doesn’t spend that much time interacting with the digital world.
Imagine a man that is purposeless, addicted to GTA, and the world around him becomes a blur of reality and the digital world. Then rage strikes and suddenly instinct has taken over and we are left sifting through the tragedy of another shooting.
There are a lot of layers to this conversation that I left out including family life and lacking present dads and access to support and tens of layers of other issues, but I wanted to lay out the interconnection between these three headlines as I processed it this week:
Thank you for reading.
Anya