The Problem Of Near-Constant Masculine Competition

In the aggregate, do I think the quote in the title is true? Yea, probably. I think a lot of guys I know do tend to view the world through a scarcity lens, instead of an inclusion lens, and thus they turn a lot of things into competition. Work is the most notable example, but even house size, car size, neighborhood involvement, etc. Sadly, a lot of men don’t compete on giving away money. Some do.

Here's a decent article from MSNBC on male competition.

There have been about 912,871 articles since 2015 about masculinity, the decline of men, male loneliness, male connectivity, males not being able to say “I love you,” and how men not having good friends has caused women to bear the burden. I have written about 30 of these articles. I think that’s maybe .00001 percent. I’m not “the voice,” but I’ve chased a lot of research, takes, videos, articles, and conversations about all this. Here is one, for example, that I wrote on Medium .

Here’s generally where I would come down on some of this stuff:

Not all men are in competition. A lot of men do have “friends,” who are really “acquaintances” but they call them “friends,” usually tied to work, gym, church, neighborhood, bar, or spouses of their wife’s friends. Usually most guys can BS with people in these tiers and don’t feel the need to compete with them, but lo and behold if Greg from church mentions he just spent 14 days with the entire family in Tahiti, you might grouse a little bit…

Not all men are anxious constantly. Most are not. But, at the same time, more men are anxious than we realize. The big issue with male anxiety is they have no idea how to discuss it, or where to go. If they constantly burden their wife with it, they’re afraid they’ll look weak, or their wife will get annoyed, or the periodic sex spigot may turn off. If they try friends, they’re afraid it won’t land properly. Therapy is OK, and can be great, but it doesn’t work as well for guys because it’s not often geared towards action, but rather discussion of “emotional” things, and guys aren’t reared to figure that out. I've also had a horrible time finding good therapists, which I understand is a problem common to many males.

The vulnerability issue: Tied to the above, we’ve had this narrative for the last few years that men need to be “more vulnerable” or “more open.” Now, I personally agree with this — but I can also tell you that I myself do this a lot, and most guys recoil from it. Some people that, at various periods, I’ve classified as best friends have basically left me for months/years at a time because I’ve been emotional around them and they couldn’t handle it and had to go be “so busy with the kids” or “so busy with work” or whatever. Vulnerability is noble, but among men it’s still a badge of scorn more than a badge of honor. That might evolve over time, but probably not in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of the kids I’ll eventually adopt and try to teach about vulnerability.

The markers of success: The biggest thing holding back male mental health and male connection is standard notions of what makes a guy successful, which tend to be vastly material or conquest-y in nature, and not tied to friendships or building up those less fortunate or anything like that. If you have a stable income, some wealth, 2–3 kids, a hot partner/spouse, and you live in a certain neighborhood, most guys will look at you and say “Oh yea, he’s doing great.” I know probably 32 guys like that, and 18 of them are completely broken and I’ve seen 3 of those 18 sob openly at least once in my life. Checking boxes is nice and it looks good, but after a while, it doesn’t always feel good. I was making probably $120,000 in NYC in 2010, after a recession, working for ESPN — which is a dream job for some boys. I was miserable, drank almost every night, fell asleep on subways drunk, once had casual sex with a girl after meeting her at a wine bar and discussing Kermit the Frog, etc. My life was a joke. But, on face, I was “doing well.” Until we shift the markers of masculine success, we can’t do much with this discussion.

Ritual: Men have a problem with ritual in friendships, which makes longer-distance friendships harder.

“Similar Life Stage:” Because a lot of guys don’t actively pursue friendships — they don’t see it as an important marker — they can fall into more passive friendships, which tend to be the easiest places to meet people, i.e. your job (if you’re in-person), your street/the street behind you, and your kids’ friends’ dads. The similar life stage thing is how people fall into a lot of adult social dynamics. Some of these groups persist for decades, which is awesome to see. I went to a funeral last April and most of the speakers were from a group of people who came together because their kids were friends, and they subsequently became friends, and those bonds were going on 35 years now. That’s magic. A lot of times, though, once your kid gets to middle school or moves or goes to private school, you never talk to those people again, even though they were your “friends” for five years. Adult friendships are more like “vacation friends” than we openly admit.

The stilted evolution of men: I think the final elephant in the male connectivity room is that a lot of men just aren’t evolving at the pace you’d expect, whether that’s as a romantic partner, a worker bee, or a member of the community. There’s been countless stuff put out about this in the last 15 years. Some of the narratives are a little flawed, i.e. “All men just jerk off to PornHub all day and don’t work and eat pretzels that fall on their obese chests."

So that one is a bit off. Men are still working, although there are issues with what they’re doing and wage stagnation and inequality and temp work and outsourcing and all that. But beyond the PornHub narrative, there are concerns about men kinda stagnating and not understanding what they’re after. Do they want respect from society and their partners in the form of elevation, three-times-per-week intimacy, and meatloaf on the table? Or are they more broadly seeking purpose? A lot of men are not sure.

I wouldn’t come out and say women are evolving faster or better. Women are evolving right now differently, but standard societal tropes are still weighing on women, i.e. look at how many women had to leave work in 2020–2021 for caregiver reasons. It’s too binary a discussion to say “men go down, women must rise.” Each couple and each individual is different.

Something is definitely going on with men in the last decade, and it’s a mix of macro-economic factors, emotional and psychological factors, community-building factors, the shifting role of work in one’s life factors, marriage decline factors, and much more. I don’t have all the answers and they would vary by person anyway. But I can tell you a bit about the landscape.