Category Archives: Inspiration
Boys Raising Men
There is a scene in the movie Fight Club, where Brad Pitt’s characters says to Edward Norton’s, “[we are] A generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is the answer we really need.”
I believe his point was that Men are being raised by Women, and thus not learning what it is to be masculine from a male authority and mentor figure. And the turnout is piss poor (in his opinion, and the point of the character in the movie) consumer driven zombies chasing satisfaction in shopping for things.
I’m not going to examine that. However, I do agree to an extent the Father figure in society has not been holding up his end of the bargain. What stirred this up is Julia Allison pointing to a new book from the TED organization, discussing the “Demise of Guys”. She summed it up, as one can only do on Twitter:
I see it constantly: the demise of (real) MEN. RT @MediaReDEF: New TED ebook warns of the demise of guys bit.ly/KkQWNz
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Julia Allison (@JuliaAllison) May 25, 2012The TED article puts it this way:
In their provocative ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, celebrated psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan say that an addiction to video games and online porn have created a generation of shy, socially awkward, emotionally removed, and risk-adverse young men who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school, and employment. Taking a critical look at a problem which is tearing at families and societies everywhere, The Demise of Guys suggests that our young men are suffering from a new form of “arousal addiction,” and introduce a bold new plan for getting them back on track. The book is based on a popular TED Talk which Zimbardo did in 2011, and includes extensive research as well as a TED-exclusive survey that drew responses from more than 20,000 men. We recently spoke with Zimbardo and Duncan about their ideas.
And of course, my first recollection of this crisis of Men idea originated from a great article in The Atlantic, “The End of Men“:
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.
So, women are doing better. Men are doing worse. Is it because society has evolved, and modern culture favors the gentle, team based, communicative methods of the feminine? Does this in fact end up hurting women because Men aren’t able to function properly in this world and end up escaping to a world of fantasy video games and needing extreme arousal in order to interact?
Unlike the characters of Fight Club, I don’t blame the other gender. The problem is that we are raising ourselves. Father figures are either absent or failing. New methods of communication and community has enabled us to seek out substitutes. The only problem is that for various reasons, our mentors end up being other people in similar situations. So you get a cultural echo chamber where we trade advice like characters in American Pie trading sex moves. And the results are just as terrible, and less comical.
Divorce rates are increasing. Single parent households are on the rise. And while it is great that women don’t feel shunned from a community for raising a family alone, it certainly doesn’t lead to a situation where boys have great role models. Often, even if there is a father figure in the home, he isn’t the shining 50s nuclear family pillar of the community Don Draper (in his public life) type. He probably got laid off because his manufacturing job got exported. He sits around the house depressed. He takes more style tips from reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond” than the pages of GQ. There is a reason every television ad you see portrays Dad as the dumb oaf in the family who learns a valuable life lesson from whatever product is being hawked.
Understandably, Men of my generation aren’t seeing great role models. But we live in the information age! We have a valuable tool available to us all the time. We can use the internet to learn all those lessons we didn’t get, right? Well, yeah, if someone would post them. But, your Dad isn’t posting life lessons. He can barely upload a photo to Facebook. Instead, we talk to our peers and try to trade things we pick up along the way. I believe this is part of the proliferation of things like Lifehacker, Reddit, fashion blogs, and one of my favorites The Art of Manliness. These are digital textbooks, trying to pass on the lessons our Fathers didn’t pass on to us.
[On a side note, I'm not attacking any of these sites. In fact, I subscribe to Art of Manliness on RSS. I think the author Brett kind of taps into the same sentiment I am going all Andy Rooney on. See his "about" page:
And as I looked around at the men my age, it seemed to me that many were shirking responsibility and refusing to grow up. They had lost the confidence, focus, skills, and virtues that men of the past had embodied and were a little lost. The feminism movement did some great things, but it also made men confused about their role and no longer proud of the virtues of manliness. This, coupled with the fact that many men were raised without the influence of a good father, has left a generation adrift as to what it means to be an honorable, well-rounded man.
Talking about honorable manliness was to me a niche seemingly not covered on the web or elsewhere, and I decided to start The Art of Manliness to talk about all things manly- both the serious and the fun, but with the ultimate eye toward encouraging readers to be better husbands, fathers, brothers, men.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, nor do I claim that I’m an expert on all things manly. I started this blog not because I had all the answers to being a man, but because I wanted to explore the questions with other men. Thankfully, I’ve found a whole community of men who wish to discover the lost art of manliness too.
This is great! Ingenuity of boys to solve a problem! However, the problem is that its a cheat-sheet. The quick and dirty method instead of the underlying lessons. We're learning to get by with duct tape and string instead of building strong foundations. We get "10 tips on how to have a great interview to land that job" instead of learning lessons about building relationships, integrity, and the pride in your work that really lead to great careers. There is a world of difference between following a bullet point list of things to do on a date, and knowing how to be a gentleman. Are we really creating great men, or actors who can play the part?
Like this:
Choice Paralysis
I tend to not read much fiction. Girls hate when I tell them this because it makes me sound boring and unromantic. I can almost always see their eyes roll when I say I prefer reading non-fiction. For me, if I am looking for entertainment or pleasure, I tend to want something that lets me kind of zone out and turn off. Reading is too active for me. I can’t just glaze over and read a pleasure book. That is not to say I don’t get pleasure from reading, but it is a pleasure of learning something new.
I am particularly interested in Behavioral Economics. Why we make certain decisions. One of the notions that always sticks with me is “Choice Paralysis“. When asked, a person will always state that they prefer more choices. “I want the product that suits me perfectly” they think. However, in practice, this is often not the case. When presented with too many choices, we get overwhelmed with a fear that we will pick the wrong product – my choice wasn’t as good in the end as another, or with this much customization this product should have been perfect – and in many cases choose to just avoid the decision entirely.
An interview with a Columbia Business School professor sums it up well:
So when I was a PhD student at Stanford University I used to frequent this grocery store called Draeger’s and you know it was… you had a little bit of that same feeling because this was a store that offered you so many varieties, things you’d never contemplated before, you know like 250 mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables, or over 2 dozen different types of water and this is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn’t have and yet I never bought anything.
And so one day I went to the manager and I asked him whether his model was working and he said, “Well, haven’t you seen how many customers we have in this store?” And yes indeed I had. I mean it was definitely attracting a lot of customers, even attracting tourist buses that would land up at this store and people would go through the store and marvel at all the options, even sometimes take photographs of the various aisles.
So the manager agreed to let me do a little experiment where we put out a little tasting booth next to the entry. We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam? The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams. About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam. So, if you do the math, people were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that’s what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.
And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don’t know how to tell them apart. They don’t know how to keep track of them. They start asking themselves “Well which one is the best? Which one would be good for me?” And all those questions are much easier to ask if you’re choosing from six than when you’re choosing from 24 and if you look at the marketplace today most often we have a lot more than 24 of things to choose from.
A great TED talk on this same topic here. He discusses how this choice paralysis is making society as a whole unhappy.:
Think about your own life. Are there things were you are avoiding making a decision on? Is it because you have too many choices? What can you do to par these down and stop the paralysis?
Confidence
“Women love a self-confident bald man. Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man—there’s your diamond in the rough.”
Persist
To Whom it May Inspire,
I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, “in the zone” seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time.
The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems.
In a word: PERSIST.
PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision. Remember what Peter Jackson said, “Pain is temporary. Film is forever.” And he of all people should know.
So next time you hit writer’s block, or your computer crashes and you lose an entire night’s work because you didn’t hit save (always hit save), just remember: you’re never far from that next burst of divine creativity. Work through that 97% of murky abyssmal mediocrity to get to that 3% which everyone will remember you for!
I guarantee you, the art will be well worth the work!
Your friend and mine,
Austin Madison
“ADVENTURE IS OUT THERE!”
Stop chasing happiness, choose happiness first
We all tend to say “I’ll be happy after I…” and finish it with a)get into a dream school b)land the perfect job c)make a certain income. However, how often after we accomplish that do we actually feel happy? Or, if we do, how temporary?
Shawn Achor says that most of us keep chasing happiness. Instead:
Our society’s formula for success and happiness is broken.
If you reverse the order of the formula, you end up with greater happiness and greater success rates. Happiness is an advantage, and the precursor to greater success. Every single relationship, business and educational outcome improves when the brain is positive first. If you cultivate happiness while in the midst of your struggles, work, at school, while unemployed or single, you increase your chances of attaining all the goals you are pursuing…including happiness.
Start around minute 7 to skip banter and get to the point.
So, the trick is – happiness breeds success, not the other way around. Make sure you are happy, and you will be more successful in all aspects of life. He lists 5 ways to do so in a post on Psychology Today.
On Critics
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt, from Brittany Bohnet’s Tumblr
