Why Men Are Addicted To Sacrifice

You stand there shivering in the rain:

Ankle deep in a muddy field, your belly empty save the weedy scraps of yesterday’s meager gleanings.

You are the work horse, set grimly to rocky pasture.

Your entire life, the message: “your place in the world… it’s here, unfeeling and unflinching in the field… your gift to the world your ability to self-deny, self-deprecate, self-annihilate.”

In a world of lower order problems… a world of tooth, claw, ice, darkness, blood… these gifts may well be your full extent: survival via stoic resolve the highest order of problem your bleak life can aspire to solve.

But that is not our reality: here you are, well-fed, warm, chomping for higher order realities.

For human history has brought you to a place of rare flourishing, born into an age of possibility past generations could not have imagined.

And their old ethic of “serve by suffering” has left you ill-equipped and restless, your possible contributions precluded and unknown.

For the world does not need another work horse, bony and ragged in the field.

You are a thoroughbred unaware:

A work of power and creation, the culmination of a thousand years of evolved body, mind, and spirit, created to take us beyond the pale of what we think possible.

So unsaddle yourself of the old familiar scarcities.

Feed yourself as a king, eating only the choicest cuts:

Create your body anew as though the most elite of athletes:

Feed your soul with the things that stir the deepest parts of you.

Your inherited ethic says this is frivolity: that your masculinity is called into question by too much “self care.”

Yet that is the old, dead dispensation whispering in your ear.

Here you are, in a position to solve higher order problems far beyond mere survival…

To crack open new forms of art, culture, business, living, loving…

…all of which will remain unknown if you keep yourself glass-eyed and shivering in the field.

So throw off your workless misery: no longer are we served by mere survival.

Create a life of unapologetic largess.

For by your joy we too become joyful:

By your flourishing we all flourish:

And by your self-emancipation we too become free.