ThirdWayMan

Years ago, I was a commercial salmon fisherman in Alaska.

It was hard, dangerous work, with insane hours and long periods of isolation.

I loved it.

To me, it was a grand adventure.

A chance to test myself against the sea, to live as the pioneers had lived.

But not everyone on the crew felt that way.

Every year, as the season drew to a close, some would grow desperately homesick.

And then they would do something that always shocked and saddened me.

They would begin to poison themselves against the entire season. read more

Last weekend I taught my eleven-year-old daughter to drive my truck.

I took her to a school parking lot, talked her through it, moved to the passenger seat, and let her loose.

I don’t think anyone saw us (which my daughter was grateful for, as she was mortified when she hit a curb).

But if anyone had, there’s a good chance they would have taken issue with me teaching her so young and deemed me a “reckless parent.”

I don’t know what it is about my generation and the “helicopter parenting” we’ve become known for, but kids today may well be the most over-protected and coddled kids in living memory. read more

Felt like shit when I woke up today.

Lots of reasons why.

All of them my own damn fault.

So I stumbled through the morning in a stupor.

Life felt… not so good.

All my hopes, dream, my plans and goals… they all seemed wrong.

I had a hike planned with my oldest son, so despite my sorry state, off we went.

Before long, the blood was pumping, and the cold misty air was filling my lungs. My son and I walked and talked in pleasant, unhurried conversation.

And suddenly, all was well.

I felt good. I felt happy. read more

From a young age you’ve been taught that gender is a social construct, a set of learned behaviors one can put on and take off like a jacket.

And since feminist sentiment has decided that most conventional masculine behavior is distasteful, you’ve grown up with a more or less “gender-neutral” set of instructions for how to be in the world.

As a result, you and millions of other men have been walking on eggshells your entire life, expending insane amounts of emotional energy trying to live your life according to the one-size-fits-all unisex script you’ve been given. read more

Most men are fundamentally daunted by their work.

Not because they dislike their projects, but because they perceive the project’s road to completion to be a long and difficult one.

It’s the sense that any project worth doing will take tremendous time and effort to complete, and may well still prove a failure in the end, despite all their trouble.

So we unconsciously inflate the time required to complete the project.

We pad our projects with “requisite steps” which are in fact non-essential and have no material impact on the end user. read more

What do you tie your identity to?

Do you choose your actions based on how they make you feel about yourself, or based on how they advance your mission?

Are you so busy preserving and protecting your old, inherited, childhood ideas of who you are from your past that you’ve stopped asking yourself what you must do and who you must become to create your future?

You want to bring on a partner to move your business forward. But as you go through the paper work, the lawyer appointments, and the due diligence, you feel overwhelmed and pull the plug because you’ve decided the whole partnership thing “just isn’t me.” read more

There is this notion that masculinity is a basket of “good” and “bad” qualities that men can pick and choose from.

The pleasant, “good” qualities being things like provision, duty, and procreation.

The distasteful, “bad” qualities being things like lust, violence, and anger.

The project of radical feminism has been to convince men that they must “rid” themselves of the distasteful qualities in their nature if they are to find acceptance in the feminized world we now live in. read more

There’s this lie out there that goes something like this:

To find your calling, identify high value work that is difficult and distasteful for the masses but EASY and FUN for you.

Now clearly, this is an attractive idea. Wouldn’t things be so much simpler if vocational success and fulfillment could be boiled down to the simple formula hard for you + easy for me = bank?

Problem is, it’s dead wrong. And I can tell you first hand you’ll waste precious years and open yourself to massive regret if you follow that advice. read more

I believe most male dread can be traced back to a broken model of the world we keep in our heads.

I don’t know where we get it.

But it’s there, like a glitch that threatens to bring down the entire system.

I call it the Terminal Sense Of Life.

It’s the gut-level feeling that your life’s natural arch is to go off the rails. To disintegrate into madness, pain, and misery, and that it will do so at any moment.

Whereas the Cyclical Sense Of Life views setbacks as temporary challenges from which you will bounce back in due course, the Terminal Sense Of Life sees these same setbacks as dreaded signals that the good times are over, that fate has caught up with you, that it’s time for your life to slowly and mercilessly unravel. read more

At this point in the series, we’ve covered the three biggest emasculators in detail.

But now I’d like to talk about a fourth “meta” emasculator. One that makes Wage Slavery, Nutritional Bankruptcy, and Toxic Feminism pale in comparison.

This emasculator goes by many names:

Learned helplessness. Self sabotage. Victim mentality.

The root is the same: it’s the habit of surrendering your power to others.

You see, most men live their lives like Edward Norton in Fight Club: sensing oppression, they look frantically for an external source, never realizing THEY are the ones punching themselves in the face. read more