Men, It’s Difficult Staying Hard When The World Wants us Soft.
Obesity, impotence and mental health issues. Laziness, sloth and irritability.
Fear of a fading vitality and a lost sense of identity in a world that shuns your masculinity and denies your essential nature.
No wonder we feel irrelevant and invisible as we get older. We allow ourselves to decay without even a whimper of protest.
Why?
The four horsemen of gravity, inertia, entropy and time. Once our biological imperative is spent — the continuity of our genes assured — we gradually and slowly head towards the boneyard.
AKA — We trade comfort for growth. It is easier to choose ease and wait to die than to choose growth and continue to live.
Whilst this is aimed at men this article is relevant for all. The bottom line is the further we move into the future the less we need to try. Our lives become predictable and mediocre and somewhere inside we smother and extinguish that little voice that asks us, “is this it, is this the grand sum of our lives?”
The answer is that it doesn’t have to be. We are not just biological instruments geared to slow down as we age. We are also souls in human bodies with ideas, will and imagination.
Make no mistake, choosing growth and change when the world has satisfied your needs is excruciatingly difficult and often only undertaken by those whose dissatisfaction exceeds their desire for comfort. Those who one day take a look at what they’ve become and weep.
But desires can be minimised and grown and if we want to live this one life we have down to its’ embers, we must get all we can out of it. That means choosing growth over comfort.
(Can you tell I’ve been reading Nietzsche all morning)
This choice isn’t for everyone. People reading this will laugh and call it ridiculous and pathetic. Fair enough. You have no monopoly on life choices. Only your own.
But for those who know my words resonate and align with their deepest truth, the question is what are we going to do about it?
