Becoming a Man

Die to Yourself

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic challenges us to rethink our expectations of men and demand more than the trappings that society tells us mark manliness. The reality is something much harder, much deeper, and much simpler; you have to die. Let’s dig in and find out how our culture has failed to mature boys into true men.

Over the past years, we’ve spent a decent amount of time understanding the feminine, whether it’s Rediscovering the Goddess, recognizing how we are Breaking the Cycle, the risks of Toxic Empathy, exploring the unique Heroine’s Journey, Rat Race Feminism, Clothing and Sex, and The Beauty Quandary.

We’ve also compared feminine Chaos vs. masculine Order and the need for our society to Embrace Bromance as part of healthy masculinity. Today, were going to laser in on the critically important foundation of how to grow strong, healthy, and capable men. Thankfully, it’s simple and only requires one thing: Death.

Embracing Bromance

This requirement is interesting because it is not a demand for men and women; only men. As we discovered in our studies of the feminine, Joseph Campbell, in Goddesses - Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, wrote:

The implication is that in embodying the divine, the female operates in her own character, simply in her nature, while the male magic functions not from the nature of the men’s bodies but from the nature of their roles in the society.

A woman is already complete in who she is, and is the embodiment of nurture. A man, on the other hand, is defined by his vestments, position, and status. However, to get to that point, the boy must be separated from the nurturing and die to those very markers of status. Travis Neville¹, writing The Death Rites of Passage, hits at the core of what we are describing:

A boy does not become a man because he turned eighteen. He does not become a man because he can grow a beard, deadlift four plates, sleep with women, pay taxes, or post gym selfies under a Bible verse. He becomes a man when something in him dies.

· When entitlement dies

· When softness dies

· When self-indulgence dies

The Death of Rites of Passage

Think about that for a minute: being a man isn’t about a thing. It’s about dying to everything. It’s separating from the softness and luxury of life and learning just how little it matters in the scheme of things. You must die to become a man.

And humans have known this for a very long time and embedded it in our male initiation rituals. Some of them are symbolic, and others were very, very real as Sam Alaimo describes in How the Plains Indians Can Help Defeat Modern Anxiety.

To summarize, the boys, already exhausted from going four days without food, water, or sleep, are painfully pierced with wooden splints, lifted by the skin, weighted with buffalo skulls, and spun until they pass out and are considered symbolically “dead.” After that, the boys are dragged in a final race until the splints are torn from their bodies, with no one allowed to help them. The whole ritual is meant to represent suffering, death, and rebirth, so that the boy who survives it is no longer seen as a child, but as a man. (fun fact: I took this narrative and adapted it to the third book, Rebirth, of The Singularity Chronicles, which I’m in the middle of writing.)

The point is that the boy had to die, almost literally. Joseph Campbell, in the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, details the process of Australian aborigines using the rites of circumcision to literally ‘cut’ the boy away from his mother and the other women. Campbell references previous anthropology where the tribes have a blood-letting ritual where upwards of two quarts of blood are taken from the men, which the boy drinks. This represents the reminder to the men of their constant sacrifice and an introduction to the boy of his future obligation. If the boy rebels or disobeys, the old shaman slices a vein and kills him as unfit for manhood.

These rites of passage shock our modern sensibilities, yet we currently have nothing anywhere close to this sort of maturity. Back to Travis’s essay, he says that, “Most modern boys are not suffering from a lack of affirmation. They are suffering from a lack of confrontation.” He begs us to offer our boys challenges as simple as a wilderness trip with no comfort, a physically brutal challenge, manual labor with a purpose, or a period of fasting, silence, and discipline.

We’ve come so far away from adversity that a hard backpacking trip is good!

For me, my major initiation was Ranger School. It’s known as the hardest leadership training on the planet, and they stress you physically and mentally to simulate the stress of combat while grading your ability to lead. Likewise, Sam Alaimo is a Navy SEAL with a distinguished deployment record. He and I write from the experience that this suffering, this incredible adversity, made us stronger and more resilient. He’s got another great essay, Why We Should End Self-Care And Embrace Hardship, which shows how our nature is designed for adversity and is well aligned with my own analysis on Trauma and Antifragility, where avoiding challenges makes us weaker.

Trauma and Antifragility

And weak is a great way to describe so many adult-bodied boys, chasing the ‘mano-sphere’ of Andrew Tate bullshit, trying to flex nuts while ignoring that it’s humility and self-sacrifice that make a strong man. Most of the conflict I see today in men is that they never faced their hardship, and so they’ll always suffer hardship.

We have boys, LARPing (life action role playing) mahood through video games, pornography, social media, and gymnasiums, in a facsimile of the call to duty. They’re sensitized to be kinder, gentler, softer, yet not realizing that true sacrifice naturally brings those things. They’re INCELS (involuntary celebates), depressed, and despised. They’ve never Stared into Evil, nor have they died to the childhood ego.

They’re not men.

The process of becoming a man is captured in the Hero’s Journey, where a man is called to adventure, separated from the old life, forced to face fear, stripped of pride or comfort, and pushed into some kind of symbolic death. That death usually does not mean literal death, but the death of the old self, the childlike self, or the false self. What comes after is rebirth, where the person returns stronger, wiser, and no longer the same person they were before.

So, when does a boy become a man? When entitlement dies, when softness dies, and when self-indulgence dies. Simply put, it’s when the boy dies.

What’s fascinating is that this pattern also exists with psychedelics, where you’ll face your inner demons and have your ego destroyed. The reason they call high-dose psilocybin a Hero’s Journey is that it follows the same pattern. When people have a ‘bad trip,’ what really happens is that they wanted a trippy trance and ended up ‘seeing Jesus, ’ and they tried to avoid it. They didn’t face their hardship, and so they could never be reborn as something stronger. What I see in today’s society is too many men living a ‘bad trip’ every day of their lives.

It’s important to note that this hardship, this death of the hero’s journey (both types), doesn’t make hard men. Hard men are fragile. What this makes is resilient men. Those who know how to balance the contradiction of the Meek Warrior where we:

So, be a warrior. Be capable. Be a warhorse a child can ride to battle. Be the master of your mind and body. Claim your agency and don’t allow manipulation. Grow others around you to be as capable as you. Demand capability from those you love while holding yourself to a higher account than anyone else.

The Meek Warrior

You can’t do this without dying, and that’s the best way to think about it. It’s no surprise, then, that this death-and-rebirth motif exists in almost every religious tradition, from Christianity to the Greek gods to the Egyptian Osiris to even Hinduism and Buddhism, where enlightenment comes from the separation of the earthly ego.

When you do this, you’ll be reborn with the recognition that none of the things we ascribe as markers of manhood are necessary because it’s not about what you are, but who you are. Dying allows you to shift from chasing those things to being those things. You can’t be a hero without the journey, so become a man and die. Die to the entitlement, softness, self-indulgence, and ego.

‘Rehearse for death’: he who says this is telling us to rehearse our freedom. One who has learned death has unlearned slavery — Seneca, Letters, 26.10²

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

- 1 Corinthians 13:11

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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.

• Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays

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• Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing

• Educating AI Integrating AI into education

• Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency

1. Travis Neville Author

2. Thanks to Andrew Perlot for his recent essay “Don’t Fancy Dying? Cicero Has Ideas” for this quote as well as other great insight for facing death.