Why Men Stop Growing
Is it self-sabotage or enlightenment?
Alexander Cortes had a good tweet about something I think about far too often these days.
What is going on here? A few theories.
Self-sabotage is real.
I never used to believe this. How can someone be afraid of success? It never registered. Got a little older and saw it again and again. I won’t subtweet friends and don’t want drama. Suffice it to say that I know some people who should be masters in their field. And they are mostly bitter and irrelevant.
Whenever they’d be close to hitting their moment, they’d do unexplainable stuff:
Started doing drugs.
Begin a “swinger” relationship.
Date someone toxic.
Got super cheap on business expenses.
What does all of that have in common?
Distraction.
Rather than lean into the victory, the person changed course.
The fear of success is rooted in the fear of failure. Just as hipsters act like they are “above it all” as a coping mechanism (you can’t get hurt if you don’t care), men on their way to success find a way out before they hit D-Day.
You hit your number and then don’t care.
Elon Musk is maybe the first man in public to have F C K You money and then actually say, “F C K You.”
Every man claims if he had x, y, and z then he would really start living an authentic life. How many billionaires are afraid of bad media coverage tho? Nearly all of them.
Outside of public life, there are many successful men who hit their number and then decide they really are Game Over.
You meet these men at cigar shops during the afternoon.
They don’t lack ambition. They also don’t see what $ ___ would do for their lives.
Also many of them destroyed their marriages / relationship with children when chasing the dragon of money.
Some are tired, but not in a lazy way. It’s deeper and more existential.
May as well enjoy some ‘gars and fellowship of the bros.
Enlightenment or fear?
I’ve “fallen off” professional quite a bit over the past couple of years. I often ask myself if I am afraid of doing more or found inner joy?
It’s a complicated conversation to have with yourself.
Someone could say that I was a huge rising star. Now what am I even? If you don’t know me from the past, you’ll probably assume I’m a loser on Twitter. If you found this post randomly, you’d assume I had zero credibility to write about life. What the heck?!
Is Cerno afraid of the next level?
Or maybe I saw the next level and decided it didn’t appeal to me.
Funny story.
I told a good friend of mine that my next book was balled Audacity: How to Go From Nobody to Somebody. He laughed and said, “The last chapter is going to be how to become a nobody.”
He’s right. I didn’t release the book.
However that could all be cope. Reach a comfortable level of success and then claim you’re the enlightened yogi chilling out in a cave. (Miyamoto Musashi killed everyone worth fighting and then took up calligraphy. He wasn’t high on copium.)
Anyway you won’t know until you reach a certain level.
The best way to reconcile all of this is to ask: Am I putting in work? (Watch Stutz, a documentary film by Jonah Jonah Hill about his therapist.)
You’re allowed to shift your focus. My children interest me far more than “FLEXING ON THE BROKE BOYS,” although that genre is still amusing to watch. From the sounds of it, even Andrew has had his fill of it himself.
In the end we remain mysteries even to ourselves.
P.S. If you’re wondering what this stack will be, then you’re seeing it. Some deep analysis, some commentary, some reaction to tweets. If you don’t like that don’t sign up and complain if something is “off topic.”
If you want an eclecticism including ramblings….
An alternate viewpoint from that level: An interesting journey you'll embark on (that I'm fully entrenched in now) is "The Other Side of Kids". I'm a decade older than you. My kids are in their 20s. My wife says my daughter and I share a brain we're so alike. Like your girls I was there for every school day, doctor visit, kids event, and so on. But they're starting their own journey now. As it should be.
We own our own business. Dialed in. Kinda easy to manage now. Requires little of me. Enough money's piled up. Good times by any measure. But...there's a hole, of sorts. It's not empty nest syndrome. Beyond that. Too young to retire. Tool old to join a little startup with the 20-somethings. The snap and crackle's faded, along with hunger and a libido. Replaced with peaceful contentment sans the occasional "Dad my car died at work" or "Honey this biz problem needs solving". Lost is the joy of victory in battle because, "What's the point now?". Consumerism ain't it. Bought a ranch so I spend time quietly hacking away at trees and clearing brush, thanking the Lord I'm not in commuter traffic on my way to a cubicle. Still, that internal battle between the glory of days gone by, the joy of raising the family, and the rewards of a life well lived persist. "I'm not dead yet!" True. But I have a nice enough view of the mountain top from here. No need to climb further.
First learned about self-sabotage / the will to fail in a book from 1936, Wake Up and Live by Dorothea Brande. She has a chapter on the rewards people get from failure:
"With not one thing competed, the acclaim you might have received, the enormous financial coup you might have brought off, the masterpiece you might have accomplished, can assume in your revery, and in the eyes of those who will accept your version of things, almost more importance than the real success would have had."
"The Unconscious dreads pain, humiliation, fatigue; it bends its efforts even more ceaselessly to the end of avoiding pain than it does to the procuring of positive pleasures. So we are faced with a fact which at once accounts for much of the inactivity, the inertia, to which we succumb at moments when positive action would be to our advantage: that rather than face the mere possibility of pain we will not act at all."