Rocky Without Adrian

A New Sense of Purpose for a New Age

Rocky absorbs another crack to the jaw. The ring spins in blurry circles around as Apollo connects again and again. Rocky stumbles to the mat as his opponent trots to his corner, grinning. The Champ thinks that this nightmare match is finally ending. Rocky sees the young lady holding up the current round “11”. The voice in his mind, once small but now deafening, tries to console him. “You had a good run”, the voice says, “just stay down.”

Within the deafening mob he recognizes familiar voices shouting. “Get up!” his gym comrades scream, the ones who sparred with him for weeks leading up to the event, the ones who believed this former bum could take on the best. Rocky imagined walking in the locker room after the match, his friends slapping him on the back and telling him he made a good run, but with that twinge of disappointment, the little delay in their voice that told him he didn’t leave everything in the ring.

He presses his palms to the mat, forcing his wasted arms to push up his beaten body through pure will, his shaking legs steadying as he stares down a befuddled and demoralized Apollo Creed. Rocky Balboa’s not done yet.

It’s a nice story, but something is missing. If Stallone walked in with a script like this, it’s unlikely the movie would have gotten the green light. There’s a lingering need inside a man’s psyche that pushes him to persevere through terrible odds and personal sacrifice to fulfill his potential. There’s a primal narrative and draw that every boy before he becomes a man, in days past huddling under his covers reading adventure novels long after his bedtime.

When John Carter entered Mars, crushing his enemies through hand-to-hand combat and conquered through his bloody sword, there was someone there to embrace him in glory. When a knight slayed the dragon, winning the favor of the king and the people, there’s was always a special someone whose hand he takes. When a teenager makes the game-winning play, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, there’s always that girl in a short skirt whose adoration he longs for.

What happens to a man who doesn’t have a Dejah Thoris? A world where the knight doesn’t have the hand of a princess to earn? A high school who doesn’t have that spunky cheerleader to yearn for? A Rocky without Adrian?

Millions of words have been spent on the state of modern romance, little of it useful. At the macro level, all indications point to a total mess in male/female relations, the old ways of courtship done away with and the new, modern methods leaving everyone unsatisfied. Countless theories are blamed for predicament, whether it is on men not stepping up like they used to, women having unreasonable standards, xenoestrogens in everything, fear of commitment, and countless others. Unfortunately, even if a root cause is “found”, we’re talking about a multi-generational effort to fix sexual relations, and the current cohort isn’t getting any younger.

Even in the most stable times, there were men who lost in the mating game. Whether through their own mistakes, terrible luck, unwillingness to do what is necessary, or plain disinterest, they stayed single or ended up in a marriage where they might as well have been single. This generation is going to see these numbers skyrocket and there’s little we can do to stop it. It’s baked into the cake. We’re going to see a catastrophic number of young men who either never marry, divorce, or suffer in an unhappy, sexless marriage.

Previous generations could have reasonable confidence that if he worked hard, proved himself, and became a respected contributor to society, his Adrian would appear. For many men of this generation going through this same process though, Adrian’s not coming, so now what?

This isn’t a Men Go Their Own Way article. This is not saying that trying to get a wife is pointless because the cards are too stacked against you. This is not saying women aren’t worth it, nor is it interested in bashing women for not marrying whom I deem to be good men. There is a massive disconnect in Western culture regarding the wants and aspirations of the two sexes, and an ocean of ink can be spilled on what caused this dis-alignment. Everyone can agree it has had cataclysmic consequences on both men and women, even if the solution is not known. Women are going to have a similar conundrum, with many finding their world without The Charming Captain, Mr. Darcy, take your pick. I’ll leave it to one of the more knowledgeable ladies on how women should navigate this new reality.

Fundamentally, there are three core factors necessary for a man to live a resilient and fulfilling life:

1. Mission

2. Freedom to Act

3. Ownership

It's no wonder throughout history the majority of men have found fulfillment in family life. It gave a man a purpose in leading the family, agency in being the head the household, and a little kingdom he would die to defend. These are core components of having agency. As our culture has become more heavily safety focused, the ability to meaningfully act has been hampered. As the real world has become more constrained, more and more men are involved in simulacra of action in the form of watching sports, playing video games, or just dulling motivation entirely with pot. It's no coincidence these are becoming the only acceptable outlets.

Even worse, many Regime approved organizations work directly against men's interests, pontificating in a smug, morally superior tone that his only mission is to sublimate his legitimate wants to the whims of others. You see this in supposedly men's organizations, in Churches, and in corporations. There's the implicit assumption that anything that helps men that doesn't bring direct benefits to other groups, like women and children, is intrinsically selfish and immoral.

Practice being controllable.

As astroturfed men’s groups continuously sputter, a power vacuum has formed that has been taken advantage of online by Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, etc. All these e-celebs have a myriad of problems but at least have a cursory understanding of their audience. While a lot of the online men’s sphere stems has been counterproductive, some productive memes have bubbled to the surface pointing men in the right direction. One is a fundamental, piercing question. Do you even lift?

This isn't gym-bro nonsense equating muscles with worth. Lifting weights is a fundamental way for any man, regardless of his station, to prove to himself he has agency. We're talking free-weights, heavy barbells here, not Planet Fitness. The process is as simple as you can get, idiot proof, leaving only himself to blame on failure. He develops a protocol, follows it religiously, and creates a habit of self-ownership over his physical well-being. Lifting is also the simplest way to boil off people who aren't interested in improving their plight but just complaining. The slow, steady building of strength makes him realize that, yes, he can improve his station, that he can responsibly handle the danger of heavy lifting, that he can become powerful and rebel against the stifling uniformity of general society.

No idea if this guy’s legit, but that’s a killer quote.

Because of this, the way men deal with emotional distress is actually far more indirect than women. They recognize systemic issues likely dwell with a chronic feeling they lack the ability to control their life than the particular distress he feels at the moment. Sometimes this leads to amusing misunderstandings when someone studies male relationships, like this twitter thread.

I've been feeling very under-nourished in my male friendships recently. I think there is something just kind of wrong with the default mode of male socialization/communication, something men aren't taught about relating to people.

For instance, I've known this guy for 15 years. I was his best man at his wedding. I told him recently about a suicidal episode of someone I love recently, and also a close family friend *lying about having cancer for two years*, and how it was killing me. crying. my male friend's response to me crying on his sofa?

"Dude, I'm sorry, that's crazy. What topping do you want on your pizza?" What the fuck? Friends for 15 years, this is his response? Not all guys are like this, but could you imagine literally any woman doing this? I realized several years ago that I could spend hours talking to my male friends and not learn a single thing about them. I always am the one that has to ask personal q's. and when I ask guys about their divorce or whatever, a solid 1/3 of them, like, shrug??? hello???

This post is delicious, because there's a hilarious obliviousness to his thought process. He took the general consensus of the Regime with regards to men needing to cope by puking their feelings, demanding such a fundamentally non-male way of handling his issues from his colleagues, then wonders why it doesn’t work. He was offended that his friend didn't follow the "proper" protocol of listening to him cry, giving reassurance, and letting him blubber on the couch. The more charitable men reading this thread thought, "Wow, what a cool guy who bought a pizza for you. What’s your problem?” The others just laughed and called him a fag.

One might ask how a pizza is going to help that man process his emotional distress. Isn't this sort of eating just masking the pain? Don't you need to do an emotional deep dive to really get to the root of the distress? Isn't his friend just using superficial nonsense because he is emotionally immature.

Of course not.

Buying the pizza, first, gives an immediate emotional lift, which is why funerals always have large luncheons after the service. The pizza also:

1. Let his friend save face. (“Yeah, you cried on my couch, but you were just really hungry. Forget it ever happened.”)

2. Gave a form of tangible support. They did something together without senseless rumination.

3. Gave an opening for further comradery and positive next steps. (“Hey, let's go to the gym tomorrow to work off the pizza”).

4. The friend defending himself from emotional parasitism. He likely worried the poster would puke his problem for hours to get an emotional high and waste his entire evening.

Remember, the immediate psychological issues are secondary to the main problem, a feeling of helplessness and lack of options. Long-term, he will only feel better once he gets his own sense of agency back and hone his ability to weather storms. He needs to refocus on his mission. The pain will still be there, but it will be a manageable pain.

This isn't to say there aren't times that you need to talk someone out of the deep end. At a Men's Conference we had a speaker talk about how he was on the verge of suicide and was saved from a random call from an old friend of his. A few years later, on a whim, he called the same friend who was now himself on a cliff and had to be slowly talked out of taking the early exit. It was a touching story about the necessity of keeping contact and the importance of old friendships. If he ended it on that note with maybe a quick summary of the steps they took to get their life back together, it would have been a good speech.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stop. He began crying on stage, telling everyone how all his kids can't wait for him to die, essentially complaining his life still sucks. There was something very distasteful about the speech, like his conference talk was just a massive barf bucket to spew all his woes to a listening audience. I'm happy the man didn't off himself, but on the other hand he gave no tips on how to not just survive, but become a stronger man. Instead of working on ascending from his predicament, either in fixing his relationship with his kids or learning from what happened, moving on, and recreating self-worth, he became enraptured with the hug-bucket of public speaking.

I left wondering what the point was, and who thought that talk was a good idea. No man in that room would follow that speaker into battle or share a foxhole with him in fear he has a mental breakdown when enemy forces assault. He couldn’t answer the fundamental question: You’re alive, now what?

This was a Catholic Conference about ten years ago. I remember the walls of the room lined up with different services. There were, of course, displays advertising the priesthood, but most of the organizations were catered to established married men, with little to no guidance for the rising cohort of young men with no prospects. In other words, no one was offering young men a pizza.

I am happy things are changing in this regard. One of my nephews just entered a fledgling men’s trade school, and not just any trade school, but a vocational track at a true meaning of the word.

At Harmel Academy, you can be formed into a man of skill, integrity, faith, and insight. In either a two-year apprenticeship-track program, or a one-year, gap year program, you will join a community of men blazing a new trail in faith and work.

Not only do these students live in a meaningful, faith-based environment, but they are essentially debt free at graduation, and they get access to a network of employers who are aligned with the values of the school, creating a straight pipeline from training to real vocational work.

There’s another tradesman close to where I live following a more direct model. He hires young men from his social circles who have little interest in the college pipeline and trains them for trades on the job. He pays them well, eschewing the common tactic of subcontracting to the cheapest people around. This makes him more expensive, but he has developed a niche, as many of his regular clients know him because he employed their brother, nephew, cousin, etc. They know he does good work, and the money they pay helps their own people.

This isn’t just trades either. I couldn’t find the post, but a man was talking about his success taking promising guys straight out of high school and starting them at his company programming, saying that within six months they were doing productive work in an environment they enjoyed. There’s no ending to people finding the talent and drive that our ossified and bureaucratized system looks over. Men who form these kinds of networks have done more to solve modern men’s issues than every therapist and online guru combined.

Though this is the right direction, we would be remiss if the opportunities were just regular jobs. New forms of adventuring will be unleashed, unhindered by the necessity of paying for a mortgage of their kid’s private school keeping them in the system. One of the most interesting men I met was in Europe, a mid-forties bachelor who worked long hours for a few months just to adventure the world again and again. You get enough of these people together with a common goal and soon you have the modern equivalent of a marauding warband.

New Mannerbunds will form, some following a guild model, some for political organization, and some like a mafia. Whatever offers a reprieve to the pointless grind and empty entertainment of modernity will attract men like flies to light. As our institutions continuously fail to encourage a society that appreciates their talents, they will gravitate to alternatives that will.

The New Mannerbund

The changing landscape is seen as tragic now, but we might have a dramatically different view in fifty years. While I am an ardent pro-natalist, maybe the influx of permanently single young men will spawn a renaissance in male comradery and organization that will upheave our entire broken society. Perhaps these men will reclaim a love and companionship greater than most receive from even their wife. There is precedent for this.

“How the mighty have fallen in battle!
Jonathan lies slain on your heights.
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
you were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
more wonderful than that of women.

2 Samuel 1 25-27

How many of us can say we’ve experienced this? How many men, married and unmarried, still think back to that time with your comrades in the wilderness, dripping in sweat, lost, dehydrated, and worn? When you looked at your buds and realized you all got in over your head and were now in deep shit, but you still had each other? How many days of glory are replayed decades after they happened, understood only with a wordless nod from one’s friends, a primal understanding not even your spouse will ever understand? How many men in this day, tragically, have never had that experience? How many men today who might have entered the domestic life will, by seeing that door close, be encouraged to rush headlong into a more dramatic destiny?

As older institutions fall, we might see a new era of agency and action, as young men learn they can find adventure abroad and carve out new spaces for themselves. It will be a return to older codes of honor for a wilder breed of men unleashed upon the world.

The avatar of men in the coming age will likely not be Rocky, but far more ancient heroes. The one that sticks out most is the saga of Beowulf. He slayed the great monster Grendel, earning fame and acclaim, then adding to it by slaying Grendel’s mother. When the heir to the throne died, Beowulf is chosen as a successor. In the fifty years of his rule the land prospers, and when a great dragon terrorizes the land, old Beowulf slays the beast and dies a heroic death.

In none of the saga is there a hint that Beowulf ever married. He never had an heir, which drives him for a different form of immortality in the form of great feats and heroism, bound to be sung in poorly lit taverns for all eternity. While modernity is a tragedy, individual lives don’t have to be, and this new age may swell with the heroes who may not have left heirs, but promulgated another legacy discussed for eons to come.

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